Pork And Beans
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Most long time readers know that I love music (and if you didn’t, the fact I just wrapped up my fifth song lyric week recently would be a hint) and there’s a song by Weezer that just stuck in my head from the moment I saw it….”Pork and Beans.” Now, the song itself is catchy like their other hits but what really put this over the top for me was the video.
If you haven’t seen it, they’ve made the video look like something from YouTube and it contains many of the people who’ve had the more popular YouTube videos like the “Leave Britney Alone” guy and the ones who set off the two liter bottles of Mentos and Coke. They even wrangled Miss South Carolina who had a little trouble with a question during the Miss Teen USA pageant to make an appearance to badly lip sync along with the song.
It struck me what people will do to gain exposure on a wide scale. These folks will have these clips running around and haunting them forever but they’re reveling in their fifteen minutes of fame and the feelings of love and acceptance that they think are coming their direction from the people who view the clips and tell them how much they love to watch them. Once the novelty of these things wear off these folks will go back their regular lives and there’s going to be a huge void left behind. A few will come through it just fine but others are going to have problems from self-esteem issues to anger issues because they want to regain that moment of glory they felt because a million folks watched them on YouTube.
Riches is so often thought of in terms of money but riches can also be in accolades or other kinds of objects that provide joy and satisfaction on some temporary level. These in and of themselves are not sinful but when you place them ahead of Christ and serving Him is when you’re going to run into problems.
Paul wrote to Timothy talking about the financially rich but I think if you take a bigger perspective of riches you can see a lot of meaning in 1 Timothy 6:17-19 (ESV): “As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.”
There is nothing as uncertain as the riches of popularity. All it can take is one person to spread a nasty rumor on the internet and you could go from hero to villain overnight. The one thing that doesn’t change is that God is in control of all things and He can provide you with things that satisfy without having to worry about it fading if the neighbors don’t want to see it anymore.
So we need to take hold of that which is truly life…Christ…and realize that while other things in life are nice they aren’t necessary.
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