Growing up I loved cartoons, nickelodeon was not only my escape from the usual boredoms of a 10 year old, but it was also one of my key teachers about life, interactions and how to adjust to life in Australia. Cartoons make us laugh, they draw us in to a story filled with characters and relationships that we can often so closely identify with. These characters can become significant symbols for us as we grow up. This is why I have always valued cartoons, these characters shape and mould us in to the people we will become have enormous significance in our place of growing up.
So pause for a moment and think about what characters have had significant influence on who you have become. My challenge for us is to pick the ones that, we don't necessarily idealise and have on our walls, but pick the ones that have subtly taught us about how to navigate the world through there archetypical portrayal of life.
This week, I had actually found out that many of the characters from Spongebob and Winnie the Pooh are based on characters with mental health issues. Wow... This is a pretty radical idea, and that got me thinking about how these seemingly unusuming characters, may have made impacts in my life and all of our lives. I wonder if there is something about Sandy's OCD that has helped me navigate parts of my own life. I wonder if she has shaped me as I grew up and watched her frustrations and strains, as she tried to hold it all together whilst hanging out with the chaos and free spirited sea critters that is Patrick and Spongebob. I wonder if there is something worth pondering when thinking about the importance of neighbourliness when we engage with those who suffer from depression. Can the push a pull relationship squidward has with his fun loving neighbours and colleagues be a teaching tool for us today? Can we learn something about how Squidward engaged with those whom he found frustrating, can the relationships of bikini bottom show us good fruit despite squidwards outward grumpiness. Can we see that he had friends around him who adamantly adored him, in a genuinely, peculiar way.
We are all a little broken inside, well actually some of us not just a little. But it is the brokeness and the peculiar idiosycnrasies that make these characters so identifiable, we see ourselves in them. These characters can show us that there is hope as we traverse the world with other broken people. We ought not to take life too seriously and remember that in the midst of a life we think is just meant to entertain us, there is actually some truly profound things we can learn. So whether your overly anxious, narsicitstic or chronically sad know that these cartoons have been subconsciously guiding us through life even if it is only something we had on in the background in our early years.
What might we find in the seemingly meaningless? What profound truths have God littered in our lives for us to discover? How does the nature of reality continue to show us the beauty of creation and the tragic gift of being present to the world around us now? Who is whispering into our ear and what might we discover about the mysteries of God today? Surely our cartoons have been whispering something of the wisdom of our true and living God. How amazing would it be if our cartoons have contained some of what we speak as the ever loving logos (of Christ) that has been so clearly revealed in another types of story. How might the story of the bible the one that is not only written for children but for all those whom are seeking something beyond themselves be seen in our loveable cartoon friends.
Where is God is our midst today?
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