Oakwood Church Fresh Start Women's Devotional Encouragement for Today Hartland Delafield

Blessed Are the Un-Cool
By Susan Klein

“For the wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s sight.”
1 Corinthians 3:19

Every decade is marked by fads and fashions that define what “cool” is according to our eclectic American culture. In the 60’s, cool meant you wore bell-bottom pants and mood rings, owned a lava lamp and listened to the Beatles. Really cool people definitely went to Woodstock!

In the 70’s, cool people wore leisure suits or anything made of polyester. The female gender sported platform shoes and Farrah Fawcet hairdos. You definitely owned an 8-track player and went to rock concerts. And only the super cool could recite scenes from The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

In the 80’s, coolness was defined by owning an Atari or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Cool girls mastered “Valley Girl talk” and “like, wouldn’t be caught dead in anything other than spandex or skinny jeans with zippers up the legs!” You emulated Michael Jackson and joined a Jazzercise class if you were “anybody.”

By the 90’s, coolness had turned to Pokemon for the kids, WWJD bracelets and wide-leg jeans for the teens, doing the Macarena for those who enjoyed group activities, and SUV’s and Oprah’s book club for the mature set. More “out-there” coolies were into extreme sports or grunge.

The coolness of the new millennium brought with it High School Musical, You Tube, American Idol, iPods and blogging. If you aren’t technologically savvy, don’t even think about being cool! Metrosexuality and Emo are lifestyles reserved for the elite cool.

I have to admit...I’m not very cool! I don’t blog, don’t own an iPod or a laptop, I wear comfortable shoes and my impossible hair never looks like the styles in the current trendy magazines. But I am who God created me to be, and I’m okay with that. In fact, I wouldn’t want to be cool if it meant trying to be something other than what God designed me to be. I’ll stick to being an alien in this strange world!

1 John 2:16-17 says: “Everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” Trends and fads all pass away, only to be replaced by more trends and fads. God’s love, His principles and His promises never pass away, nor do they change with the times. Isn’t it better to be trained by God’s time-tested truths, than to be tempted and trapped by today’s worldly trends?

GOING DEEPER:
1. How can you resist the “trend-trap” and stay grounded in the Truth? Will you give yourself permission to be “un-cool” by the world’s standard?

FURTHER READING:
John 15:18-19; Colossians 3:2; James 4:4-6

Susan is a wife and mother of two. She leads a small group and teaches for Tuesday a.m. Bible Study.