Not Special By Norman Kissinger

I do not watch late night talk shows but somewhere I saw a show where a young mischievous actress-comedian went to England was walking around I believe the Thames river.  There was a gigantic blow-up statue of Jeff Goldblum of Jurassic Park Fame. This young actress climbed up on his lap. English Bobbies came up to her and told her that she had to get down. They said that she was not special, and she needed to get off the display. She told them she obviously was special because she was the only one sitting on Jeff Goldblum’s lap.  

I thought her story was funny, but the English Bobby’s statement caught my attention. We live in a time where almost everybody in our culture expects to be special. About 30 or 40 years ago we begin to teach our children that they were special. And so, they grew up believing that no matter how they acted or what they did they were special and deserve recognition for who they were simply because of that.

Now I fully understand that building children's self-esteem by encouraging them to see their gifts and talents is important to a point, but our society has taken specialty and turned it into a cult. Especially today every group wants recognition for being special. Whether it is gender or skin color or sexual orientation or how we grew up-take your pick. We decide what makes us special and this allows us to have special recognition and more importantly to have an excuse for almost any attitude or wrong behavior. The fact that I am special gives me a moral get out of jail free card for any behavior. It has become an excuse to not learn empathy or to not work on our moral failures and repent of them. If I am special, I no longer must work on myself because I have already reached the pinnacle of my greatness, I’m special.

But the scripture clearly points out that we are special only in the sense that Christ loves us, and his love makes us special. As Christians we need to have a completely different focus. Our focus should not be on our specialty but on Christ’s specialty. The Apostle Paul did not say that he was special, but he did his best to uplift Christ so that the world would know that our Lord was special.

This deadly poison is destroying our culture. We need to get a dose of humility and realize that the only thing that makes us special is who we are in Christ. I am not talking about putting ourselves down but this cult worship of being special makes us dangerously close to worshiping ourselves. And that is the worst idol worship of all.