Michael Krahn : A Mind Awake

“And that’s the tricky thing about life, really, that the things we want most will kill us.” This statement follows 13 illustrated pages of a story about sexy carrots. You really need to look at the book to understand, but this is another good reason I never would have found this book in the Christian bookstores of my youth. Cartoons about sexy carrots?! Way too edgy!

Miller relays a lot of his stories through the eyes and actions of his friends - characters (non-fiction characters but certainly characters) like Tony the Beat Poet and Mark the Cussing Pastor (more on this one later) and Andrew the Protester and other real-life friends whom he calls by their real names like Laura and Penny and Rick.

The point of the sexy carrot episode was that, “Tony the Beat Poet read me this ancient scripture recently that talked about loving either darkness or light, and how hard it is to love light and how easy it is to love darkness. I think that is true. Ultimately, we do what we love to do.”

Miller expands on this, delineating his philosophy of humanity that includes common, if rarely talked about, Christian ideas like sin, self-addiction, and living in the wreckage of “the fall” and saying that because of these “my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love the things that kill me.”

“Tony says Jesus gives us the ability to love the things we should love, the things of heaven. Tony says that when people who follow Jesus love the right things, they help create God’s kingdom on earth, and that is something beautiful.”

This is the crux of another misconception about Christians: that we are ever increasingly rule-bound automatons, taking orders from our Pastors to tell everyone that we meet to “Turn or Burn!” or wear t-shirts that say things like “Eternity: Smoking or Non-Smoking?” or, to put slogans on out church’s marquee like one I saw recently during a period of very hot weather: “Smile. We know of hotter places.”

You may have been accosted by Christians like that and if you have I’m sorry. But I also want to tell you that there are great changes happening in the Christian community, and that even though we’ll never rid the world of sloganeering salvation warriors I think there is more of a counter-effort to that than there has ever been before.