The cage door is more open than it’s ever been.
It’s not a tease. It’s real. “Taste and see that God is good.“
__________
Daniel Zeigler
Why are revolutions almost always led by the young?
Youth looks at the world with fresh eyes, sees it for what it is, and dares to hope that change is possible. The young instinctively believe that the risk is worth taking. They scoff when they hear the older establishment counsel, “Accept things as they are. When we were young, we were just as idealistic as you. But by the time you’re our age, you’ll be just like us. Settle down and wait your turn. You’ll see we’re right.”
Those words jolt the young like a painful electric shock. They don’t want to lose hope. They want to believe, to impact their world.
But a sad fate can overtake someone when they repeatedly receive “shocks” of discouragement, criticism, and failure:
Learned helplessness.
In his book The System or the Ecosystem, Michael Peters tells the story of a disturbing series of experiments conducted in Martin Seligman’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s. The researchers administered painful electric shocks at random intervals to caged dogs. At first, the animals jumped, howled, and struggled to get out of the cage. But soon, many dogs responded to the inescapable shocks by growing passive, groveling and whimpering, and abandoning all attempts to escape—even when the cage door was open.
If the research strikes you as cruel and unethical, you’re not alone. Although those experiments were accepted at the time, no institutional review board in America would approve them today. But the research allowed Seligman to develop a theory of learned helplessness. He proposed that humans—like the dogs in his experiments—give up trying if they believe their actions don’t matter, anyway.
Can you relate?
When you’re young, it looks like the brass ring of changing the world is dangling right in front of you, just waiting for someone to grasp it. You even dare to believe that you might be that someone. But it doesn’t work out quite the way you envisioned. For one thing, you underestimate the pain that inevitably accompanies a world changer. For another, you quickly discover that existing institutions have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and have no intention of allowing you to challenge it. You try and fail. You try again, and somebody slaps you down and tells you to get back in line. Eventually, you learn to feel helpless.
That’s why Peters specifically addresses Gen Z in his Ecosystem book—they’ve yet to learn helplessness. He calls them “the courage generation.” I believe him. Gen Z just might be dauntless enough to trigger a much-needed revolution in Christianity. As Peters puts it: “They are the first generation in centuries who might actually say…‛No matter what anyone else does, let’s do it the way Jesus did it.’”
I’m not directing my words at Gen Z, though. I’m looking squarely at us thirty-somethings and beyond—well beyond in my case. Let’s become young again. Let’s challenge ourselves to shrug off “learned helplessness.” Let’s hope. Believe. Risk. Dare. Care.
At a recent conference, the keynote speaker recalled a week in her life that was almost too much to bear. A series of blows struck her adult children—marital problems, health scares, spiritual crises.
I cried twice during her presentation. First, when she talked about her pain. Second, when she described choosing a counselor living in a different city than her home. Her reason? “You can’t tell your ‘church friends’ about things like that.” And the audience nodded, murmuring their agreement. I say that’s tragic.
The Life that Jesus pioneered was never meant to look that way. Our first-century brothers and sisters experienced heartaches, too. But they:
“…were together and had everything in common” (Acts 2:44)
“…rejoiced with those who rejoice and mourned with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15)
“…carried each other’s burdens and so fulfilled the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
But those passages don’t match the experience of most people today. They’ve learned over time that to betoo vulnerable with their “church friends” invites judgment. Whispers. Gossip. Exclusion. As the conference speaker put it, “If you share things like that, people will never look at you the same again.”
The audience knew exactly what she meant. A few, like me, thought, “It doesn’t have to be that way!” But most simply accepted her viewpoint. After years of disappointment, they no longer expected “church” to mean a family where everyone is “like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind…in humility, valuing others above themselves, not looking to their own interests but each to the interests of others.” They’d given up on experiencing the first-century Life as an idealistic dream.
May I offer an antidote?
Love.
If we chase “success,” we can be bitterly disappointed. We may find ourselves right back in Seligman’s cage. But if instead we relentlessly offer our lives to Jesus, simply because we love Him and long to see “the Lamb receive the reward of His suffering,” how can we fail at that?
Believers from the Millennial, X, and Boomer generations, I’m calling on us to jettison our disillusionment and the apathy it breeds. Let’s believe that the Life Jesus showed the Twelve—and that the resurrected Jesus passed on to the 120 and the 3000 and beyond—is possible in our day. If He is our help and shield, we need never feel helpless again.Caption: “Come on. It’s worth the risk.”
