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Print By Kent d Curry Comic-con International is a boisterous zoo of nearly 100,000 people shoveled into the San Diego Convention Center to celebrate pop culture over four days in July. Long ago, even last decade, it was a convention that centered on comic books, but now it is movie stars and TV shows and toys and video games. There are over 50 rows of booths selling figurines, trading cards, comics, original art, video games, DVDs, rare books, animation cells, and an endless parade of civilians dressed up like superheroes, Imperial Stormtroopers, and Darth Vaders. It is the epitome of overload. So that’s where I took my seven-year-old last year for our first father-son trip. He loved it.
The only problem was, out of the hundreds of booths, he only wanted to visit two, both featuring Legos. Now it’s true they were both cool. The first featured Bionicles, kind of 21st Century robot beings, with a huge evil spider Bionicle dangling dangerously overhead, and—of course—endless Bionicle products to purchase. The second Lego booth, seven rows down, was all Star Wars. There was a life-sized Chewbacca and Darth Vader built out of Legos, a seven-foot Star Destroyer, dangling smaller ships battling overhead, boxes of Star Wars sets for sale, and—best of all—a motor-driven R2-D2 made out of Legos, complete with a round top that rotated and burbled and bumped into people in the surrounding aisles. Like I said, cool. But after about 20 minutes the appreciation begins to wane. Besides, there was just so much more to see. Not exactly.
Caleb enjoyed the displays that offered free T-shirts, autographed posters, and the drawing for the free Pokemon VW bug (with lightning rod tail), but—unless it was superhero cartoon exclusives—he was happy to camp in the Lego booths. We had some serious discussions about this. I wanted us to see the sights. I wanted him to see the sights. He wanted to see the Legos. I flew us across the country into this Mecca of pop culture exclusives, yet he refused to budge from what he loved best.
Not much different from real life though. If we’re to cultivate our first love for Christ (Revelation 2:4), we must resist the endless cacophony around us, the distractions that entice, the commitments that drain, the diversions that numb. We must sell everything else for the soul’s true treasure (Matthew 13:44). Then it hardly matters what surrounds us, for they are but trivialities compared to true Lego love.
© 2006, ninetyandnine.com ------- Kent Curry is an executive editor at ninetyandnine.com. |
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