Worship is formative. That means it has power to shape us. We are what we sing (as Mark Noll writes in a recent article in Christianity Today.) Our hearts are drawn from other “treasures” as our eyes are opened to see Jesus for who He really is. Thomas Chalmers called this the “expulsive power of a new affection.” By that phrase he means that you never really get over one love until a new one comes along. In worship we seek to have Jesus become more beautiful and believable to us. We seek to have God restore our sanity so that we can live in line with the truth of the gospel rather than in the fantasy world in which we must earn God’s favor and manipulate Him to do whatever we want.

I had always considered myself to be fairly handsome. I knew that I was being a bit generous to myself, but hey, it was me. There were moments when I knew that I could stand to lose a few pounds here and there. My jeans would feel a bit snug—I’d just figure the dryer shrunk them (keep in mind they were two years old). The notches on my belt kept moving out to cleaner, unused notches leaving the inner ones distressed and worn out like the collar of an old shirt. I was, as my friend Jeffrey Lancaster says, “body dismorphic”—I saw myself as thinner than I actually was. That self-misperception was about to change.

In recent weeks a smaller, somewhat unexpected film is getting some Oscar attention. Into the Wild is based upon the true story of Christopher McCandless, who after graduating from Emory University in the early nineties, gave all of his money to charity, loaded his sub-compact with his few possessions, changed his name, and headed west. Judging from McCandless’ detailed journals, he was disgusted with the wealth of his parents, along with the greed and corruption he saw all around him, and so he determined to fight the American way of life by going “off the grid”. It was a quest for adventure, and at the heart of that adventure, for McCandless, was anonymity and solitude. It seemed the way to escape the mess of the world would be to escape the presence of other people.