Plastic Jesus on the streets

Plastic Jesus hit the streets this month. Whew... thanks for all your prayers, encouragment and support! That's really cool.

As promised here is another exerpt...

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Chapter Two
Keeping Up With the Jones’s
On Identity

The other day I was reading a blogsite, in which the writer, who had heard me speak at a conference, referred to me as the “quintessential poster child for the metrosexual pastor.” Okay. That short phrase contains a whole lot of verbage, most of which I had to look up to understand.
I don’t particularly like having sex on subways or trains, so why would someone say that I’m a metrosexual? And aren’t poster children usually disabled or on the picture to solicit sympathy?
I jumped over to Google and did a search on metrosexual. Of course, any search containing the word sex is bound to yield some dangerous links. Nonetheless, curiosity got the better of me, even though I was sitting next to a couple of middle-aged church ladies at my local coffee shop, The Bella Rosa.
Wordspy.com yielded my answer:

metrosexual (met.roh.SEK.shoo.ul) n. An urban male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle…. A metrosexual is a clotheshorse wrapped around a dandy fused with a narcissist. Like soccer star David Beckham, who has been known to paint his fingernails, the metrosexual is not afraid to embrace his feminine side. Why "metrosexual"? The metro- (city) prefix indicates this man's purely urban lifestyle, while the -sexual suffix comes from "homosexual," meaning that this man, although he is usually straight, embodies the heightened aesthetic sense often associated with certain types of gay men.

Hey, I resemble those remarks…
I mean it’s not like I’m a candidate for the cable television hit, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the show where five highly fashionable gay men attack and transform some unaware, underdressed, undereducated, and undersocialized jock whose hip, Barbie-doll girlfriend signed him up for a makeover.
Actually, just the other day I was looking in my closet and noticed a wide array of Hawaiian shirts. What great inventions those things are for guys. They match any color pants or shorts we wear. Plus, they hide any stain that we put on them—whether mustard, wine, or brie. And where else can you find a shirt that is so floral and yet so irresistibly masculine? Last season, when they were in fashion, I definitely felt like the Big Kahuna.
Yep, I could walk around most any church conference in the middle of winter, and it was like springtime on the islands. Everyone cool had on a Hawaiian shirt and sported a tightly-cropped goatee. All we needed was Don Ho leading worship, and the set would have been complete.
But this year is a different story. As I’ve walked around the malls and attended emergent church conferences, I’ve felt a little out-of-place. Hawaii is not hip this year. No, this year it is the retro T-shirt and trucker hats for the guys, and pink and black for the ladies. I’m thankful mullets aren’t back in style yet, because I am still shaving my head and holding onto my soul-patch goatee to be edgy.
So I’m staring at my closet, wondering what to do with all my Hawaiian shirts. Suddenly they are not so avant-garde looking. They aren’t even made in Hawaii.
How can I wear something not authentic, when I’m trying to speak on authenticity?
Of course, the Philippines are islands too, but that is beside the point. No, what I really want is a cool retro T-shirt… maybe a “sugar daddy” one, or one that says, “I get pumped at Gold’s Gym.”
Yeah, that would be cool. I want to be cool. Being cool is part of ministering the gospel. The gospel is cool. Where’s my credit card?
Okay, so maybe I am a bit of a meterosexual. But I don’t find my identity in what I wear or in what others are saying about me. Okay, so I don’t find all of my identity in what I wear or what others are saying about me. Man, I wish I hadn’t read that blogsite …
The whole Hawaiian-shirt-in-the-closet dilemma got me thinking about all the stuff we grab onto in our struggle to find our identity. This struggle is core to how we interact in this world.

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Peace out...
Eric