What brings you back to the familiar so many times?
There’s a trend in modern creativity that doesn’t allow for a lot of newfangled ideas; lots of movies nowadays are reboots or sequels within a franchise with a grounded fanbase, or following up on age-old nostalgia. Publishers are far less likely to take a chance on a book that doesn’t check the boxes on themes or elements that are already selling well in their genre. Even food titans lean heavily on bringing back creations that were once loved, but discontinued for one reason or another.
Many complain, yet this trend continues…and it continues because it works. Why does it work? Because things that have a reliable history to them, an element of the expected, speak to us on an intrinsic level. It soothes us; we know this food will taste good because we loved it back in the day, we know we’ll like this book because we read 52 just like it this year, we know we’ll at least be entertained by the next Marvel installment. There’s a weird comfort in the established.
Now, I know I said all that with a bit of a jaded tone, but it’s actually not altogether bad. I think the need to trust what is established, to consider reliability in the unswaying, is a God-given trait the world has simply found a way to exploit. And I believe that because of places like Psalm 93—passages that talk about our established, everlasting God.
It’s no happenstance that God remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. He has made it a facet of His very nature that He is constant and unchanging in His character, which is love as well as justice, truth, righteousness, holiness, and fairness.
Think about how beautiful that is: God’s very essence, His nature, meets a deep need within us. We seek what we crave, and what we crave is the reliable, the steadfast and trustworthy things of the world. But while the world will always fail us, God never will. He is the one and only Whose establishment is firm and unchanging. We are never hedging our bets on His goodness; unlike when you slap down $20 on a new Star Wars sequel and leave the theater feeling robbed, God does not disappoint. His loving, caring, and consistent character is a stronghold. It’s a sanctuary from a world that cheapens our desire for stability by using it to sell us grating repetition, profiteering off a need built into our nature that exists first and foremost to call us back to the Rock on which we can stand and endure all.
So, if you find yourself craving something that feels steady and constant, endless and rooted and right, remember the One who built that need into your very design…and then satisfy it by running to Him!
