modeling action...

its 1am; a little late (or early depeding on which clock you run on) to be writing. however, duty calls.
i was brushing my teeth, and thinking about how we go through all this time trying to preserve our bodies: we do our best to eat healthy, get exercise, wear nice clean clothes, clip our toenails, wash our hair... the list goes on and on. and that's just the physical part of it.
socially, we try and maintain a profile that we believe people will think is cool. we try and say the right words, be at the right places, dress the right way, and like the right things. whatever is status quo.

in the end it all comes down to action figures and model cars.

the model car sits on the shelf, it hardly ever gets touched, much less played with, but it lasts a long time. it looks nice, is kept clean, has that shine that we guys go crazy trying to get into our daily drivers, and pretty much just sits there in your bedroom for 5 years looking cool. after all, you wouldn't have a model of a car you didn't think was cool. the model reminds us of what we'd like to have, but probably won't ever get. the model only takes 76 words to describe its life.

the action figure is the toy that goes through hell. any kind of hell a young boy kind think of. and generally the messier, higher, farther, deeper, slimier and deadlier the better.
for the females reading this, well, you had barbies, and they are roughly the equivalent to the action figure. i know what happens to those dolls, i have a sister.
anyway, the action figure is the toy that gets used and abused.

it starts like this: you pull the action figure out of that bedding of plastic that it fits so perfectly into and you put all his accessories on; the backpack, helmet, grenades, and all 82 guns. you get him looking great, just like on the box, and almost like the commercials (we know that some of that stuff on tv isn't real).
but in only a short period of time, action figure is no longer cool to just look at. he's lived up to the latter part of his name, but now its time for some action. generally this involves mom's household plants for camoflauge, lots of string for flyng and repelling off of balconies and toilet flushing retrievals. later, when you feel action figure has completed his indoor training and is ready to face the outdoors, you take him outside and play with him on the driveway, then the grass, then the sandbox, and finally with the help of a shovel and some manual labor from you, 2 feet under the sandbox (action figures require really deep fox holes). presently action figure fights in as many battles with as many twists as your mind can come up with, and eventually he is awarded the medal of honor and an early retirement.
action figure, as i said, goes through some rough times, but thats what action figure was made for. eventually he'll be stuck in toybox, then the drawer, until finally after mom has moved him enough times, his fate is met in the hands of a younger sibling or relative, or a thriftstore employee who is busy sticking a whole assortment of different used play things into bags marked $1.

action figure doesn't last nearly as long as model car...

but action figure was used.

i figure we can go through life as action figures, or as model cars. the way i see it, we weren't built to just look pretty. i mean lets face it, we can be butt ugly sometimes.
but i'm pretty sure Christ wasn't really concerned with how he looked when he came to earth, (contrary to hollywoods blue eyed, long haired white toothed super-jesus).
he had a job to do, and he didn't need to be pretty to do it.

the pharisees were models of what to look like, but they weren't useful. Christ showed us how to it was done and said "follow me." i never heard anything about sittin' on the shelf.

later