The Wondering Years: How Pop Culture Helped Me Answer Life’s Biggest Questions

by Knox McCoy

For most of my believing life, God has been this preexisting curriculum I had to get up to speed with, which I couldn’t question or doubt. Every connection to him just felt immensely complicated and cloaked in an abrasive formality. But, to me, this scene is about God and the simplicity within which he can sometimes exist. That’s not meant as a minimization of God, rather a confession that I’ve participated in a vast conspiracy to complicate God and assign motivation to him that only functions to disguise his truest essence. In doing this, I’ve layered him with a pastiche of complexity all of my own doing. But when I think of that scene from Moana, it makes me wonder: Is it possible that there’s a simplicity to the complexity of God?

Big V showed up and had Peter Pettigrew sizzle Cedric so hard that he turned him into a vampire and sent him to Oregon to hang out with Kristen Stewart.

Even now, routine and the status quo feel like freedom to me. Conversely, discomfort and the distress of unfamiliarity feel like ruin. But really, I have it backward. Comfort is bondage; it promises faux relief. Discomfort and unfamiliarity are gifts that provide a type of freedom that buoys, broadens, and always benefits me in the long term.

I would argue that God is never threatened when we pursue a deeper truth about him.

Sin is definitely poison, but so is shame; and grace exists as the antidote to those poisons so we can focus on the lessons we need to learn from our screwups.

It is my hope that these moments communicate the idea that we’re never closer to the heart of things than when we’re willing to be vulnerable and transparent.