The Best There Is

Laura Booz: I’ve got a question for you. What do you expect success to look like?

Hi there. You’re listening to Expect Something Beautiful with Laura Booz. Your expectations really matter.

I have six children, ages four to eighteen. As they’ve been getting older, I’ve been keeping my eye on the images and messages that come their way through media, movies, what have you. There’s this one unspoken age-old message that shows up quite frequently, and it’s this: the best life, the successful life, includes the objectification of women. 

This drives me mad. But it’s a tricky topic to address with children and pre-teens and teenagers. 

I wish I could shut it down. I wish that I could just act like it doesn’t exist. 

Try as I might, though, we can’t escape it or avoid it altogether, but I can equip my children to think about it from God’s perspective. 

So, I had been looking for an opportunity in which I could sit them all down at the kitchen table and we could talk about this together. 

Now, let me tell you, it’s not easy to frame a conversation that will resonate with each one of them. But I came across a music video that communicated the message I wanted to address, and it was tame enough for us to watch together, to sit with it, and talk it over. 

I played the video for my kids at lunch one day. Here’s the gist: the story accompanying the music begins with sepia footage from the past. We see two boys at their music lesson, laboring over their instruments. Their teacher is strict, the music is dry, the boys are miserable and uninspired. 

And we get the point: there’s got to be more to life than this. 

When the teacher leaves the room, the boys break the music stand, grab their instruments, and escape. They run down the hallway toward a door through which shines a blazing white light. 

On the other side is the good life, the best, the world they’ve been longing for. All they have to do is walk through the doorway. 

I paused the video and asked the kids, “What might be on the other side? What might this good life look like for these boys, for these musicians?”

We tossed around some ideas, talked about it for a bit, and then I resumed the video just as the boys burst through the bright light into the present day. They are suddenly young men performing in technicolor, performing for a theater of people. People are up on their feet, dancing, waving glow sticks in the air, the atmosphere is electric. The musicians play with all of their might. They are passionate. They are skilled, and everyone seems to be having the time of their lives. It’s the best, it’s the ultimate . . . it’s success! 

At the end of the video, the music slows way down, and we flash forward in time to when the musicians are old men. They are now tucked away in a corner in a nursing home, still playing their instruments, but back to the dry boring style they learned as boys. Two elderly folks play a slow card game. A few others stare into space, uninterested in music, uninterested in life. 

Again, we get the point, there’s got to be more to life than this. The two old men look at each other, grab their instruments, and escape—wheelchair and all toward the bright light at the end of the hallway. 

And that’s the end of the video. 

My kids put their sandwiches down and looked at me, probably wondering what I had in mind this time. On the surface level, the music video is simply communicating, “Don’t make boring music, make exciting music, live a little.”

But see, it was the living a little in the middle section that I wanted to talk about with my kids. I wanted to explore how the music video showed that the musicians had made it. What images did it use to communicate that the musicians were experiencing the best moment of their career? 

We looked back at the video and paused. Here’s how: with a theater full of women, exclusively young women, standing shoulder to shoulder, dancing, cheering, waving their glow sticks. The musicians are grinning ear to ear, jumping from the stage, dancing with the women, jumping back on the stage. They are just reveling in that situation. 

As I said, it’s the age-old question—that ultimate happiness and success is when you’re young, attractive, talented, and adored by masses of alluring women. And if you can’t quite be the star, well maybe you’ll be selected to be in the crowd of women, adoring the star. 

This is “the good life” for women. This is “ the good life” for men.

So, I put down my own sandwich and I asked my kids some questions:

• What about those two musicians, do they know these women? 
• Do they care about them? 
• Do you think they picked and chose who would be in the video and who wouldn’t? 
• Did they pay them? 
• What happens after the concert? Do the musicians just pack up and head home? 
• I wonder how they feel when the crowd disperses and everything is quiet and they’re alone? 
• Is the video saying that the moment in the limelight was worth the work? 
• Was that moment worth running toward? Was it the best?”

Then I asked my kids about the women.

• Who do you think they are? 
• Why are they there? 
• I wonder if each woman we see knows that God loves her and created her for so much more than to be a body in a crowd as a symbol of somebody else’s success?
• It looks like they were having fun, but I wonder if participating in the video was truly fulfilling for them? 
• Did they feel valued? 
• Did they feel a sense of unity and love? 
• Was there a connection with one another deep enough to forge real friendship?
• Would they say on the timeline of their lives that that was their shining moment? 
• And hey, what about the women not invited to be part of this music video? The women who didn’t look the part? Or dress the part? Or act the part? What about the women who said, “No, thank you. I’d rather not”?

I don’t want to be curmudgeonly. I don’t want to over analyze things. I don’t want to be judgmental. And I knew in this type of conversation, I could get close. So, I checked in with my kids. How were they all processing this?

My older kids were tracking with me. They had seen this dynamic at play in many instances, and they could understand its effects on how we view one another. 

My precious six-year-old, on the other hand, narrowed his eyebrows and pursed his lips with worry. He said, “Mom, I’m afraid I’m going to marry someone who goes to concerts.” I was thinking, What? Oh no, no, buddy. Oh, how could I have communicated so poorly with this sweet child? 

Well, I could certainly see myself having a lot of explaining to do to his future spouse. I knew I had to clarify things for him. I also knew I had to make a beeline straight for Scripture, because I don’t want to plant seeds of fear or legalism in my kids. 

But I want them to know what God thinks about this. 

So, we turned to Philippians 2, where we see a completely different image of success, happiness, of excitement. We see a completely different definition of the best.

Spoiler alert: It’s the opposite of the image in the music video. It goes like this, 

“So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Wow! What an image. Talk about a blazing white light. You and I are invited to say so long to the boring life of self-glorification. So long to worldly success, and so long to objectification. 

You and I get to run toward true joy and love and friendship, worship. We get to fill our minds with thoughts about Christ. Remembering that He left His glorious position in heaven to serve us. And we get to be like Him. We get to think like Him, and see like Him, and serve like Him. 

After reading Philippians 2, it was clear what our response would be whenever we see “the best” portrayed through the objectification of women or any other false portrayal of success. We can think of Christ and His sacrificial love for all women and for all men. We can see that Christ portrays success not by objectifying people, but by serving us, and by saving us, and by inviting us all to come together and worship Him.

You know what I hope my kids and I say whenever we see images like the one portrayed in the music video? I hope we look at it and without a shadow of a doubt, we say, “That’s not the best, because we know what is.”

Expect Something Beautiful is a production of Revive Our Hearts, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.