Popular culture comes up with some doozies! “You need to go touch grass” is a playful way to suggest someone has been online too long. In a deeper sense, it means someone needs to connect with what is true and real. They need a reboot.
Truth claims abound these days. Some look an awful lot like conspiracy theories, which insist (without evidence) that a secretive group of people are controlling events with malicious intent. Another way to drift away from reality is “expressive individualism.” This is philosopher Charles Taylor’s term describing how “each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity…as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside” (i.e. society, parents, or religion).
In other words, you are supposed to find your own meaning and define your own morality according to what connects to your feelings. The irony is, chasing happiness like that is not new, nor does it work. It becomes its own captivity, resulting in loneliness, guilt, and anxiety. It causes crisis of identity, fear of failure, and loss of hope for the future. These pathologies are rooted in the bad soil of self-idolatry. It’s time to go touch grass.
These pathologies are what you would expect if the world has no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, using the words of Richard Dawkins. But if there is a Creator, for Whom I submit there is overwhelming evidence, then there is a joy to be found, a reality to be known. To accept the Creator’s design and intent for you as a human calls for blessed change. C.S. Lewis wrote, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man…There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake.”
So recognizing cultural captivity, you can either be pigheaded or go touch grass. (Please take that in the good humor intended!) “By what a man is overcome, by this is he enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:19). That is pigheaded. But Jesus said, “If you continue in My word…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32). That is an offer to walk away from captivity, barefoot on the green grass!
The reality is God created you with purpose and dignity. He loves you and invites you to enjoy the repentant life of faith in Jesus your Savior. Step outside in the yard at night and look up. “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; What is man that You take thought of him?” (Psa. 8:3-4). Go touch grass.