Out of the Box

A week ago I had the opportunity to see Rob Bell during his “Drop Like Stars” tour stop in Chicago. First off I just have to say… he’s a pretty funny dude! I mean look at the picture behind him in this shot… it’s a squirrel in the hand of a waiter. The point he was making here was that the squirrel is out of the box. One would normally expect a waiter to be handing them a menu… that would be referred to as inside the box. But here the waiter is offering a squirrel. We recognize this furry creature as a squirrel because we’ve seen them inside the box climbing trees in the park. This is quite a turn of events for the squirrel though. No longer is it safely scampering from tree to tree but it now finds itself out of the box.

Rob also gave another pretty humorous example of out of the box. In the context of a college application essay question, one would expect a formal essay, however Hugh Gallagher gave an outside the box answer.

Rob explains to us that when something is out of the box that box is still the primary point of reference. When we suffer we no longer have our customary points of reference. It’s very easy, over time, to pick up assumptions and expectations about how things are supposed to go. Then things start to unravel and that’s when a bunch of the insulators are being taken away. We’re forced, in suffering, to come up with a new tomorrow. Rob also says that within suffering, there are all these imaginative seeds that lead to new tomorrows.

One of those seeds is Charitywater. Take a look…