A couple of months ago, my son and I went to a TobyMac concert in Denver, and I was able to get us a couple of pre-concert meet-‘n’-greet passes. It was my son’s first concert and he was off-the-charts thrilled to have a chance to meet Toby.
As is often the case with such events, we stood in a long line of perhaps 100, maybe 150 people in the basement of the arena to meet Toby before the show. The former DC Talk musician was exceedingly gracious and professional with everyone, smiling, autographing pictures and CDs, posing for pics with everyone’s smartphone cameras.
Now, as demanding jobs go, I know that there are harder things. But I couldn’t help but think that it might get tiring to muster that kind of relational energy night after night, year after year, to connect with absolutely awestruck fans that you’ve never met before and likely will never see again.
That thought popped into my head again last month when I came across a story about Justin Bieber in which he basically said he’s done taking pictures with fans he encounters in public. “If you happen to see me out somewhere know that I’m not gonna take a picture I’m done taking pictures,” he said in a May 10 Instagram post. He added a telling rationale behind his decision: “It’s gotten to the point that people won’t even say hi to me or recognize me as human, I feel like a zoo animal, and I wanna be able to keep my sanity.”
This post came on the heels of another back in March, wherein Bieber announced that he’d also no longer be doing meet-‘n’-greets with fans because of that same pressure. “I’m going to be cancelling my meet and greets,” he wrote, also on Instagram. “I enjoy meeting such incredible people but I end up feeling so drained.” He added that he wants “to make people smile and be happy but not at my expense.” In the end, though, he said that “the pressure of meeting people’s expectations” almost always leaves him “feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted.”
Now, for those of us who don’t have to deal with the adulation of screaming, smiling throngs of fans, it’s tempting to respond by rebuking Bieber for being a self-absorbed whiner. After all, how hard can it be just smiling and being nice, right?
But in Justin’s defense, I think it might be a lot harder than we realize. In describing himself as feeling like a “zoo animal,” what the 22-year-old singer is saying is that he’s weary of being objectified. He’s tired of being treated not as a person, but as a thing. To put it spiritual terms, I think what Justin Bieber is discovering is that being worshipped by fans ultimately becomes a burden that no person was ever meant to carry.
Worship—which descends from the Old English word worthship, meaning to ascribe worth—is something only God is worthy of. And only God is big enough to receive honor, praise and glory without being corrupted or crushed by them.
We might think that being adored by the masses would be a deeply satisfying, amazing experience. But as Justin Bieber is discovering in his experience with exactly that kind of unadulterated ardor, it becomes a burden that he’s not designed or intended to bear. Ultimately, he’s just as finite and human as the ecstatic, enthralled supplicants who long for him to be so much more than that.
And he’s weary of trying to pretend otherwise.
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