Infusion

Infused by I Am, I am filled with the flavor of God.
My character and being, becoming succulent with essence.

Yahweh left unchanged, yet somehow permeated by me, perhaps
Not changing, but myself, my being, still some part of Him.

My character, wondrous but bland, brought out
Of dormancy, possibly, to bloom with Grace Essence.

Life, nay people, can now swirl me around in mouths,
Tasting profound flavor.

The bouquet that emanates, wafts into empty nooks where
Brokenness lies in disheveled heaps,
Infused by I Am.

My totality, increased of Him.
His totality, includes me, yet
His definition remains undefined,
Molecules co-permeating,
Redemption.

A Brush with Death… No Really!

The entire wheel, with the suspension still completely attached, had been tossed 30 yards down the highway, ripped from the already trashed Camry by the violent 60 mph impact. The Camry, rested, mangled, snugly against the jersey barrier. Not six feet away, all four of us cowered in shock by what just happened. The young, substance-impaired driver of the Camry, had been tossed across the barrier as he cried on my Blackberry to his brother. He was sitting in the long, wet grass, disheveled and horrified. The rest of us were no less stunned. I stormed away to move my car, a long stream of profanities spewing from me.

A half hour earlier, my friend Victoria and I happened upon this two car accident early on a Saturday morning just outside of Redmond, WA. We had been out, playing darts and found ourselves hungry. Fat chance finding late food in Redmond, a town of young families that cocoon very effectively. Late eats are mostly out of the question there. So, there we were, driving over to Seattle for the famous hotwings at Charlie’s on Capital Hill. Alas, the meal would have to wait.

We found a very shaken woman, her car askew in the carpool lane, not much damage and no injuries. The other vehicle, the Camry, was backwards and very messed up. The young driver was wandering around in a stupor, asking to borrow a cell phone. The woman was still in her car, and I encouraged her to get out and wait with us in a safer place (the accident left the vehicles blindly around the curve of an onramp).

As we waited eons for the State Patrol to arrive, not 5 minutes after we took what appeared to be better refuge along the jersey barrier, I looked to my left to see a car swerving into the lane of the white Camry. I heard it cross the lane as its tires thrummed over the lane marker bumps with a frightening staccato. I had the presence of mind to yell something  of a warning just as the speeding car smashed into the Camry and spun it right past us, nearly missing its driver and Victoria, but glancing off of me and the other woman. I literally saw the car spinning toward me, hitting my left knee. It slammed into the wall just to our right.

The woman was not so fortunate, suffering a bloody laceration on her left foot, and two possible leg fractures. She was absolutely hysterical by now, weeping without inhibition, completely freaked out. Victoria put her arm around her, held her hand, and prayed quietly with her.

I was left with two scrapes, a cut and an bruise on my knee, and a left side that would have been a field day for a chiropractor. Everyone else was uninjured.

We had to wait since we were witnesses to the second accident. The young guy was arrested for DUI, but was likely under the influence of antidepressants according to his mother which showed up later. The guy that plowed into the Camry had the smart presence of mind to not leave the scene of the accident. He was later arrested for felony vehicular assault, as his girlfriend stood passively by.

After we filled out our statements, Victoria and I still felt the hunger pangs, now even more so. Charlie’s was done serving food at 2:30 AM (go figure!), so we were pointed to the 5-Point in Seattle, in the shadow of the mighty Space Needle. This was an entire adventure unto itself.

We walked into the dim neon glow. The place was packed with a boisterous crowd at 3:00 in the groggy hours of the morning. Iggy Pop and other messy punk favorites were blaring on the sound system. The crowd was colorful menagerie of frat boys, rockers still looking sweaty after shows at local clubs, and goth girls eating voluptuous breakfasts. We waited 15 minutes for a table. After we were finally seated, we got our order in and soaked in the very profane, yet sacred atmosphere.

As we waited for our meal, people sang happy birthday to one of the staff. By “people”, I mean everyone in the diner. The song morphed into the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”. And there we were, immersed in a wild crowd loudly singing the famous Beatles anthem.  This was a hell of a way to work through the bizarre shock of the accident earlier, all the while pacifying ourselves with eggs benedict and a chicken fried steak the size of the large plate it was served on.

Why this sequence of events? Why a brush with death and then the surreality of the 5-Spot and its apparently divinely inspired soundtrack (not to mention food)? “All You Need is Love.” Hmmmm… Life flashed in front of us. I am still shocked by seeing a car violently skidding toward me and literally skimming across my knee. It ripped my jeans. Was God’s hand in this, reaching down to avert our certain death, or at best total dismemberment? Saying that God saved us all with a miracle almost makes this all sound trite, but I feel like He did. Maybe he cared for the safety of Victoria and I. But maybe He cared more that we were right there right then, giving His comfort to a couple of frightened children of His that appeared to be living empty lives. I don’t know. What I do know is this:

All you need is love. And the longer I live and survive the painful, wacky and preposterous experiences of life, the more I am convinced that God is Love.

Solzhenitsyn Get It Right, As Usual

“The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Giving Up Our Freedom?

Today, I vividly remembered riding with my folks in a little yellow Renault to visit relatives in East Germany, back in the 80’s.  This visit was always one I anticipated deeply. It was to the only relatives that lived imprisoned by a repressive government. It was always an adventure. And the fondest memories of my life still linger on my times there.

Today, I am forced to consider profoundly, the direction our current administration is forcing us down. As I remember passing through a mile-wide border, bounded by high-tension wires strung through the woods and meant to kill. I recall seeing the barren no-man’s lands cut as scarring swaths through pristine forests, meant to incarcerate the kind citizens of that country. I shudder as I remember the stern East German border officers that had us remove our luggage from the car, only to have them search through every single item as we waited to two hours while others removed the seats from our humble vehicle and scrutinized every square inch. And I remember wondering why?

The times with my East German cousin were sweet times. I remember the hot summer, drinking red currant wine out of a carboy, because no wine was available. I remember helping him DJ at the kid’s summer camp with marxist slogans plastered on the walls, for this is where the indoctrination began. We left that night drunk on the rice beer that was our payment for spinning contraband Beatles and Zeppelin albums acquired surreptitiously. We stumbled home, nearly getting lost. I flopped down on the expensive leather couch that no one else within 100 miles owned, only to ralph on it in the middle of the night.

I woke up in a haze next morning to hear a horse drawn carriage rumbling down the horribly bad dirt road out front (nicknamed Rio Chocolato because it became a chocolate milk flash flood any time it rained). The driver was delivering the raw goods for the glass blowing business my relatives owned. They labored harder than any I have likely ever worked with, in toxic fumes brought on by the chemicals that silvered the insides of the beautiful Christmas balls they handicrafted. And they worked for a pittance, returned to them by the government after it sold their goods on the world market, retaining most of the spoils of their trade.

These kind people, making very little income, had most every need provided for them by Erich Hoenneker and the magnanimous East German government. But the needs were provided marginally, whether health care or otherwise. Yet, when we visited, the entire town knew, and the collective generosity ran deep. We were looked on as novelties, and given much. We’d arrive to amazing meals of Sauerbraten w/ Thuringian Dumplings, sublime foods that emerged out of deep repression.

We’d share meals of food acquired on the black market under the threat of arrest, because the Trader Joe’s-sized grocery stores perpetually had bare shelves. Of course, we would bring many things out of our relative abundance. Candy, bread, staples, bananas. Oh, the bananas… I nearly wept as one of the little nephews of this dear family studied a banana for the first time for he had never seen one. He proceed to take a bite into it, peel and all. He’d not even ever seen a banana on state-run TV.

And I remember standing on the street corner as larges buses belching black, acrid smoke drove by. I stepped off the sidewalk, looking to my left, to see a large troop truck lumbering down the road. It was filled with Russian soldiers. Yet, we were not in wartime. The presence of repression. We went nowhere were there was not some reminder of the state that was in charge of the lives of its people. Even as we wandered the local wilderness foraging for the wondrous wild blueberries that carpeted the forests, we had to keep 50 worthless Ostmarks with us, in case we ran afoul of border zones. Guards could be bought off fairly easily.

The propaganda was palpable, even in the small burg my relatives lived in. The “The Dawn of a New Era” theme was prevalent, along with themes fraternal unity with the Soviet Union, youth being the future, progress, etc. etc. My dad, contrary to laws, snapped photos of a lot of them. Everywhere you turned, there were pictures of Erich Hoenecker, the president of the time, along with promises of provision, hope and change. Hmmmm…

But all of it was smoke and mirrors. Goods were not available. The roads were in utter disrepair. People lived with marginal health care. And when they reached pensioner age, were promptly, and strongly, encouraged to leave their country. You see, the entire system of cradle-to-grave care and management of every aspect of life, was economically unsustainable.

I remember the day, my great aunt was allowed to leave East Germany for the first time in close to 40 years. I wept. She wept. We all wet the pavement with our tears. And the West Government handed her 100 marks of “Welcome Money” for all of her many years of living in tyranny. We slowly brought her back into the society of the West, which displayed both its good sides and bad. The day after her first visit to the Kaufhof, a large department store, she had a nervous breakdown.

She came from almost nothing, into almost everything, but decided to stay in her homeland, much to the chagrin of East German planners who would have much rather saved on her meager pension benefits.

It is hard to fully describe the dynamic of my experience, much less the country that was East Germany. Reunification has happened. As I watched the Berlin Wall being torn down by jubilant revelers, I could not contain my emotion. I have visited since, tears washing the embrace of my cousin. I walked in the minefields, now a UN Monument. I sat on the deck of my friend’s cabin that juts over a pond in the woods. It’s just a small vacation home on 10 hectares (24ish acres). His two ponds were stocked one with 100s of ornamental koi, and the other u-fish trout. On the backlot, he raised Christmas Geese. He was renting from an absentee landlord that lived in Italy, or some such southern country. He told me his rent, and I had to spend 40 minutes to get him to convince me that he was not lying. Are you ready? $50 per year!!! He was sitting on a goldmine that guaranteed profit, but he did not understand the idea of free enterprise. His family had never had to operate with a profit incentive to provide Christmas ornaments to the world. I tried to explain what he had, and how he could provide for his family well after a recent layoff as a grocery manager. We talked. He tried to understand. To no avail.

And as Germany unified two countries, assimilating its citizens and worthless currency, the problems lingered. The West Germans resent the apparent malaise of the Ossis, the not-so-fond reference to former East Germans. Germany still makes massive financial transfers to prop the “East” Germans up. And most West Germans view the Ossis as lazy.

You may be wondering about why I have meandered through some of my East German experiences. As we sit on the biggest recession and highest unemployment rates ever, and our government giddily pushes health care reform and cap and trade, etc., etc., ad nauseum, I recount my experiences as a free person in a repressed society. I saw a government that thought it was taking care of everything in a utopian ideal. I saw people full of life, but dulled deeply by surviving under tyranny. I saw a government that meddled in every damn thing and sought to control the actions of others. Sure, they eventually made the best of it, but daily they lamented the loss of what God placed inherently in their souls — freedom. They didn’t want more goods, or more money necessarily. They wanted the freedom to raise their families without interference. They wanted to carry on business without constant scrutiny at every corner. They wanted to speak freely against the repression the lived under daily. They wanted to be able to buy a banana without having to wait for the Russian troop trucks to pass by. All in all, they were straining to live out from under the stifling burden of a government that claimed to know what was in their best interests. They wanted to be free.

As you listen to the current propaganda perpetuated by our administration’s media cheerleaders, I would ask you these things?

Do you value your freedom?

Do you realize that we have more freedom from tyranny than most any other nation ever in history?

Are you taking your freedom for granted?

Do you care that government is taking your hard-earned money, created by the sweat of your brow, or by the efforts of your mind, to place all of us under more crushing debt? Is this what you want for your family?

With your freedom, are you pursuing merely your self-gratification, or are you using it to perpetuate charity and good to your family, friends, community and the world?

Do you recognize the malaise, entitlement mentalities, and resignation that are beginning to flow through our culture? Do you want to go the way of more repressive systems that political fools try time and time again, though history has proven them wrong time and time again?

If you are dead to these questions, it might be worth spending some time peeling back the layers that have dulled your senses to the unadulterated freedom that God has place in all of us. This is not a matter of Obama, or of political party, or of conservative vs. liberal. It is a matter of the very trait we have been endowed with – Freedom. Is that something you are willing to give up at the expense of you, your family, or your nation, not to mention the world? Do you want to give the government full care of your life, and the lives of others? If so, God help you.

So what is my encouragement? It is to get involved, to engage, to start caring. Get to know your neighbors. Serve them. Give, your time and money. Raise your kids right. Care. Read laws that are being proposed, even the ones that are foolishly long and meant to deceive  you. Don’t be resigned. Call and write your representatives. Follow your heart.

And speaking of following your heart, maybe it is time to get back in touch with your Creator. Forget the evangelicals, christians, left, right, conservatives or liberals. Consider Jesus. Could He be more than a moral teacher, and actually have unleashed the redemption meant to save all of us from our brokenness? Try to put your hurts perpetrated in the name of religion aside, and the hypocrisy you have experienced. Don’t let go of it. Give it a break, just for a bit, to get in touch with Jesus again. I think you will be profoundly surprised.

As I saw the extreme lack of freedom in East Germany, I am more keenly aware of how it is being slowly taken from you and I. Am I paranoid about it? No. Will I still live my live my life creatively and productively, hoping to have some impact on everyone I meet? Yes. Will I continue to struggle in my attempts to inspire people in their heart and minds? I hope so. Ultimately, government cannot fully repress the human spirit that God has infused us with, but we can all step up more to avoid the potential worst.

Obama, the Hypocrite?

“…folks who are struggling don’t simply need more government bureaucracy; that top-down, one-size-fits-all program usually doesn’t end up fitting anybody. People don’t need somebody out in Washington to tell them how to solve their problems, especially when the best solutions are often right there in their own neighborhoods, just waiting to be discovered.” – Barack Obama 6/30/09

So, then, why do all the bills, taxes, and bailouts you propose fly completely in the face of this statement of yours, Mr. President?

Cool Books from Amazon!

You can now purchase books directly through this blog by clicking the Great Books… link in the Blogroll in the right column. Note that the book sales page will open in a new window.

Please check out what’s here.  Right now, books on trinitarian theology (a Google search, just for you) are offered. This will be changing on a regular basis. And of course, when you buy through this site, part of the proceeds of sales go to fund this site.

Thanks!

Ok, I Get The Message

The past month has brought an onslaught of traffic to this blog.  And I really dont’ know why.  But it is clear that I need to be more consistent with posting here.  For those who have posted comments, a hearty thanks.  I welcome all of your thoughts, from the great encouragement you have given, to dissent.  I will try to comment as much as possible.

An update about me: I am currently attending Mars Hill Graduate School in the astounding city of Seattle, WA.  I count it a privelege to have professors like Dan Allender, Dwight Friesen and Roy Barnsess. This school, not without its faults, is an amazing place.  If you are interested in further education and pursuing a counseling or seminary degree, this place is for you. But don’t just expect academics. Your life will be turned upside down, but in a good way. You will love it and hate it.  You will to quite.  You will wonder what you have gotten yourself into.  But you will see God’s imprint on your life as a result of it. I am on this journey and it has been the most challenging time in my life — ever!

So then, I hope to write regularly, but with all the other reading and writing I have to do, it will be spotty.

Thanks for reading!! More to come…

Late Friday Night at the Raging River

It’s a sleepy town, along a flood-prone river. There’s not much there — a grocery, a Mexican restaurant, a few bars. This is no metropolis. Most just pass through to places more significant. I am out with a friend, late on a Friday night, visiting the most popular place on this tiny strip. It’s a microcosm of not much. The rural character of this area is keenly present. The bar is filled with the usual working stiffs, medicating from their weekly boring fates at work.

A band is playing. At first, I wonder if they are any good. My ears are splitting, so it’s hard to tell. The guitarist is a tone God, somehow extracting some amazing crunch from his Charvel combined with some unknown amp buried on the stage. An ersatz light show flashes weird arrays around the dim room completely out of synch to the music.

The rest of the band is comprised of middle-aged rock wanna-be’s. They are fronted by three women that are merely weathered reflections of good looks of better days past. I immediately go into critic mode, but then get over my temptation: they are up there performing — I am not.

The set list is a bold mixture of covers ranging from a Blues Brothers tribute to Gloria Gaynor to ZZ Top and back again. I am beginning to like this motley crue. The three chanteuses oozing biker chic are clearly having fun and have a well-rounded collection of gimmicky moves for each song along with cheesy props. It’s no wonder that the crowd is in the palm of the band’s hand.

I love this place because it is permeated with real. Picture middle-aged divorcees, trying just a bit too hard to look good, with smoke-addled voices like Suzanne Pleshette, silently yearning for companionship. And then there’s the mid-life crisis male Viagra crowd. You know, the 50-year-old set deep in the midst of sordid affairs with their Harleys. They are dressed too young, exuding too much effort to stay hip. The bad perms with hair plugs give it away. They are here to feel some wisp of youth gone past, hoping maybe to get it on with a willing companion, on the dance floor at the very least.

The bar is dim, and the dance floor crowded with people that dance maybe even worse than I do. With few exceptions. Only after a bit, I start to discern who is tipsy, and I begin to notice those that are blindingly drunk. One very diminutive drunk woman, staggers past me, stops, grabs my hand, and kisses it. Should I be flattered, or repulsed? In her case, the answer was clear.

This is an interesting crowd. I am amazed by how weathered everyone seems to look. There is this aura of fun, obscured by a dull patina of brokenness. This bar beckons, offering some glimpse of hope for something remotely better. Sure, live music and connecting over pints is great (though I don’t know how anyone can have fun drinking Bud Light), but there is so much more to be had. And these people appear to be way the below the summit of fulfillment, and are wont to see it through the haze of their lives.

Yet there is an easy friendliness here. Everyone seems open to having a chat, BS’ing about whatever spills out of their tipsy mouths. There is a good nature here — an openness that is refreshing. I find it immensely satisfying to connect with these people and reflect something of Jesus to them. This humble club is the great equalizer, at least in my experience. It is where the guard is down, and everyone truly does know your name. It is a rough-edged place, filled with people that have had rough lives. It is a place where pretense cannot find a comfortable home. In very fact, this almost feels like home. It is where I feel accepted and welcomed.

A rough-looking biker with a Billy Gibbons beard draping almost past his belly is a regular. He is one of those “real” Harley riders and has quite a Hog out front. His identity is his ruffian persona and the Harley that is his throne. He’s playing pool out back with a beautiful buxom blond there with her very tolerant (or else completely crazy) husband — she is a man magnet. The woman is a very self-assured speaker/author that appears very out of place in this worn bar until I hear her swearing like an infantryman with a stubbed toe. The strip tease to distract her worthy opponent marks her place among the resident hoi polloi. Beard man reciprocates. Things are not looking up. And no one will be looking down. Did I say that there was no pretense here?

The pool game progresses to a photo finish. Mr Beardly rushes over to the Blonde to give her a hug, even though he won. The hug was long enough to be creepy, but the woman humors the guy. All is good.

A dude, cap on backwards, heavy silver chains connected to his wallet swallowed up by his baggy jeans, brushes past me and does a double take. “Dude, your tall!” he stammers. “Dude, you’re observant” is my prickly reply. As if things could not get more surreal, a gangly guy walks in through the smoking patio, barely skimming below the door frame with his cranium. I’ll be damned if there ain’t another tall dude on my turf. Oh, yeah. If forgot, the room belonged to the blonde pool femme fatale.

Gangly and I exchange the typical tall pleasantries: “Where do you buy your clothes?” “How’s your forehead?” “Is it really true what they say about large shoe sizes?” It’s getting deep. Just then, Baggy Pants walks up, stands in front of us, neck strained, as if he were looking at some national monument. I have half a mind to chain him to a post in the smoking patio with his wallet chain. But that wouldn’t be too graceful. He stands, he stares. Words fail to escape him. He trundles of to his buddies, which loiter like an amoeba of Bud Light drunken fog over by the dart board. They’re all looking over at us, pointing, apparently with drunken expressions of awe. Is there a way I could charge people to ogle at my tallness? I’d be rich in this place.

The night wears on, people mingling back and forth amongst each other, trying to find something. I am not thinking they will find it. This place is a sad, yet vibrant. The apparent fascination for tallness will not sway me from coming back. In the affluence I live around, this place reinvigorates me with life. I’ll come back again — to the Harleys, cheap beer, drunkenly amorous women, and men-children. I’ll seek to connect and bring some life to this place where people are straining to find it.

Resurrection…

I have been living amongst the dead.  When it comes to my writing that is.  My mind has been so full lately, and my inner life contorted by all manner of stresses.  Words — written ones — have eluded me as of late.  Picture a big, lumbering Great Dane trying to get out of the house through the cat door.  Thus are my words.  But I have written.

My graduate studies have driven my recent words, under the duress of deadlines and style guides… and ideas that are still forming themselves in my mind.  At least I wrote.  But something in my deep inner being yearns for more — more words, woven together from my tattered threads.  I am starting again and even as my fingers clumsily tap, I feel refreshed.  This is the beginning of the purge.

So maybe I am rising.  The recent temprorary death of my verbal being, rejuvenated.  Words give me passion, and the Word of Life, life.  This little post is the beginning of more, I hope. But I fear that I will disappoint myself through my lack of consistency.

“And I’ll try, oh lord, I’ll try to carry on.”

The Bumbling Bureacracy, or YOU?

Like many of you, I get up every day and go to work.  It is likely that I burn time in traffic, inhaling exhaust, stressing at other drivers, and generally not making the best use of my time.  But I have to get to work to provide for the simple life I maintain.

I get to work, and I love what I do.  It is flexible.  It pays well.  And it empowers me to fund things in life that are important to me, like going to grad school for a Master of Divinity so I can figure out how to better impact this amazing place we live in.

I work hard, and I have a lot to offer.  My value is high, and I get compensated accordingly.  But I am disturbed.

I am disturbed that I, like the average American, has to work for four months to pay my taxes.   I provide value to the company I work with, but the government extracts this value for its own ends, which are said to be in the best interest of we the people.  This does not sit well with me.  Why?

To give an example with round, easy numbers, if you make $12k a year, you will give $4000 of that to your government, not by your choice (ignore the low income and the wrong tax rate here).  This will leave you with $8000 to spend providing for you and/or your family, saving for the future, laying up funds for college, etc.

Sure, your money goes to fund some basics: law enforcement and infrastructure, like highways and the like.  We should all contribute to the things we use.  But are you fine contributing to things that are morally reprehensible to you?  Are you OK with the government confiscating your income to better the fortunes of other groups that have been arbitrarily deemed to be in need, like the poor, the elderly, women seeking abortions, corporations, college students etc.?

In perspective, you give four months of your earnings from your sweat, skills and brains to fund things you may not agree with, like war, abortion, pork subsidies, etc.  And if you have causes that mean a lot to you, you have $4000 less to spend giving to those causes and a vastly more limited ability to give of your time (because, if you give your time, you won’t earn the money to provide, save, etc.).  In essence, you and I have transferred the ability to promote justice, charity and change in our society to a government that knows far less how to meet its needs that you and I do.

For every dollar you “charitably” gave to your government — I am speaking ironically here since  failing to pay taxes will land you in jail eventually –  it spends $6-10 dollars depending on which data you look at.  That means, following our example,  they spend $24-40,ooo.  Just try spending like that for a couple of months.  You’ll end up in the poorhouse.  That aside, this out of control spending will go toward certain arenas that are morally reprehensible to you.  Are you OK with that?

So then, we have worked for  four months for our government for it to overspend the money it has required of us, funding things that may utterly fly in the face of our consciences.  I am pretty certain this is not the picture of freedom our forefathers had in mind.  And I am sure to the depths of my soul that God is grieved by this.

You see, we have failed as the Body of Christ (Not entirely though.  There are significant exceptions that are due credit for serving the world well).  We have relegated the work of God’s redemption in the world to our government.  What do I mean by this?

We were all created with the purpose of foreshadowing redemption to the world though acts of love, justice, grace and service (aren’t they all one in the same?).  The universal community of faith, built upon the vivid gifts given us by a God of Grace, is to be the expression of His love in the world.  And through us, and our love, Christ will become known.  But we have feebly failed.

Rather than living as a Body of Grace, we have remained content to focus on ourselves, to be fed and lifted up so we can become better disciples.  We have sought salvation for ourselves and others as the goal, rather than offering a banquet of succulent acts of Grace for the world to be fed and be changed by.  We have become internally focused on self-improvement, felt needs, and programs, and have forgotten the precious souls screaming outside to have peace, care, and healing from the horrible betrayals of the world.

And as we have all become doped up by the self-serving activity that is always buzzing around in every church, we have let the profound privilege of working with God on loving the lost and hopeless of this world get frittered away only to be co-opted by our government.  Worse yet, we now look to government to be our answer in caring for the poor, standing up for the rights of the oppressed, and living in justice in a corrupt world.  And we swoon when the candidates tell us of change as they falsely promise to transform a corrupt system that will only suck them in to itself.

We are frogs in the kettle.  The water is warm and soothing.  The temperature is going up, little by precious little.  And we won’t even feel the boiling point.  By that point, any option we have of giving of our time, selves and money will be little more than quaint memories.  And we can sit idly by while our politicians dole out our hard-earned money on our behalf to provide the human services they are not even meant to provide.  (I even heard one “thoughtful” Christian mention that if we don’t elect the right president, human services will be in jeopardy.  It is a travesty that we as followers of Christ can even think such a thought.)

Are you content with this?  What are you doing?  What is the church doing?  What am I doing?  Are we regularly serving those in need?  Are we giving our money and talents to causes WE choose, not ones our government chooses for us?  Are we relying far too deeply on a huge, impersonal and bumbling bureaucracy to meet the needs of our society, whether they be health care, help for the homeless, or whatever, when only we know the true needs of our neighbors?  If so, we are all guilty of sloth, apathy, and idolatry.  And if so, we have failed as the Body of Christ.

Are you enamored of Obama?  Of McCain?  If so, you are putting your trust and faith in the wrong thing.   This next regime will help our country, but our choices are between “not a lot of help”, and “a lot less help”.  Why do certain believers of Jesus care so much about who gets to be president, to the point of demonizing the other party?  McCain and Obama are both guilty of slamming each other (and those who would not vote correctly, like those who “hide behind guns and religion”) to the same extent, in different ways.  Will it make us feel better to elect the right president so we can avoid serving the world with Grace?  It’ll be fine, the government will take care of it.  Will it perpetuate us sitting on our asses, dissociating in front of the Idiot Box, being spoon fed where to spend our money, how to vote, and how to be socially conscious so we can have our ears tickled and our consciences appeased?  Are we content with this?  I pray to God we are not.

If you can’t seriously answer these questions, or understand how other countries have fared when their governments have gotten too large and have taken away the ability for people to live based on their consciences, it is probably better you don’t vote. Wouldn’t you rather keep more of your hard-earned money, and give it as you see fit (or use it to give your time as you see fit)?  Wouldn’t that be the more responsible and deeply fulfilling way to live?  I think the answers are clear.

Participating in our political process is important, I suppose.  But rather than voting for the “right” candidate, wouldn’t we accomplish more if we served, gave our time and loved this world as only we can through the love of Jesus?