"Even if one new gun law saved a life, it would be worth it."
How often have you heard somebody give that argument in the debate over our Second Amendment?
It's been a one-liner opponents of more gun laws have had a difficult time refuting.
Well, I'm neither a gun owner, nor do I want to own a gun, and I don't think evangelicals have any sort of mandate from God to spend a lot of energy fighting over this issue, but the more times I hear the "if even one new law saves one life" rationale, I think I'm going to scream.
We're fighting battles on catch phrases, slogans, and sound bites that we're not thinking through. And when you think this one through, you see that it doesn't make sense.
It may sound like it, since protecting human life is something governments and laws are supposed to do. But if it were true, it should apply in other cases, right? Meanwhile, most of the people who are spouting it in advocacy of more gun laws are... the same people who support abortion.
Think about it: each abortion takes a life. Not every gun that is shot is involved in hurting anything, let alone death. Hardly any gun owners, considering how many there are and how few of them use guns inappropriately, kill people with a gun. But each abortion is a human being's death.
Every time.
Life, Laws, and Abortion
So, using the type of rationale that presumes more laws are good, as long as one life is saved by them, our society should be outlawing abortion, right? If more gun control laws that infringe on the rights of Americans to own guns will save even one life, which would make the new laws worthwhile, shouldn't the "rights" of women to kill their unborn offspring be secondary to the laws limiting a woman's freedom to pursue inconsequential sex so her baby could live?
Isn't that the corollary to "even if one new law saved a life, it would be worth it" in the abortion debate?
Of course, since it works to the advantage of pro-lifers, perhaps gun advocates should re-think their opposition to more gun laws. But the fact is, "even if one new law saved a life" needs to be balanced against the wider scope - pardon the pun - of civil rights and basic morality. In the case of gun rights, since so few guns are involved in the horrific crimes that have captured our nation's emotions, and since so many gun owners act responsibly with the weapons they own, curbing gun violence has more to do with societal attitudes towards violence and conflict resolution than more legislation.
In terms of abortion, it's not just one life that is saved by making abortion illegal, but millions. And it's not a mother's rights to irresponsible sex that government needs to protect, but the right of life that begins at conception to make it through birth alive. Since the mother is opting for murder, the state needs to protect innocent life.
This is the logic behind gun rights advocates resisting more gun control, and pro-life advocates working to save the unborn. Not "even if one new law saved a life."
Love the Sinner, Accommodate the Sin?
By the way, speaking of logic - or the lack of it, advocates of amnesty for illegal immigrants are increasingly relying on the "treat them as people" argument for letting illegals stay in the United States despite their status as lawbreakers.
"We need to sympathize over the plight of these people, and understand that simply kicking them out of our country and back into a culture that their kids, especially, would find foreign is inhumane."
OK, if that is the case, then why should evangelicals insist, for example, that homosexuals who come to Christ abandon their homosexual lifestyle? Homosexuality is as much against God's law as breaking national sovereignty laws, is it not? What's the difference? I imagine it would be just as difficult - if not more so - for a gay person to leave their sexual relationships, than for a family here illegally to return to their native country. If we're talking inhumanity and lack of love, what's the difference?
Christians who advocate for amnesty rely on the "sojourners and strangers in your midst" scriptures that teach us to treat people unlike us with kindness and dignity. However, couldn't "sojourners and strangers" be the unsaved people who populate our pews alongside us on Sunday mornings in our churches? But do we preach that people can stay in their sin after they repent and turn to Christ?
Of course not! We believers pursue discipleship so we can learn how to better love our Savior and demonstrate our faith by committing our ways - sins and all - to His lordship in our lives. If that means we need to make lifestyle changes, then we make those changes.
How is that different for illegals? Granted, most evangelicals have not displayed much Christ-like love to illegals, let alone gays. So, to the extent that we still need to learn how to demonstrate love to these people groups, the point being made by the "sojourners and strangers" crowd is well taken. For example, although I oppose amnesty, I support a moratorium on deportations, while efforts to encourage illegals to return to their native countries have time to take effect.
Meanwhile, do you see how careful we need to be in the sides we take and what we say to support our positions? Logic is a critical component in every conversation, particularly ones in which emotions can run high. We need to use the brains God has given us more effectively as we represent Christ in our fallen world.
It may not win us popularity, but popularity is like guns and living in a country illegally. God doesn't guarantee us the right to have or do any of them. But He does expect us to choose our positions on these issues with integrity and compassion.
While we rely far less on laws, and totally on Him.
_____
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Drought Could Shrink Texas City
A crisis is brewing in Plainview, Texas.
Years of drought have reduced the once-mighty cattle industry anchored across the vast plains of west Texas to a scrawny herd, and recently, the city's largest employer, a beef processing plant, announced it was shutting down.
Forced to close because there isn't enough cattle nearby to justify its existence anymore.
For its relatively unpopulated region of the Lone Star State, Plainview is a sizable city, with approximately 22,000 residents. Statistically, these 22,000 people live in 7,600 households. And this plant that's closing, Plainview's largest employer by far, has 2,000 people on its $80 million annual payroll.
That means a lot of families will be hit hard when the plant, owned by Kansas-based Cargill, ceases operations on February 1.
That's this coming Friday.
Of course, they've seen it coming in Plainview. Not only because the city sits on land about as flat as it gets, and seeing far into the distance is easy to do. A company for which I used to work had a customer in Plainview, and after the president of our firm made a visit out there, he commented, "I've never seen a city with a more appropriate name."
Plain. View.
All kidding aside, Friday's closure has been dreaded by Plainview for a while now because the drought they've been experiencing for the past several years has left the region with few options. Ranchers can neither afford to fatten their herds for market nor maintain them on a meager diet, since their ranchland has withered up. Imported food is costly, whether it's for us humans buying it at Whole Foods, or farmers trying to find it and truck it in from parts of the country that have it to spare. West Texas has seen droughts before, but not like this one.
An ethanol plant in Plainview has been forced to shut down its primary operations due to the lack of corn, but it hopes to deploy its 45 employees on other ancillary assignments in its facility through the summer. Cargill says it's already strung along its plant in Plainview for as long as it can, and considering how west Texas' drought is staring everybody there in the face, it's hard to fault the company.
Texas, after all, isn't the only state facing drought conditions. And it's not like Cargill is shipping production to Mexico or China; this is pretty much a localized business they're in. And the locale in which Plainview sits can't sustain it.
Workers at Cargill's plant weren't living like kings off of their salaries, but they were earning a good living that kept them in Plainview, paid the taxes that supported a robust public school system, and created a thriving community boasting a hospital, a Baptist college, and several museums. Perhaps it's not the most exciting city on the planet, but considering how many communities across America's formerly "great" plains are shriveling up and blowing away like tumbleweeds, Plainview held its own, which is saying something good about the place.
Cargill's Plainview plant, meanwhile, churned out four percent of America's annual beef production all on its own. Earlier this month, when the company first announced its plans for Plainview, live cattle futures collapsed, Cargill's operations were that important. Indeed, it's a significant blow, not just to the city of Plainview and the plant's employees, but America's entire beef industry. Experts predict that in the long run, as the market contracts to match production with cattle supply, the industry will be remain relatively healthy, even if collateral damage is suffered by folks in places like west Texas. But it's small comfort to see such a hit coming due to something no rancher or food processor can control: the weather.
Some Plainview residents know Who does control the weather, however, and yesterday, approximately 300 residents joined a dozen civic leaders and pastors to pray for rain and other solutions to the imminent economic disaster their city is facing.
And already, at least one company has begun poaching employees for its own plant in South Dakota, sending corporate recruiters to Plainview in search of experienced meat cutters willing to relocate. Otherwise, the options for people wanting to stay in west Texas appear pretty slim. Granted, the larger city of Lubbock, home to almost a quarter-million people and the acclaimed Texas Tech University, is only 40 miles or so from Plainview, and workers willing to commute may be able to find something in that far more bustling environment. But however you look at it, losing 14% of a county's jobs in one day will change the social and economic landscape of Plainview for quite some time.
Before today, and before you read this essay, you'd probably never heard of Plainview, Texas. And chances are, if you hear about this city again, it won't be in the most positive of contexts. Some people would probably blame Plainview's misfortunes on global warming, since the historic drought plaguing our nation's midsection might be the result of ozone emissions. Some people might shrug their shoulders and say a severe drought every now and then is part of the ecology of the Great Plains, and simply weeds out the stronger from the weaker.
Instead, I submit that the relevance of Plainview to you and me today isn't so much in the politically-charged debate it could foment, or a fatalistic factoid for academic historians, but the reality that God sometimes allows pain to afflict some people so that others of us will be jolted out of our own complacency. We take far too many things in America for granted, especially when it comes to the food we eat, and the people who process it.
You and I will likely not see a shortage of beef in our grocery stores because of Cargill's shutdown in Plainview. But that doesn't mean there isn't a shortage of beef.
A whole city in dusty west Texas can testify to that.
_____
Years of drought have reduced the once-mighty cattle industry anchored across the vast plains of west Texas to a scrawny herd, and recently, the city's largest employer, a beef processing plant, announced it was shutting down.
Forced to close because there isn't enough cattle nearby to justify its existence anymore.
For its relatively unpopulated region of the Lone Star State, Plainview is a sizable city, with approximately 22,000 residents. Statistically, these 22,000 people live in 7,600 households. And this plant that's closing, Plainview's largest employer by far, has 2,000 people on its $80 million annual payroll.
That means a lot of families will be hit hard when the plant, owned by Kansas-based Cargill, ceases operations on February 1.
That's this coming Friday.
Of course, they've seen it coming in Plainview. Not only because the city sits on land about as flat as it gets, and seeing far into the distance is easy to do. A company for which I used to work had a customer in Plainview, and after the president of our firm made a visit out there, he commented, "I've never seen a city with a more appropriate name."
Plain. View.
All kidding aside, Friday's closure has been dreaded by Plainview for a while now because the drought they've been experiencing for the past several years has left the region with few options. Ranchers can neither afford to fatten their herds for market nor maintain them on a meager diet, since their ranchland has withered up. Imported food is costly, whether it's for us humans buying it at Whole Foods, or farmers trying to find it and truck it in from parts of the country that have it to spare. West Texas has seen droughts before, but not like this one.
An ethanol plant in Plainview has been forced to shut down its primary operations due to the lack of corn, but it hopes to deploy its 45 employees on other ancillary assignments in its facility through the summer. Cargill says it's already strung along its plant in Plainview for as long as it can, and considering how west Texas' drought is staring everybody there in the face, it's hard to fault the company.
Texas, after all, isn't the only state facing drought conditions. And it's not like Cargill is shipping production to Mexico or China; this is pretty much a localized business they're in. And the locale in which Plainview sits can't sustain it.
Workers at Cargill's plant weren't living like kings off of their salaries, but they were earning a good living that kept them in Plainview, paid the taxes that supported a robust public school system, and created a thriving community boasting a hospital, a Baptist college, and several museums. Perhaps it's not the most exciting city on the planet, but considering how many communities across America's formerly "great" plains are shriveling up and blowing away like tumbleweeds, Plainview held its own, which is saying something good about the place.
Cargill's Plainview plant, meanwhile, churned out four percent of America's annual beef production all on its own. Earlier this month, when the company first announced its plans for Plainview, live cattle futures collapsed, Cargill's operations were that important. Indeed, it's a significant blow, not just to the city of Plainview and the plant's employees, but America's entire beef industry. Experts predict that in the long run, as the market contracts to match production with cattle supply, the industry will be remain relatively healthy, even if collateral damage is suffered by folks in places like west Texas. But it's small comfort to see such a hit coming due to something no rancher or food processor can control: the weather.
Some Plainview residents know Who does control the weather, however, and yesterday, approximately 300 residents joined a dozen civic leaders and pastors to pray for rain and other solutions to the imminent economic disaster their city is facing.
And already, at least one company has begun poaching employees for its own plant in South Dakota, sending corporate recruiters to Plainview in search of experienced meat cutters willing to relocate. Otherwise, the options for people wanting to stay in west Texas appear pretty slim. Granted, the larger city of Lubbock, home to almost a quarter-million people and the acclaimed Texas Tech University, is only 40 miles or so from Plainview, and workers willing to commute may be able to find something in that far more bustling environment. But however you look at it, losing 14% of a county's jobs in one day will change the social and economic landscape of Plainview for quite some time.
Before today, and before you read this essay, you'd probably never heard of Plainview, Texas. And chances are, if you hear about this city again, it won't be in the most positive of contexts. Some people would probably blame Plainview's misfortunes on global warming, since the historic drought plaguing our nation's midsection might be the result of ozone emissions. Some people might shrug their shoulders and say a severe drought every now and then is part of the ecology of the Great Plains, and simply weeds out the stronger from the weaker.
Instead, I submit that the relevance of Plainview to you and me today isn't so much in the politically-charged debate it could foment, or a fatalistic factoid for academic historians, but the reality that God sometimes allows pain to afflict some people so that others of us will be jolted out of our own complacency. We take far too many things in America for granted, especially when it comes to the food we eat, and the people who process it.
You and I will likely not see a shortage of beef in our grocery stores because of Cargill's shutdown in Plainview. But that doesn't mean there isn't a shortage of beef.
A whole city in dusty west Texas can testify to that.
_____
Friday, January 25, 2013
Weak Stance on Purchasing Power
Who was surprised this past Monday when President Obama laid out a liberally progressive agenda for his next term?
And who was surprised to read in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that America's stagnant middle class is a "myth?"
While a Democratic president portrays our country's middle class as being under attack by conservative business values, a financial newspaper owned by a staunchly conservative One Percenter begs to differ.
Well, duh.
And while plenty of us have read the opinion piece by economics professors Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry with hopes of salving our concerns regarding middle-income America's buying power, how many of us have been disappointed to discover that these esteemed conservative scholars are merely playing the same smoke-and-mirrors ploy that's the stock-in-trade of political partisans on both sides of the aisle?
Boudreaux and Perry presume to challenge the notion that our country's legendary middle class is losing ground when it comes to paying for our enviable lifestyle. Liberals like to say that the upper and lower classes are increasing in size, while the economic backbone of America, our middle class, is shrinking. Conservatives have lately been trying to re-frame the scenario as, yes, the lower class increasing due to government handouts, and perhaps, the upper class experiencing an increase in its wealth, if not its actual membership. Republicans have resorted to the specter of a shrinking middle class only in its political warfare during last year's election season.
Except now that Mitt Romney lost the election, Boudreaux and Perry figure it's OK to slap some spurious data on the argument and challenge Democrats on the whole middle-class-in-crisis thing. And they've done just that, irresponsibly contriving an argument disproving Democrats using real data, but data with anecdotal, insufficient relevance as proof of their claim.
First, Boudreaux and Perry claim that longer life expectancy helps show that the middle class isn't stagnating. Second, they point out that while we're living longer, we're also spending less on life's basic necessities. In 1970, 40% of our disposable income went to pay for things like groceries, cars, and utilities, while today, we pay 32%. Third, they say that middle class Americans can pretty much enjoy the same things that used to be available only to the rich; for example, it takes the same length of time for an American to fly across the globe whether they're a billionaire or an office clerk.
All of what the professors say is generally true, if you ignore the fact that life expectancy can have a devastating effect on one's life savings: how many Americans end up destitute when they die? Then there's what we're spending on basic necessities, since most of what we buy today is made in Asia for a fraction of what it cost Americans to make it a generation ago, which is another economic conundrum entirely: is what we're saving buying all this foreign-made stuff greater than our lost manufacturing wages?
And frankly, it's hard to see what difference it makes if both Bill Gates and I can fly to Moscow in the same amount of time if he's still able to fly on his schedule in his corporate jet, and I have to work my flight around an airline's timetable. Ends hardly ever justify the means, and that's true for morality as well as economics.
But even more than these discrepancies in the glowing tableaux Boudreaux and Perry paint for the middle class, what about the things they're not talking about? What about the high amount of unsecured debt Americans are carrying? What about the fact that middle class purchasing power used to be based on one income per family, while now, it takes two incomes to make ends meet? What about the fact that many Americans don't have enough savings to see them through retirement because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck during their working years? What about the fact that we're more educated than ever before, but wages have remained stagnant - as the professors readily admit - for decades? If we're more educated, shouldn't we be worth more to employers, and shouldn't that translate into higher wages?
Boudreaux and Perry argue that middle-class Americans should stop whining, and that our politicians should stop catering to our fears. We should be content with having more buying power than ever before, living longer lives, and enjoying unprecedented access to the same goods and services billionaires do. If we'd stop worrying about our shrinking paychecks, our world would look a lot rosier.
Funny how it all sounds like what some liberals have been saying all along, isn't it? About how the One Percenters throw the middle class bones from their tables with leftover fat on them to try and pacify us. About how One Percenters have contempt for the middle class and our inability - disinterest, even - in amassing large sums of money. About how middle class workers don't have the right to be disgruntled at their purchasing power vis-a-vis our One Percenters.
"Enjoy your longer lives, your ability to fly coach around the globe, and your leased BMWs, and quit harassing us about your stagnant wages," Boudreaux and Perry appear to be saying for their elite benefactors at the heavily biased Mercatus Center and American Enterprise Institute, both of which receive significant funding from the right-wing Koch brothers, David and Charles.
If enough conservative, middle-class voters buy this schtick, maybe capitalism and free markets will survive another term of Barak Obama.
Hey - it's one thing to not to like what the President had to say about his plans for the next four years, but if conservatives hope to mount some opposition and advocate for more common-sense economics, does it really help to have people like Boudreaux and Perry running interference with platitudes about longer life and consumeristic gimmicks?
We all know that if you ask ten economists to tell you what 2 + 2 equals, you'll probably get ten different answers. So it's not like many people are going to take seriously what these two professors have written. It doesn't take a lot of work to see through the gaping holes in their propaganda. But neither does it set a very good tone for the next four years if this kind of stuff is what the Journal thinks represents a logical rebuff to the President's grand plans.
If right-wingers have about as much faith in integrity as left-wingers, it might not be much longer before we're through arguing over whether our middle class is stagnating.
We'll know for a fact we're sinking. And our loss of credibility will be one of the reasons.
_____
And who was surprised to read in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that America's stagnant middle class is a "myth?"
While a Democratic president portrays our country's middle class as being under attack by conservative business values, a financial newspaper owned by a staunchly conservative One Percenter begs to differ.
Well, duh.
And while plenty of us have read the opinion piece by economics professors Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry with hopes of salving our concerns regarding middle-income America's buying power, how many of us have been disappointed to discover that these esteemed conservative scholars are merely playing the same smoke-and-mirrors ploy that's the stock-in-trade of political partisans on both sides of the aisle?
Boudreaux and Perry presume to challenge the notion that our country's legendary middle class is losing ground when it comes to paying for our enviable lifestyle. Liberals like to say that the upper and lower classes are increasing in size, while the economic backbone of America, our middle class, is shrinking. Conservatives have lately been trying to re-frame the scenario as, yes, the lower class increasing due to government handouts, and perhaps, the upper class experiencing an increase in its wealth, if not its actual membership. Republicans have resorted to the specter of a shrinking middle class only in its political warfare during last year's election season.
Except now that Mitt Romney lost the election, Boudreaux and Perry figure it's OK to slap some spurious data on the argument and challenge Democrats on the whole middle-class-in-crisis thing. And they've done just that, irresponsibly contriving an argument disproving Democrats using real data, but data with anecdotal, insufficient relevance as proof of their claim.
First, Boudreaux and Perry claim that longer life expectancy helps show that the middle class isn't stagnating. Second, they point out that while we're living longer, we're also spending less on life's basic necessities. In 1970, 40% of our disposable income went to pay for things like groceries, cars, and utilities, while today, we pay 32%. Third, they say that middle class Americans can pretty much enjoy the same things that used to be available only to the rich; for example, it takes the same length of time for an American to fly across the globe whether they're a billionaire or an office clerk.
All of what the professors say is generally true, if you ignore the fact that life expectancy can have a devastating effect on one's life savings: how many Americans end up destitute when they die? Then there's what we're spending on basic necessities, since most of what we buy today is made in Asia for a fraction of what it cost Americans to make it a generation ago, which is another economic conundrum entirely: is what we're saving buying all this foreign-made stuff greater than our lost manufacturing wages?
And frankly, it's hard to see what difference it makes if both Bill Gates and I can fly to Moscow in the same amount of time if he's still able to fly on his schedule in his corporate jet, and I have to work my flight around an airline's timetable. Ends hardly ever justify the means, and that's true for morality as well as economics.
But even more than these discrepancies in the glowing tableaux Boudreaux and Perry paint for the middle class, what about the things they're not talking about? What about the high amount of unsecured debt Americans are carrying? What about the fact that middle class purchasing power used to be based on one income per family, while now, it takes two incomes to make ends meet? What about the fact that many Americans don't have enough savings to see them through retirement because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck during their working years? What about the fact that we're more educated than ever before, but wages have remained stagnant - as the professors readily admit - for decades? If we're more educated, shouldn't we be worth more to employers, and shouldn't that translate into higher wages?
Boudreaux and Perry argue that middle-class Americans should stop whining, and that our politicians should stop catering to our fears. We should be content with having more buying power than ever before, living longer lives, and enjoying unprecedented access to the same goods and services billionaires do. If we'd stop worrying about our shrinking paychecks, our world would look a lot rosier.
Funny how it all sounds like what some liberals have been saying all along, isn't it? About how the One Percenters throw the middle class bones from their tables with leftover fat on them to try and pacify us. About how One Percenters have contempt for the middle class and our inability - disinterest, even - in amassing large sums of money. About how middle class workers don't have the right to be disgruntled at their purchasing power vis-a-vis our One Percenters.
"Enjoy your longer lives, your ability to fly coach around the globe, and your leased BMWs, and quit harassing us about your stagnant wages," Boudreaux and Perry appear to be saying for their elite benefactors at the heavily biased Mercatus Center and American Enterprise Institute, both of which receive significant funding from the right-wing Koch brothers, David and Charles.
If enough conservative, middle-class voters buy this schtick, maybe capitalism and free markets will survive another term of Barak Obama.
Hey - it's one thing to not to like what the President had to say about his plans for the next four years, but if conservatives hope to mount some opposition and advocate for more common-sense economics, does it really help to have people like Boudreaux and Perry running interference with platitudes about longer life and consumeristic gimmicks?
We all know that if you ask ten economists to tell you what 2 + 2 equals, you'll probably get ten different answers. So it's not like many people are going to take seriously what these two professors have written. It doesn't take a lot of work to see through the gaping holes in their propaganda. But neither does it set a very good tone for the next four years if this kind of stuff is what the Journal thinks represents a logical rebuff to the President's grand plans.
If right-wingers have about as much faith in integrity as left-wingers, it might not be much longer before we're through arguing over whether our middle class is stagnating.
We'll know for a fact we're sinking. And our loss of credibility will be one of the reasons.
_____
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Two Ushers Talking Legalism
Usher!
No, not the singer. This past Saturday, I had the honor of serving as an usher at a wedding.
And in case you think being a wedding usher is lowly stuff, please allow me to name-drop, and inform you that among the guests I seated were the famed Elizabeth Elliott; her husband, Lars Gren; and her aide.
Mrs. Elliott was confined to a wheelchair and uncommunicative, due to her advanced age and failing health, but still, my youngest nephew was named after her martyred first husband, so I thought the moment was special just the same.
At any rate, following the ceremony, while another usher and I were waiting for our turn in front of the wedding photographer, we struck up what I thought would be a fairly bland conversation. We didn't know each other, and the other usher was far younger than me.
"Wow," I exclaimed mildly, as I collapsed next to him in a pew. "I sure could use a nice, cold glass of water! I don't know why my mouth is so dry."
The younger usher snorted. "I'm thinkin' about going outside for a smoke!"
Not knowing this young man, but knowing the groom's family has a lot of unsaved - or at least, unchurched - people in it, I wasn't particularly surprised at the smoking reference, but I was disturbed nonetheless.
"Oh... well, there's no way smoking can be good for you," I cautioned him. "How old are you anyway, if you don't mind my asking?"
He said he was 21, and I think he said something about his girlfriend not liking him to smoke either. "She didn't come with me down here... and now that I'm back in Texas, around these people, I'm reminded why I left," he offered, his awkward, loaded answer completely unsolicited.
"Oh? Where do you live now?" I queried, piqued by his bluntness. He had no idea who I was, or if I would be offended by his dismissive attitude regarding his family. Yet he obviously didn't care, and he wanted to get something off of his chest.
"I live in Iowa now, and I like it up there," he replied, along with something about this wedding being the first time he'd set foot into a church since he'd left Texas.
This was turning into a far juicier conversation that I'd expected!
"Yeah," he continued, "churches like this make me uncomfortable. I'm afraid I'm gonna break something." He indicated the grand Steinway piano, our sanctuary's impressive wood-and-wrought-iron pulpit, and wedding flowers atop carved wood stands.
I followed the direction of his gaze and hand gesture, smiling. Not exactly fragile, breakable stuff.
"Don't worry," I tried to assure him. "All this stuff is quite sturdy and well-built!"
I didn't really believe the fixtures in our building were what he was talking about, and sure enough, he came clean.
"Well, I'm not really talking about the furniture," he admitted. "I was kicked out of my mom's church by some jerk who didn't like me wearing a hat inside it."
I could tell he wanted to talk about it, so I let him.
"Yeah, I walked into my mom's church wearing a hat, and this guy came up to me and told me to take it off, and I wouldn't," he recounted, somewhat pleased with himself at the recollection. "When I didn't take off my hat, the guy said he didn't like my attitude, so he made me leave. They didn't like me at that church anyway. They thought I was trouble."
Before the ceremony, when a group of us ushers had taken a shortcut across a parking lot to get to the sanctuary, one of the wedding guests was making his way across the busy avenue in front of our church, and he was wearing a large, black felt cowboy hat. The ushers saw him and were admiring his hat. I know the guy, and sitting there talking with this young usher now, I quickly glanced about the sanctuary, wondering if my friend with the hat was available to talk. He wasn't, since the reception had been going on for awhile now without us.
My friend would likely have plopped his hat on his head right there in the sanctuary just to prove to the kid that not wearing one in God's house has more to do with politeness than legalism.
But legalism is what this young usher wanted to complain about.
"I like to drink, I like to smoke, and my mom's church didn't want me doing any of that."
Being a non-smoking teetotaler myself, I first felt awkward, feeling compelled to defend activities in which I myself choose not to engage. But I don't drink alcohol because of the alcoholism that runs in my family, and I don't smoke simply because it's unhealthy and obnoxious, not because there's a Biblical commandment against it.
"Smoking, drinking, and wearing hats in church isn't any reason to kick you out," I began, choosing my words carefully. "It's what's in your heart, not your actions, that matters most to God."
And dad-burnit, wouldn't you know, but the photographer called out right then and there for us ushers to come for our photo-op!
That isn't the timing we're taught in evangelism class, is it? You're supposed to be able to let the person to whom you're witnessing mull over the "heart, not actions" thing for a moment or two, and then follow-up with faith not being a system of laws, but love for Christ.
In the flurry of activity as we ushers scrambled to where the groom and photographer were waiting, the conversation evaporated into thin air. After the photographer was done with us, my new friend dashed off with some other guys, while somebody else told some of us the guests were waiting for the wedding party to join the reception. We needed to start trickling in to the church's fellowship hall to help pacify the increasingly impatient crowd of well-wishers.
I saw my new friend only once more after that - he was weaving through throngs of guests, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his necktie nowhere to be seen, and his face damp and flushed. It was a chilly day outside, and the temperature was quite comfortable inside, so I didn't really want to know why he was so disheveled.
Not after the conversation we'd been having, anyway.
So I simply prayed that the Holy Spirit would be able to use my attitude during that conversation - and hopefully my demeanor when he mentioned the smoking and drinking bits - to perhaps show him that the guy at his mother's church who kicked him out displayed only one side of our church culture.
For all I know, this young usher had been a rascal all during his growing-up years, and the guy against whom he harbored resentment had finally had enough of it. Then too, this young usher could have been looking for any reason he could find to use as rationale for dropping out of church, and he used his belligerence over a hat as his ticket to churchless freedom. It's not like not going to church prevents you from believing that Jesus Christ died for your sins. But I got the distinct impression that not going to church wasn't the deepest problem this young man had.
I don't know for sure. But when the groom gets back into the country from his honeymoon, I'm going to ask him. And if I can't pick up from where we left off last Saturday afternoon, maybe somebody else can.
I have a feeling his mother - without knowing who we are - is praying that one of us will.
_____
No, not the singer. This past Saturday, I had the honor of serving as an usher at a wedding.
And in case you think being a wedding usher is lowly stuff, please allow me to name-drop, and inform you that among the guests I seated were the famed Elizabeth Elliott; her husband, Lars Gren; and her aide.
Mrs. Elliott was confined to a wheelchair and uncommunicative, due to her advanced age and failing health, but still, my youngest nephew was named after her martyred first husband, so I thought the moment was special just the same.
At any rate, following the ceremony, while another usher and I were waiting for our turn in front of the wedding photographer, we struck up what I thought would be a fairly bland conversation. We didn't know each other, and the other usher was far younger than me.
"Wow," I exclaimed mildly, as I collapsed next to him in a pew. "I sure could use a nice, cold glass of water! I don't know why my mouth is so dry."
The younger usher snorted. "I'm thinkin' about going outside for a smoke!"
Not knowing this young man, but knowing the groom's family has a lot of unsaved - or at least, unchurched - people in it, I wasn't particularly surprised at the smoking reference, but I was disturbed nonetheless.
"Oh... well, there's no way smoking can be good for you," I cautioned him. "How old are you anyway, if you don't mind my asking?"
He said he was 21, and I think he said something about his girlfriend not liking him to smoke either. "She didn't come with me down here... and now that I'm back in Texas, around these people, I'm reminded why I left," he offered, his awkward, loaded answer completely unsolicited.
"Oh? Where do you live now?" I queried, piqued by his bluntness. He had no idea who I was, or if I would be offended by his dismissive attitude regarding his family. Yet he obviously didn't care, and he wanted to get something off of his chest.
"I live in Iowa now, and I like it up there," he replied, along with something about this wedding being the first time he'd set foot into a church since he'd left Texas.
This was turning into a far juicier conversation that I'd expected!
"Yeah," he continued, "churches like this make me uncomfortable. I'm afraid I'm gonna break something." He indicated the grand Steinway piano, our sanctuary's impressive wood-and-wrought-iron pulpit, and wedding flowers atop carved wood stands.
I followed the direction of his gaze and hand gesture, smiling. Not exactly fragile, breakable stuff.
"Don't worry," I tried to assure him. "All this stuff is quite sturdy and well-built!"
I didn't really believe the fixtures in our building were what he was talking about, and sure enough, he came clean.
"Well, I'm not really talking about the furniture," he admitted. "I was kicked out of my mom's church by some jerk who didn't like me wearing a hat inside it."
I could tell he wanted to talk about it, so I let him.
"Yeah, I walked into my mom's church wearing a hat, and this guy came up to me and told me to take it off, and I wouldn't," he recounted, somewhat pleased with himself at the recollection. "When I didn't take off my hat, the guy said he didn't like my attitude, so he made me leave. They didn't like me at that church anyway. They thought I was trouble."
Before the ceremony, when a group of us ushers had taken a shortcut across a parking lot to get to the sanctuary, one of the wedding guests was making his way across the busy avenue in front of our church, and he was wearing a large, black felt cowboy hat. The ushers saw him and were admiring his hat. I know the guy, and sitting there talking with this young usher now, I quickly glanced about the sanctuary, wondering if my friend with the hat was available to talk. He wasn't, since the reception had been going on for awhile now without us.
My friend would likely have plopped his hat on his head right there in the sanctuary just to prove to the kid that not wearing one in God's house has more to do with politeness than legalism.
But legalism is what this young usher wanted to complain about.
"I like to drink, I like to smoke, and my mom's church didn't want me doing any of that."
Being a non-smoking teetotaler myself, I first felt awkward, feeling compelled to defend activities in which I myself choose not to engage. But I don't drink alcohol because of the alcoholism that runs in my family, and I don't smoke simply because it's unhealthy and obnoxious, not because there's a Biblical commandment against it.
"Smoking, drinking, and wearing hats in church isn't any reason to kick you out," I began, choosing my words carefully. "It's what's in your heart, not your actions, that matters most to God."
And dad-burnit, wouldn't you know, but the photographer called out right then and there for us ushers to come for our photo-op!
That isn't the timing we're taught in evangelism class, is it? You're supposed to be able to let the person to whom you're witnessing mull over the "heart, not actions" thing for a moment or two, and then follow-up with faith not being a system of laws, but love for Christ.
In the flurry of activity as we ushers scrambled to where the groom and photographer were waiting, the conversation evaporated into thin air. After the photographer was done with us, my new friend dashed off with some other guys, while somebody else told some of us the guests were waiting for the wedding party to join the reception. We needed to start trickling in to the church's fellowship hall to help pacify the increasingly impatient crowd of well-wishers.
I saw my new friend only once more after that - he was weaving through throngs of guests, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his necktie nowhere to be seen, and his face damp and flushed. It was a chilly day outside, and the temperature was quite comfortable inside, so I didn't really want to know why he was so disheveled.
Not after the conversation we'd been having, anyway.
So I simply prayed that the Holy Spirit would be able to use my attitude during that conversation - and hopefully my demeanor when he mentioned the smoking and drinking bits - to perhaps show him that the guy at his mother's church who kicked him out displayed only one side of our church culture.
For all I know, this young usher had been a rascal all during his growing-up years, and the guy against whom he harbored resentment had finally had enough of it. Then too, this young usher could have been looking for any reason he could find to use as rationale for dropping out of church, and he used his belligerence over a hat as his ticket to churchless freedom. It's not like not going to church prevents you from believing that Jesus Christ died for your sins. But I got the distinct impression that not going to church wasn't the deepest problem this young man had.
I don't know for sure. But when the groom gets back into the country from his honeymoon, I'm going to ask him. And if I can't pick up from where we left off last Saturday afternoon, maybe somebody else can.
I have a feeling his mother - without knowing who we are - is praying that one of us will.
_____
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Roe v. Wade is About Love v. Hate
Even tragic anniversaries need to be acknowledged.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. It's an anniversary for which we evangelicals mourn, while militant feminists gloat. During the past 40 years, tens of millions of murders have been committed in the one place God designed for life to be at its most nurtured: the womb.
After all this carnage, there's not much more that can be said or argued about - regarding either the court's ruling, or abortion in general - that hasn't already been said and argued.
Either you believe that all human life is worth protecting, whether it can walk, talk, and breathe on its own, or not. Or you believe that only human life that is convenient has value.
No matter what you personally believe about abortion, or how much wiggle room you like to think you have on this subject, these two options are what this debate boils down to.
Pro-life advocates may not be able to definitively pinpoint to a pro-choice advocate's satisfaction the point at which life actually begins, but science is increasingly proving that it begins a lot earlier than pro-choicers want to claim. And even if science can't currently convince skeptics that conception is the start of human life, the viability factor of a fetus' ability to survive outside of its mother's womb should by itself be enough to secure recognition as something worthy of greater dignity than murder.
Civil Liberty for Whom?
Yet for those who don't want to admit that their sexual activity has produced its biological intent, ignoring science under the guise of civil liberties becomes a convenient crutch, especially since women who can walk, talk, and breathe on their own have a far greater ability to advocate on their own misguided behalf, and cut off the dialog given by pro-lifers on behalf of those who can't yet walk, talk, and breathe on their own.
Killing those within a society who can't advocate on their own behalf is not new. World history is replete with infanticide and it's generational parallel, elder abuse. Contrasted with such barbarism, it's been relatively easy for pro-choicers to cloak their own murderous deceit in a charade of human rights for women. "Choice," after all, is liberalism's catch-word for liberty (except when it comes to education), and what's more American than liberty?
So we've de-criminalized murder in cases where a woman can claim she deserves a sexual do-over. While legalizing anything that's wrong doesn't make it right, many Americans have deluded themselves into hoping that there's enough rape, incest, and medical challenges to a pregnant woman's life to justify blanket amnesty for the vast majority of women who simply want to erase the product of a moment of passion they've reconsidered in the light of practicality.
Maybe this is what freedom has come to be redefined as: the ability to be released from responsibility, accountability, and authority. The liberty and equality pro-choicers claim is theirs through abortion is based on a worldview in which personal integrity is a relative concept, discernible more through a lens of satisfaction than sacrifice.
Can We Ignore the Pleasure Principle?
If that is indeed the case, however, then might it not just be abortion advocates who've stumbled into a myopic abyss of carnality? Fun and pleasure represent goals for America's evangelicals, too, only under the guise of enjoying God's vast creation. Increasingly, we Americans spend a lot of our resources on ourselves, while pegging our generosity towards others on stingy societal norms or ostensibly churchy percentages. The verse teaching us that "it's better to give than to receive" is treated more like an old wives' tale than a prescription for genuine "fun" and "pleasure" being found in joyful service to others.
After all, God indeed wants us to enjoy the things He's created for us. But might we have deluded ourselves into ascribing for ourselves permission to acquire a preponderance of ownership over God's creation at the expense of sharing those things with those less able to dominate the acquisition process? In other words, might we have bought into a worldly, hedonistic system where selfishness and hoarding is perfectly acceptable in terms of deriving enjoyment out of life?
"Wait a minute," you may be saying; "this is supposed to be about the evils of abortion, not the sins of God's people! What right do you have to go telling me I'm having too much fun?"
The thing about fun is this: statistics say that 95% of abortions are for convenience, which means the fetus being terminated is the product of unwise, irresponsible sexual activity. In other words, the parents were having too much fun to think about the parenthood they were on the brink of christening. With righteous anger, we evangelicals decry abortion as the taking of life, but before we spit out vitriol at those who participate in this court-sanctioned homicide, let's not forget Christ's warning about casting the first stone.
Or maybe I'm the only one with a warped interpretation of how we're to enjoy God's blessings to us.
Even if I am, I can console myself with the fact that even though I may waste God's blessings, and take them for granted, I still have the Holy Spirit living in me to help encourage, teach, support, cheer, and pacify me. How easy it becomes, then, to forget how utterly miserable those people must be who don't know Christ and who aren't indwelt with the Holy Spirit. Chasing after wealth, significance, happiness, pleasure, and fun through mortal means are all they can do to scratch any meaning and energy out of the life they think they can control.
Aren't Varying Degrees of Sexual Perversion All Still Sin?
Sex, of course, represents one of God's most misunderstood blessings. It's also one of the easiest ways for people whose morality is otherwise contrived to lunge at the mirage of fun. Since sex is a biological process, it's easily explained as something we're compelled to do. We can't penalize a woman for her sexual activity since she's the one biology has arbitrarily assigned with the birthing role. She has as much right to sexual pleasure as a man does. Abortion simply removes the double-standard nature has apparently left unresolved between the genders.
If morality is going to be the argument we evangelicals use to dissuade women from pursuing abortions, perhaps our argument would be more persuasive if we admitted the extent the pleasure principle plays not only in sexual activity, but in the pursuits of significance, fun, and contentment in which we all engage.
After all, the sin of murder by abortion carries the same penalty in God's eyes as our own wasteful mismanagement of the resources - including, yes, our sexuality - He's given each of us. It's just that the results of our sins can look quite a bit different in our eyes than the results of abortion.
Just because most of us evangelicals haven't had an abortion, or don't know of anybody who's had one, we tend to smugly demarcate this debate between upright pro-lifers and evil pro-choicers. And in the narrow view of the sin of murder, for all practical purposes, this is an accurate clarification.
However, to the extent that we find arguing over the issue and demonizing those of opposing views from ours as being easier, more gratifying, and more practical than anything else we can do about it, how do we honor God?
How much compassion do we have for the women who are being falsely instructed that they don't have a moral choice, but a practical one? How complicit are we in endorsing the pleasure principle in our society? How far do we go in allowing sexuality, sexual suggestion and imagery, lust, and adultery to enjoy dalliances - however fleeting - in our consciousness? It's not like unwanted pregnancies always come from out of the blue. Most of the time, there is a series of sexual perversions that come to pass before an abortion is contemplated.
Of course, those sexual perversions are perverse more often in God's eyes than ours, aren't they?
Writing In the Dirt
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that our own sexual sin makes us responsible for somebody else's. Or that our rates of adultery, teenaged pregnancy, and other sexual perversions within America's churched culture invalidate our collective stance against abortion.
To a certain degree, unfortunately, our own sins will discredit our testimony as being salt and light in our society. But we have been granted grace through Christ. The life we live in the flesh - including our advocacy for the unborn - we live by faith in Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is our hope, and the hope we should be demonstrating to the killers of unborn children all around us.
In a way, the battle over abortion isn't just between good and evil, but love and hate. Perhaps the legislation, agitation, and advocacy we've waged to protect unborn life for the past 40 years - some of which has been more successful than others - has been used by God in ways we haven't been able to see. But just as God sees our battle with perfect perspective, He also sees our individual hearts, and He knows whether we love our enemies or hate them. He knows whether we love our own private sexual immorality, or whether we hate it and grieve over it.
Some ardent pro-lifers, if abortion were ever made illegal again, would like to see women who still procure one tried and punished for murder, since that's what we're saying it is even today as it's legal. But Christ, when the crowd brought the woman accused of adultery and they wanted to stone her to death, simply bent over, wrote in the dirt, and forgave her when her accusers were shamed into silence.
As we continue to work to overthrow Roe v. Wade, let's not forget how Christ bent over and wrote in the dirt. We can't pardon those who advocate for abortion, but Christ can.
Just as He has pardoned us.
_____
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. It's an anniversary for which we evangelicals mourn, while militant feminists gloat. During the past 40 years, tens of millions of murders have been committed in the one place God designed for life to be at its most nurtured: the womb.
After all this carnage, there's not much more that can be said or argued about - regarding either the court's ruling, or abortion in general - that hasn't already been said and argued.
Either you believe that all human life is worth protecting, whether it can walk, talk, and breathe on its own, or not. Or you believe that only human life that is convenient has value.
No matter what you personally believe about abortion, or how much wiggle room you like to think you have on this subject, these two options are what this debate boils down to.
Pro-life advocates may not be able to definitively pinpoint to a pro-choice advocate's satisfaction the point at which life actually begins, but science is increasingly proving that it begins a lot earlier than pro-choicers want to claim. And even if science can't currently convince skeptics that conception is the start of human life, the viability factor of a fetus' ability to survive outside of its mother's womb should by itself be enough to secure recognition as something worthy of greater dignity than murder.
Civil Liberty for Whom?
Yet for those who don't want to admit that their sexual activity has produced its biological intent, ignoring science under the guise of civil liberties becomes a convenient crutch, especially since women who can walk, talk, and breathe on their own have a far greater ability to advocate on their own misguided behalf, and cut off the dialog given by pro-lifers on behalf of those who can't yet walk, talk, and breathe on their own.
Killing those within a society who can't advocate on their own behalf is not new. World history is replete with infanticide and it's generational parallel, elder abuse. Contrasted with such barbarism, it's been relatively easy for pro-choicers to cloak their own murderous deceit in a charade of human rights for women. "Choice," after all, is liberalism's catch-word for liberty (except when it comes to education), and what's more American than liberty?
So we've de-criminalized murder in cases where a woman can claim she deserves a sexual do-over. While legalizing anything that's wrong doesn't make it right, many Americans have deluded themselves into hoping that there's enough rape, incest, and medical challenges to a pregnant woman's life to justify blanket amnesty for the vast majority of women who simply want to erase the product of a moment of passion they've reconsidered in the light of practicality.
Maybe this is what freedom has come to be redefined as: the ability to be released from responsibility, accountability, and authority. The liberty and equality pro-choicers claim is theirs through abortion is based on a worldview in which personal integrity is a relative concept, discernible more through a lens of satisfaction than sacrifice.
Can We Ignore the Pleasure Principle?
If that is indeed the case, however, then might it not just be abortion advocates who've stumbled into a myopic abyss of carnality? Fun and pleasure represent goals for America's evangelicals, too, only under the guise of enjoying God's vast creation. Increasingly, we Americans spend a lot of our resources on ourselves, while pegging our generosity towards others on stingy societal norms or ostensibly churchy percentages. The verse teaching us that "it's better to give than to receive" is treated more like an old wives' tale than a prescription for genuine "fun" and "pleasure" being found in joyful service to others.
After all, God indeed wants us to enjoy the things He's created for us. But might we have deluded ourselves into ascribing for ourselves permission to acquire a preponderance of ownership over God's creation at the expense of sharing those things with those less able to dominate the acquisition process? In other words, might we have bought into a worldly, hedonistic system where selfishness and hoarding is perfectly acceptable in terms of deriving enjoyment out of life?
"Wait a minute," you may be saying; "this is supposed to be about the evils of abortion, not the sins of God's people! What right do you have to go telling me I'm having too much fun?"
The thing about fun is this: statistics say that 95% of abortions are for convenience, which means the fetus being terminated is the product of unwise, irresponsible sexual activity. In other words, the parents were having too much fun to think about the parenthood they were on the brink of christening. With righteous anger, we evangelicals decry abortion as the taking of life, but before we spit out vitriol at those who participate in this court-sanctioned homicide, let's not forget Christ's warning about casting the first stone.
Or maybe I'm the only one with a warped interpretation of how we're to enjoy God's blessings to us.
Even if I am, I can console myself with the fact that even though I may waste God's blessings, and take them for granted, I still have the Holy Spirit living in me to help encourage, teach, support, cheer, and pacify me. How easy it becomes, then, to forget how utterly miserable those people must be who don't know Christ and who aren't indwelt with the Holy Spirit. Chasing after wealth, significance, happiness, pleasure, and fun through mortal means are all they can do to scratch any meaning and energy out of the life they think they can control.
Aren't Varying Degrees of Sexual Perversion All Still Sin?
Sex, of course, represents one of God's most misunderstood blessings. It's also one of the easiest ways for people whose morality is otherwise contrived to lunge at the mirage of fun. Since sex is a biological process, it's easily explained as something we're compelled to do. We can't penalize a woman for her sexual activity since she's the one biology has arbitrarily assigned with the birthing role. She has as much right to sexual pleasure as a man does. Abortion simply removes the double-standard nature has apparently left unresolved between the genders.
If morality is going to be the argument we evangelicals use to dissuade women from pursuing abortions, perhaps our argument would be more persuasive if we admitted the extent the pleasure principle plays not only in sexual activity, but in the pursuits of significance, fun, and contentment in which we all engage.
After all, the sin of murder by abortion carries the same penalty in God's eyes as our own wasteful mismanagement of the resources - including, yes, our sexuality - He's given each of us. It's just that the results of our sins can look quite a bit different in our eyes than the results of abortion.
Just because most of us evangelicals haven't had an abortion, or don't know of anybody who's had one, we tend to smugly demarcate this debate between upright pro-lifers and evil pro-choicers. And in the narrow view of the sin of murder, for all practical purposes, this is an accurate clarification.
However, to the extent that we find arguing over the issue and demonizing those of opposing views from ours as being easier, more gratifying, and more practical than anything else we can do about it, how do we honor God?
How much compassion do we have for the women who are being falsely instructed that they don't have a moral choice, but a practical one? How complicit are we in endorsing the pleasure principle in our society? How far do we go in allowing sexuality, sexual suggestion and imagery, lust, and adultery to enjoy dalliances - however fleeting - in our consciousness? It's not like unwanted pregnancies always come from out of the blue. Most of the time, there is a series of sexual perversions that come to pass before an abortion is contemplated.
Of course, those sexual perversions are perverse more often in God's eyes than ours, aren't they?
Writing In the Dirt
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that our own sexual sin makes us responsible for somebody else's. Or that our rates of adultery, teenaged pregnancy, and other sexual perversions within America's churched culture invalidate our collective stance against abortion.
To a certain degree, unfortunately, our own sins will discredit our testimony as being salt and light in our society. But we have been granted grace through Christ. The life we live in the flesh - including our advocacy for the unborn - we live by faith in Him, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is our hope, and the hope we should be demonstrating to the killers of unborn children all around us.
In a way, the battle over abortion isn't just between good and evil, but love and hate. Perhaps the legislation, agitation, and advocacy we've waged to protect unborn life for the past 40 years - some of which has been more successful than others - has been used by God in ways we haven't been able to see. But just as God sees our battle with perfect perspective, He also sees our individual hearts, and He knows whether we love our enemies or hate them. He knows whether we love our own private sexual immorality, or whether we hate it and grieve over it.
Some ardent pro-lifers, if abortion were ever made illegal again, would like to see women who still procure one tried and punished for murder, since that's what we're saying it is even today as it's legal. But Christ, when the crowd brought the woman accused of adultery and they wanted to stone her to death, simply bent over, wrote in the dirt, and forgave her when her accusers were shamed into silence.
As we continue to work to overthrow Roe v. Wade, let's not forget how Christ bent over and wrote in the dirt. We can't pardon those who advocate for abortion, but Christ can.
Just as He has pardoned us.
_____
Friday, January 18, 2013
Vetting Another Corvette's Allure
And then there's this:
A paint-pitted, faded Corvette for $225,000?
On Monday, I wrote about Chevy's brand-new 2014 Corvette Stingray being introduced at Detroit's auto show. Although most people won't be able to justify the purchase of such a car for their personal use, since Corvettes take a sports car's usual inefficiencies as a passenger vehicle to the extreme, the Corvette is still a bellwether of how American drivers expect their dream rides to look and perform.
Oftentimes, America's premiere sports car doesn't make waves in the international automotive media the way next year's Vette did this week, but the nameplate's legend and aura consistently boasts remarkable resiliency. Since it holds a revered place in the hearts and minds of automotive enthusiasts, even during Detroit's decline, when Chevrolet shipped hunks of misfitting fiberglass out to the carbuying public and labeled them "Corvettes," longsuffering fans would patiently admire their model's glory years and console themselves that somehow, someday, the Corvette would be back.
The car is that iconic.
That's why it's not really much of a surprise to learn that a yellowed, paint-pitted 1954 model from Maine is going on the auction block in Florida tomorrow with a plausible selling price estimated to be between $175,000 and $225,000.
Two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars! For a completely unrestored, as-is 1954 car that hasn't been driven since it was entombed by its original owner into a grocery store in Brunswick, Maine, in 1959.
That's Corvette love for ya, folks!
It also helps to explain how this car's story is part of its value. As they say in the antiques trade, it has a great "provenance," or history.
Purchased new by Maine grocery story magnate Richard Sampson, the car was driven mildly for about five years. I say "mildly," because there are only 2,331 miles on the untouched odometer. With winter weather being exceptionally grueling in the Pine Tree State, many owners of exotic or "cream puff" cars put them in storage for the snow and ice season, and while I don't know it for a fact, it's likely that Sampson only got this car out of mothballs for the few days during Maine's glorious summers when driving is indeed pure pleasure.
And this Corvette, being a convertible, likely made it an ideal cruising car for both the back roads of Maine, as well as its narrow lanes that wind along its shoreline. A while ago, I commented that I used to find it remarkable that so many Maine residents own convertibles, considering the state's brutal weather, but I can't help but acknowledge that a perfect day in Maine really is a perfect day, and a convertible is a great way to enjoy those few yet perfect days.
Anyway, at one point in 1959, Sampson decided to preserve his wonderful little two-seater for posterity, and had it bricked into its own tomb in a store under construction in Brunswick. Eventually, the brick coffin was taken down, and the car was enshrined in Sampson's daughter's home in Florida.
Can you imagine having your father's vintage white Corvette convertible sitting in your living room? Its years of being bricked away in Brunswick were amazingly kind to the car, with the only serious visible damage being to the paint job - it pitted, which, considering GM's abysmal record of bad paint jobs over the decades, isn't surprising - and the wide white sidewalls yellowed with age like untended fine linen. The convertible top has stains from being left out in Maine's many rainy days, but the interior is practically flawless, as are its flashes of chrome.
Experts estimate it's the only unretouched, completely original 1954 Corvette in existence. And fortunately, 1954 was a glorious year for the Corvette. No warped fiberglass on this beauty, but plenty of elegant flourishes and sexy lines, along with chic wire "veils" over each oval headlight, mimicking the veils women of that era wore on their hats.
If its fetching looks don't grab you, or the price it may well fetch this weekend at auction, how about this stunning bit of trivia: even if it sells for $225,000, this "entombed Corvette" won't be the most expensive Corvette ever. That distinction goes to a far less glamorous 1969 Corvette L88, which sold for $446,250 in 2007.
Almost half a million dollars! And that's for one of Chevy's newer 'Vettes. Granted, the grand champion Corvette was built for racing, while the 1954 model was mostly for prestige touring. But still, it tells you something about the Corvette market out there, and the interest these cars command.
As does our prized 1954 model.
One guy bricked up his pampered convertible for 27 years, his daughter displayed it inside her house, and even with pitted paint and yellow sidewalls, it could command upwards of a quarter-million-dollars at auction tomorrow.
Yesterday I warned that we Americans don't know as much about our history as we should. Judging by the keen interest people still have in our vintage cars, and the prices they're willing to pay for them, maybe I was wrong about that.
The antique car market, and Corvette aficionados in particular, prove that we Americans can learn our history when we want to!
_____
Update: Our "entombed Corvette" was Lot #S187; updated selling info has yet to be posted as of Monday evening.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
History's Lesson From TV and Sports
Do you like watching old TV sitcoms?
Actually, instead of "old," television stations these days call them "classic" sitcoms, and I suppose there is a difference. Just because a TV show is old, that doesn't make it a classic. Some old shows should never have been aired to begin with, let alone today.
Others, however, have stood the test of time, and are about as funny today as they were when they originally appeared in our culture's consciousness. Granted, sometimes the humor today comes from how dated some of the storylines are, compared with today's lifestyles and current events. Seeing people use rotary phones attached to cords of tight spirals, for example, likely baffles today's iPhone generation.
I've noticed from these shows, however, that the more some things may change, the more they stay the same. Even back in the 1970's, people were complaining about do-nothing politicians and America's horrible economy. In the 1960's and 1950's it was high food prices. In the 1980's, it was how violent our cities were, and the lack of jobs.
History sure has a way of repeating itself, doesn't it? Some people say that history proves human existence is little more than cycles of booms and busts. Moral standards, political objectives, and even economies rotate through periods of progress and regression. Politics seems to be about the only thing that never changes - it's always a negative factor on society.
Rabbit Ears and Cathode Ray Tubes
I was reminded of what classic TV sitcoms are teaching me as I had lunch today with a good friend of mine, J.C. Derrick, who works for World magazine. He told me that last week, after the Baseball Writers Association of America refused to vote several players known to have used steroids into the Baseball Hall of Fame, he wrote an editorial for World's website in which he expressed disappointment in the writers' action. In other words, he thought those 'roid boys should have been voted in.
I didn't read his article last week, but I read it today, after I got back from lunch with him, and he'd explained his position a bit more.
At first, I was surprised at my friend's take on what struck me as stunning news - J.C. disagreed with the writers, and thought these juiced-up players deserved to be in the Hall? Wouldn't overlooking all of those violations be the same as endorsing them?
Not necessarily, J.C. explained to me. While several readers of his article tried to take him to task for apparently being ambivalent about performance enhancing drugs, J.C. took me through a quick history of the game - and a list of other successfully-inducted Hall of Fame players about whom many of us today have forgotten.
Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, for example, were each sleazy womanizers. Not exactly against the rules in baseball, of course, but if we're talking about players our youth could emulate, philandering isn't hardly a wholesome trait.
Then there was Hank Aaron and Sandy Koufax, both of whom took primitive versions of what today we'd call performance enhancing drugs, as did Mickey Mantle. My friend rattled off the names of other Hall of Famers who doctored balls and did other unethical stuff, but since I'm not a baseball historian, I didn't get those. But I didn't need to - he'd made his point.
Many baseball fans who've cheered that their sport's most notorious steroid users were not voted into the Hall don't know their sport's history. Like many of us have done in many areas of our modern society, we've allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and estimation of how real our reality is. Unfortunately, reality can be quite different than what we think it is. Particularly the reality that we think tells us everything in our fuzzy past constitutes the golden years, while today, everything's going to Hell in a handbasket. Or vice versa.
Sometimes things were worse than they are today, and sometimes, things are just as bad now as they were then. Fortunately, some things are better today. For example, rates of crime and violence in many major American cities actually peaked years ago. But despite all our frustration about taxes, did you know federal income taxes peaked at a staggering 94% in 1944 and 1945? A lot of us call our current batch of elected representatives in Washington the "do-nothing Congress," but did you know we're just recycling a term President Harry Truman coined back in 1948 for the 80th Congress?
Buddy and Sally, Ted and Georgette, Oscar and Felix
Turns out, history isn't the irrelevant abstraction many Americans consider it to be. At the very least, it contains patterns of human experience that can help us gain a more accurate perspective on what's happening to us and around us today.
It's been said that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps it's also true that those who don't study history have a harder time understanding why things are the way they are today. And maybe, if today's not better than how things used to be, that things still aren't as bad now as they've been before.
Maybe such knowledge provides small comfort, considering we're the ones living with our present reality, and responsible for interacting with it for our benefit. And the benefit of future generations as well.
Which likely means we should try to treat history less like the academic stepchild we often treat it as, and more like a chart of clues to help keep future generations from suffering through the same things we are today.
Otherwise, our future generations may look at the way we've fumbled around at what becomes their history as less sitcom and more blooper reel.
_____
By the way: As reported on Drudge Report, the Vatican has announced a morality campaign for international sports with hopes of recruiting Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin to "to help put healthy values back into sport." Actually, it sounds like the Vatican wants to reduce the influence capitalism has in sports, which frankly, is probably as unrealistic as making the industry morally "healthy." Sports may not have been as lucrative a business "back "in the day," but when have any of them been as pure as the Vatican apparently assumes them to have been? Consider this: after he talked about baseball, my friend J.C. told me that football used to be a far more bloodier - and lethal - sport than it is today.
Actually, instead of "old," television stations these days call them "classic" sitcoms, and I suppose there is a difference. Just because a TV show is old, that doesn't make it a classic. Some old shows should never have been aired to begin with, let alone today.
Others, however, have stood the test of time, and are about as funny today as they were when they originally appeared in our culture's consciousness. Granted, sometimes the humor today comes from how dated some of the storylines are, compared with today's lifestyles and current events. Seeing people use rotary phones attached to cords of tight spirals, for example, likely baffles today's iPhone generation.
I've noticed from these shows, however, that the more some things may change, the more they stay the same. Even back in the 1970's, people were complaining about do-nothing politicians and America's horrible economy. In the 1960's and 1950's it was high food prices. In the 1980's, it was how violent our cities were, and the lack of jobs.
History sure has a way of repeating itself, doesn't it? Some people say that history proves human existence is little more than cycles of booms and busts. Moral standards, political objectives, and even economies rotate through periods of progress and regression. Politics seems to be about the only thing that never changes - it's always a negative factor on society.
Rabbit Ears and Cathode Ray Tubes
I was reminded of what classic TV sitcoms are teaching me as I had lunch today with a good friend of mine, J.C. Derrick, who works for World magazine. He told me that last week, after the Baseball Writers Association of America refused to vote several players known to have used steroids into the Baseball Hall of Fame, he wrote an editorial for World's website in which he expressed disappointment in the writers' action. In other words, he thought those 'roid boys should have been voted in.
I didn't read his article last week, but I read it today, after I got back from lunch with him, and he'd explained his position a bit more.
At first, I was surprised at my friend's take on what struck me as stunning news - J.C. disagreed with the writers, and thought these juiced-up players deserved to be in the Hall? Wouldn't overlooking all of those violations be the same as endorsing them?
Not necessarily, J.C. explained to me. While several readers of his article tried to take him to task for apparently being ambivalent about performance enhancing drugs, J.C. took me through a quick history of the game - and a list of other successfully-inducted Hall of Fame players about whom many of us today have forgotten.
Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, for example, were each sleazy womanizers. Not exactly against the rules in baseball, of course, but if we're talking about players our youth could emulate, philandering isn't hardly a wholesome trait.
Then there was Hank Aaron and Sandy Koufax, both of whom took primitive versions of what today we'd call performance enhancing drugs, as did Mickey Mantle. My friend rattled off the names of other Hall of Famers who doctored balls and did other unethical stuff, but since I'm not a baseball historian, I didn't get those. But I didn't need to - he'd made his point.
Many baseball fans who've cheered that their sport's most notorious steroid users were not voted into the Hall don't know their sport's history. Like many of us have done in many areas of our modern society, we've allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and estimation of how real our reality is. Unfortunately, reality can be quite different than what we think it is. Particularly the reality that we think tells us everything in our fuzzy past constitutes the golden years, while today, everything's going to Hell in a handbasket. Or vice versa.
Sometimes things were worse than they are today, and sometimes, things are just as bad now as they were then. Fortunately, some things are better today. For example, rates of crime and violence in many major American cities actually peaked years ago. But despite all our frustration about taxes, did you know federal income taxes peaked at a staggering 94% in 1944 and 1945? A lot of us call our current batch of elected representatives in Washington the "do-nothing Congress," but did you know we're just recycling a term President Harry Truman coined back in 1948 for the 80th Congress?
Buddy and Sally, Ted and Georgette, Oscar and Felix
Turns out, history isn't the irrelevant abstraction many Americans consider it to be. At the very least, it contains patterns of human experience that can help us gain a more accurate perspective on what's happening to us and around us today.
It's been said that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps it's also true that those who don't study history have a harder time understanding why things are the way they are today. And maybe, if today's not better than how things used to be, that things still aren't as bad now as they've been before.
Maybe such knowledge provides small comfort, considering we're the ones living with our present reality, and responsible for interacting with it for our benefit. And the benefit of future generations as well.
Which likely means we should try to treat history less like the academic stepchild we often treat it as, and more like a chart of clues to help keep future generations from suffering through the same things we are today.
Otherwise, our future generations may look at the way we've fumbled around at what becomes their history as less sitcom and more blooper reel.
_____
By the way: As reported on Drudge Report, the Vatican has announced a morality campaign for international sports with hopes of recruiting Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin to "to help put healthy values back into sport." Actually, it sounds like the Vatican wants to reduce the influence capitalism has in sports, which frankly, is probably as unrealistic as making the industry morally "healthy." Sports may not have been as lucrative a business "back "in the day," but when have any of them been as pure as the Vatican apparently assumes them to have been? Consider this: after he talked about baseball, my friend J.C. told me that football used to be a far more bloodier - and lethal - sport than it is today.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Talking the Walk We Want
By now, it should be obvious.
We evangelical Christians are in the minority here in the United States.
It's hard to look at the results of last November's elections, the omens of Obamacare, and our nation's ambivalence towards things like gay marriage and not draw that conclusion.
Personally, I suspect that true believers in Christ have always been in the minority in the United States, as they are everywhere else. Oh sure, over the centuries, plenty of Americans have talked with churchy words and modeled - publicly, at least - a religious lifestyle, but in terms of people who've lived out the Fruits of the Spirit, the percentage relative to our overall population has likely been slim.
Now that America has apparently caught up with the post-Christian era that took hold in Europe during the Cold War, we evangelicals are beginning to stick out more. We're not blending in with the overall fabric of society like we used to. This new vulnerability seems to scare many of us, at least in terms of being ill at ease because our minority status is so noticeable now.
But curiously, that vulnerability isn't inhibiting the way we're conducting ourselves in matters of our national dialog.
Should We Let Our Culture Calibrate Our Dialog?
Just check out the comments your friends are probably posting today on Facebook about President Obama's executive orders regarding gun control. For an issue that has little direct relevance to our faith in Christ, plenty of churchgoers seem to be grossly overreacting. Like many fellow evangelicals, I don't think any more gun control is the answer to gun violence, but you can't convince me this issue is worth staking the Prince of Peace's reputation on. By the way things in our country seem to be going, there will be plenty of issues pertaining to biblical doctrine for us to get riled up over.
It's also been easy for us this week to let ourselves get carried away over the whole Lance Armstrong circus. Did he or didn't he? Even today, news websites are saying that his Livestrong cancer charity is advancing its stakeholder status in the outcome of his pre-recorded interview with Oprah Winfrey.
To me, this particular saga represents nothing more than two fading stars trying to grab a fleeting glimmer of former fame. Armstrong is aging rapidly, and will likely never reclaim the athletic dominance he used to expect. For her part, Winfrey gambled on shutting down her popular daytime talk show and lost, and her subsequent OWN network has struggled for relevance from day one. Normally, I like rooting for the underdog, but when situations like the one Armstrong and Winfrey videotaped get manipulated from a personal act of repentance to a generic publicity stunt, people like them loose credibility in my eyes. It's hardly worth the space my comments take up on this blog, but since it's obvious Armstrong's desire to leverage his confession betrays his lack of contrition, why do we feel so sorry for him?
I'm not trying to bash my own faith family, but when we evangelicals participate in public discourse, shouldn't we at least be consistent? If we're going to feel sorry for a guy who probably doped his way through seven major international championships and threw his fans, sponsors, and teammates under the bus while he did it, can't we at least withhold some of our vitriol from our president who's only responding to populist pressure like any politician would? Yes, I think the sums of money he and Joe Biden are dishing out from the Treasury for (ostensibly) safer schools is a staggering sum, especially considering how relatively rare massacres like Newtown's are. But if we haven't learned it by now, better late than never: politics is a sloppy and illogical business. Most Americans want these protections, however overpriced and ineffective they may be.
Just look at our national ambivalence towards the Transportation Security Administration. Most any safety expert will insist that the TSA is pure window-dressing, a tissue of illusions as we're wanded through machines that take images of our physique. But apparently, since it was George W. Bush's team that concocted this tableau of shoeless shuffling and granny-searching, Republicans are about as silent as anybody when it comes to overhauling airport security measures.
Garbage In, Garbage Out?
Which brings me to one of my familiar rants, that evangelicals spend too much time listening to what people like Rush Limbaugh think, rather than studying what Christ tells us is true and honorable. Petty partisan politics plays too great a role in evangelical American Christianity, and all it's doing is earning us enemies on issues Christ never tells us to weigh as unequivocally as His Gospel.
Take, for example, illegal immigration. I was reminded by a very close friend of mine today that it's not just the topic of illegal immigration that requires diligent attention from us evangelicals, but the tone of our language that needs to reflect Christ's heart on this topic. While I still disagree with my friend on the ways we demonstrate Christ-like love to people who feel as though they need to come here illegally, and I still personally oppose gimmicks like granting amnesty to illegals, I agree with my friend that we still need to temper our attitudes and convictions in this debate so we're mindful of the innate humanity of the people involved.
But is that the message we're conveying to our watching country? Not by a long shot. While a group of liberal-leaning professional Christians are attempting to build bridges to the community of illegals in our country, the far-right side of our faith chuckles at reckless partisan sniping from officials in places like Arizona, and we paint too broad a brush when it comes to illegal workers and our country's high unemployment rate. Since this is a political issue, and it deals with our government's response to a question of national sovereignty, it will be resolved by some sort of political compromise, unless factions of American voters insist on stalling any accord and letting the status quo perpetuate the problem. How sad would it be for evangelicals to comprise one of those factions that refuses to even consider less acrimonious dogma?
Speaking Truth in Love
We believers are to "speak the truth in love," right? That doesn't mean we don't broach controversial topics, and it doesn't mean we don't hold fast to incontrovertible truth. But it in no way gives us license to belittle, berate, or begrudge other people who don't share our viewpoints. In fact, the onus is on us to examine each policy scenario and evaluate it on the basis of God's Word, not what Fox News, Sean Hannity, or even Huffington Post has to say about it.
Hey, I'm preaching to myself here as much as anybody else. Although I try hard to not offend anybody with how I say something, I realize that sometimes the viewpoints I hold disturb people who don't agree with me. Isn't there a difference? Evangelicals get blamed for dispensing "hate" speech all the time, and we react in confused derisiveness, instead of a realization that God's standards aren't our culture's. Indeed, the standards for which we advocate will be disturbing - and even offensive - to people who do not love Christ, but what point is there in stacking the deck by combining those standards with vitriol, sarcasm, and contempt?
Remember, we're living in a democratic republic, which means the minority side of a particular proposition needs to be smart - not smarmy - about how to protect its interests.
If there's ever been any doubt that we evangelicals are the minority in America, there isn't any more. We may pray to God for His will and purposes for our country, but if we're going to engage in sabotage against His sovereignty by our non-Christlike attitudes and actions, what does that say about our faith?
God never promises us low taxes, the right to hoard weapons, or a society free from evil. In fact, He promises us that life here on this planet He created for us will be tough and challenging. He expects us to trust Him, and He's given us Americans a rare luxury of being able to participate in the direction of our ship of state. It's not like He expects us to win these political arguments anyway. He expects us to honor Him by how we live our lives. Standing up for what we think is right is one thing. How we do that is quite another, and unfortunately, does not always honor God.
Let's not waste what voice we have as evangelical Americans! Not simply to see justice and righteousness prevail in our country, but to honor God in the opportunities of advocacy He gives us.
This is our time and place to serve Him. If our country can benefit along the way, so much the better.
_____
We evangelical Christians are in the minority here in the United States.
It's hard to look at the results of last November's elections, the omens of Obamacare, and our nation's ambivalence towards things like gay marriage and not draw that conclusion.
Personally, I suspect that true believers in Christ have always been in the minority in the United States, as they are everywhere else. Oh sure, over the centuries, plenty of Americans have talked with churchy words and modeled - publicly, at least - a religious lifestyle, but in terms of people who've lived out the Fruits of the Spirit, the percentage relative to our overall population has likely been slim.
Now that America has apparently caught up with the post-Christian era that took hold in Europe during the Cold War, we evangelicals are beginning to stick out more. We're not blending in with the overall fabric of society like we used to. This new vulnerability seems to scare many of us, at least in terms of being ill at ease because our minority status is so noticeable now.
But curiously, that vulnerability isn't inhibiting the way we're conducting ourselves in matters of our national dialog.
Should We Let Our Culture Calibrate Our Dialog?
Just check out the comments your friends are probably posting today on Facebook about President Obama's executive orders regarding gun control. For an issue that has little direct relevance to our faith in Christ, plenty of churchgoers seem to be grossly overreacting. Like many fellow evangelicals, I don't think any more gun control is the answer to gun violence, but you can't convince me this issue is worth staking the Prince of Peace's reputation on. By the way things in our country seem to be going, there will be plenty of issues pertaining to biblical doctrine for us to get riled up over.
It's also been easy for us this week to let ourselves get carried away over the whole Lance Armstrong circus. Did he or didn't he? Even today, news websites are saying that his Livestrong cancer charity is advancing its stakeholder status in the outcome of his pre-recorded interview with Oprah Winfrey.
To me, this particular saga represents nothing more than two fading stars trying to grab a fleeting glimmer of former fame. Armstrong is aging rapidly, and will likely never reclaim the athletic dominance he used to expect. For her part, Winfrey gambled on shutting down her popular daytime talk show and lost, and her subsequent OWN network has struggled for relevance from day one. Normally, I like rooting for the underdog, but when situations like the one Armstrong and Winfrey videotaped get manipulated from a personal act of repentance to a generic publicity stunt, people like them loose credibility in my eyes. It's hardly worth the space my comments take up on this blog, but since it's obvious Armstrong's desire to leverage his confession betrays his lack of contrition, why do we feel so sorry for him?
I'm not trying to bash my own faith family, but when we evangelicals participate in public discourse, shouldn't we at least be consistent? If we're going to feel sorry for a guy who probably doped his way through seven major international championships and threw his fans, sponsors, and teammates under the bus while he did it, can't we at least withhold some of our vitriol from our president who's only responding to populist pressure like any politician would? Yes, I think the sums of money he and Joe Biden are dishing out from the Treasury for (ostensibly) safer schools is a staggering sum, especially considering how relatively rare massacres like Newtown's are. But if we haven't learned it by now, better late than never: politics is a sloppy and illogical business. Most Americans want these protections, however overpriced and ineffective they may be.
Just look at our national ambivalence towards the Transportation Security Administration. Most any safety expert will insist that the TSA is pure window-dressing, a tissue of illusions as we're wanded through machines that take images of our physique. But apparently, since it was George W. Bush's team that concocted this tableau of shoeless shuffling and granny-searching, Republicans are about as silent as anybody when it comes to overhauling airport security measures.
Garbage In, Garbage Out?
Which brings me to one of my familiar rants, that evangelicals spend too much time listening to what people like Rush Limbaugh think, rather than studying what Christ tells us is true and honorable. Petty partisan politics plays too great a role in evangelical American Christianity, and all it's doing is earning us enemies on issues Christ never tells us to weigh as unequivocally as His Gospel.
Take, for example, illegal immigration. I was reminded by a very close friend of mine today that it's not just the topic of illegal immigration that requires diligent attention from us evangelicals, but the tone of our language that needs to reflect Christ's heart on this topic. While I still disagree with my friend on the ways we demonstrate Christ-like love to people who feel as though they need to come here illegally, and I still personally oppose gimmicks like granting amnesty to illegals, I agree with my friend that we still need to temper our attitudes and convictions in this debate so we're mindful of the innate humanity of the people involved.
But is that the message we're conveying to our watching country? Not by a long shot. While a group of liberal-leaning professional Christians are attempting to build bridges to the community of illegals in our country, the far-right side of our faith chuckles at reckless partisan sniping from officials in places like Arizona, and we paint too broad a brush when it comes to illegal workers and our country's high unemployment rate. Since this is a political issue, and it deals with our government's response to a question of national sovereignty, it will be resolved by some sort of political compromise, unless factions of American voters insist on stalling any accord and letting the status quo perpetuate the problem. How sad would it be for evangelicals to comprise one of those factions that refuses to even consider less acrimonious dogma?
Speaking Truth in Love
We believers are to "speak the truth in love," right? That doesn't mean we don't broach controversial topics, and it doesn't mean we don't hold fast to incontrovertible truth. But it in no way gives us license to belittle, berate, or begrudge other people who don't share our viewpoints. In fact, the onus is on us to examine each policy scenario and evaluate it on the basis of God's Word, not what Fox News, Sean Hannity, or even Huffington Post has to say about it.
Hey, I'm preaching to myself here as much as anybody else. Although I try hard to not offend anybody with how I say something, I realize that sometimes the viewpoints I hold disturb people who don't agree with me. Isn't there a difference? Evangelicals get blamed for dispensing "hate" speech all the time, and we react in confused derisiveness, instead of a realization that God's standards aren't our culture's. Indeed, the standards for which we advocate will be disturbing - and even offensive - to people who do not love Christ, but what point is there in stacking the deck by combining those standards with vitriol, sarcasm, and contempt?
Remember, we're living in a democratic republic, which means the minority side of a particular proposition needs to be smart - not smarmy - about how to protect its interests.
If there's ever been any doubt that we evangelicals are the minority in America, there isn't any more. We may pray to God for His will and purposes for our country, but if we're going to engage in sabotage against His sovereignty by our non-Christlike attitudes and actions, what does that say about our faith?
God never promises us low taxes, the right to hoard weapons, or a society free from evil. In fact, He promises us that life here on this planet He created for us will be tough and challenging. He expects us to trust Him, and He's given us Americans a rare luxury of being able to participate in the direction of our ship of state. It's not like He expects us to win these political arguments anyway. He expects us to honor Him by how we live our lives. Standing up for what we think is right is one thing. How we do that is quite another, and unfortunately, does not always honor God.
Let's not waste what voice we have as evangelical Americans! Not simply to see justice and righteousness prevail in our country, but to honor God in the opportunities of advocacy He gives us.
This is our time and place to serve Him. If our country can benefit along the way, so much the better.
_____
Monday, January 14, 2013
Corvette Mania Tests Driverless Allure
They're being hailed as America's next great lifestyle revolution.
Driverless cars.
Automakers are increasingly exploring the market for such an innovative transportation option, and creating new technologies in anticipation of its promise. But who's really on-board with the whole concept?
Sure, the number of lives experts say can be saved by taking humans out of the driving equation is high. And it's not like driverless cars will take over our roadways anytime soon; plenty of the technology, laws, and standards necessary to implement the driverless concept still need to be invented, not just refined. That means we have time to prepare, both logistically, and in terms of our driving mindset.
However, isn't it just a bit ironic that, just when America's environmentalists and techno-geeks have been able to froth up their pitch for driverless cars, the North American International Auto Show opened today in Detroit?
And instead of a driverless car, the new automobile commanding most of the attention today was Chevrolet's brand-new 2014 Corvette? This isn't just any Corvette either, mind you, but the 2014 Stingray, a rare breed of Corvette that boasts extraordinary power and - for this fiberglass fantasy - remarkable fuel efficiency and structural rigidity. It's Chevy's no-holes-barred attempt to muscle back into the elite halo of muscle car bragging rights, which helps explain its uncanny resemblance to its brand's lesser sibling, the mass-market Camaro.
Now, while the automotive world and sports car enthusiasts debate the merits - or lack of them - in the Corvette's evolution, isn't it odd that with so many people supposedly wild about removing the driver from the controls of our vehicles, we're even talking about the Corvette anymore?
After all, if the public is pushing for self-driven cars, why should we care whether this new Corvette carries on America's premiere sports car legacy or not?
Most of the journalists who are writing stories about driverless cars live either in California or the Northeast, where congested roadways and hours-long commutes are frustratingly common. Most of these writers are also men whose idea of a commute is probably more singular, in terms of getting to the office and back home, rather than tangential, like a woman's list of errands she runs before and after work. Since the average American rush hour commute is 25 minutes one-way, however, the grief experienced by these male journalists in our big cities likely isn't as bad for everybody else as they assume it to be. Granted, nobody likes being stuck in traffic, but are most Americans anxious to give up conventional driving for self-driving cars?
If we are, why the fuss over Chevy's newest hot rod, or Detroit's flagship auto show in general? It's not that today is an otherwise slow news day; we get heavy reporting of Detroit's annual winter car carnival every year. And if news organizations didn't think the public was interested in the new offerings from the world's automakers, isn't there plenty of other non-news to report instead of what next year's Jeeps are going to look like?
Rather, isn't this fuss over the new Corvette simply to be expected from a car buying public that loves cars? Sure, most of us understand most of us only need - or can afford - a utilitarian vehicle, but we still like to drool over hot automobiles, don't we? Sure, a driverless car sounds wonderful for people who endure a mind-numbing and nerve-wracking bumper-to-bumper crawl to and from work every day. But how many people purchase the Corvette Stingray for ordinary commutes? Corvettes are about a state of mind, much like Bentleys, which ooze idyllic luxury, or massive 4x4 pickup trucks, which reek of testosterone. They're illogical vehicles, but we still ogle them.
And that can't be good news for fans of the driverless car.
As much common sense as such driverless technology may hold, American society does not value common sense as much as it does power, speed, luxury, image, and individuality - all things that driverless cars will minimize, if not obliterate.
Who needs a powerful car when a street grid adapted for driverless cars tells your onboard computer how much you can accelerate? And who needs speed when your computer will regulate how fast you can go?
Who needs luxury when so many of a car's gadgets will become standardized so computers from different vehicles can communicate more seamlessly? After all, our idea of luxury isn't based on how many gadgets a car has, but how many gadgets your car has that other cars don't.
Who needs image when the standardization this technology will inevitably require levels the automotive playing field? And by this time, you've no individuality left, since it's not your car anymore, but in reality, the street's. According to some proposed driverless scenarios, which include massive car-swapping paradigms, the car you ride home may not even be the same one you ride back to the office in the morning.
Take the concept of driverless cars to their logical conclusion, and you don't have the Great American Automobile anymore, but a glorified mass transit system in the form of individualized pods.
To the extent that, yes, such a system would save tens of thousands of lives per year, thanks to incredible accident-avoidance technology, it could be argued that driverless cars would be worth the investment. Even if the auto industry never makes it to a totally driverless future, some of the safety inventions it comes up with in the meantime could themselves be worth the ride. Just don't be sucked into thinking all that technology would cost you less than what you drive now!
But as Americans - and indeed, drivers around the world - react to Chevy's new Corvette this week, do any of the environmentalists and computer nerds pushing for driverless technology think their battle for driverless cars - and by extension, driverless driveways, streets, and freeways - will be won on the basis of safety and efficiency?
Who actually needs a two-seater fiberglass box on wheels that can rocket from zero to 60 mph in under four seconds? Who needs 450 horsepower or a multi-tone exhaust system? Nobody needs the new Corvette, but a lot of people would love to own one. The dream of roaring down a deserted road with your love interest sitting beside you, eating up the pavement as your mighty machine responds instinctively to your every turn of the wheel or shift of its gears... it's the stuff that car commercials are made of, and it's what car buyers want to imagine for themselves.
Even as we putz along in morning traffic, the reality of our daily grind slapping us in the face every time we have to tap the brakes, crawling through one accident scene after another, wondering why life has to be so hard... there's a little bit of Corvette owner in many of us that hopes for a faster, sexier, automotive future.
Right now, however, it's unlikely driverless cars will be faster or sexier. Safe and convenient, maybe, but oh, so dull. Yes, they may take away much of the pain we experience in normal driving scenarios, but are Americans willing to give up the Corvette dream for a commute that's all about equalizing the experience for everybody on the road?
Just look at what most people are talking about in Detroit's auto show. And that's probably your answer.
_____
Driverless cars.
Automakers are increasingly exploring the market for such an innovative transportation option, and creating new technologies in anticipation of its promise. But who's really on-board with the whole concept?
Sure, the number of lives experts say can be saved by taking humans out of the driving equation is high. And it's not like driverless cars will take over our roadways anytime soon; plenty of the technology, laws, and standards necessary to implement the driverless concept still need to be invented, not just refined. That means we have time to prepare, both logistically, and in terms of our driving mindset.
However, isn't it just a bit ironic that, just when America's environmentalists and techno-geeks have been able to froth up their pitch for driverless cars, the North American International Auto Show opened today in Detroit?
And instead of a driverless car, the new automobile commanding most of the attention today was Chevrolet's brand-new 2014 Corvette? This isn't just any Corvette either, mind you, but the 2014 Stingray, a rare breed of Corvette that boasts extraordinary power and - for this fiberglass fantasy - remarkable fuel efficiency and structural rigidity. It's Chevy's no-holes-barred attempt to muscle back into the elite halo of muscle car bragging rights, which helps explain its uncanny resemblance to its brand's lesser sibling, the mass-market Camaro.
After all, if the public is pushing for self-driven cars, why should we care whether this new Corvette carries on America's premiere sports car legacy or not?
Most of the journalists who are writing stories about driverless cars live either in California or the Northeast, where congested roadways and hours-long commutes are frustratingly common. Most of these writers are also men whose idea of a commute is probably more singular, in terms of getting to the office and back home, rather than tangential, like a woman's list of errands she runs before and after work. Since the average American rush hour commute is 25 minutes one-way, however, the grief experienced by these male journalists in our big cities likely isn't as bad for everybody else as they assume it to be. Granted, nobody likes being stuck in traffic, but are most Americans anxious to give up conventional driving for self-driving cars?
If we are, why the fuss over Chevy's newest hot rod, or Detroit's flagship auto show in general? It's not that today is an otherwise slow news day; we get heavy reporting of Detroit's annual winter car carnival every year. And if news organizations didn't think the public was interested in the new offerings from the world's automakers, isn't there plenty of other non-news to report instead of what next year's Jeeps are going to look like?
Rather, isn't this fuss over the new Corvette simply to be expected from a car buying public that loves cars? Sure, most of us understand most of us only need - or can afford - a utilitarian vehicle, but we still like to drool over hot automobiles, don't we? Sure, a driverless car sounds wonderful for people who endure a mind-numbing and nerve-wracking bumper-to-bumper crawl to and from work every day. But how many people purchase the Corvette Stingray for ordinary commutes? Corvettes are about a state of mind, much like Bentleys, which ooze idyllic luxury, or massive 4x4 pickup trucks, which reek of testosterone. They're illogical vehicles, but we still ogle them.
And that can't be good news for fans of the driverless car.
As much common sense as such driverless technology may hold, American society does not value common sense as much as it does power, speed, luxury, image, and individuality - all things that driverless cars will minimize, if not obliterate.
Who needs a powerful car when a street grid adapted for driverless cars tells your onboard computer how much you can accelerate? And who needs speed when your computer will regulate how fast you can go?
Who needs luxury when so many of a car's gadgets will become standardized so computers from different vehicles can communicate more seamlessly? After all, our idea of luxury isn't based on how many gadgets a car has, but how many gadgets your car has that other cars don't.
Who needs image when the standardization this technology will inevitably require levels the automotive playing field? And by this time, you've no individuality left, since it's not your car anymore, but in reality, the street's. According to some proposed driverless scenarios, which include massive car-swapping paradigms, the car you ride home may not even be the same one you ride back to the office in the morning.
Take the concept of driverless cars to their logical conclusion, and you don't have the Great American Automobile anymore, but a glorified mass transit system in the form of individualized pods.
To the extent that, yes, such a system would save tens of thousands of lives per year, thanks to incredible accident-avoidance technology, it could be argued that driverless cars would be worth the investment. Even if the auto industry never makes it to a totally driverless future, some of the safety inventions it comes up with in the meantime could themselves be worth the ride. Just don't be sucked into thinking all that technology would cost you less than what you drive now!
But as Americans - and indeed, drivers around the world - react to Chevy's new Corvette this week, do any of the environmentalists and computer nerds pushing for driverless technology think their battle for driverless cars - and by extension, driverless driveways, streets, and freeways - will be won on the basis of safety and efficiency?
Who actually needs a two-seater fiberglass box on wheels that can rocket from zero to 60 mph in under four seconds? Who needs 450 horsepower or a multi-tone exhaust system? Nobody needs the new Corvette, but a lot of people would love to own one. The dream of roaring down a deserted road with your love interest sitting beside you, eating up the pavement as your mighty machine responds instinctively to your every turn of the wheel or shift of its gears... it's the stuff that car commercials are made of, and it's what car buyers want to imagine for themselves.
Even as we putz along in morning traffic, the reality of our daily grind slapping us in the face every time we have to tap the brakes, crawling through one accident scene after another, wondering why life has to be so hard... there's a little bit of Corvette owner in many of us that hopes for a faster, sexier, automotive future.
Right now, however, it's unlikely driverless cars will be faster or sexier. Safe and convenient, maybe, but oh, so dull. Yes, they may take away much of the pain we experience in normal driving scenarios, but are Americans willing to give up the Corvette dream for a commute that's all about equalizing the experience for everybody on the road?
Just look at what most people are talking about in Detroit's auto show. And that's probably your answer.
_____
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Chasing Relevancy to Irrelevance?
Hey, all y'all fellow evangelicals:
You know how our Christian culture is supposed to be "relevant" and all that?
Well, how's that "relevance" schtick workin' out for ya?
Remember back in the 1980's and 1990's, when the contemporary Christian music movement washed through North American evangelicalism? The focus was on changes in music style, but we also got big PowerPoint screens and fancy slides, kitschy skits and props, worship teams instead of choirs, dark warehouses instead of bright sanctuaries, parking lot attendants, and outlandishly lavish theme parks instead of children's ministries.
We had to be relevant to reach our culture. We had to mimic our culture in every way possible without compromising the basics of our faith. We had to attract, win, relate to, copy, woo, change, refocus, shift our paradigms, be like a business, deploy savvy marketing, know our consumer, and break the Bible down into clever sound bites.
It was a lot of work, it made a lot of long-time churchgoers mad, and it dumbed-down a lot of theology. But we were told it was all worth it.
Well, was it?
You tell me. Today, it was announced that for all practical purposes, the Obama inauguration committee had pulled the plug on evangelical pastor Louie Giglio and their invite to have him give the benediction at this month's grand event.
Apparently, somebody dug up an old audiotape in which Giglio was preaching about homosexuality as a sin. Increasingly, public sentiment is turning against anything that they think compromises an inclusive, non-absolutist, "everyone right in their own eyes" paradigm. Giglio may be hip and happenin', but all that style means little these days if he's also trying to claim traditional moral standards. Some evangelicals are publicly pouting that the president's team is doing an about-face to save face with one of its aggressive constituencies, but why the surprise that worldly values are conflicting with God's? Have we stumbled into the last stop on this relevancy train?
Hey, both liberals and conservatives pounce on people they don't like, and root around in their forgotten closets until they find some skeleton they can trot out as representative of all that's wrong with that person. But even if you didn't like the tone of Giglio's sermon, was he wrong in his basic message?
Obama and his inauguration committee believe he is. So he's out. To his credit, Giglio is willing to let his principles stand on their own merit. Which are God's merits, anyway. And they don't need to be "relevant" to be right, do they?
Meanwhile, wasn't all that relevancy stuff two decades ago supposed to help us avoid messes like this? In addition to Obama's latest snub of orthodox Christian theology, consider our nation's overall reaction to the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora, in which guns are popularly targeted for blame, instead of personal responsibility. Consider New York State's governor Andrew Cuomo, and his call for stripping any last vestige of legal and administrative wording or conditions implying anything immoral about abortion from the state's "health" laws. Consider how censorship on the Internet is being applied disproportionately to religious content with relative impunity in the United States.
Maybe being "relevant" has worked for evangelicals who championed relevancy as a reason to change why we do church. Maybe if we weren't so relevant today, our country would be in even worse shape than it is.
Alternatively, however, might we have become so relevant, we now have as much integrity as everybody else? That wouldn't be a good thing, would it? Have we stooped so low to meet our culture, we've lost our credibility? We've got rock music in church now, but does any unchurched person really care?
What have we done for our country lately, besides meeting it where it is - on the slippery slope to irrelevance? We complain about the poor, and we complain about Social Security for widows. We bemoan one-parent families, yet divorce* at almost the same rate as the unchurched, and let our political talking heads vilify women who get abortions. We scoff at environmentalism and insist we have the right to waste and destroy God's creation. We hoard instead of share. And we dismiss every single person who calls us on the carpet for these sins as a leftist liberal, as if the truth is relative, which we claim it is not.
In our push for relevance, doesn't it look like we're on the verge of becoming irrelevant? If you work really hard to look like the culture around you, what's there to distinguish you when you blend in? By trying to match our culture, did we take our eyes off of our true mission: honoring God?
Not that hymns, choirs, stained glass windows, and flannel graphs instead of videos in Sunday School would have won our country for Christ. To the extent that we rely on gimmicks instead of the Holy Spirit, we short-change our country whether its by traditional or contemporary styles. Unsaved people don't truly care whether your pastor wears a suit and tie while preaching. They want to see what you truly believe - especially when you're not listening to somebody's sermon, or "talk," or whatever it's called these days.
We're taught to think that the opposite of "relevance" is "irrelevance." Paradoxically, however, trying to be relevant can make one irrelevant. At least, judging by how society seems to be shunting us off into the margins of our cultural discourse.
Turns out, we're really supposed to be pleasing God after all, aren't we? Not the people around us.
We can be disappointed by Obama's jilting of Giglio. But we shouldn't be surprised. Especially if it means our honor of God is what the world is spurning.
_____
*Don't fall for Focus on the Family's funny math on this subject.
You know how our Christian culture is supposed to be "relevant" and all that?
Well, how's that "relevance" schtick workin' out for ya?
Remember back in the 1980's and 1990's, when the contemporary Christian music movement washed through North American evangelicalism? The focus was on changes in music style, but we also got big PowerPoint screens and fancy slides, kitschy skits and props, worship teams instead of choirs, dark warehouses instead of bright sanctuaries, parking lot attendants, and outlandishly lavish theme parks instead of children's ministries.
We had to be relevant to reach our culture. We had to mimic our culture in every way possible without compromising the basics of our faith. We had to attract, win, relate to, copy, woo, change, refocus, shift our paradigms, be like a business, deploy savvy marketing, know our consumer, and break the Bible down into clever sound bites.
It was a lot of work, it made a lot of long-time churchgoers mad, and it dumbed-down a lot of theology. But we were told it was all worth it.
Well, was it?
You tell me. Today, it was announced that for all practical purposes, the Obama inauguration committee had pulled the plug on evangelical pastor Louie Giglio and their invite to have him give the benediction at this month's grand event.
Apparently, somebody dug up an old audiotape in which Giglio was preaching about homosexuality as a sin. Increasingly, public sentiment is turning against anything that they think compromises an inclusive, non-absolutist, "everyone right in their own eyes" paradigm. Giglio may be hip and happenin', but all that style means little these days if he's also trying to claim traditional moral standards. Some evangelicals are publicly pouting that the president's team is doing an about-face to save face with one of its aggressive constituencies, but why the surprise that worldly values are conflicting with God's? Have we stumbled into the last stop on this relevancy train?
Hey, both liberals and conservatives pounce on people they don't like, and root around in their forgotten closets until they find some skeleton they can trot out as representative of all that's wrong with that person. But even if you didn't like the tone of Giglio's sermon, was he wrong in his basic message?
Obama and his inauguration committee believe he is. So he's out. To his credit, Giglio is willing to let his principles stand on their own merit. Which are God's merits, anyway. And they don't need to be "relevant" to be right, do they?
Meanwhile, wasn't all that relevancy stuff two decades ago supposed to help us avoid messes like this? In addition to Obama's latest snub of orthodox Christian theology, consider our nation's overall reaction to the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora, in which guns are popularly targeted for blame, instead of personal responsibility. Consider New York State's governor Andrew Cuomo, and his call for stripping any last vestige of legal and administrative wording or conditions implying anything immoral about abortion from the state's "health" laws. Consider how censorship on the Internet is being applied disproportionately to religious content with relative impunity in the United States.
Maybe being "relevant" has worked for evangelicals who championed relevancy as a reason to change why we do church. Maybe if we weren't so relevant today, our country would be in even worse shape than it is.
Alternatively, however, might we have become so relevant, we now have as much integrity as everybody else? That wouldn't be a good thing, would it? Have we stooped so low to meet our culture, we've lost our credibility? We've got rock music in church now, but does any unchurched person really care?
What have we done for our country lately, besides meeting it where it is - on the slippery slope to irrelevance? We complain about the poor, and we complain about Social Security for widows. We bemoan one-parent families, yet divorce* at almost the same rate as the unchurched, and let our political talking heads vilify women who get abortions. We scoff at environmentalism and insist we have the right to waste and destroy God's creation. We hoard instead of share. And we dismiss every single person who calls us on the carpet for these sins as a leftist liberal, as if the truth is relative, which we claim it is not.
In our push for relevance, doesn't it look like we're on the verge of becoming irrelevant? If you work really hard to look like the culture around you, what's there to distinguish you when you blend in? By trying to match our culture, did we take our eyes off of our true mission: honoring God?
Not that hymns, choirs, stained glass windows, and flannel graphs instead of videos in Sunday School would have won our country for Christ. To the extent that we rely on gimmicks instead of the Holy Spirit, we short-change our country whether its by traditional or contemporary styles. Unsaved people don't truly care whether your pastor wears a suit and tie while preaching. They want to see what you truly believe - especially when you're not listening to somebody's sermon, or "talk," or whatever it's called these days.
We're taught to think that the opposite of "relevance" is "irrelevance." Paradoxically, however, trying to be relevant can make one irrelevant. At least, judging by how society seems to be shunting us off into the margins of our cultural discourse.
Turns out, we're really supposed to be pleasing God after all, aren't we? Not the people around us.
We can be disappointed by Obama's jilting of Giglio. But we shouldn't be surprised. Especially if it means our honor of God is what the world is spurning.
_____
*Don't fall for Focus on the Family's funny math on this subject.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Give Me Jesus
Spirituals.
As in, the genre of music from America's legacy of slavery.
The choir director at my church knows I'm not a fan of spirituals. He, like many classically-trained musicians, contends that as a type of folk music, spirituals represent a vivid aesthetic of faith in the midst of oppression, and he says that makes them more than worthy of being sung in church, no matter how white the congregation.
I don't deny that spirituals command a unique place in America's worship and classical repertoires, but I'm always a bit uneasy, being a white guy, singing words that black people sang while being abused by, well, white folk. My friend rebuts my concern with the fact that many spirituals contained code-words for real political freedom, not just religious slogans white slaveowners would have expected their human property to learn in their segregated southern churches. That means spirituals, as anthems of liberty anybody should appreciate, are more than just songs for black people.
When I attended the multi-racial Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, the choir and congregation sang spirituals frequently, but doing so made much more sense in that context. Less than 50% of the church was white, and blacks in our congregation were from not only the South, but also Africa and the Caribbean. We all knew the story of America's tortured record with civil rights, but the political correctness implicit in spirituals was far less obvious in racially diverse Manhattan, as opposed to Dallas' lily-white enclave of Highland Park, where my church is located.
My other objection to spirituals in general is that many of them contain sloppy - even heretical - theology. After all, white slave owners didn't force their human property to attend church so they could learn how Christ came to die for their sins. Like it has been for centuries, church was a socialization tool more than anything else, so it's unlikely that sound theology was conveyed to slaves, even as their owners were sitting in grander religious palaces under sermons that danced around the very ethics propping up the southern labor standard.
I realize this is wildly inappropriate for me to say from a political correctness standpoint, but bad theology has a bad habit of breeding and spreading, not only through weak song lyrics we whites excuse because slaves composed them, but also through the system of black churches we have in the United States today. Whites suffer from bad theology too, of course, as can be seen from the post-Civil-War liberalism which sprouted from white abolitionist mainline churches in the North. Similarly, however, bad theology from the South's poorly-taught slaves likely bred the likes of President Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and an incredibly reliable voting bloc that feigns spiritual amnesia when it comes to social issues like abortion. For the Republican Party to be the party that, for all practical purposes, set slaves free politically, having the Democratic Party assume it now needs to protect the interests of blacks didn't happen in a vacuum. Never having a solid theological foundation must have played an integral role in modern America's quandary of blacks who oppose abortion and gay marriage overwhelmingly voting for a president who champions both.
Nevertheless, having said all of this, there are still some spirituals that even I can't deny speak to the essence of faith, and cut to the heart of the matter in a way other religious songs don't.
Take, for example, a song that came to mind this afternoon as I continued to mull not only the tragic passing of Harriet Deison, but the homegoing yesterday of a longtime family friend, the hospitalization of yet another family friend today, and other sobering events from recent days.
It's entitled "Give Me Jesus," and that's exactly what I pray not only for myself on this dark, rainy day in Texas, but for you as well. Jesus truly is ultimately, perfectly, and absolutely, all we need. And God has given Him to us!
In the morning when I rise,
In the morning when I rise,
In the morning when I rise,
Give me Jesus.
Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus
You may have all the rest [or, "you can have all this world"],
Give me Jesus.
Dark midnight was my cry,
Dark midnight was my cry,
Dark midnight was my cry,
Give me Jesus.
Just about the break of day,
Just about the break of day,
Just about the break of day,
Give me Jesus.
Oh, when I come to die,
Oh, when I come to die,
Oh, when I come to die,
Give me Jesus.
And when I want to sing,
And when I want to sing,
And when I want to sing,
Give me Jesus.
And if you would like to see a video of this spiritual, here it is sung by Fernando Ortega, who as a Hispanic, conveniently erases whatever racial hang-ups there may be about this song:
_____
As in, the genre of music from America's legacy of slavery.
The choir director at my church knows I'm not a fan of spirituals. He, like many classically-trained musicians, contends that as a type of folk music, spirituals represent a vivid aesthetic of faith in the midst of oppression, and he says that makes them more than worthy of being sung in church, no matter how white the congregation.
I don't deny that spirituals command a unique place in America's worship and classical repertoires, but I'm always a bit uneasy, being a white guy, singing words that black people sang while being abused by, well, white folk. My friend rebuts my concern with the fact that many spirituals contained code-words for real political freedom, not just religious slogans white slaveowners would have expected their human property to learn in their segregated southern churches. That means spirituals, as anthems of liberty anybody should appreciate, are more than just songs for black people.
When I attended the multi-racial Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, the choir and congregation sang spirituals frequently, but doing so made much more sense in that context. Less than 50% of the church was white, and blacks in our congregation were from not only the South, but also Africa and the Caribbean. We all knew the story of America's tortured record with civil rights, but the political correctness implicit in spirituals was far less obvious in racially diverse Manhattan, as opposed to Dallas' lily-white enclave of Highland Park, where my church is located.
My other objection to spirituals in general is that many of them contain sloppy - even heretical - theology. After all, white slave owners didn't force their human property to attend church so they could learn how Christ came to die for their sins. Like it has been for centuries, church was a socialization tool more than anything else, so it's unlikely that sound theology was conveyed to slaves, even as their owners were sitting in grander religious palaces under sermons that danced around the very ethics propping up the southern labor standard.
I realize this is wildly inappropriate for me to say from a political correctness standpoint, but bad theology has a bad habit of breeding and spreading, not only through weak song lyrics we whites excuse because slaves composed them, but also through the system of black churches we have in the United States today. Whites suffer from bad theology too, of course, as can be seen from the post-Civil-War liberalism which sprouted from white abolitionist mainline churches in the North. Similarly, however, bad theology from the South's poorly-taught slaves likely bred the likes of President Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and an incredibly reliable voting bloc that feigns spiritual amnesia when it comes to social issues like abortion. For the Republican Party to be the party that, for all practical purposes, set slaves free politically, having the Democratic Party assume it now needs to protect the interests of blacks didn't happen in a vacuum. Never having a solid theological foundation must have played an integral role in modern America's quandary of blacks who oppose abortion and gay marriage overwhelmingly voting for a president who champions both.
Nevertheless, having said all of this, there are still some spirituals that even I can't deny speak to the essence of faith, and cut to the heart of the matter in a way other religious songs don't.
Take, for example, a song that came to mind this afternoon as I continued to mull not only the tragic passing of Harriet Deison, but the homegoing yesterday of a longtime family friend, the hospitalization of yet another family friend today, and other sobering events from recent days.
It's entitled "Give Me Jesus," and that's exactly what I pray not only for myself on this dark, rainy day in Texas, but for you as well. Jesus truly is ultimately, perfectly, and absolutely, all we need. And God has given Him to us!
In the morning when I rise,
In the morning when I rise,
In the morning when I rise,
Give me Jesus.
Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus
You may have all the rest [or, "you can have all this world"],
Give me Jesus.
Dark midnight was my cry,
Dark midnight was my cry,
Dark midnight was my cry,
Give me Jesus.
Just about the break of day,
Just about the break of day,
Just about the break of day,
Give me Jesus.
Oh, when I come to die,
Oh, when I come to die,
Oh, when I come to die,
Give me Jesus.
And when I want to sing,
And when I want to sing,
And when I want to sing,
Give me Jesus.
And if you would like to see a video of this spiritual, here it is sung by Fernando Ortega, who as a Hispanic, conveniently erases whatever racial hang-ups there may be about this song:
_____
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Picking on Pickup Trucks
It's raining today.
Which means, for many construction workers, the workday may have been called short.
Driving back from Dallas after lunch this afternoon, in a drizzle which kept everything wet between sporadic downpours, I noticed on the freeway a lot of pickup trucks with equipment haphazardly stacked in their beds. This being Texas, where construction is a way of life, you always see pickup trucks hauling equipment, but in the rain, it seemed like there were more of them on the road than on job sites.
Indeed, most of the stretch of freeway I drive between Dallas and Arlington is one long series of construction sites, and they were all deserted this afternoon.
In addition to being a construction hotspot, Texas is also pickup truck country. More pickups are sold here than in any other state. All of the brands have "Texas" editions, with special badging, wheels, and options packages designed to appeal to Lone Star truck buyers. Toyota even builds their full-size pickups here in San Antonio, although Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge still duke it out for the preponderance of market share.
It's hard getting pickup truck drivers into import brands. After all, when you're talkin' redneck, these motor vehicle owners really do have red necks, from working all day in what's normally a brutal Texas sun. Country music, patriotism, football, American beers, and the occasional Confederate flag. Toyota and Nissan just don't fit, and Honda, which builds the Ridgeline, just gets laughed out of the picture.
Pickup truck owners in Texas may buy a Honda passenger car for their wife, but they lose serious man points if they pay money for what Honda calls a truck.
Then again, plenty of women own pickup trucks here, too. And not just trucks that are all girlied-up with chrome bling. You'd be surprised at the burly guys who claim all of that froo-froo shininess for their own pickups.
I've never owned a pickup truck, although I've come close. A few years ago, I was evaluating a Ford F-150 Supercrew, because I loved all of the room it gave the driver, as opposed to the compressed space most passenger cars give guys as big as me. But I was only a block away from the dealership on my test drive before I had to pull off the road and turn around - it was just too big a vehicle! I felt like I was plowing a piece of earthmoving equipment, and was petrified I was going to hit something.
My male cousin in Finland, an owner of economy cars, couldn't understand why I'd want to buy a pickup truck anyway. "Then you'd never get married," he assumed, speaking from a sensible European mindset. "Who wants a guy who drives a huge ugly truck?"
Are you laughing? I was! My cousin obviously didn't understand how American women - and Texas women in particular - go for guys who drive pickups they either don't need or guzzle more gas than is necessary to get from Point A to Point B. Contrary to my cousin's assumption, there's no compromising one's sexual allure with the purchase of a pickup truck here. In fact, my Honda sedan probably is more punitive to whatever allure I hold than a truck would be.
Unless it was a Ridgeline, of course. By comparison, I probably earn macho points by owning a Honda sedan over the Japanese brand's truck.
In New York City, the status car is probably some imported luxury sedan. In Chicago, it's probably a loaded Cadillac. In Los Angeles, it's probably a Bentley convertible with leather seats the same custom color as its paint job. Here in Texas, with the possible exception of snooty Dallas, the status vehicle isn't a car, but a truck. And it doesn't even have to be brand-new, or top-of-the-line.
Or even clean.
Until his messy divorce, a neighbor up the street had an orange 1970 Chevrolet pickup. It belched blue smoke, and this neighbor - like many of traditional truck ownership's dying breed - didn't always keep it clean, but it was still a cool ride.
Although a tiny truck by today's standards, it was the kind of vehicle I'd grown up assuming a pickup is supposed to be. Two-wheel drive, long bed, single-cab, two doors, and all-around no-nonsense. No-nonsense not just in its lack of frills, but in the way it acknowledged its purpose: working.
This truck wasn't built to show off, or to make somebody look masculine, or to give somebody an air of off-road adrenaline-pumping action. It was built to get somebody - probably a guy, but not necessarily - to a destination that had less to do with status and image and more to do with everyday work or everyday recreation, like fishing or camping.
My Uncle Arthur and Aunt Hattie drove a dark green Chevy of the same vintage in Maine - they only ever owned one pickup at a time. No need for more than that. Except that when Uncle became unable to drive, Aunt Hattie went into town and traded in their pickup for a more ladylike coupe!
You've likely seen pickups advertised on television that are shiny, glistening with chrome, and hauling ridiculous amounts and types of cargo while staying in pristine condition. Meanwhile, how many office parks and shopping malls around you are full of those same $45,000 fully-loaded pickups without a scratch, dent, or clump of mud anywhere on them?
Like I said, I go past construction sites all the time when I take my regular freeway rides back and forth to Dallas, and most of the construction workers at these sites park their beat-up old sedans and coupes behind concrete barriers, and contractors drive their plain-Jane white trucks in the dirt, but I don't see many souped-up trucks like what are advertised on television as work site workhorses.
Misleading advertising isn't common just to pickup trucks, of course. Yet increasingly, pickup truck manufacturers are selling more of an image and a perception of a certain lifestyle, instead of just a utilitarian vehicle. The fact that you can spot non-commercial pickup trucks on the urbane avenues of New York City these days proves that.
All this, while most of the jobs for which we're told pickup trucks are designed pay a fraction of the sticker prices those trucks display at dealerships these days.
Fortunately, at least for Texans, old trucks have an uncanny ability to hold their value. Especially the ones that didn't have all the bells and whistles to begin with. The bells and whistles that tend to malfunction in their American-made vehicles. Turns out, a good, honest workhorse is still a good value, whether it's the Old West, or today's Lone Star State.
If you do happen to get stuck on the job site during rainy weather like today's, however, that fancy doo-dad called four-wheel-drive probably does come in mighty handy.
_____
Which means, for many construction workers, the workday may have been called short.
Driving back from Dallas after lunch this afternoon, in a drizzle which kept everything wet between sporadic downpours, I noticed on the freeway a lot of pickup trucks with equipment haphazardly stacked in their beds. This being Texas, where construction is a way of life, you always see pickup trucks hauling equipment, but in the rain, it seemed like there were more of them on the road than on job sites.
Indeed, most of the stretch of freeway I drive between Dallas and Arlington is one long series of construction sites, and they were all deserted this afternoon.
In addition to being a construction hotspot, Texas is also pickup truck country. More pickups are sold here than in any other state. All of the brands have "Texas" editions, with special badging, wheels, and options packages designed to appeal to Lone Star truck buyers. Toyota even builds their full-size pickups here in San Antonio, although Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge still duke it out for the preponderance of market share.
It's hard getting pickup truck drivers into import brands. After all, when you're talkin' redneck, these motor vehicle owners really do have red necks, from working all day in what's normally a brutal Texas sun. Country music, patriotism, football, American beers, and the occasional Confederate flag. Toyota and Nissan just don't fit, and Honda, which builds the Ridgeline, just gets laughed out of the picture.
Pickup truck owners in Texas may buy a Honda passenger car for their wife, but they lose serious man points if they pay money for what Honda calls a truck.
Then again, plenty of women own pickup trucks here, too. And not just trucks that are all girlied-up with chrome bling. You'd be surprised at the burly guys who claim all of that froo-froo shininess for their own pickups.
I've never owned a pickup truck, although I've come close. A few years ago, I was evaluating a Ford F-150 Supercrew, because I loved all of the room it gave the driver, as opposed to the compressed space most passenger cars give guys as big as me. But I was only a block away from the dealership on my test drive before I had to pull off the road and turn around - it was just too big a vehicle! I felt like I was plowing a piece of earthmoving equipment, and was petrified I was going to hit something.
My male cousin in Finland, an owner of economy cars, couldn't understand why I'd want to buy a pickup truck anyway. "Then you'd never get married," he assumed, speaking from a sensible European mindset. "Who wants a guy who drives a huge ugly truck?"
Are you laughing? I was! My cousin obviously didn't understand how American women - and Texas women in particular - go for guys who drive pickups they either don't need or guzzle more gas than is necessary to get from Point A to Point B. Contrary to my cousin's assumption, there's no compromising one's sexual allure with the purchase of a pickup truck here. In fact, my Honda sedan probably is more punitive to whatever allure I hold than a truck would be.
Unless it was a Ridgeline, of course. By comparison, I probably earn macho points by owning a Honda sedan over the Japanese brand's truck.
In New York City, the status car is probably some imported luxury sedan. In Chicago, it's probably a loaded Cadillac. In Los Angeles, it's probably a Bentley convertible with leather seats the same custom color as its paint job. Here in Texas, with the possible exception of snooty Dallas, the status vehicle isn't a car, but a truck. And it doesn't even have to be brand-new, or top-of-the-line.
Or even clean.
 |
| 1970 Chevrolet pickup truck |
Although a tiny truck by today's standards, it was the kind of vehicle I'd grown up assuming a pickup is supposed to be. Two-wheel drive, long bed, single-cab, two doors, and all-around no-nonsense. No-nonsense not just in its lack of frills, but in the way it acknowledged its purpose: working.
This truck wasn't built to show off, or to make somebody look masculine, or to give somebody an air of off-road adrenaline-pumping action. It was built to get somebody - probably a guy, but not necessarily - to a destination that had less to do with status and image and more to do with everyday work or everyday recreation, like fishing or camping.
My Uncle Arthur and Aunt Hattie drove a dark green Chevy of the same vintage in Maine - they only ever owned one pickup at a time. No need for more than that. Except that when Uncle became unable to drive, Aunt Hattie went into town and traded in their pickup for a more ladylike coupe!
You've likely seen pickups advertised on television that are shiny, glistening with chrome, and hauling ridiculous amounts and types of cargo while staying in pristine condition. Meanwhile, how many office parks and shopping malls around you are full of those same $45,000 fully-loaded pickups without a scratch, dent, or clump of mud anywhere on them?
Like I said, I go past construction sites all the time when I take my regular freeway rides back and forth to Dallas, and most of the construction workers at these sites park their beat-up old sedans and coupes behind concrete barriers, and contractors drive their plain-Jane white trucks in the dirt, but I don't see many souped-up trucks like what are advertised on television as work site workhorses.
Misleading advertising isn't common just to pickup trucks, of course. Yet increasingly, pickup truck manufacturers are selling more of an image and a perception of a certain lifestyle, instead of just a utilitarian vehicle. The fact that you can spot non-commercial pickup trucks on the urbane avenues of New York City these days proves that.
All this, while most of the jobs for which we're told pickup trucks are designed pay a fraction of the sticker prices those trucks display at dealerships these days.
Fortunately, at least for Texans, old trucks have an uncanny ability to hold their value. Especially the ones that didn't have all the bells and whistles to begin with. The bells and whistles that tend to malfunction in their American-made vehicles. Turns out, a good, honest workhorse is still a good value, whether it's the Old West, or today's Lone Star State.
If you do happen to get stuck on the job site during rainy weather like today's, however, that fancy doo-dad called four-wheel-drive probably does come in mighty handy.
_____
Monday, January 7, 2013
Suicide as a Negative Proof
It's a haunting that says more about me than I care to admit.
Suicide, and those who commit it.
I mentioned the violent passing of Harriet Deison to my editor at Crosswalk.com, Debbie Wright, and she brought to my attention a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, entitled Richard Cory:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1865-1935
Originally published by the poet in 1897, it's been adapted in modern pop culture by Simon and Garfunkel into a song of the same name, and literature by writers the likes of Garrison Keillor. Maybe you were already familiar with this poem, but we're always learning, aren't we?
Or, at least; we should be.
Having Richard Cory and the death of Harriet Deison share such parallel paths brings several things to mind. First, that the more things change in our world, the more they stay the same, even as we think we've become so much more sophisticated, inoculated from antique travails.
Second, as the saying goes, we truly can never judge a book by its cover.
Third, that some people suffer deeply tragic pain that they can train themselves to hide from us.
Despair isn't just a form of economic poverty. Despair is a poverty of many forms, some of which become lethal when complexities like chemical imbalances deprive both brain and soul of purpose and promise.
Deep depression is as cancerous to the soul as physical cancer can be to any biological organ. At this very moment, my family has two dear loved ones at death's threshold, one from injuries sustained in an accidental fall, the other from a sudden return of an aggressive cancer. We know these people, one a long-time friend, and the other a relative, are near death because of their obvious physical symptoms. Even if they wanted to hide those symptoms, our loved ones simply cannot.
How many Richard Cory's and Harriet Deison's do we have within our family? How many are within yours? We can't necessarily see the symptoms, most likely because they're kept well-hidden from us.
Like I said the other day, I don't know Dr. Pete Deison, Harriet's widowed husband, to pull him aside and have this personal little chat. From what I've heard, he and a small circle of Harriet's beloved were aware of her private griefs, and likely were doing all they thought they could - and should - to help her.
Not knowing the situation, we can't say whether they should have done more. Her suicide is neither proof that all other avenues of healing had already been tried, nor proof that anything else had been left untried. What it is, however, is proof that fierce battles still rage within the most unlikely among us.
As much as we'd like to think there must be some solution to chronic clinical depression, sometimes the only tool we have at our disposal is to "mourn with those who mourn."
We cannot solve everything. These suicides are proof of that.
_____
Suicide, and those who commit it.
I mentioned the violent passing of Harriet Deison to my editor at Crosswalk.com, Debbie Wright, and she brought to my attention a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, entitled Richard Cory:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1865-1935
Originally published by the poet in 1897, it's been adapted in modern pop culture by Simon and Garfunkel into a song of the same name, and literature by writers the likes of Garrison Keillor. Maybe you were already familiar with this poem, but we're always learning, aren't we?
Or, at least; we should be.
Having Richard Cory and the death of Harriet Deison share such parallel paths brings several things to mind. First, that the more things change in our world, the more they stay the same, even as we think we've become so much more sophisticated, inoculated from antique travails.
Second, as the saying goes, we truly can never judge a book by its cover.
Third, that some people suffer deeply tragic pain that they can train themselves to hide from us.
Despair isn't just a form of economic poverty. Despair is a poverty of many forms, some of which become lethal when complexities like chemical imbalances deprive both brain and soul of purpose and promise.
Deep depression is as cancerous to the soul as physical cancer can be to any biological organ. At this very moment, my family has two dear loved ones at death's threshold, one from injuries sustained in an accidental fall, the other from a sudden return of an aggressive cancer. We know these people, one a long-time friend, and the other a relative, are near death because of their obvious physical symptoms. Even if they wanted to hide those symptoms, our loved ones simply cannot.
How many Richard Cory's and Harriet Deison's do we have within our family? How many are within yours? We can't necessarily see the symptoms, most likely because they're kept well-hidden from us.
Like I said the other day, I don't know Dr. Pete Deison, Harriet's widowed husband, to pull him aside and have this personal little chat. From what I've heard, he and a small circle of Harriet's beloved were aware of her private griefs, and likely were doing all they thought they could - and should - to help her.
Not knowing the situation, we can't say whether they should have done more. Her suicide is neither proof that all other avenues of healing had already been tried, nor proof that anything else had been left untried. What it is, however, is proof that fierce battles still rage within the most unlikely among us.
As much as we'd like to think there must be some solution to chronic clinical depression, sometimes the only tool we have at our disposal is to "mourn with those who mourn."
We cannot solve everything. These suicides are proof of that.
_____
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Suicide's Subtle Paradox, Redux
On Wednesday, July 11 of last year, I posted the essay below about suicide.
This past Saturday, the wife of a pastor at my church killed herself. Her husband, Dr. Pete Deison, is, for all practical purposes, the Number Two pastor at Park Cities Presbyterian in Dallas, although he doesn't preach very often. I don't - didn't - know either of them personally, having only chatted in the blandest of pleasantries with Dr. Deison, as many of the thousands of congregants at our large church do. Knowing even less about Harriet Deison, learning of her violent and self-inflicted passing still came as quite a shock.
She seemed to have it all. She was attractive, especially for her 65 years, always impeccably dressed, with her hair just so. She and her husband had two children and five grandchildren. She drove a Lexus, which I thought was weird for a pastor's wife, even one from as wealthy a congregation as ours is. She came from an old-money family in Dallas, the Schoellkopfs, and was related to the Hunts, one of the city's legendary old-money oil families. So to her, perhaps a Lexus was slumming it. After all, wealth is relative.
Harriet was a longtime member of several prestigious social organizations in Dallas, a city known to grovel at the feet of anything that even remotely hints at exclusivity. But she came by her status by not only birth, but integrity and, to hear others tell it, by genuine sincerity. It's hard to imagine anybody with her pedigree and lifestyle having an inferiority complex.
Or worse, an inability to appreciate life.
Apparently, those close to her knew of her struggles, and from what I've heard, it probably wouldn't be inaccurate to say that, in addition to grief and sorrow, her loved ones have a certain peace about her finally being in eternal peace in Heaven. Harriet's funeral is this afternoon, but as our congregation says "goodbye" to her, I can't help but wonder how many other people in our midst are just as close to mortal despair as she was.
Harriet had all the accoutrements our society says can make us happy, and she wasn't.
What does that tell you and me?
Here's my essay from last summer:
So very sad.
A friend of a friend killed himself today. I didn't know him, but I know he leaves behind a wife and two young children. He was a professing Christian, which makes his loss particularly tragic.
In a way, the faith we're told can save us from ourselves... couldn't. Not mortally, at least.
Suicide has been erroneously called an unpardonable sin, because it involves the willful destruction of God's creation of life by the very benefactor of that creation. But although suicide is bad, and may be a combination of sin or the result of sinful thoughts, it's not unpardonable. The Bible tells us that the only unpardonable sin is denying what the Holy Spirit teaches about Christ. In other words, when a person dies without ever professing that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, they've committed the unpardonable sin.
Everything else in which we believers in Christ fail Him, including suicide, is pardonable through His grace.
That doesn't necessarily take away the pain of loss, though, does it? Or the confusing aftermath of suicide? Loved ones are usually left with so many unanswered questions and guilt that it's easy to become angry. However hard it might have been to work through the problems that precipitate a suicide, those left behind to mourn a suicide victim's loss face an even more difficult path to some semblance of healing and reconciliation with their new reality.
Couldn't we have worked this out somehow? Surely alternatives existed!
I once attended the funeral of a college student who killed himself, ostensibly after an argument with his girlfriend. Some cryptic messages were discovered later, but nothing definitive regarding the victim's precise reasoning. As I sat in the church sanctuary that day, I stared at the overflow crowd numbering close to 1,200 and wondered how somebody with this many friends and family members could feel so utterly alone and destitute.
A few years ago, I attended the funeral of a bubbly, energetic older man who had become a millionaire through his own entrepreneurship. He'd had an eye for seeing the untapped potential in offbeat products and obscure industries. Speaking of untapped potential, he had once offered me a job in one of his businesses. A couple of years after that, however, some final engineering tests determined his latest and greatest product would not work the way he'd hoped it would.
He was already rich, influential, well-loved, and respected. A longtime believer, he was a church elder, Bible Study Fellowship leader, and Prison Fellowship volunteer. But it wasn't enough. He was so distraught that what he'd hoped would be his grand legacy had been deemed unworkable, he gave up. Literally.
His funeral was standing-room-only, too, only not with fellow college students, but with business executives and local politicians; a crowd just as unused to suicide in their accomplished ranks as young adults so full of anticipation for the future.
While I don't remember much from the funeral homily for my college student friend, I distinctly remember the sermon at my older friend's funeral. Grappling with how to summarize the profound discrepancy between a life and faith so apparently well-lived and such deep discouragement despite it all, the pastor came to a remarkable conclusion.
This suicide victim had won the war, but lost the battle.
Indeed, our friend was now in Heaven with Christ, but his own demons that had been so well-hidden from most of us were more powerful than he realized.
Which begs the question: in a moment of weakness, who among us can say with complete confidence that we could spurn our darkest enemy? Who doesn't have a so-called Achilles heel, whether it's hereditary, an acquired habit, a chemical dependency or deficiency - but something that we learn to hide exceptionally well from just about everybody? Maybe, even, sometimes... ourselves?
We cloak it with tenacity, hard work, or a cheerful disposition, no matter how forced. We train ourselves to be amazingly productive and even self-sacrificing. We tell ourselves that people with a stronger faith conquer these foes. Or, we blatantly ignore them.
And yes, maybe a stronger faith proves victorious for many folks. But what about those folks who science suggests have a chemical imbalance that undermines even the staunchest faith or the most determined will? Those who may not even realize their vulnerability, because no doctor has ever diagnosed it?
Yes, our faith surely will save us. Which is an eternally good thing, because sometimes, our bodies won't.
How we share our grief over those who lose that battle, however, is something experts tell us is best done more in silent kindnesses than chatty platitudes. Not just because what we say while trying to be helpful may actually be ineffective. But because crises like these tend to hold an unwieldy, disturbing paradox.
They can remind us of our own vulnerabilities.
Particularly when we ordinarily like to think we don't have any.
_____
This past Saturday, the wife of a pastor at my church killed herself. Her husband, Dr. Pete Deison, is, for all practical purposes, the Number Two pastor at Park Cities Presbyterian in Dallas, although he doesn't preach very often. I don't - didn't - know either of them personally, having only chatted in the blandest of pleasantries with Dr. Deison, as many of the thousands of congregants at our large church do. Knowing even less about Harriet Deison, learning of her violent and self-inflicted passing still came as quite a shock.
She seemed to have it all. She was attractive, especially for her 65 years, always impeccably dressed, with her hair just so. She and her husband had two children and five grandchildren. She drove a Lexus, which I thought was weird for a pastor's wife, even one from as wealthy a congregation as ours is. She came from an old-money family in Dallas, the Schoellkopfs, and was related to the Hunts, one of the city's legendary old-money oil families. So to her, perhaps a Lexus was slumming it. After all, wealth is relative.
Harriet was a longtime member of several prestigious social organizations in Dallas, a city known to grovel at the feet of anything that even remotely hints at exclusivity. But she came by her status by not only birth, but integrity and, to hear others tell it, by genuine sincerity. It's hard to imagine anybody with her pedigree and lifestyle having an inferiority complex.
Or worse, an inability to appreciate life.
Apparently, those close to her knew of her struggles, and from what I've heard, it probably wouldn't be inaccurate to say that, in addition to grief and sorrow, her loved ones have a certain peace about her finally being in eternal peace in Heaven. Harriet's funeral is this afternoon, but as our congregation says "goodbye" to her, I can't help but wonder how many other people in our midst are just as close to mortal despair as she was.
Harriet had all the accoutrements our society says can make us happy, and she wasn't.
What does that tell you and me?
Here's my essay from last summer:
So very sad.
A friend of a friend killed himself today. I didn't know him, but I know he leaves behind a wife and two young children. He was a professing Christian, which makes his loss particularly tragic.
In a way, the faith we're told can save us from ourselves... couldn't. Not mortally, at least.
Suicide has been erroneously called an unpardonable sin, because it involves the willful destruction of God's creation of life by the very benefactor of that creation. But although suicide is bad, and may be a combination of sin or the result of sinful thoughts, it's not unpardonable. The Bible tells us that the only unpardonable sin is denying what the Holy Spirit teaches about Christ. In other words, when a person dies without ever professing that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, they've committed the unpardonable sin.
Everything else in which we believers in Christ fail Him, including suicide, is pardonable through His grace.
That doesn't necessarily take away the pain of loss, though, does it? Or the confusing aftermath of suicide? Loved ones are usually left with so many unanswered questions and guilt that it's easy to become angry. However hard it might have been to work through the problems that precipitate a suicide, those left behind to mourn a suicide victim's loss face an even more difficult path to some semblance of healing and reconciliation with their new reality.
Couldn't we have worked this out somehow? Surely alternatives existed!
I once attended the funeral of a college student who killed himself, ostensibly after an argument with his girlfriend. Some cryptic messages were discovered later, but nothing definitive regarding the victim's precise reasoning. As I sat in the church sanctuary that day, I stared at the overflow crowd numbering close to 1,200 and wondered how somebody with this many friends and family members could feel so utterly alone and destitute.
A few years ago, I attended the funeral of a bubbly, energetic older man who had become a millionaire through his own entrepreneurship. He'd had an eye for seeing the untapped potential in offbeat products and obscure industries. Speaking of untapped potential, he had once offered me a job in one of his businesses. A couple of years after that, however, some final engineering tests determined his latest and greatest product would not work the way he'd hoped it would.
He was already rich, influential, well-loved, and respected. A longtime believer, he was a church elder, Bible Study Fellowship leader, and Prison Fellowship volunteer. But it wasn't enough. He was so distraught that what he'd hoped would be his grand legacy had been deemed unworkable, he gave up. Literally.
His funeral was standing-room-only, too, only not with fellow college students, but with business executives and local politicians; a crowd just as unused to suicide in their accomplished ranks as young adults so full of anticipation for the future.
While I don't remember much from the funeral homily for my college student friend, I distinctly remember the sermon at my older friend's funeral. Grappling with how to summarize the profound discrepancy between a life and faith so apparently well-lived and such deep discouragement despite it all, the pastor came to a remarkable conclusion.
This suicide victim had won the war, but lost the battle.
Indeed, our friend was now in Heaven with Christ, but his own demons that had been so well-hidden from most of us were more powerful than he realized.
Which begs the question: in a moment of weakness, who among us can say with complete confidence that we could spurn our darkest enemy? Who doesn't have a so-called Achilles heel, whether it's hereditary, an acquired habit, a chemical dependency or deficiency - but something that we learn to hide exceptionally well from just about everybody? Maybe, even, sometimes... ourselves?
We cloak it with tenacity, hard work, or a cheerful disposition, no matter how forced. We train ourselves to be amazingly productive and even self-sacrificing. We tell ourselves that people with a stronger faith conquer these foes. Or, we blatantly ignore them.
And yes, maybe a stronger faith proves victorious for many folks. But what about those folks who science suggests have a chemical imbalance that undermines even the staunchest faith or the most determined will? Those who may not even realize their vulnerability, because no doctor has ever diagnosed it?
Yes, our faith surely will save us. Which is an eternally good thing, because sometimes, our bodies won't.
How we share our grief over those who lose that battle, however, is something experts tell us is best done more in silent kindnesses than chatty platitudes. Not just because what we say while trying to be helpful may actually be ineffective. But because crises like these tend to hold an unwieldy, disturbing paradox.
They can remind us of our own vulnerabilities.
Particularly when we ordinarily like to think we don't have any.
_____