For Tomorrow

Aren’t presidential elections fun! We should do this every year!!!

Maybe not.

Today – Tuesday, November 3rd – is election day. Tomorrow we’ll have results. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. We may or may not know who our next president is. We may or may not know which party controls congress. We may or may not know who will be leading our state offices.

There’s a lot that I don’t know, but here are a couple of things that I do know:

  1. No matter the results of the elections, I will have a lot of friends despairing over the results.
  2. That despair isn’t necessary, because…
  3. No matter what, God is in control.

We keep hearing that this election is the most important election in our lifetime. I’ve heard that about every presidential election I’ve ever voted in. That’s not to say that it isn’t important, or even the most important, but we do need to keep some perspective. As the band Wilco sings, “every generation thinks it’s the end of the word.”

Read these words from Peter:

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

-1 Peter 2:13-17

A couple of takeaways from this:

  1. We are to submit to the government, because God has commanded that we submit to the government.
  2. Our primary citizenship is in the Kingdom of God, so our focus should be there.
  3. This is being written to Christians who were being powerfully oppressed by their government through mask mandates arrests and martyrdom. If they are to submit to a government that actively attacks them, we can submit to ours.
  4. No matter what, God is in control.
  5. I’m in the mood to make lists.

Regardless what the results of this election will be, the world isn’t going to end. Unless it does, in which case the children of God will be better off! We can be upset, frustrated, or motived, but we shouldn’t be anxious, hateful, or disrespectful. Our focus tomorrow and next week should be on what our focus today and last week was supposed to be on: loving God and loving others (yes, even those that voted differently than you). Remember, we have a savior that lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death, all so that we could be forgiven and live for eternity in heaven with Him, and that savior’s name wasn’t Joseph or Donald.

Be at peace. Trust in God’s guidance. Know that, no matter what, in good and in bad, His will will be done, and our assured hope is in a future where we won’t be voting on a flawed leader, we’ll be bowing before a glorious throne.

A guy smarter than me: Schaeffer on how to save America

In “A Christian Manifesto”, Francis Schaeffer discussed how the Judeo-Christian worldview that America was founded on has been replaced by Humanism:

Humanism means that the man is the measure of all things…Man beginning from himself, with no knowledge except what he himself can discover and no standards outside of himself. In this view Man is the measure of all things…

Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto

Schaeffer wrote this from Europe in 1981.

The following is an excerpt from “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis A. Schaeffer.

The world view which produced the founding of the United States in the first place is increasingly now not allowed to exert its influence in government, in the schools, or in the public means of information.

The results of the original base in the United States gave the possibility of “liberty and justice for all.” And while it was always far from perfect, it did result in liberty. This included liberty to those who hold other views—views which would not give the freedom. The material-energy, chance view has taken advantage of that liberty, supplanted the consensus, and resulted in an intolerance that gives less and less freedom in courts and schools for the view which originally gave the freedoms. Having no base for law, those who hold the humanist view make binding law whatever they personally think is good for society at the moment. This leads increasingly to arbitrary law and rulings which produce chaos in society and which then naturally and increasingly tend to lead to some form of authoritarianism. At that point what the country had in the first place is lost and dead.

What is now needed is to stand against that other total world view. We must see and make clear that it is not the truth of final reality; and we must understand and show that it is producing its own natural results which are opposite to those upon which the United States was founded. It is opposite to the great freedoms produced which everyone now enjoys. What is needed at this time is to take the steps necessary to break the authoritarian hold which the material-energy, chance concept of final reality has on government and law.

The result would be freedom for all and especially freedom for all religion. That was the original purpose of the First Amendment. 

With this freedom Reformation Christianity would compete in the free market place of ideas. It would no longer be subject to a hidden censorship as it is now. It can and would give out the clear preaching of God’s “good news” for individuals, and simultaneously it is also the view which gives the consistent base for the form-freedom balance in government and society — the base which brought forth this country with its freedoms. It is the responsibility of those holding this view to show it to be unique (the truth of total reality) for individual salvation and for society — by teaching, by life, and by action.

A guy smarter than me: Tozer on the universe

The following is an excerpt from “Experiencing The Presence of God”, written by A.W. Tozer and edited by James L. Snyder.

The Bible…teaches that this universe, this “uni” (meaning “one”), this one great interlocking system has a central control. And that control is called the throne of God. The universe is controlled from that center…

If any organism has to have a head, if a machine has to have a head, an organization has to have a head, is it not logical to believe that somewhere in this vast universe, there is a throne where somebody runs it?…

And I believe that the one on the throne is God, the Majesty in the heavens. The Bible refers to this center of control as the throne of God. And from that throne, God governs His universe according to an eternal purpose. That eternal purpose embraces all things. “All things” are two little words used often in Scriptures, yet they are bigger than the sky above. They are bigger than the entire world. They are big because they take in all things.

So, we have the Majesty in the heavens, sitting upon His throne. Then someone is sitting on the right hand of that throne. Why? And who is He? He is Jesus, the minister of the sanctuary, which God made, not man. The reason for His being there, in brief, is this: A province revolted in what we call the universe. In all this interrelated, interdependence, interlocking universe, one province revolted and said, “We don’t want to be ruled by the head. We will not be ruled from the throne. We will rule ourselves. We will build this great Babylon up to heaven. We will not have God rule over us.” That province we call “mankind.” And mankind inhabits the little rolling sphere we called “the earth.”…

I think the earth belongs to man. They have not done much with it, and they have not done a very good job, but it belongs to the sons of men.

That province is now in revolt against the Majesty of the heavens. What is God going to do? God could, with a wave of His hand, sweep that province out of existence. But what did He do? God sent His only begotten Son that He might redeem that province and bring it back into the sphere of the throne again, back into the sphere of the Kingdom. And that Kingdom is called “the kingdom of God.” When a man is converted, he is born again into the kingdom of God. What does that mean? It means that he is born out of the old rebellious province into a new Kingdom, and admits that there is a throne, which he did not admit before…

You cannot get there by being baptized, though we all ought to be baptized, according to the teaching of Jesus. We do not get there by joining a church, although we all ought to join a church. We do not get there by praying; you can pray to the end of your life, 24 hours a day, and not get there. It is coming into the Kingdom by an act of the will, through Jesus Christ the Lord, that gets me out of the old, revolted province and into the kingdom of God and under the rule of the throne of God again.

The people who need to read this won’t

In the Matrix, there’s a pivotal scene that I’m often reminded of. Cypher, one of the good guys, makes a deal with the machines to give up his friends. He explains the reason:

“You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After 9 years, you know what I realize? 

Ignorance is bliss.”

Cypher, The Matrix

He knows that the Matrix is just a computer simulation and not real life, but real life is hard, and he doesn’t care anymore. So he is giving up.

All of us, right now, could be working towards a better community, a better nation, and a better world. The problem is, most people have just given up.

Doing something of value requires effort. We need to pay attention, understand the problem(s), and work towards a solution. The bigger the problem, the more complex the solution, and the more effort, experience and knowledge it will take to tackle it. Average Jane from Rapidan isn’t going to jump in and tackle the national health care system at the very beginning. There are a lot of people with a lot of intelligence and a lot of experience that are more likely to see success there than Jane (there are also a lot of people without a lot of intelligence or experiences already trying that one too). Maybe Average Jane needs to figure out if there’s a way to not throw a soda bottle out the window of her car first, then we can move up from there.

People handle their endeavor for a lack of effort in different ways. Some isolate – they don’t want to see the news, they don’t want to know what the issues are, they don’t want to understand what’s going on with their neighbors. They just want to be left alone, and will remain in that place until the Thought Police from the Socialist States of America come knocking on the door. These people tend to be ignorantly blissful and mostly useless, ignoring not only current issues and events, but also ignoring their call to show love to their neighbors (which they think means the people that live on either side of them, and in reality means looking out for our fellow human beings).

There’s another cross section of the “ignorantly blissful” that tend to be far more irritating: the pretenders. They’re the ones that read a headline and rage, without reading the article. They’re the ones that are looking for opportunities to speak up and be heard, without knowing what they’re talking about. These people can be found all over the place, from social media trolls to virtue signalers to protesters that don’t know what they’re protesting.

I had a conversation with someone recently who had a concern over an organization based in large part on a position paper that it had posted. I read the paper and was pleased with what I read; it was thoughtful, well-stated, and biblically founded. The person with the concern, however, had read very little of the paper, in part because it was a bit academic and difficult to understand. It was the headline of the paper, and the existence of the paper, that he was concerned with. The difference between this person and the “ignorantly blissful” is that he wanted to understand and, instead of jumping on social media to rage, called me up, sat down and had a conversation in order to better understand the topic. I wish more people would be more like him.

If we want to be useful, if we want to do the work God has called us to do, then that means we are going to need to work. It requires physical exertion, emotional energy, and intellectual effort. We need to think, learn, grown, and understand others in order to love God and love others as we are called to do. That doesn’t mean we all need Master’s Degrees or to attend weekend seminars, but it does mean we need to read and listen, not only to what we believe but also to those we disagree with. 

I have a “heresy” section of my personal library for that reason. It’s a shelf with a selection of books that I would never recommend. They’re books that I thoroughly disagree with. But they’re also books that I have read, wanting to understand what they taught and what others who read them believe so that I can better understand and interact with them.

Do your homework. Listen to varying opinions. Think, then engage. The world needs more of that.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the fall of America. Our great country, the greatest on the planet, is in a downward spiral, and here’s why:

Marketing.

Well, I sort of believe that. It isn’t really marketing that is destroying us, but marketing is being used to destroy us. Let me explain.

First off, marketing itself isn’t bad. I’ve done it a lot myself. Marketing is simply getting the word out about your product, service or idea. Promotion. In and of itself it is morally neutral.

If you are marketing from an ethical standpoint, you will promote your product, service or idea from an honest standpoint. You will highlight the benefits, the positives, and the advantages of what you want others buy or buy into. In marketing, you are trying to create need or desire for what you are marketing.

But, if you are marketing from an unethical standpoint, you will be willing to lie, cheat, manipulate, and twist any facts and perception to get your desired outcome.

America is being lied to.

Case in point: the Minneapolis ‘defund the police’ movement.

August 3, 2020, bringmethenews.com : “Poll finds majority of Minneapolis residents favor replacing police department”. Seems clear, except I don’t believe it. Let’s look at the poll.

It was commissioned by the ACLU and The Fairness Project, two organizations with clear ideological lines, and conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group. The first question worth asking: why are political nonprofits commissioning a poll? Next question, what is the Benenson Strategy Group. Answer:

We help leaders connect with, persuade and activate the audiences you need to win…

BSG’s reputation as a premier consulting and strategic research firm is built on our relentless pursuit of the right answers. 

In today’s world, cutting through the clutter and noise is harder than it has ever been. That means to connect and achieve your goals, you need more than a message. Our unique approach is built on collaboration with our clients to develop their durable narrative, rooted in their values. We leverage our language expertise with innovative qualitative and quantitative methods to uncover the “Hidden Architecture of Opinion” that shapes your audiences’ decision frames.

http://www.bsgco.com

So, this group conducted a poll, why? To “persuade and activate the audience [that the ACLU and The Fairness Project] needs to win”

How? By building a poll to “relentlessly pursue the right answers.” What are the right answers? The developed “durable narrative, rooted in [the ACLU and The Fairness Project]’s values” using “language expertise.”

In other words, they’re going to do marketing gymnastics in order to get you to believe what they want you to believe by claiming that it’s already widely believed, accepted and supported. This isn’t a poll; it is marketing that is, at best, morally questionable, being disguised as legitimate, objective news.

Another brief example: according to Gallup, the average American believes the percent of our population that identifies as gay or lesbian to be approximately 25%. The real number? 4.5% – less than 1 in 20, rather than 1 in 4. Why is there such a disparity in perception? Because of the concerted effort by media companies to push the LGBTQ narrative, especially on television and in movies. Over the 2019-2020 television season, 10% of all prime time characters on broadcast TV (ABC, CBS, The CW, FOX, and NBC) are identified as LGBTQ, with the teen/young adult focused CW tallying 15.4% of its characters as LGBTQ (TV stats from GLAAD).

Here’s the problem: we are presented with information like these examples a dozen times a day, and most of us simply accept it. We don’t challenge, we don’t ask questions, we don’t push back. Why? Because that would require time and effort.

And this isn’t even about the ‘defund the police’ or LGBTQ movements. It’s about thinking for ourselves in a reasoned, educated way, rather than just parroting back what we are told to believe by the people we have chosen to listen to.

There are some that claim to be pushing back. A few truly are, but many are simply pushing back on the manipulation from those they disagree with, but they’re fully drinking the Kool-Aide from the side that they want to believe.

For example, many have been eager to point out some of the media manipulation of the COVID-19 epidemic that has inflated a very serious situation into a perceived apocalypse, but then they’re quick to put up a Facebook post saying masks don’t have any value (seriously, doctors have worn mask for 100+ years-there’s at least some value to them).

I fear for the future of our nation. It isn’t because there are evil people trying to manipulate others; there will always be evil people trying to manipulate others. I fear for our future because I’m not sure there are enough good, thoughtful, reasoned people willing to push back and lead.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

-Edmund Burke

Refs and control issues

I coached junior high football for a few years. That was an experience.

There were a few aspects of junior high football that were a challenge. Junior high boys were a big one; when practice shuts down because a rabbit ran past the goal posts, that’s a bit frustrating. But another big frustration was referees.

Any sports fan knows that referees can be frustrating from time to time (unless they’re a Packers fan-they don’t know what its like to have calls go against them). But junior high football referees can be particularly difficult. 

First off, I’m one to give refs a bit of slack – they’re trying (usually). But for someone to be reffing a junior high football game usually means they fall into 1 of 3 categories: 

1) They’re very bored.
2) They’re very new to reffing.
3) They’re an employee of the school hosting the game and were contractually obligated to say yes when “asked” to ref a junior high football game. 

The refs in category 1 usually were fine. The refs in category 2 were often easy enough to deal with because when they’d make a mistake they would at least be willing to talk about it because they weren’t jaded by idiot junior high football coaches that constantly yelled at them about everything for years. Category 3 was the one that tended to be a real difficulty.

Any time I was in a position to ref or oversee a game and I had a connection to one of the teams, I would tell them they would be frustrated with me because I was going to be particularly hard on them in order to ensure I wasn’t biased against the other team—if a call was 50-50, it was going to go against them.

Not everyone shares my approach.

I had a couple of run-ins with school employee refs. One crew gave my team multiple 15 yard personal fouls in a game that we were dominating (we were really good, the other team really wasn’t), before sending a letter to my Athletic Director calling me the “dirtiest, most unethical coach” they had ever seen (even though my second half play-calling was ‘dive left’, ‘dive right’, ‘dive left’, etc). I asked the AD to convey to the other school that Reverend Whitman apologized for any misunderstand.

There was another game where the school employee refs were consistently calling penalties against us while missing some very obvious penalties against the other team. I did a little coach-barking at the refs a few times, but I never lost my cool, I didn’t throw anything, and I went out of my way to be positive and humorous with the refs. We lost a close game that I thought we should have won.

After the game one of the JV coaches sat next to me on the bus home and we talked about the game. He noticed the refs favoring the other team as well, and he asked me how I had kept my cool when there were so many obvious missed calls.

My answer was this: I focus on the things I can control, and I don’t worry about the things I can’t. I can control my team (well…as much as you can control junior high boys). I can control my play calls. I can control my attitude. I can’t control the refs. Yelling at them isn’t going to help; they’ll just get mad and it’ll get worse. So I’ll point things out, I’ll try to develop a rapport with them, but I’m not going to lose it because it will not only be counterproductive to the game, that isn’t what I want to be teaching my boys.

That’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve had my moments where I’ve flown off the handle over things that just didn’t matter or were out of my control. I’ve gotten worked up about things I couldn’t do anything about. I’ve been there, I’ve regretted it later, and I’ve dealt with the consequences.

Life is full of moments where things are out of our control. Those moments can lead to stress, anxiety, and frustration, and often justifiably so. But we’ll be better off when we can focus on what we can control, and when we can let go of things that are out of our control. Ultimately, God’s got everything, so what do we have to worry about? We aren’t judged by our outcomes, we’re judged by out faithfulness.

Am I doing what God has called me to do, the way He would want me to do it? If so, it doesn’t matter what happens, I’m right where I should be.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:12-14

Only God can judge me (and He will)

Nobody likes consequences. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. Relient K hates them.

But they’re real and unavoidable. Get pulled over for speeding, you pay a fine. You can be mad all you want, but…consequences. You don’t water your flowers, and they die. Frustrating, but…consequences. You’re upset with decisions being made by the governor? Elections have consequences.

We can whine and complain all we want, but the truth of the matter is that we are blessed to be in a country where we have a part in the nation’s decision making process. We have a voice. We can vote. We can contact our representatives at any level of government, and we will almost always get a response. We can even get heavily involved in choosing the candidates for various offices.

However, instead of being involved, most people just sit at home and complain. Well…if you aren’t involved…consequences.

The Bible talks a lot about consequences. Often times it calls them ‘judgement’. That struck me yesterday morning. It was our first Sunday following the MN governor’s mask mandate that requires masks indoors. I know that the order is not popular with my church congregation. I also know that the Bible teaches that we are to respect governing authorities. That makes for a complicated decision-where is the line between standing up against what we believe is wrong, and respecting and submitting to leaders that are put in place by God.

As a side note: to some, the idea of pushing back against a mask mandate is ridiculous: its there for the protection of our communities, it has science behind it, and its a small thing in the scope of a worldwide pandemic. For others, a mask mandate is a clear violation of personal freedoms in the face of an overblown situation. I’m not going to argue either direction on this, but both sides of this argument would do well to listen a little more to the other side.

Regardless of what is done day-to-day, I firmly believe that Sunday morning church is not the place to take this kind of stand. The church should be above this argument-the work of the Kingdom of God is far beyond whatever petty thing this world is dealing with. If we can follow the rules placed on us and still do the work that God has called us to do as a church, then we follow the rules at church.

Another side note: I fully support those churches in California that have chosen to violate the order placed on them to not meet. We are called to gather together, to worship with songs and hymns and spiritual songs, to study the Word, to love God and love others.

While I was preparing for church yesterday, I had to make a sign asking people to wear masks in church. I took a lot of time to prepare the wording. I knew some people would be mad, and I didn’t want that. On the sign I put the following passage:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

Romans 13:1-2

The second verse there stood out to me: there are consequences to our decisions, and making the wrong decision brings more than just some earthly consequences like a threat or a fine, it potentially brings with it judgement by God. That isn’t good.

We don’t often consider our decisions in life with the idea that judgement by God is something potentially hanging over us. We talk about making right decisions, about following God’s leading, and about being faithful. But we don’t talk about the consequences of when we don’t do those things. We will be judged, and that can be bad.

This passage has often stood out to me:

For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Hebrews 10:30-31

The thing that stands out to me here is the fact that this is written to God’s people, the church, and not to non-believers. Christians are the ones that are falling into the hands of the living God, as a consequence and as a judgement for following our own desires rather than following God’s calling and commands.

We have a lot of decisions to make, every single day, and right now there are some big things going on in our country that require us to take stands: elections, virus response, social justice issues, marriage and sexuality, religious and personal liberties…the list goes on and on. I pray that we take the time to think biblically about our decisions, consider that the judgement of God will be on us when we choose to act selfishly or pridefully, and that there is forgiveness for us when we do make mistakes.

Canceled

Cancel culture started as an stupid social media thing. Someone would say something that fans of someone else didn’t like, and they would be canceled: they were ignored and no longer relevant on Twitter. What a crushing blow…

But then something terrible and stupid happened: it moved to real life. Lake Calhoun is now Bde Maka Ska (I think my daughter sneezed that once…), because John C. Calhoun, former Vice President of the United States, once had slaves, like the large portion of successful men of his time. Woodrow Wilson’s name is being removed from a Princeton school because of “racist thinking and policies”. The Minnesota Twins removed the statue of long-time owner Calvin Griffith for a statement he made in Waseca in 1978. There’s even a movement to completely remove the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.

Cancel culture has led to the attack on statues across the nation by BLM, Antifa and others over the last few weeks. These statues have included numerous Confederate and Christopher Columbus statues; a statue of Jesus Christ in Florida and a statue to the Virgin Mary in Chattanooga; police officer memorials in Richmond VA and Dover DE; several statues related to the founders of our nation, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key, Ulysses S. Grant; and a statue of Frederick Douglass, an African-American abolitionist and statesman (they may have lost the plot on that one).

First off (and I don’t believe I have to say this, but…), slavery is bad. It always has been. Jefferson shouldn’t have had slaves. It was wrong.

Are we all on the same page there?

Despite that fact, history is history, and there are few people as significant to the history of the United States, and of the world over the last 300 years, than Thomas Jefferson. He can’t be cancelled—his work is long done, and he did it extraordinarily well and should be honored for it. Could we have conversations about how he is remembered based on the bad aspects to his life? Sure. But, we can’t change history in the process. Slavery was a thing in his day, and it was widespread. That doesn’t make it ok in the least, but we can’t simply judge men and women from that era based on modern-day thinking and perspectives. If that is the standard we will use, then we will have to eliminate every president before Lincoln, and Lincoln was a Republican, so…

This is the hugely dangerous and insidious nature of cancel culture today. There are some that mean well and legitimately want to call out wrongs; I may not agree with all of their methods, but I can appreciate their goals. But, there are others that are clearly trying to change history, and that is exceedingly dangerous.
History is important, because it tells us what happened in the past, why it happened, and thereby gives us an opportunity to learn from the best of the past and avoid repeating the worst of it. But, history is also exceedingly dangerous when it is manipulated. Winston Churchill highlights this idea when he said: 

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Churchill was an exceptional leader that played a pivotal part in saving the world from Hitler and Nazi Germany. In other areas of life and leadership, he was a failure, but when the world needed him, he was extraordinary. However, he also knew that those failures were there and, to use some modern parlance, he wanted to “shape the narrative” so that those failures would be minimized or eliminated from the record.

It’s one thing for a man like Churchill to do that, but its another for others to do that with the express purpose of manipulating future generations, as dictators and oppressive regimes have done throughout history. It’s happening in America, now, to our public school kids. I’ve seen it, and it needs to be pointed out and stopped.

Historical figures need to be viewed with consideration to their time period, and we need to remember that they were human and made mistakes that, while those mistakes shouldn’t be written off, also shouldn’t define them as historical figures. Martin Luther, at the end of his life, wrote some pretty terrible things about Jews, possibly as a result of dementia. Ulysses S. Grant worked on the farm of his slave-owning in-laws and owned a slave named William Jones for a time before emancipating him pre-Civil War.

There was also some guy named Paul, who was once a horrible persecutor of Christians. There was a guy named Abraham, who gave away his wife another man twice. David was God’s king and committed adultery and murder. Peter was a Christian leader that distanced himself from certain people that God had called him to serve because of their ethnicity.

The Bible teaches right and wrong, good and evil. But it also shows us that we are all deeply flawed sinners in need of a Savior, and in need of grace from God and from others. That doesn’t negate the evils of racism, slavery, oppression, sexism, violence, or any other sin that so often invades humanity. We can respect and honor the powerful achievements of those who came before us without changing history or in any way condoning their moral failures. Maybe that means we need to remove statues, maybe it means we need more comprehensive education. It doesn’t mean that violence, vigilantism, or editing history is the answer.

It is my hope that, in the future, I will be looked on in the same way—as a sinner trying to serve God. If not, I’m sure to be canceled some time soon.

Maybe I’ll throw a party.

Don’t Cough On Me

Last week my family and I went shopping at Walmart. That used to be insignificant, but now it’s sort of a treat for my girls to get to go shopping. The location we were at does not require face masks, and few shoppers wear them. My family did, largely because I want my girls to get used to them in the event that there is a statewide mandate or they have to wear them more often. I often do not wear a face mask myself unless I am asked to, or there is a large percentage of people at a particular location wearing them. I don’t care that much one way or another.

While we were walking through the store, I saw a guy eyeballing me from up ahead. He was a younger, tall, muscular guy who was wearing a smedium shirt and no face mask. As he passed by, I noticed he was unusually close to my cart, and just as was about to pass me, he turned his head towards me and coughed. I felt it on my face.

So, I immediately turned, punched him in the head and knocked him out, while my daughter Bella cheered me on.

Just kidding.

My immediate reaction was a bit of shock: did he mean to do that? That’s the kind of thing other people have been arrested for around the country! Is he walking around trying to start a fight? Maybe he’s just an idiot and didn’t realize what he did-I am a firm believer in the stupidity of humanity.

Ultimately, I don’t really care. I’m not paranoid about the ‘rona. If I get it, I get it. But what strikes me, especially in light of this incident, is how disconnected from each other we’ve been. We’ve got people fighting retail employees for doing their job and asking people to put masks on. We’ve got others melting down because someone disregarded the aisle arrows at the grocery store. There’s no grace. There’s no care. There’s anger, and fear, and hate.

Why can’t we just respect each other? If a business or city (or state) requires a mask, then put it on and stop complaining, or simply don’t do business there. If you are a business or city that requires masks, understand that people can make choices for themselves, including where they do their business. If you don’t like what your city or state has decided-elections have consequences. Vote for someone else next time.

If you think everyone should wear a mask, have some understanding that there is a lot of conflicting data as to whether or not they really matter, and some people simply are going to choose not to wear them if given an option (data does show social distancing to be very significant in preventing the spread, which is worth noting as cases are skyrocketing around the country). 

If you are a person that isn’t going to wear a mask, remember that there are a lot of people who are afraid, who have lost loved ones to Covid-19, who have preexisting medical conditions, and who simply cannot remain at home for the entirety of the pandemic. Show them some love and consideration, and if you can love them better by wearing a mask, then wear a mask or give them a lot of space.

There are a lot of emotions going in a lot of directions right now. Don’t let your emotions cause you to forget what’s right:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Mathew 22:36-40

“The Second Coming”, by W.B. Yeats

This poem, written by Irish poet W.B. Yeats in 1919, is a rather dark view of a world that he felt was failing. I think it holds significant relevance today. While it holds spiritual imagery, it is not written as a “Christian” poem.

Pay attention to his imagery related to the problem, especially in the first verse: “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, “the centre cannot hold”, and “the best lack all conviction…”.

I pray that, today, godly men and women would have conviction and be filled with passionate intensity.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?