How We Raise Our Kids

Back in the early 80’s I taught evening classes at a local business college.  One afternoon, Robert, the janitor was cleaning around my desk and asked me to check a drawer to see if the morning instructor had forgotten to take his pistol home again.  He hadn’t, and as we talked, Robert mused “you know, he keep doin’ that, one of these days I’m gonna get that gun  … almost did the other day .. if I could have got away with it”. 

This was the Moral Majority era and it struck me how telling a comment this was of life on the south-side where Robert grew up & still lived.  There stood a man who worked hard all his life, always on time, always there.  Yet this same dependable man just admitted that he would steal from a fellow employee if he could get away with it.   Does he really believe stealing is ok if you get away with it?  Does he think I agree?  Does his social circle think this way and is this what he taught his kids?  Is this what’s wrong with America that the growing Christian Right movement is talking about?

I was reminded of Robert the other night as I watched the Republican convention.   They ran a short promotional video introducing John McCain and part of the video highlighted how John met Cindy and how magically telling it was that they both lied to each other about their ages. (He told her he was 44 when he was actually 48 and she said she was 28 when actually only 24).

It was telling all right, I thought.  But what does it say about someone who lies to you the very first time you meet them?  Forget that he was married & cheating on his wife at the time - what does this say about his own moral compass and those around him when they put up their deceitfulness as a cute thing to know about themselves?   What does it say about the audience if they see nothing wrong?  Is this what their social circle believes – that lying is ok?   Is this what they teach their kids? 

Yet Americans cheered and clapped and chanted for more.  The show went on and they said a lot things. The Associated Press tried to be as generous as possible the next morning,  but still felt compelled to published a long list of the missleading statements made. (Link below.)

And in the end the truth didn’t make any difference – they had gotten away with it and that’s what really mattered to them. This the “family values” party.   It made me sad, really.  I’m only glad my daughter is too young to have grasped it all – that such a large group of her fellow Americans have so little regard for the core American value of telling the truth, the need to stand firm on it, and to tolerate nothing less.

I still believe we are a nation of Christians, but after that spectacle, I’m not too sure we’re any kind of a Christian nation - at least not by any living witness of those who boast so loudly we are.   Our Lord is the Way, the Truth & the Light.  As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord and continue to value the truth. 

Sheepgoat 

Ref:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h4Os_NvbBurz0R8IejrDDj-4sRlAD930AQV01

Defeating the Terrorists – Can Jesus Help?

The sheer amount of pain, misery and death wrought by the Islamic extremist and our war on terror blows the mind.  Be-headings, people jumping out of burning buildings, little kids being blown apart, a daughter saved because the blood from her mother’s dead body covering her fooled the soldiers in to thinking she was dead.  We’ve gotten almost numb to it.   It’s in the paper everyday.

Somehow, sometime soon, we’ve got to quit all this and get back to our normal lives.  Almost five years now, stay the course just ain’t cutin’ it.  What do you think Jesus would tells us to do?  Well,  I think He’d have of us first take a look at what we’re doing. 

And boy are we’re giving it back to ‘em - pound for ounce – teaching them not to mess with us.   But are we winning?   Hey look, they deserve it, they attacked us!   What about the innocent?   Hey, man those people killed on 9-11 were innocent too.  And we had right to get mad and hit back - hard!  Can’t help it if some innocents get caught in it.  But the guys in Iraq didn’t hit us. Well, maybe we made a mistake, but it’s done now.  But now they’re mad and hitting us back.  And we hit back, harder.  And they …  and we… and here we are.  So what do we do?  Cut and run?  Just let the terrorists win?  Is that what Jesus wants?

Let’s set retaliations aside and look at what started this.  Why did they do that, kill all those people on 9-11?  Just hate freedom, I guess.  But Bin-Laden hated the Saudi royal family more.  True, and they were smarter than striking the seat of Islam. It wouldn’t gather much support in the region.   Better would be to kick a decedant, overindulging, arragant, easy to hate nation like us in the shins.  if we’d then be foolish enough to invade and inspire an army of angry Muslims, Al-Qaeda needs only keep up a hit and run gureilla war until they wore us out.  Ali’s old rope-a-dope.  (It’s the same strategy that one the Amercian Revolution.)

Why? – to raise a great Mujahadeen army to rebuild the Islamic Empire, which once reached as far a Spain. Uniting the Arab world, a perpetual mess of squabling factions, is a very tall order.   A common enemy from the West, the perceived return of crusaders is what it would take.  Is it working? Pretty much.  Our war on terror catapulted a criminal, Asama Bin Laden, to the level of a head of state, and the inevitable carnage has filled the new tv sets over there with plenty of images to get mad at.   The result: In every election since, voters have rolled to the side of extremists - Hamas in Palestine, Mahmoud in Iran, Mubarik in Egypt. 

Al-Qaeda still has a long way to go. While they have somewhat unified Sunnis, they’ll have to topple the Shiites leasership to bring them in.  The new Shiite majority government in Iraq is bound to us by association.  So every time we kick in a door, accidently bomb the wrong house, or refuse to say when we’re leaving, we play to Al-Qaeda’s hand. 

Hey man, if we don’t fight them over there, we’re going to have to fight them over here.  Really?  Just where do you think an army with no C130′s, no troop ships, no means of extending any logistics wants to fight us?   Where can they sustain the fight long enough to unite the arab world?  What land do they want to conquer?  Keeping our foot soldiers in target range with bullseyes on their backs in not a successful strategy. It plays right in to their playbook.  The only reason I can think of for not redeploying would be if we don’t really plan on leaving.  That’s not our plan, is it?

So how can Jesus help? Pray and ask Him.

Amnesty

Amnesty’s sure been in the news a lot lately.  Conservatives in Congress shout it about anything not guarantying the swift deportation of anybody that don’t belong here (especially the brown ones).  ”What they’re talking about is AMNESTY!” … “It’s not amnesty!” … ” IT IS TOO!”. “WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE!!!”.  It’s mystifies me the scurrilous way some folks say amnesty. Seems the more they profess Christian values, the broader they snarl at the thought of it.

Amnesty is letting people off the hook, granting them pardon. Except for maybe Richard Nixon, you got to say what Jesus’s did with that woman at the well was the be most widely publicized pardon ever. He just up and let her go scot-free. In fact, He went on and pardoned every single one of us for every crime we have ever committed, in one quick swoop – just like that. I guess that means we’ve all been given amnesty. Pretty nice, huh?  Makes you want to act better, don’t it?

This week, amnesty has come up in another context. Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Al-Maliki has announced a plan which includes amnesty for insurgents – even those who have killed U.S. troops. Outrage in Congress is expected, but curiously it is coming from the left, while the right seems to want to  accommodate it. There’s no figuring politicians, is there?

Well, what I do know is that amnesty’s well founded in Christian principles. Our Lord washed the slate for us and expects us to do the same. If necessary, seventy-seven times for each offense. To be truly OK with amnesty, we have to actually forgive those who transgress against us.  We certainly don’t do that very much these days.  But we’ve got to, and even more.  We’ve got to learn how to love our enemies.  It’s one of the first thing He told us to do and He didn’t make it optional.

Dr. Martin Luther King understood the hidden power of this.  With it, he accomplished a great miracle in America.  As a rambunctious southern whiteboy who’s  teenage years were in the mid 60′s, I can tell you just exactly how great.   Thru Christ’s simple principle of love, the lives of millions of Americans were changed forever, and the hatred that comsumed millions more was quietly broken.  Something I never would have thought would happen in my lifetime – not in a million years.

Dr King planted some of the seeds for this miracle in a sermon to a little congregation in Alabama.  The year was 1957.   I post this great sermon in it’s entirety here, and conclude with this excerpt: 

“….Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.

Now first let us deal with this question, which is the practical question: How do you go about loving your enemies?  I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. And I’m sure that seems strange to you, that I start out telling you this morning that you love your enemies by beginning with a look at self. It seems to me that that is the first and foremost way to come to an adequate discovery to the how of this situation.

Now, I’m aware of the fact that some people will not like you, not because of something you have done to them, but they just won’t like you. I’m quite aware of that. Some people aren’t going to like the way you walk; some people aren’t going to like the way you talk. Some people aren’t going to like you because you can do your job better than they can do theirs. Some people aren’t going to like you because other people like you, and because you’re popular, and because you’re well-liked, they aren’t going to like you. Some people aren’t going to like you because your hair is a little shorter than theirs or your hair is a little longer than theirs. Some people aren’t going to like you because your skin is a little brighter than theirs; and others aren’t going to like you because your skin is a little darker than theirs.  So that some people aren’t going to like you. They’re going to dislike you, not because of something that you’ve done to them, but because of various jealous reactions and other reactions that are so prevalent in human nature.

But after looking at these things and admitting these things, we must face the fact that an individual might dislike us because of something that we’ve done deep down in the past, some personality attribute that we possess, something that we’ve done deep down in the past and we’ve forgotten about it; but it was that something that aroused the hate response within the individual. That is why I say, begin with yourself. There might be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.

This is true in our international struggle. We look at the struggle, the ideological struggle between communism on the one hand and democracy on the other, and we see the struggle between America and Russia. Now certainly, we can never give our allegiance to the Russian way of life, to the communistic way of life, because communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. When we look at the methods of communism, a philosophy where somehow the end justifies the means, we cannot accept that because we believe as Christians that the end is pre-existent in the means. But in spite of all of the weaknesses and evils inherent in communism, we must at the same time see the weaknesses and evils within democracy.

Democracy is the greatest form of government to my mind that man has ever conceived, but the weakness is that we have never touched it. Isn’t it true that we have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes?   Isn’t it true that we have often in our democracy trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression? Isn’t it true that through our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism? And all of these things must be taken under consideration as we look at Russia. We must face the fact that the rhythmic beat of the deep rumblings of discontent from Asia and Africa is at bottom a revolt against the imperialism and colonialism perpetuated by Western civilization all these many years. The success of communism in the world today is due to the failure of democracy to live up to the noble ideals and principles inherent in its system.

And this is what Jesus means when he said: “How is it that you can see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?” Or to put it in Moffat’s translation: “How is it that you see the splinter in your brother’s eye and fail to see the plank in your own eye?” And this is one of the tragedies of human nature. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.  [more ...]

Sheep or Goat?

Is that a sheep or goat?  How do you tell?  Goats got horns, right?  Well, what about those big-horn sheep - they're not goats.   Okay, it's one of those "you know one when you see one" things.  And Lucky me, getting brought up on a farm blessed me with a fair eye for livestock.  I grant you, there's not much stead for this here in 21st Century America.  Electronics is where it's at.

Way back, when Jesus told folks that come judgement day, He was going to gather us all up and seperate us out - sheep from goats, the herdsman out there knew exactly what He was talking about.  See, seperating livestock's a big part of animal husbandry.  Seems like you're always in there cutting out the ones for slaughter.  Tough work for anybody who loves his animals, but  it has to be done.  The poor things you once petted frantically run ever which away trying to get away.  Almost like they know what's coming.

Matthew 25:31-47 gives a plain account of whats going to happen after we get divided up.  One bunch will inherit the Great Kingdom and the other will get pitched in to the eternal fire.  Reckon, like goats, we'll know what's coming that day too, and which bunch we want in.

That brings us to what we're doing here.  This blog will try to explore todays world using Christ's teachings to Light the way, maybe add to it the perspective of simple country life, and hope it will help us to be unmistakably a sheep, come judgement day.

God had graced me with more than a half century of life in the great state of Texas  when He blessed me with a beautiful daughter, my only child.  A unique situation, I know.  But, like grandfather in the old classic, Heidi, she spurrs a new dogged determination in me to make things better for her around here.  And I know that our Lord's coming back someday.  So, what say we start cleaning up?