The Dysfunctional Nation
This past week events occurred in my life that paralleled one another quite profoundly.
The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer.
The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom.
Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue.
Regarding the first, Americans went to the polls and elected a man who expressly desires to continue enabling people to commit murder against their own unborn children, encouraging sexual abuse by institutionalizing sodomy, endorsing the rule of drug cartels over Mexico and the commensurate murder of thousands of its people, and expanding the idea that so many people wantonly decide to do nothing productive yet leech off the productive capacity of others. I could name a dozen more moral crimes that this man will continue to commit.
The stunning truth that so many refuse to grasp is that his opponent would do nothing to effectively stem these things. In fact one of the reasons he lost was because he was too ambivalent about truly changing the above conditions, mostly because the mass of the nation's mass media favored the incumbent's agenda as well. The opponent couldn't risk alienating them. They still torpedoed his candidacy.
Don't get me wrong. Both will or would do whatever Cain's legacy expects them to do. They're fully authorized to do what it is they do so well -- I contest it not at all. I just feel deeply about it.
The thing that is most frightening came from looking at my Facebook wall this week. About half my friends are old friends from high school and college, people who grew up with the kinds of views the incumbent holds. A handful are former students who've been proficiently indoctrinated in the virtues of infanticide and such. Most wrote on their Facebook walls how proud they were that the incumbent president was elected again, and their posts had lots of exclamation marks and smiley emoticons. I truly felt ill inside.
About half of my other friends are Christian friends I've had from church or ministry connections, more recently in my life. They too made me queasy when looking at how little they know about what is really going on. How misled are they to firmly believe that the way to go was to vote for the challenger -- a Mormon who is kind of Christian I guess. Some of their posts were accompanied by Scripture, most of which related to how God is in charge of things and don't get discouraged and all that. Errckh.
The thing that should be understood about all of this is that all of this is the activity of Cain. He was the first city-builder, ordained by God to rule as governor over a reprobate population. As the clearly identified murderer, he uses seven times the murderous power over others, and part of that design involves the most viciously seductive deceit. This program continues to this very day, and should you choose to get into it with your civil election voting power you become a vital part of it.
No wonder this country is the wretched pit that it is.
And no wonder the church is completely impotent to do anything about it.
Oh the churchly people will say that they know about it all and they'll issue warnings and they'll spout some moralistic plap, but it all vanishes before it even gets close to deaf ears, because the church is really just the Catholic church, and that is Cain's church anyway. Think you've got a not-a-Catholic-church? If you fiercely clutch a 501c3 tax exemption then you're Cain's church, so shut up. Wait, I don't have to tell you to shut up. No one listens to you anyway!
This week as I watched even my very best friends reveal the pathetic wickedness of their own hearts up and down the social networking site, I was having to painfully wrestle with this student and his stubborn mother, both gushing right out of the most dysfunctional background imaginable. And while this student was busy wrecking my classroom -- administrators, counselors, and whatever other stakeholders were busy fiddling. The reason is quite reasonable actually.
Mom was using the weight of the law in every facet possible to keep her boy mainstreamed. And it had all these people cowering in fear.
It required me to use that law to my advantage, document everything that he was doing, and keep insisting to everyone that they take action, by the clear provisions of this law. To their credit -- including his mom! -- they did get it and they did find another situation to provide for him.
But the main thing it required was prayer. And not just any prayer but intercessary prayer with others praying with me.
All it requires is truth and grace.
But what do we do. We do the law.
The law. Everything managed by THE LAW.
And why do so many keep enlisting THE LAW to govern everything they do?
There is only one thing the law does, really.
It points out how much we are sinners.
No matter how cool we look - how nice we are - how skilled we are at our jobs - how many jokes we can tell - how many smiles we can paste on our face - how many swell things we can do for others - how considerate and giving we try to be - how much we're into what's really going on with politics for the apparent benefit of everyone
We're dead in our sin.
Funny (or not so funny as may be more the case) when we say in bright splendid colors, "LAW, do x, y, z for me!" in whatever way we do that, then we plainly declare that we're sinners. The only way out of that is to not only turn from that stuff and boldly say you're Christ's, but also abjure the World System that exploits the law.
I grieve -- I am overwhelmed with that grief (call this melodramatic, but it is true) -- when I see the millions and millions of people in this country jumping up from whatever ideological part of the arena they sit and cheering on some agent of Cain to use the bruising strength of THE LAW against them. Them, themselves, those around them, everyone.
When will Christ actually be made Lord over their lives?
I see so little of that happening. So little.
And I grieve.
_
I wrote my latest home page piece about this. Would love for you to read it. Even better, would love for you to be introduced to Christ. Think about it, would you?
The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer.
The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom.
Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue.
Regarding the first, Americans went to the polls and elected a man who expressly desires to continue enabling people to commit murder against their own unborn children, encouraging sexual abuse by institutionalizing sodomy, endorsing the rule of drug cartels over Mexico and the commensurate murder of thousands of its people, and expanding the idea that so many people wantonly decide to do nothing productive yet leech off the productive capacity of others. I could name a dozen more moral crimes that this man will continue to commit.
The stunning truth that so many refuse to grasp is that his opponent would do nothing to effectively stem these things. In fact one of the reasons he lost was because he was too ambivalent about truly changing the above conditions, mostly because the mass of the nation's mass media favored the incumbent's agenda as well. The opponent couldn't risk alienating them. They still torpedoed his candidacy.
Don't get me wrong. Both will or would do whatever Cain's legacy expects them to do. They're fully authorized to do what it is they do so well -- I contest it not at all. I just feel deeply about it.
The thing that is most frightening came from looking at my Facebook wall this week. About half my friends are old friends from high school and college, people who grew up with the kinds of views the incumbent holds. A handful are former students who've been proficiently indoctrinated in the virtues of infanticide and such. Most wrote on their Facebook walls how proud they were that the incumbent president was elected again, and their posts had lots of exclamation marks and smiley emoticons. I truly felt ill inside.
About half of my other friends are Christian friends I've had from church or ministry connections, more recently in my life. They too made me queasy when looking at how little they know about what is really going on. How misled are they to firmly believe that the way to go was to vote for the challenger -- a Mormon who is kind of Christian I guess. Some of their posts were accompanied by Scripture, most of which related to how God is in charge of things and don't get discouraged and all that. Errckh.
The thing that should be understood about all of this is that all of this is the activity of Cain. He was the first city-builder, ordained by God to rule as governor over a reprobate population. As the clearly identified murderer, he uses seven times the murderous power over others, and part of that design involves the most viciously seductive deceit. This program continues to this very day, and should you choose to get into it with your civil election voting power you become a vital part of it.
No wonder this country is the wretched pit that it is.
And no wonder the church is completely impotent to do anything about it.
Oh the churchly people will say that they know about it all and they'll issue warnings and they'll spout some moralistic plap, but it all vanishes before it even gets close to deaf ears, because the church is really just the Catholic church, and that is Cain's church anyway. Think you've got a not-a-Catholic-church? If you fiercely clutch a 501c3 tax exemption then you're Cain's church, so shut up. Wait, I don't have to tell you to shut up. No one listens to you anyway!
This week as I watched even my very best friends reveal the pathetic wickedness of their own hearts up and down the social networking site, I was having to painfully wrestle with this student and his stubborn mother, both gushing right out of the most dysfunctional background imaginable. And while this student was busy wrecking my classroom -- administrators, counselors, and whatever other stakeholders were busy fiddling. The reason is quite reasonable actually.
Mom was using the weight of the law in every facet possible to keep her boy mainstreamed. And it had all these people cowering in fear.
It required me to use that law to my advantage, document everything that he was doing, and keep insisting to everyone that they take action, by the clear provisions of this law. To their credit -- including his mom! -- they did get it and they did find another situation to provide for him.
But the main thing it required was prayer. And not just any prayer but intercessary prayer with others praying with me.
All it requires is truth and grace.
But what do we do. We do the law.
The law. Everything managed by THE LAW.
And why do so many keep enlisting THE LAW to govern everything they do?
There is only one thing the law does, really.
It points out how much we are sinners.
No matter how cool we look - how nice we are - how skilled we are at our jobs - how many jokes we can tell - how many smiles we can paste on our face - how many swell things we can do for others - how considerate and giving we try to be - how much we're into what's really going on with politics for the apparent benefit of everyone
We're dead in our sin.
Funny (or not so funny as may be more the case) when we say in bright splendid colors, "LAW, do x, y, z for me!" in whatever way we do that, then we plainly declare that we're sinners. The only way out of that is to not only turn from that stuff and boldly say you're Christ's, but also abjure the World System that exploits the law.
I grieve -- I am overwhelmed with that grief (call this melodramatic, but it is true) -- when I see the millions and millions of people in this country jumping up from whatever ideological part of the arena they sit and cheering on some agent of Cain to use the bruising strength of THE LAW against them. Them, themselves, those around them, everyone.
When will Christ actually be made Lord over their lives?
I see so little of that happening. So little.
And I grieve.
_
I wrote my latest home page piece about this. Would love for you to read it. Even better, would love for you to be introduced to Christ. Think about it, would you?
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