Horatio Spafford’s four little girls lost at sea, with a telegram his wife Elizabeth sent to tell him of the loss.
When we moved to the USA in 2009 our son was enrolled in middle school in the Peninsula School District. He went all the way through High School in the same district in western Washington. The two schools he was part of would regularly send recorded notifications by e-mail and phone, each message ended with the same phrase: “Safety is our first priority.”... Why?
Establishing healthy political views is like establishing a healthy diet; It’s not easy. It’s more expensive to eat healthy, a healthy diet requires a lot of reading and filtering; filtering out bad info from good, filtering out bad ingredients from good. It means more preparation and planning and a change in taste.
It was a lot easier to eat healthy a few hundred years ago, because there wasn’t much else to choose from. Fake foods were yet to be invented.
The same principle is true for politics in a democratic society. We have become addicted to a sugar-diet of policy politics built on policy promises. Despite the fact that politicians who win races on their policies seldom fulfill election promises we keep reaching for that idealism high we get from knowing we didn’t vote for the “other guy” with the "other policies". Whether or not our candidate has good character has become a vague after thought.
And so we are easily manipulated by spin and "dirt" dug up on the opposition is believed completely with very little objective thinking.
It's hardly a surprise that we have become so polarized politically, our high-fructose policy politics is the auto-immune disease of society.
Recently in a sermon I read a rendition I wrote of Paul's poem from Philippians 2:5-11.
This small piece of scripture was written as a poem and should, I think, be read as one:
“5 Think like Jesus thought:
6 He was every bit God
But regarded it not
7 He made himself nothing
Lowering His voice, Abandoning choice
8 He made Himself into a man
Becoming a slave, He stooped to the grave
By the shame and the pain of a cross
9 So God lifted Him up
Right to the top
And He gave Him The NAME
And the Greatest of Fame
11 That all will proclaim
and loudly exclaim “Jesus Christ! The Lord Overcame!
All my shame, all my blame, all my pain!”
And they glorify God
They’re amazed and they’re awed!”
Whitney Houston's song The Greatest Love of All is one of those songs that pervades the zeitgeist, almost subconsciously.
I'd like to bring it to a conscious level in this post and think about the opening lines; do we really believe these words?
