So, I recently had a bit of a spat, a bit of a conflict with a couple of people on social media and on the ground too, all while our Governor has decided to flex his foolishness by locking us all down even more.
For some people this means nothing more than taking another trip to Mexico or spending a few weeks warm and cozy in in their fancy homes reading a good book. For the rest of us it means businesses we’ve invested everything in will collapse, people will be unable to feed their kids, and those we love with mental health and addiction problems will not get the help they need and may not survive any of this.
You’re darn right, I’d rather just die of covid then watch people I care about suffer and lose everything due to government incompetence and draconian lock downs.
I have zero regrets about my harsh words, zip, zilch, nada, except perhaps that they should have come much sooner and been much harsher. I’m ready to see people go to prison at this point, and anybody supporting this theft, this injustice, this un-constitutional bovine crap is an accessory to a crime, as far as I am concerned.
However, in the process of getting stressed out by life and attacked on the intertoobz, I snapped at this one stranger on Twitter, this innocent bystander who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Doggone if he didn’t meet my fury with kindness, with respect, and patiently address my concerns. Dang dude, I was surprised and totally crushed by your grace. How sweet that is! Doesn’t happen very often, either. I kind of sat there staring at my screen with my mouth open, wondering if I was seeing that right.
That’s what it really means when we say, “He is risen indeed.” You have our resurrected Lord Jesus living on the inside of you and some of Him even spilled out onto me in the heat of my moment. I recognized His voice right away, too. “My sheep know my voice.” That’s the Lord I know, patient, gracious, and not easily offended.
I’d go tell my newly discovered hero that I’m sorry I snapped at him, except I’m not really “sorry” at all. I feel a bit more like the woman with the issue of blood who simply reached out for what she needed and caught a good glimpse of Jesus in the process.
See, there’s this thing called credibility. 😉
What gives your words wings of power is brutal honesty. We are imperfect. Human even, and the Lord IS good- He understands our groans- our recognition of stupidity and our willingness to say so.
For goodness sake- don’t the rocks cry out when man is mute?? But you are spot on- and many agree with you- even if they cannot/will not say so.
But I said so msb.
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Ahhh, thanks Colorstorm! That guy was kind. Also, God saw that and took note of it. He doesn’t miss a thing. Just like His word never returns void, our kindness to others never goes unnoticed. 🙂
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Be easy on yourself. There is so much ridiculousness going on, so much wrong that we have no control over and being committed by really, dumb, shallow people who happen to hold positions of power that having a short fuse is par for the course for most of us.
I had a similar situation last night during a discussion on masks where the dam that normally keeps my pent up frustration and anger separated from polite conversation sprung a large leak. Like you can’t pretend anymore that any of this is normal but I can control how I express it. Sometimes… 😉
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Wise words, Tricia! Absolutely, I have to be easy on myself. The depth of the shallow, the dumb, the really bad leadership is just unreal and totally overwhelming.
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I hope you’ll be patient and allow my response – it’s not meant as a spoof or as a critique or anything like that. When you say, “ I’d rather just die of covid then watch people I care about suffer and lose everything due to government incompetence and draconian lock downs”, now that’s the compassionate voice of a person who doesn’t want to see the ones she loves dying from a largely preventable cause. I still doubt you’d rather die of COVID (it’s a brutal, brutal death, which I “witnessed” from afar when my dearest older brother died from it, completely separated from family, which he – unconscious-did not know, but they most certainly and tragically did), but still, the thought of, “I’d rather die than watch someone I love suffer,” well, that’s truly honorable and I commend you for restating your original expression. I would rather not have people die from this thing, either; I’ve known too many and buried a few and will spend a part of my remaining working days addressing the trauma of families who were deprived of whatever ‘comforts’ come during normal deaths. We differ, I’m sure, on the form that government incompetence takes. I get that. But it seems to me that it’s a very different thing to say, “I would rather die than see people I love suffer” than it is to say, “I would rather die than to read someone’s prayer.” The first seems to be admirably self-less; the latter, somewhat confusing and self-serving. Not saying that was your intent – just saying that’s how it reads to at least this outsider. So – thank you for bearing witness to the feelilngs you hold for those you love. (Again, this isn’t a spoof, or ironic, or swarmy or overwrought – just one person thanking another.)
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No. I have an irreconcilable difference with anyone who claims, “we differ, I’m sure on the form that government incompetence takes.” I believe in civil rights, the freedoms protected and laid out in the US Constitution. These draconian lockdowns and horrific government over reach violate those rights. And yes, death would be preferable to enduring the sappy prayers of complicit Christians who are enabling this nightmare. We are not the same.
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@united pastor
If we can deceive someone, we can even use that person’s capacity to love against them. Therefore, even if you or I have the best of intentions, someone can use our love for others against us. They just have to make us believe a lie. That is why the Bible tells us to tell the truth in love and to love in truth. This is why wisdom is so important. Unless we can discern the difference between good and evil, we will hurt those we love.
It is an unfortunate fact that the Democratic Party and their hardcore supporters used the Coronavirus (COVID-19) to scare people into shutting down the economy. Why? Many perceive the roaring economy as Trump’s biggest accomplishment.
Doesn’t seem possible? Big conspiracy theory? Not really. We form into factions. We coordinate according to the faction we have chosen. How? The technique is as old as mankind. Monkey see. Monkey do.
The key here is the group we each claim as our own. We copy the people we most want to be like. That is why Jesus calls upon us to put God first and the things of man second. If we are not careful we will idolize our political faction. What God wants us to is imitate Him using Jesus, His Son and our Lord, as our model.
Anyway, check out http://christianoutlook.com/2020/11/08/price-panic-georgene-rice-dr-jay-richards/.
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Yeah, OK, clearly we differ. (Which I thought was kind of the same as saying “we are not the same”, but I guess maybe not.) Not going to start getting into an argument over which political party is using scare tactics to gain political ends. That will end up being a wash at best. Let’s just mutually shake off the dust from our respective feet and commend one another to the grace of God, who will in the end, per the parable of the wheat and tares, sort it out in the end. Hope that’s not too sappy or overwrought for ya. Peace be with you.
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@United Pastor
Shaking off the dust from our feet as the Bible uses that metaphor would mean having nothing to do with each other.
We have to make decisions. Because it is imperfect world, we rarely get to choose between perfectly good and perfectly bad. If we are lucky, we get to choose between not so good and not so bad.
These are not lucky times. Democrats and Republicans stand for distinctly different things. One party imperfectly stands for our nation’s founding principles. The other seeks the acquisition of power using “social justice” as an excuse and racism as a club. This other tell us they care so much for us they have to run every aspect of our lives.
Is it easy to see the truth? No. Never has been. In fact, none of us has a lock on the truth. We have to try to grasp each others point of view. We have to grasp as best we can how our Lord sees us.
Unfortunately, what most of use do is just read and listen to people who echo back what we already believe. So, I congratulate you for reading IB’s blog.
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I’m with you – until you start to get into the partisan stuff. I just don’t find it particularly helpful – especially when one claims moral high ground (or even slightly higher ground). We might (not sure) agree that, the kingdom of God is NOT principally about material matters or issues that divide, like who should be eating and drinking what in order to please God; but IS about justice, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. That said, my guess is that what we believe these words mean will diverge pretty quickly, based on whatever first principles we bring to them. So I’ll cop to the principle that justice is not about courts and punishments and whatnot, but is about the establishment and preservation of right relationships among human beings. Thus a human arrangement that either relies on or assumes or perpetuates unequal relationships is unjust. And that would likely lead to differing policy outcomes. See how quickly things diverge? Likewise peace = shalom, a fullness, a wholeness of life among the human family in which all can flourish. Food for all, health for all, equal standing for all, etc. And as for joy, well there are lots of ways to take that, but I begin with the sorta Hippocratic axiom of ‘first, do no harm’ to the joy of another, before proceeding to doing whatever pleases me and makes me temporarily happy. (I don’t want to bore you with Biblical citations for all of these, and I’m not big on proof-texting, in any case.) Probably sounds like an eminently humanistic set of principles to you, and that would probably be a fair enough reading of them, except that these trajectories are, to me, the foundations of practices that put the prayer “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” into effect. But, yeah, we differ. So I’ll choose the ‘not so bad’ from the just a bit left of center perspective. (I know far lefties; I’m not one of them) And you may choose your ‘not so bad’ from a bit right of center perspective (though I don’t know you, so maybe you’re more centrist or farther to the right). At least you seem to be a person who’s up for plain old conversation rather than . . . Whatever – I won’t make a caricature now. (Though I confess I’m not above that.)
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@unitedpastor
You are with me until we start getting into some of the partisan stuff? That’s kind of like being in a foxhole with someone who says goodbye when the shooting starts.
If God gives us wisdom — if we ask for wisdom — then we have some capacity to discern between good and evil. Because some people will correctly choose good and others will not, the exercise of wisdom is an innately partisan activity.
God gave us three institutions, the family, the church, and government. With respect to all three institutions, God gave Christians a duty to be salt and light.
Because the Bible makes it clear that we should receive justice in in our courts, including just punishment if we are guilty, your definition of justice is not biblical. Consider. You say justice “is about the establishment and preservation of right relationships among human beings.” Government is about the regulation of the right relationships among human beings. Murder, stealing, libel and slander, and so forth involve the abuse of human relationships. When an army engages in rape and pillage, you don’t think that is an injustice?
Christians have a responsibility to make certain that government operates the way God intended. That makes us partisans. We try to be on God’s side. Do we always agree and get it right? No, but not trying to be on God’s side is a bad choice. When the choice is between good and evil, Jesus did not call for us to be indifferent. In fact, when we choose Him, He said we would be hated.
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Reblogged this on clydeherrin.
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Thanks, Clyde. Much appreciated.
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Keep an open mind, heart and soul!
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Well, that I can get behind. 🙂
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@Citizen Tom – Of course, one aspect of justice will take some form of punishment. But when government uses retribution and punishment in the interest of justice, it’s in the interest of justice – it’s not justice itself. Justice may also involve economic justice, restorative justice, reparative justice, etc. I don’t claim that it’s never about punishment. Only that it’s about so much more than punishment, and even punishment is by no means an end in itself. And I’m not sure where you get warrant for the claim you make: “God gave us three institutions.” Some would say more. (Dominion theory, sphere sovereignty, and other varieties of alleged divinely-instituted foundations) If one doesn’t believe in a god, then of course the number of “givens” is zero. Whose theory are you claiming as self-evident truth? I’m just curious.
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