Many issues have come up recently that I’ve wanted to write about, but life sort of became paralyzed around March 13 (our daughter’s birthday and probably the most life-changing Friday the Thirteenth I have ever experienced (almost the last normal day I remember from this year). I’ve been treading water ever since, trying to do various things and getting no traction. I might as well have had Covid-19 because I’ve been in a mental quarantine for a long time.
Around me people got sick, churches closed, businesses shut down, people stopped hugging and even seeing grandchildren and good friends and co-workers. A few other things intruded on people’s consciousness, like earthquakes and other natural disasters. That went on for a time, and then things seemed to be getting better, reopening, until a man was killed and riots began. Property was destroyed, people were attacked and killed. This kind of brought into sharp focus what began back there in the year of the coining of a new phrase, “social distancing.” The human race in general terms seemed to go blind, deaf, and in many cases just plain stupid as regards life around them.
I won’t even get into the murder hornets thing. The praying mantises got that covered. Which brings up the subject of prayer. People prayed not to get sick, or not to be asymptomatic and spread the virus anyway to those co-workers, grandbabies, and friends. People prayed for their jobs to open back up, for churches to get back to live meetings, and above all for the government to give us guidelines about what to do.
Some people have been pretty much skipping the whole praying to God thing and praying straight to the government. Oh, my government, please get those “stimulus” checks out here. Please set guidelines and make decisions about masks or no masks, sanitizing procedures, who can do business and who can’t. Who can meet and who can’t. We gotta eat, so yes to endless lines of single file shoppers, but those church people don’t gotta meet. No to them.
And no to schools all over the country, of all kinds. They don’t even know yet, in all the cases I’ve heard of, whether they will reopen this fall. I have seen everything from little plastic cubicles to room-height PVC and plastic sheet barriers separating desks. How are children going to be made to sit motionless at a desk all day? What about students who change classes every period? Even assuming natural-born vandals leave it alone, how often can the plastic be cleaned before it is so scratched students can no longer see the teacher?
Anyway, I don’t have any control over how all that shakes out. But I do think there is one thing that has happened that we really, really need to figure out how to get some control over. That is the use of our tongues in digital forums. I have been watching my facebook “blow up,” as the saying goes, with posts and comments I couldn’t believe I was digitally hearing. From friends of friends, people I barely knew existed, to people I have interacted with on facebook for years and really thought I knew and respected.
People have been going nuts on facebook for years, I know. That profile prevents you from seeing the real face and hearing the voice of the people you interact with. There’s been a gradual but definite breakdown of respect, civility, and self-control. I think it kind of all came to a head when people were trapped at home, forbidden to work or go much of anywhere. Those natural disasters we heard about? They were piddly compared to the erupting volcanoes of emotional outbursts. Anger, fear, outrage, hurt … you name it.
That practice of making opinions into facts just by saying them more emphatically has been given free rein. Masks or no masks, vaccine or no vaccine, preventive medicine or deadly poison, close everything or close nothing, stats are bogus or stats are underreported …
Meanwhile, with our emotions quivering like Jell-O salad and the unfriending and blocking at an all-time high, what’s really been happening in the world? I mean, what have we been missing while focusing on ourselves? Because that is what all this is all about. The world, or, at least America, has taken a giant selfie, so focused on personal issues and reactions, that we have missed some genuine bad news. Some have tried to focus our attention on these things but our strident cries have drowned it out, and our eyes have been turned inward.
- Babies are still being murdered. Abortion rages almost unchecked. I can’t say it any more clearly than that. The attempt to defund on the federal level simply made the corruption of the baby killing political machinery go deeper still and find other ways to spend tax money to snuff out the inconvenient and unwanted and make the sacrifice to the god of self. I love the name of one organization that I follow dedicated to saving these babies: Let Them Live. Why is that so hard? Why?
- Believers are still being horribly persecuted all around the world. Every other religion and those claiming no religion are going out with torches and clubs and machetes and guns and murdering brothers and sisters in Christ. Subscriptions to organizations like Voice of the Martyrs give you a window into the life and death world of the persecuted.
- Public officials are being exonerated if innocent or held accountable if guilty — or at least some people are trying to scratch the surface of corruption in many levels of government. But while this struggle to do the right thing goes on, the machine rages to seize the “throne” of the presidency of the United States and put up a puppet king controlled by someone so evil they refuse to let us know who it is.
- Christians and their beliefs in this country are being attacked philosophically, morally, on all levels except the physical persecutions experienced elsewhere. A Harvard professor fears homeschoolers. An outcry surges against traditional marriage. And for sure all white Christians are racists. Even many so-called Christians are showering “white guilt” around and making a straw man case for institutional white supremacy in every church in the country. Maybe that’s why some good police officers are finally sick of it all and quitting, because they think even supposedly godly people don’t support them.
But we are barely hearing these issues. We are putting “safer at home” rings around our profiles and railing against anyone who says freedom is compromised. We don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to see it. We are selfish, committing the most primal sin since Eve desired that forbidden fruit. We don’t look outside our own comfort or pleasure or complacency. We don’t want to see or hear beyond the distorted images and reverberating voices telling us everybody deserves freedom, even if its purpose is to destroy the next generation.
Because that’s what we’re doing by killing babies and pushing for transgender kids and deepening the divide between people with different-colored skin. And that’s especially what we’re doing by shoving God to the side because He’s once again not doing things the way we want Him to. People who kill their children or tell them sex isn’t a man and a woman marrying or exploit racial tension or refuse to give any place to the true God are tumbling down the path to the pit they’ll never get out of. We need to wake up, and care about waking them up. They are perishing, and we are letting them.
Some Scriptures to consider:
Philippians 2:3-4 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.
Proverbs 2:11 Discretion will protect you, and understanding will guard you.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
Jude 1:23 Save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh.
Proverbs 24:11 Deliver those who are being taken away to death,
And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.
Jeremiah 22:3 Thus says the Lord, “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. Also do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan, or the widow; and do not shed innocent blood in this place.
Images from Pixabay, credits in order from top to bottom: geralt, The Digital Artist, geralt, succo, enriquelopezgarre, Wokandapix, JooJoo41
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Oh my Gosh … this is the most important post lots of people need to read. Well said, my friend.
Aww! Thank you so much!