August 18, 2009
Reading the Bill
I get frustrated with Senators and Representatives who are prepared to sign a health care bill without first having read it. Apparently many of those in Congress rely on their staff to do the reading, research and help formulate opinions. In reality I suppose it’s not much different than those of us who never crack open our Bibles…we rely on preachers and teachers to spoon feed us their opinions and interpretations. You wanna bet that the Spirit Himself just might be a little frustrated with us?
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Gail;
-----We don’t realize how deeply involved in the social mind our thinking is. People need a sense of belonging, so we group with others who think and feel like us. Sharing conclusions, being entertained by similar events and circumstances, and wearing clothing of basically similar styles lends us all feelings of personal validation about decisions and lifestyles, feelings of comfort in normalcy. In addition to this human nature, the nature of knowledge steers us further into a social mind. Most of us know some math, but did not ourselves construct the theorems of mathematics, algebra, and geometry by experimenting with multitudes of objects. Although we all know at least some basic science, we did not discover for ourselves that passing a wire through a magnetic field induces an electrical charge. We learned it from others. In today’s complex environment, almost everything involves layers upon layers of intelligence learned by one then passed to another, then to another, then to one who invents, then finally to another who produces. This truth holds strong in our ideologies and values. We group ourselves around lines of thought that have been developed by others, not only to feel the comfort of holding common philosophies, but also because the complex array of thought involved in their development is a barrier to any one’s own ability to construct them.
-----So the individual is left with the challenge of employing a vetting process to the things and ideas he encounters. Most of us are not faced with the responsibility of effecting numerous lives by our discernment regarding opposing ideas, so we do not probe as deeply as we should into the layers of history and thinking that produced them. If they match what we’ve learned, or the opinions of respected people, that is good enough. From the Senator with the unread bill to the pregnant teenager with “the woman’s right to choose,” there is the temptation to apply accepted thought to the face of the issue, avoiding the drudgery of analyzing deep into the heart of either. Therefore, mistakes are common.
-----But a Holy God has called us to apply careful discernment to our sense of belonging. He also knows that knowledge is too vast for any one individual to formulate alone, therefore He makes belonging important. But, as water is the universal solvent that will break down any matter, He gave a universal wisdom that will discern any ideas. He gave this wisdom not fundamentally in the form of knowledge and intelligence, so prudence does not have to be from high education. Rather, He gave it in the aspects of humility, mutual respect and honor, common sense, basic reason, and godliness. One does not have to be highly educated to vet ideas, opinions, and the character of others with this wisdom. One just has to live by it. And from the intelligence developed by such living, the accumulated knowledge of the Word of God becomes more understandable, acceptable, and useful. Daily problems as well as prominent leaders and their ideas are dissolved by this wisdom and the Word into simpler parts more easily analyzed and understood. Solutions become more readily apparent, increasing the individual’s pool of unique thought, and personalities become more transparent, limiting the individual’s risks from bad associations.
-----I yearn for that kind of society. Although I find it in the pools of the truly humble amongst the churches, these pools still exist in a broader sea of arrogance that vets ideas by pop thought and iconic images. The shouts of glory to rise at The Lamb’s victory will be less for the destruction of such a careless society, and more for the construction of His careful society.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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