October 23, 2012
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
The political season is in full swing and locally we’ve heard
complaints from both political parties accusing each other of stealing campaign
signs. Although a sign in my yard had been untouched, my next door neighbor appears
to be one of the victims. His sign would be up for a few days and then missing
for a week before another one reappeared. This ‘here today gone tomorrow’ activity
has been going on for well over a month. Since we live on an extremely busy
street, you would think someone would have seen the thief and reported him.
Yesterday I caught the husband in his yard, and I had to ask, “What gives with your missing sign?” My
zealous Christian friend laughed, “Well,
Sandy and I don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to politics. So we share
the yard. She puts up her candidate’s sign…and I take it down.”
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3 comments:
Gail;
-----As low as are the depths of stealing campaign signs, I can’t help seeing the simple mischief of it. If putting up the sign is speaking up, then stealing it tells someone to pipe down. Beyond that, the action has no cuteness. Telling someone to pipe down is merely a somewhat euphemized way of telling them to shut up. Either way you wish to express it, the soul of the victim is jailed, cut off from substantive participation in reality. And that isn’t to carry the idea to extremes.
-----After all, each of us is truly an accumulation of ideas and feelings trapped inside a biological machine. That machine is less like a window for the soul to see into the physical world and more like an avitar for interaction with it. Expressions are received by the soul as well as given from the soul. Whether or not either has a deep and lasting effect upon the other, the soul perceives its level of entrapment in direct proportion to the degree which it is unable to interject expressions into the world. So, to eliminate another person’s communication by denial or destruction indeed is very akin to locking that person in the basement with only a TV. The real message is that the victim’s validity is only for its being shaped by its surroundings, and none whatsoever for shaping its surroundings.
-----Participating in the shaping of our surroundings is one half of mental health. The unexpressive person looks at himself differently. Whether a lack of ability or right to express has quieted him, he sees no effects by him upon his surroundings to reflect back to him some evidence that he exists. I know this carries the idea a bit far, but the magnified distance helps us perceive a subtle effect. Doubt. Thank God no one can shut us up entirely (which is also a statement carried too far, think solitary confinement.) We are called to a new life defined by Christ’s character. His character is love and truth. Love will truly not silence the expressions of the one loved. Doubt is certainly not its goal, but edification is.
-----Which causes me to suck a gasp of horror at your neighbor’s husband. Paul tells us gentlemen in the Lord to love our wives as Christ loves the church. Now, it is understandable that expressing support for Barrack Obama is expressing not only foolishness, but also the destruction of a somewhat healthy society. (I don’t say this in arrogance because I can back it up with evidence and sound logic which objectively leads to that very truth.) Also, the church sloshed waves of bloody war across Europe for over a century, and sought out countless individuals she described as evil just to torture them. She has drawn theological lines for butchering Christ’s body into more cuts than Safeway has steaks and roasts and ribs and bacon. She collects tithes from her people to lavish plush sanctuaries upon well paid preachers, then shells out a penny to help a pauper heat his shack. Yet Christ loves and supports her and will be faithful to take her home. I think if He overlooks the thousands of burned bodies staked to her lawn, your neighbor should be able to overlook his precious bride’s campaign signs staked to his lawn.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Steve,
I hear what you are saying. However, in the husband’s defense, he is of a different political persuasion and chooses not to display any sign. I thought he was giving consideration to his wife by letting her support her candidate, but not insisting on having his own sign preference displayed.
I know other marriages that are split Republican and Democrat, and I don’t see how they manage. It looks so ‘unequally yoked’, and yet they good naturedly accept one another and it does work.
The neighbor’s backyard abuts a park and yesterday it cracked me up when the political sign reappeared…this time in the backyard.
Gail;
-----Most likely you are right; they play with each other this way. I must confess I took advantage of an opportunity to demonstrate what I believe is the main responsibility for peace in the home. If someone must loose, it should be the man. That is what happened to Christ. But then, His loss was severely limted to just a moment and a hundred and some odd pounds of flesh. His win was billions of eternal souls in addition to His own. So, it is not really loosing after all.
Steve
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