July 28, 2016

A Slap in the Face

Whether it’s in the biological family, or the church family, we believers often unconsciously look the other way when it comes to bad behavior, destructive actions and false teachings. I suspect that many of us confuse looking the other way, with turning the other cheek. It takes someone with the character of Paul exposes our tolerance, “You gladly put up with fools since you are so wise! In fact, you even put up with anyone who enslaves you or exploits you or takes advantage of you or pushes himself forward or slaps you in the face” (2 Cor 11:20 NIV).

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----Hillary is actually right about it taking a village to raise a child. Here in the good ole US, we like to think that the family is the first and foremost place of child development. And families do refine the children’s beliefs and attitudes. But the foundations of social life come from the community. Outside the walls of the home, the child must successfully interact with products of the rest of the village’s homes. He will need to learn the village culture and how to deal within it.
-----If Hillary meant to be saying that any old village can raise a child well, then she’s dead wrong. American villages many decades ago had narrower, more beneficial expectations of the village people. It wasn’t like there were laws around town about how you should be and what you should believe. But there were expectations. And there were “treatments” for villagers who did not live up to village expectations.
-----Then a good amount of thinking brewed up by pot smoke and LSD wafted in upon a storm of shocking, social disorder. Too many mommies, who would otherwise have let their children grow up to be cowboys, accepted a foreign preaching against everything which once made their villages home. All they could see, when looking at that greasy, long haired, stoned, mess of a socially blithering idiot come home to visit, was sweet little Johnny. And to keep sweet little Johnny close to her heart, mommy had to keep little Johnny’s brain rot close in her mind.
-----The emotions of love have a way of doing that. But the intelligence of love will have no part of it. Intelligence knows the difference between lime Kool-Aid and antifreeze. It refuses to drink the latter no matter how successfully its flavor has been popularized. The love in those gone villages of the good ole US was made more of intelligence than emotion. Norms were norms by the benefits they supplied the villagers and the intelligence holding them together. When the villagers loved smartly, the children were pressed to live by beneficial norms. People paid attention. And they corrected each other to maintain those norms.
-----I think it very fitting that the stooges who blithered in their love for the stoned, unbathed, children of the 1960s now live in villages not at all free from norms, as those dope crazed idiots promoted, but in villages now enslaved to political correctness circling over them like swarms of vultures awaiting the next poor yokel to utter that day’s key-word of a dinner bell.
-----We will never escape the expectations of villages. There is no normlessness. There are only smart norms and stupid norms, and smart people and stupid people serving them. It’s just that if we do not help one another to intelligence, village expectations will escape good reason and serve us Hillary’s villages of mind-numbed, useful, little idiots.

Love you all,
Steve Corey