My Struggle Today

Politics have always interested me. I know that may come as a surprise to a great many people. But I do enjoy politics.

Or I did enjoy politics, is probably more accurate. There is little enjoyable about politics these days. I find myself struggling more and more in the effort to be a good citizen and a Christian. I desire to be as Christlike as my sinful self can be, first and foremost. That will always be first priority, or at least I pray that it will. And I live in the U.S.A. where I wish to be an informed and vocal citizen in an effort to do my part to make this great country ever better. And I don't intend for that to be any kind of patriotic bombast; I am sincere in my hopes and efforts.

And the struggle between being a Christian and being a citizen was never as much of a, well, struggle let's say, as it is for me in the here and now. And to be honest, I am not always certain as to why that is so.

Some of it has to do with rights. It seems like everyone has every kind of right to perform any kind of action or say any kind of thing that any kind of person desires; except a Christian. Not a cultural christian, but a God-fearing follower of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit. When I express my opinions on same-sex unions, abortion, evolution, stem-cell research, and many other topics, I am viewed as either a fanatic or a close-minded, backwards buffoon who wants to revert to the fourteenth century. Or both. For some reason, my personal views, how I interpret the Bible, and how I understand our Constitution to read NOW all clashes together and makes a big, brownish-black blob of reasoning; instead of a portrait of red, white,blue and red and white, that it once did.

We have found so many loopholes and technicalities in which to live by that even the deepest and more coherent thinkers become confused as to how to live in Christ and Country at the same time. We have trivialised the monumental and made social mountains out of political molehills. In both our churches and our government. We have become complacent in areas that need urgency and have taken on dead-to-right severity in our opinions on issues that can wait. The water is so muddy between rights, freedoms, separations, and free will that it has become difficult to be diligent in our Faith and in our citizenship. At least it has for me, many times.

And I think that it is so because I refuse to be be a lukewarm Christian and a lukewarm Citizen; and I am experiencing a struggle between the two that rarely existed in the past.

But I am a big advocate for the separation of Church and State, don't misunderstand that. If you want to see abuse of the treatment of peoples and neglect of needs and hopes, look no further than the bureaucratic mess of our churches today or the dogmatic government we are currently under. By combining the two, we will certainly be doomed to hopelessness. But I think that many people misunderstand the concept of separation of church and state, and the actual, applied separation thereof; it is separation, not absence, that is the ideal behind the constitutional concept.

Maybe my desire to serve God and the U.S. causes a struggle because our views are clouded due to the misconceptions people have of our church and our constitution. And we want to give everyone the right to be heard, regardless of how informed they actually are. Maybe too many people think that you can balance issues and faith by taking shortcuts or making compromises between the two. Or maybe I am too arrogant and ignorant for my own good and just can't See the forest for the trees. As much as I hate to admit that, it is a possibility.

Why else would I have such a struggle? What other reason could there be for me to find it so difficult to encourage others to follow God and accept Jesus as Lord when the Holy Spirit convicts, while trying to encourage the same people to become informed, active, and concerned about issues that affect our lives?

Whatever the reason, this is not the direction I had planned to go today; but it is too late now. Hopefully I was listening to the Holy Spirit as I voiced concern over our country. Hopefully I'm finding my way through this struggle...