Be the cliché you wish to hear...

I have learned that you can’t tell the ignorant that they are ignorant, and those with closed minds will never hear a contradictory word you speak. Any hope for dialogue is futile. You can only hope that they may see the truth when it is presented to them.
I have learned the hopeless despair that arises when I start to think about the problems in our country and our world, and their seeming insurmountable complexity. When I think about how each issue is so intricately intertwined with all the others, and to what great scale, I ask myself, “how can one person ever begin to make a difference?”

And then I learned something else.

Recently I have learned that change is happening in my own little circle. Minds are opening and ignorance is being replaced with the pursuit of understanding. Problems are being understood and solutions are being developed. The crazy thing is that some people attribute some of these advancements to my efforts to make a difference in my own life.

So, what have I learned? Sometimes a cliché or two can actually be fitting:

What we need is “a little less talk, and a lot more action!”

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The gift that keeps on giving?

What if the way some Christians feel about "the War on Christmas" is how everyone else has always felt about the evangelistic efforts of those same Christians?

What if the perceived push by some to remove God from our schools, government, and society is simply the backlash against the overzealous attempt of some to force superficial godliness on our nation through legislation?

True or False?

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with our seemingly binary culture.  Who has convinced us that there are only 2 options, and that they are extreme opposites?  And who decided that compromise is only for sissies?  When did dialogue (multilogue?) turn into multiple concurrent monologues? And why has Christian activism been reduced to hoping that we yell the loudest by turning out the most voters?  Whatever happened to sitting down and working towards ideals that we can all agree on?

This is my perspective on religious involvement in government: instead of attempting to legislate the moral code of our own religion on the entire nation, we should work together with representatives of every major belief system in our society (including atheism!) to settle on a set of laws we can all approve of.  Anything that can’t be agreed on by a consensus probably does not belong in the laws of our nation.

Pilgrims

If our forefathers dreamed of a place where they could enforce their religion rather than the king's, they dreamed of nothing new and better than what they left. If we seek to implement that philosophy today, it is not any earthly kingdom we will drive pilgrims away from, but the Kingdom of Heaven.

Where is your God now?

If you think that we have taken God out of schools or government, then you do not understand the manner in which He has been there all along. If you think the spirituality of public institutions is an indicator of the faith of a nation, you are sadly mistaken. If you have spent time fighting to make our nation reflect only Christianity in its laws and policies, you have wasted precious time in the real fight for the Kingdom of God. Much like the heart of a person is not changed by outward conformity to God’s laws, neither are the people of a nation brought closer to the Kingdom by the whitewashing of their government. The failure to “keep God in the public” lies not with institutions- public or religious- but with God’s people, who are too willing to leave the work of the Kingdom to “the leaders” of our nation, rather than be the leaders themselves. Furthermore, when our religious liberty is taken from us, it will be the result of us trying to make our public institutions into mass outreach devices rather than using our freedom to be a light in our everyday relationships. That is how God remains in our schools, government, and nation- by being in your little piece of the world, through you.

Or is He?