Getting Involved

Seems to me that most people who claim to be followers of Christ get, or at least say they get, the idea that we are supposed to love one another . . . and not hate others . . . and all that stuff.

Then we do a good job of picking and choosing: who's in and who's out, whom does God approve of and whom does God not approve of, etc., etc. People all across the spectrum of the Christian faith have their own various groups they oppose (or fear, depending upon how you look at it). I could list them all out, the groups that we oppose; and we all do it, but I am getting tired just thinking about it.

One group of people that we all love to jump in on is politicians, whether we are conservative or progressive, Democrat or Republican, high-church or low-church, hymn-singing or chorus-singing, large church or small church, weekly communion or quarterly communion, hand-raising or knee-kneeling (see where I'm going with this?) is: people running for or currently in public office.

I am one of the world's worsts at this. I try to encourage others to equally jump on people on both sides, not just the side they want to demonize. But why do we need to demonize?

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty out there that ain't right. During these two weeks of political party national conventions, I have gotten very bothered and very excited about a whole host of people and issues. And I plan to continue that theme for the next two days. And I plan to continue doing it until November. I have strong, passionate beliefs. And those beliefs usually cause me to be for someone and against, many times passionately against, their political opponent.

But it would do me good (confession here) to stop for a moment and put myself into the shoes of the politicians that I demonize. Doing that would probably still leave me either angry or pumped-up, depending upon the person and the issue. But it would help me to see that politicians do the things they do for reasons that are beyond my understand and my comprehension.

So what should we do? Should we just give up on the political system?

I would encourage the other end of that spectrum, or something close to it: we need to all be involved, to be educated on issues, at the very least, to go vote. There is no perfect political candidate. They're all people, doing what they do for a reason.

So let's try to make it better. Let's make it better because these political races matter. They really, really, really, really do, regardless of what we think about the direction of our country or of our pocket of the country. We can throw our hands up and say we don't care. But we do care . . . because these races affect what happens in our lives. We might say we don't care in November. But we'll sure as heck care when our school taxes are raised, or when the decision to go to war comes up, or when your local police force makes huge changes in the way things are run, or when health care issues are decided upon, or when your local elected leaders are deciding whether or not to allow new business to build in your town.

Until we are ready to go run for the particular political offices ourselves, let's vote for the person that we feel will do the best job. It won't be the way we would do the job. But then again if everyone did their jobs the way we would, it probably wouldn't be that great of a world . . . and it sure wouldn't be all that enjoyable.

On a completely unrelated side-note, I just deleted all of the e-mails in my inbox. That is an incredible feeling! Anybody else with me on that one???