Refugees and security

Let’s get right to the point:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”                                                  — Matthew 22:36-40

We know that there are millions of people who have been displaced by the terrible civil war in Syria. As Christians, we need to help them.

And yes, that means having some of them come to the United States. Could some of them be up to no good? Possibly. Should we screen them to try to prevent that? Of course. Will our screening be perfect? Probably not. (See the last link below for more on this line of thought.)

Thinking about that last point leads me to some tough thoughts, trying to do some sort of calculation about the benefit of helping thousands of refugees versus the potential cost in American lives. My logic brain starts kicking into overdrive: “Well, if we bring in X refugees, and only Y of them are bent on violence against America, and that means Z Americans will die, what is the proper ratio of X to Z to justify accepting or rejecting refugees?” Unfortunately, I don’t anticipate hitting on an answer to that one anytime soon.

I’ve said this before, but as Christians, we’re supposed to obey God without getting preoccupied about what happens after we do that.

I also understand that it’s easy for me to say all of this as I sit at my desk in relative safety. Someone whose family member is killed by a refugee probably doesn’t want to hear, “Well, that’s just part of the deal.” I doubt that I would want to hear it if I ever found myself in that situation. But I don’t think that changes the answer to what is the right thing to do.

Other people around the world have written on this same topic, so I’m not going to drone on about it. I will, however, link to some other writing that I have found compelling:

1. This post by someone who already works with Syrian refugees covers a lot of ground when it comes to helping them. I’ll pick one excerpt: “There is no gain in having a secure nation if we lose our souls due to self-love (by making safety our highest good).”
2. For some factual background, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog has a primer on how the refugee screening process works in the U.S.
3. The basic point here is that the refugee issue is complicated, and it will help everyone if the debaters can treat each other with some respect as we figure things out.
4. Finally, this opinion column in the Washington Post (written by someone who is in Iraq working with refugees) describes how we need “new eyes” to view this situation properly:

When we get new eyes, we see babies who need protection. We see boys and girls who need to be rescued from ISIS. And we see able-bodied men and women who need help starting new businesses to provide for their family. We see the minuscule number of wolves among the sheep and admit that we are vulnerable and that our security could fail us. And we love anyway.

God of science

I’m a smart guy … but I choose to believe in something that I can’t see and can’t prove exists. Self-delusion or faith, depending on your point of view.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

I like to think that I have first-rate intelligence. I have a law degree from a top 10 school and a bachelor’s degree in math. I always did especially well in math and science classes in school, and I love reading about the most recent scientific discoveries as we continue to use our abilities and intellects to learn more and more about this wonderful place where we live. But I suppose believing in God isn’t what most people would call scientific: I can’t point to a theorem in a textbook or whip out my symbolic logic textbook and give you a nice, clean proof.

Comic strips usually don’t have much to do with science, but the return of Bloom County earlier this year made me very happy. I remember many episodes from the original strip, and one of them is relevant here: It ends with Oliver Wendell Jones – the resident scientist and atheist – taking a moment of “wild abandon” and exclaiming, “The universe is just a little too darned orderly to be one big accident!”

That sums it up, doesn’t it? We can embrace that the Big Bang just “happened”, and that every scientific law, chemical process, biological structure, etc. simply followed without anything to guide them. Or, we can embrace an omnipotent God who has had his hand on creation for many, many years, but it can be difficult to grasp the concept of one being who is in charge of everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the grandest mountain range.

The philosophical questions are endless. Skeptics about God may ask where God came from, or how we can prove He exists, or why he apparently intervenes in some things and not others. On the other hand, something had to explode to start the Big Bang – where did that something come from?

(Lawrence Krauss – an anti-theist who is much more famous than me and probably a lot smarter than me – disputes this and believes the laws of physics allow for something to be created from nothing. His book on the subject is here. Krauss also wrote this piece in The New Yorker earlier this year, where he takes an extremely dim view of faith and how it gets in the way of doubt. In this interview with National Geographic, atheist Jerry Coyne describes the something-from-nothing process as possible “if you conceive of nothing as the quantum vacuum of outer space.”)

I don’t pretend to have the answers to any of these questions. In fact, I think one of our biggest problems as a society is that so many people seem convinced they have all the answers to complex questions (see, e.g., any presidential candidate). I used to work in Washington, DC, and someone I worked with was once quoted as describing Washington as a town that is “full of people who don’t know what they don’t know.”

Amen! It’s OK to say, “I don’t know” or “let me think about it and get back to you.” That’s a sign of honesty and humility. Instead, we stake out our position and confront anyone who dares challenge our view on any issue of the day. I’m right, you’re wrong. End of story. There is no room for nuance or thoughtfulness in the Facebook comment that is solely designed to shoot someone down. [We all have our blind spots, but we usually don’t acknowledge them – for more on that, check out the BBC story at the end of this post.]

Scientists, by their nature, admit that there is still much we don’t know. That’s the whole point of science – discovering new things, and correcting earlier mistakes. (Just do a Google search for “previously thought” for a sampling of all the discoveries that act as corrections.) It’s the last part that the science-only crowd tends to gloss over – the innumerable times throughout history that we, as supreme intellectual beings, have “known” something to be “fact” … until we didn’t.

I love what St. Augustine said about miracles: “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” Along the same lines, writer and historian Will Durant said, “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

[Aside: Yes, I know there are Christians out there who are ignorant on a wide variety of subjects, and unfortunately, some of them have very loud mouths and very high profiles. But let’s not pretend that every atheist is an intellectual giant, either.]

I don’t write this blog to pretend to be all-knowing on the subjects I write about (including this one). I don’t do it to be pious or self-righteous. I write it to be obedient to what I hear God telling me to do.

All I can do is share my story and how God has worked in my life since I felt the Holy Spirit with me in my bedroom during my second year of law school. There are millions of other people who have their own stories.

One of those other people is my cousin who is a church pastor. He recently shared an experience he had in college where he heard God “loudly and clearly” calling him to the ministry.

If you don’t believe my cousin could have had this experience (because you believe the Christian God doesn’t exist), then you must think one of two things: (1) He has an overactive imagination and convinced himself he received this message because he wanted to, or (2) he is a liar. If there are other explanations I’m missing, I’d love to hear them. As for me, I choose to believe my cousin 100 percent.

I need to wrap this up because I’ve thought about this post for far too long, and if I try to make it perfect and address every possible argument and every loose end, I’ll never post anything. For example, the question of the historical truth of various parts of the Bible is a large enough, and important enough, topic that I will leave it for another day.

If you clicked on this hoping that I would prove to you that God exists, well … sorry to disappoint you. I can’t. To claim otherwise would be pure hubris. But I write this blog because I believe in God, and I want to share my experiences and musings in hopes that my fellow Christians will find encouragement and that non-Christians may eventually share my belief. We all come to God through different paths, and if this blog can point someone in the right direction, that would be truly awesome.

Here is some further reading on this and on related subjects:

1. The Washington Post had a piece a couple of weeks ago on how faith affects Americans’ views on science.
2. The New York Times has a fascinating article that has nothing to do with faith, but “spooky action at a distance” is an incredible aspect of quantum theory.
3. And this NYT article has nothing to do with science, but it shows how there are still gaps in our understanding of how the King James Bible came to be.
4. Finally, this BBC story explains how having “intellectual humility” – not pure intelligence – is the real key to wisdom. That’s something to remember for everyone on both sides of any debate.

(OK, one more link: How about some scientific music?)

First, serve

Although we’re still more than a year away from the U.S. presidential election, it seems like stories about the potential candidates are lead news items almost every day. Inevitably, we hear what different candidates think we need to do about “the poor”, but I’m not sure that looking to these presidential wannabes for leadership on this particular issue is the right place to look.

Let’s start with what Jesus had to say on the matter. He doesn’t mince words in Matthew 25:31-46. Those who help the poor, the sick, and the hungry – they are rewarded by God. Those who don’t? Well, ending up in “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” doesn’t sound like a particularly happy outcome.

Jesus didn’t say whether we should embrace social welfare programs or trickle-down economics. He simply said that, as individuals, it’s up to each of us to help people who are in a rough spot.

Proverbs 14:31 boils it down to one sentence: “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.”

St. Augustine fleshed it out a little more:

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

I’ve struggled with this subject for a long time. While I was working in Washington, DC, I saw a lot of people begging for money and food. Was I supposed to give something to every single one of them? I convinced myself the answer to that was “no”, but was that just the result of multiple justifications on my part? Justifications like: They must have done something really bad/stupid/awful to end up in that situation; they’ll just use the money on booze or drugs; or I can’t help everyone, so I’m going to ignore them all for consistency’s sake.

I’m gradually getting past those hesitations – not so much with random encounters on the street, but with purposeful action to help specific groups of people. Yeah, I still can’t help everyone, but that’s no reason to sit around in my comfortable suburban house and do nothing.

For each of the past two summers, I’ve spent a week in McDowell County, West Virginia, which by some measures is the poorest county in the state. Poorest county. In West Virginia. Yes, that’s as bad as you think it is (read some statistics and history on Wikipedia).

I’ve made the trip with a group from my church, and we work with the good folks at Big Creek People in Action. BCPIA does a lot of different things, but for groups like ours, the primary focus tends to be construction – going to people’s homes and doing whatever needs to be done. Last year I helped install a bathroom (sink, shower stall, and toilet) in a house that didn’t have a bathroom. I put vinyl siding on another house, and I sanded and painted a new ceiling in another. This year, my first project was back at the house with the new bathroom – as it turned out, the floor was rotting and couldn’t support the weight of everything we had installed in 2014. This meant taking everything out so we could rip up the floor, put in new joists (supports) under the floor, put down a new plywood floor, lay down linoleum, and then re-install everything.

Things took an interesting turn on the first day. The man who lives in the house where we worked started getting paranoid about why we there and turned fairly hostile. Turns out he had started drinking (and maybe indulging in other things) in the morning and was good and drunk by early afternoon. He started cursing at us a lot, which we tried to ignore, but the last straw came when he told one person in our group that if he tried to come back into the house, he was going to get his shotgun. The BCPIA construction manager wisely told us it was time to pack up.

The next morning, one of BCPIA’s co-executive directors and another construction manager went to talk to the man. He was very apologetic, said he was so drunk he didn’t remember most of it, and noted that he didn’t even own a gun. (Thank goodness.) The BCPIA people were satisfied with his explanation and agreed that at some point, someone should go finish the bathroom floor for him. They told us we could do it “if we wanted to” – the clear implication being that they didn’t expect us to, given how we had been treated. To us, though, it was pretty a much no-brainer – we wanted to finish what we started, first off, but we were essentially “turning the other cheek” as well. We went back and had the floor done, and everything re-installed, in a couple of days.

Clearly, the man we were helping is no saint. Based on an episode from last year, we’re pretty sure he and some of his buddies are involved in dealing drugs, and on one morning after the “shotgun” episode this year, I heard him telling a relative that he was shaking because he hadn’t had anything to drink yet that day (it was around 10 a.m. when he said this). One of the co-executive directors told me that entitlement is another issue they deal with frequently. One woman – for whom BCPIA has done multiple renovation projects in recent years – called to complain because BCPIA was preparing a project for her neighbor’s house, and she thought that she should be receiving that help instead. Speaking of cheek, this lady obviously had a lot of it.

One of the points here is that we’re not called to help only the perfect people, or people we like, or people who are like us. We’re called to help the broken – the addicts, the ungrateful, the lazy – because if we stop and take a look at ourselves, we should know that we’re broken, too. Maybe our brokenness is easier to hide, and maybe it’s more socially acceptable, but it’s there. On these mission trips, my overriding thought is that I’m there to obey God – the results of my obedience, though, are in God’s hands. My job is just to do what I’m told and leave the rest up to God.

What are you being told to do?

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P.S. – I’ve read a lot of articles recently on what we should do about poverty – too many for me to incorporate them neatly into this post, so I’m going to offer a link list here along with brief thoughts for your consideration.

1. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne on Pope Francis, written a few days ahead of the pope’s visit to the U.S.: He writes that the pope would most likely inspire guilt “about our individual and collective failures to pay attention to those whom he’s lifting up [i.e., poor people]” and would be “calling everyone (liberals no less than others) out of complacency.” In other words, paying our taxes and thinking we’ve done our part – by funding welfare programs – isn’t enough. Neither is spending money at an establishment and patting ourselves on the back for helping to support the employees who make minimum wage. We have to get off our duffs and actually do something.
2. The New York Times’ David Brooks writes about Francis as well. He focuses on the pope’s emphasis of ministering to individuals on a personal level – seeing them face-to-face, talking to them, engaging them – and how that is the proper way to preach to them:

Francis’ whole approach is personal, intimate and situation-specific. If you are too rigorous and just apply abstract rules, he argues, you are washing your hands of your responsibility to a person. But if you are too lax, and just try to be kind to everybody, you are ignoring the truth of sin and the need to correct it.

Only by being immersed in the specificity of that person and that mysterious soul can you strike the right balance between rigor and compassion. Only by being intimate and loving can you match the authority that comes from church teaching with the democratic wisdom that bubbles from each individual’s common sense.

3. Another NYT piece (this one by David Kirp) on the importance of involving the poor as part of the solution: Kirp describes a couple of non-profit organizations that have taken their quest directly to the people who need help, and the positive results that have followed. In other words, no more blind (and lazy) reliance on this “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you” junk that has failed time after time.

4. In June, The American Lawyer’s cover story was on the “justice gap”. Large law firms in the U.S. bring in millions of dollars of revenue each year, but only 0.1% of that money finds its way to Legal Aid programs that give legal assistance to the poor. One of the biggest shortfalls of our legal system is that the people who most need a lawyer often can’t afford one, and those who are making good money from the legal system could stand to step up their game on this front.

5. This longer piece from the Atlantic looks back at the Puritans and their lingering effect on American society. Personal responsibility – including an obligation to help others for the greater good – was a key part of the Puritanical worldview:

[A] liberal capitalist republic must ultimately rely on citizens voluntarily upholding public virtues and beliefs—reasonableness, forbearance, a willingness to discover one’s self-interest in serving public interests—that neither the liberal state nor capitalist markets do much to nourish or enforce. The liberal state doesn’t do it because it’s not supposed to judge between one way of life and another (as Puritans certainly did). Markets don’t do it because they work by approaching individuals as self-interested consumers and investors, not as bearers of a common mission. Small-r republican citizens and leaders need to be cultivated all the more intensively somehow.

6. And one last article from one of my favorite magazines, The Economist: An international study provides some hints on what works (and what may not work) in helping people to “graduate” from poverty.

I hate this post

“Hate” is an interesting word because it covers so much ground. There is the true sense of hate – a member of the Islamic State who hates Christians, for example. There is the more casual, almost careless, use of the word – I hate the Yankees; I hate Tuesdays; etc. It can be very specific (“I hate peas”) or very general (Iranians who hate “America”, whatever that means).

A few weeks ago, a parent (who we know is a Christian) in our neighborhood mentioned how he “hates” his next-door neighbor. I didn’t think anything of it because I was busy with other things, but my wife mentioned it to me later. It bothered her that someone who professes to be a Christian would say something like that. After all, isn’t “love your neighbor as yourself” the second-greatest commandment?

At the time, I was reading Proverbs, and this verse came to mind:

The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. (Proverbs 12:18)

No doubt, saying you “hate” your neighbor is a pretty reckless, unwise statement. Some of the things your neighbor does may be annoying, but come on – hate?

The obvious defense here is that he doesn’t really hate his neighbor and that he was just using that word in a casual sense without really meaning anything by it. I understand, but I’d rather err on the side of the “tongue of the wise”. Even when we say things that we don’t really mean, we can still do a lot of damage.

Hate (both real and imagined) has been in the news a lot recently in the context of same-sex marriage, the display of a Confederate battle flag, immigration, and politics in general. The next U.S. presidential election is still more than a year away, and I’m already tired of the campaign.

This New York Times column on political hate hit home. Hot hate, cool hate, and anonymous hate: It’s all around us; there’s no escape. I’m sick of it. The only thing to do, it seems, is for each of us to mind our little corner of the world:

Declare your independence by not consuming, celebrating or sharing the overheated outrage and negative punditry — even if it comes from those with whom you agree. Avoid indulging in snarky, contemptuous dismissals of Americans on the other side. And always own up to your views.

Another piece from the Times discussed the subject of political disagreements, and two passages stuck with me:

I am skeptical about the value of any single-cause explanation of current American political life, but I do think one factor is the common belief among many Democrats and Republicans that the other side is stupid, corrupt and, indeed, evil. Many on the left see themselves as supporting enlightenment and justice against the superstitious and plutocratic Republicans; many conservatives see themselves as being on the side of freedom and self-reliance against the snobby political correctness of the cultural and political elites who, deep down, are repelled by their own market society. If that is the way we view others, then a political war is all we can expect. Each marches forth in the righteous belief they are protecting the truth from the enemy.

…

Minding one’s own business isn’t easy. Most people prefer to live among like-minded others, and most are interested in limiting how different their neighbors are. But life in a free and open society requires living on publicly equal terms with strangers one may well loathe.

If we “loathe” our neighbors and think that those who disagree with us are “evil” … well, I’m not sure how we can be optimistic about our future. I’m not saying we should adopt an “anything goes” worldview, but let’s do a better a job at slowing down – let’s stop and think at the “I disagree with …” step instead of jumping directly to the “I hate …” step.

In the past couple of months, I’ve been really discouraged by what I’ll call the “we win / you lose” phenomenon. When something happens that someone likes, and they know other people don’t like it, there has been a lot of gloating and a lot of “and if you don’t like it, then you’re an idiot, you and everyone like you are stupid, I can’t stand you, etc. etc.”

I suspect that some of this behavior has been grounded in the belief that the “winners” were the target of hateful behavior previously, so now they’re just giving it right back. A natural reaction, perhaps, but don’t most kindergarteners learn that two wrongs don’t make a right? Aren’t we supposed to be forgiving and loving, no matter how we’ve been treated? In this big sandbox we call Earth, I feel like we’ve lost the ability to play nicely. Even Supreme Court justices – who are in theory above this kind of thing – are sniping at each other instead of focusing on a dispassionate interpretation of the law.

Still, there is hope, even in the darkest times. In the aftermath of the murders at a church in Charleston, SC – acts of hate, to be sure – we read in the Washington Post about incredible forgiveness:

‘I acknowledge that I am very angry,’ said Bethane Middleton-Brown, the sister of one of the victims. But ‘she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating.’

The author describes this reaction as “the sign of a determined faith, fighting against every natural human inclination.”

Boom. He nailed it. How can we fight this natural reaction to hate, to respond to hate with more hate, to demonize anyone who doesn’t embrace our view of things? I don’t think there are many of us who can do that consistently in our own strength. It takes the type of strength we can draw only from God – a God who still loves us despite all the hateful things we’ve done for thousands of years.

And if you’re not ready to accept God’s love … well, there’s always Depeche Mode.

Back in time

Two weekends ago I went to a 20^th class reunion in Charlottesville … for about seven hours. (Funny how grown-up responsibilities can cut into our time dedicated to remembering what it was like to not have those responsibilities.)

Still, I packed quite a bit into that tight time window. I met a friend at my favorite hangout, saw some fraternity brothers on the Lawn, hung out with old friends from the school newspaper, walked and drove around seeing old sights, and finished things off with a dinner where I saw many, many familiar faces.

I was especially happy to reunite with one friend in particular – someone who I have known since my first day at college, who was my fraternity brother, who was my fellow Managing Board member at the paper … and who I sued for a few hundred dollars during our third year.

That last part is a long story – not worth telling here. Let’s just say that suing him wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t want to do it, but other authorities held sway. I sandbagged the court hearing a bit, lost, and wasn’t really that disappointed – I was just glad it was over.

As you can imagine, the entire experience created quite a bit of distance and awkwardness, especially since the two of us still had many mutual friends. Finally, toward the end of our fourth year (I think), I pulled him aside to apologize and to explain my end of things – especially the part that the whole thing was something I was ordered to do by a fraternity muckety-muck (the adult in charge of our region). I had figured he knew this, but I still felt compelled to actually say it. It was a good thing, too, because he didn’t know it. It was news to him. Hatchets were buried, and a few months later I was honored to play a small part in his wedding.

Fittingly, my Sunday school class’s reading for the day after the reunion included Proverbs 17:17:

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

(Aside: I like Proverbs a lot because it is probably one of the most accessible books of the Bible for non-Christians. It is full of wisdom for living that is relevant even if you’re not a follower of Jesus Christ. Check it out sometime.)

A footnote in my Bible describes the verse this way: “When you are in trouble, you see who your friends are and how helpful a brother can be.” Another way of looking at it is that your true friends are the ones who think you’re worth it – worth helping when you’re down, worth sticking up for, worth making time for, worth tolerating when you’re showing off the less-attractive parts of your personality … and worth forgiving.

So, back to my friend and me. Since we each left the cocoon of college, we have visited with each other in Virginia, Florida, and Texas. The reunion brought back memories, both college and post-college: the time he sent me an entire packet of postcards for the Beverly Hillbillies movie; the postcard he sent from Monument Valley; going sailing in the Gulf of Mexico; playing shuffleboard, outdoor racquetball, and disc golf; tracking him down in the physics building at UT-Austin unannounced and a day ahead of schedule; pushing his old VW Beetle up and down 17^th St two dozen or so times trying to start it so he could drive home for break. In particular, I remember a card he and his wife gave me when I graduated – it talked about the difference between “college friends” and “friends you made in college”, and how I was in the latter category. I kept that card for a long time. (Who knows? I may still have it tucked away somewhere.)

The reunion also brought back a regret. My friend posted a bunch of college photos on Facebook ahead of the reunion, and one of them was a close-up of my first-year roommate. I ended up suing him, too, in college – same deal: didn’t want to, hated it, etc. The difference is that I never explained it to this guy, and we never reconciled. I saw him a few times afterward and just couldn’t get past my pride, shame, regret, etc. to bring myself to say something to him. I guess part of me suspected he wouldn’t be as receptive, or maybe that was just an excuse I gave myself.

This guy didn’t even make it to a fifth class reunion – he killed himself a year before that. I remember finding out, months after the fact. The first thing I did was call my friend in Texas to tell him the news and to share in some mourning over the phone.

I know it’s easy to overestimate our importance in other people’s lives, but I still wonder whether anything would have been different if I had reached out with my old roommate the same way I did with the guy who I’m still friends with today. I read things like, “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act.” (Proverbs 3:27) All I can do now, though, is wonder “What if?” I assume a lot must have happened in the four or five years before his death – a lot that I had absolutely nothing to do with, I know – but I’m a fixer, and our relationship was something my 21-year-old self chose not to try to fix. It was in my power to act, and I didn’t.

I don’t really have an elegant or clever way to wrap up this post. It has been a bit more personal than usual and has had me thinking about some things I don’t think about very often. All I’ll say in closing is that if there is something negative hanging around between you and someone you care about, pray for the strength to approach that person, for the strength to be the one who reaches out.

As for me, I’m extremely glad that I did … and I hate that I didn’t.

Inch by inch

It’s been almost a month since I have posted anything here. The longer I went without sitting down to write something, the easier it was to keep avoiding it. It wasn’t some big decision on my part to not write anything for four weeks, but it was a lot of small decisions to remain inactive at that moment that had a large cumulative effect.

Of course, it wasn’t that I wasn’t doing anything. I was busy: watching TV, checking Facebook, writing emails, managing my fantasy baseball team. You know, important stuff.

The initial thought for this post finally came to me this past weekend while I was spending way too much time watching the NCAA baseball tournament. (Go Hoos!) I can’t remember the game or the exact sequence (and I may be misremembering it entirely), but one inning started like this: (1) batter reached first on a ground ball that was a tough play for an infielder; one of those plays that could have been scored a hit or an error; and (2) next batter singled on a bloop hit that the shortstop barely missed. So instead of two outs and nobody on, the pitcher was faced with two on and no outs.

The first batter could just as easily have been an out. Same for the second batter — the ball drops a couple of inches more in one direction, and it’s an out. Take it one more step — maybe the third batter walks on a 3-2 pitch that’s a borderline strike, but the umpire calls it a ball. The pitcher was thisclose to having a 1-2-3 inning and everyone telling him what a great job he did, but he ends up in a bases-loaded, no-outs jam with his coach coming to the mound to ask him what’s wrong.

Three individual plays. Three small margins between a baserunner and an out. Add them up, though, and you end up with drastically different results.

In the New York Times last week, David Brooks devoted some space to this concept of increments in his column “The Small, Happy Life“. He had asked readers to tell him about how they found purpose in their lives. One wrote, “Everywhere there are tiny, seemingly inconsequential circumstances that, if explored, provide meaning.” Another described what he called the “decision trap”:

This trap is an amazingly consistent phenomena whereby ‘big’ decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.

I could come up with a lot of examples. Weight comes to mind. It isn’t one pizza that makes you overweight. It takes a lot of decisions over time about what to eat, what not to eat, how much exercise to get, etc. Those small decisions add up.

Our faith journeys are a series of small decisions. Now, the decision on whether to follow Christ is clearly a huge decision, but once that decision is made — what then? We’re not done. We’re never done.

Each day, we have “small” decisions to make. Do I stop what I’m doing and pray for someone I know who needs it? Do I spend my lunch hour looking at espn.com or reading my Bible? Do I devote some time to just being quiet and alone with God?

Taken alone, those decisions don’t seem big. After all, I can always do it later — I’ll pray later. I’ll read my Bible later. I’ll have some quiet time later … but probably in front of the TV. Now it’s Sunday morning, and I’m tired — it’s no big deal if I sleep in this time. It’s just one day of missing church.

Each of these decisions is another step on our faith journey, but not all of our steps are in the right direction. Too many steps the wrong way, and we’re the pitcher with the bases loaded and none out …  wondering how we got into this awful situation without anything “big” happening.

Double talk

I’m always open to suggestions for possible blog topics, and a few weeks ago, one of my fraternity brothers (who is also a lawyer) suggested I take on the Virginia State Bar mess related to a bar conference that was scheduled for later this year in Israel. Until the past couple of days, though, I hadn’t really figured out an angle that I liked. In re-reading some of the media coverage this week, I finally hit on what I wanted to say.

In case you don’t know what “mess” I’m talking about, check out a couple of articles from that time here and here. This April 1 Volokh Conspiracy entry from David Bernstein sums up the entire episode nicely.

I won’t rehash everything from the articles that I linked to, but my conclusion matches that of Bernstein: Instead of simply saying “We’re cancelling this trip because of lack of interest,” the VSB leaders instead tried to seize an opportunity to pose as champions of civil rights, diversity, inclusion, etc. while cancelling the trip (and saving face). Upon receiving a petition from a small number of Virginia lawyers, they took less than eight hours to cancel a trip they had just distributed a reminder about a few days earlier.

The second email from the VSB president about the cancellation spent several paragraphs addressing the Israel issue but mentioned the lack of sufficient interest in only one sentence. In other words, he took the path that tempts so many people in elected positions – he spun it. He left a grain of truth in there (hardly anyone wanted to go on the trip in the first place) but covered it up with a bunch of other stuff.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn’t an isolated occurrence. We read and hear spin everywhere. I feel like I can’t trust any news story I read or watch because I’m sure there’s some sort of agenda. I drive my wife crazy because whenever she tells me about something she read in the news, my first instinct is to start asking all sorts of questions to poke holes in the story or to get an idea of what the author’s angle must be. I get sick of trying to wade through all the spin and get the real story.

As Christians, we should detest spin. James gives it to us straight:

Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear — not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple “Yes” or “No.” Otherwise you will be condemned. [James 5:12]

In other words, tell the truth, and tell it straight. Don’t dissemble, don’t obfuscate, don’t spin something to save face, don’t sugarcoat things. Jesus had some thoughts on this as well in the Sermon on the Mount:

All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one. [Matthew 5:37]

Easier said than done, and I’m looking in the mirror when I say that. Whether you’re dealing with a co-worker, a spouse, or a neighbor, it can be hard to tell the truth without any shading.

This article explores the topic in more depth than I have here, so check it out for some discussion of other facets that I haven’t touched on. I especially like this part:

Whatever the reason, God expects His children to be clear cut with their words. We aren’t to wade in the subtle grey areas of ambiguity with our words. Rather we are to be people who speak plainly, clearly, and truthfully so that we aren’t condemned by our own words.

Some VSB leaders got a tough lesson in being “condemned by [their] own words”. Next time, I hope they just say what they mean. And I pray that I, and any Christians who may be reading this, take the lesson to heart, too.

Out of sight, out of mind

Monday night, when I was struggling for something to write about, I considered putting something together about the persecution of Christians.

I decided against it because I wasn’t sure that I had enough material or clear thoughts to make any good points. I also thought that it could come across as whining or self-serving or that it would not be particularly relevant to the people reading this.

Sometimes it is hard to understand God’s timing, but this time God slapped me upside the head right quick to get my attention on this point.

On Wednesday, I came across this screed by Matt Walsh. I generally like what Walsh has to say, although I find him to be a bit of a bomb-thrower at times. (When your livelihood depends on getting page views, however, I suppose that’s part of the gig.)

His starting point is that the most recent Islamic State video showing the execution of several Ethiopian Christians received little coverage in the mainstream media. This is true. This was one of the points I was considering on Monday night – the shock of such an occurrence has apparently vanished, so it’s something that gets reported briefly and immediately pushed aside by everything else in the 24-hour news cycle.

Walsh then gives some global perspective on the extent of the persecution of Christians and points some fingers at U.S. foreign policy for fomenting some of this. Then he asks two questions: Why don’t American Christians care more about the fate of our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world? And once we do care, what can we do to help?

He points out the obvious: (1) Prayer; and (2) Financial support for organizations like Open Doors.

Then he gets to his real message for us:

We can honor their courage and sacrifice by not being such lazy, selfish, apathetic, cowards.

(Don’t be shocked – I told you he was a bomb-thrower.) He continues:

In America, many Christians stand down. They cower. They whimper. They won’t even declare their faith on Facebook for fear that it might prompt a mean Facebook message and an unfriending. Christians in the Middle East will give up their lives to keep their souls while we give up our souls to keep our reputations and our social media reach.

And because it’s so well-written, I’m going to include his entire concluding passage:

One day soon, we better wake up and realize that Jesus is talking directly to us in Revelation when He says:

“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

We are comfortable and insulated, but spiritually, as Christ said, we are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.

This is what we can do for the martyrs. We can try to change that. We can be inspired. We can make a sacrifice. We can make an effort. We can take a stand. We can take a risk. We can run hot, not lukewarm.

We can ask ourselves how many of us would still profess the faith if we knew it would put our lives in danger. Would it still be 80 percent? Or more like 20? Or 5? Or 1? Or even fewer?

Would you be in that group, however small? Do you believe in Christ so deeply that you’d give up everything for Him? Do you believe enough to give up anything for Him?

That’s a question you have to answer for yourself, just as I have to answer it for myself.

And if you want to do something about the persecution of Christians, this is a good place to start.

You might not be able to end it, but are you willing to endure it? If so, pick up your cross and follow Him up that hill.

That’s what we can do about it.

It’s hard for me to imagine being in danger because of my faith, but I can think of one real example in the U.S.: the Columbine shootings in 1999. One of the killers shot a girl who was on the ground and then asked her if she believed in God. She said “yes”, and the killer walked away. She survived. (This isn’t how the story is usually remembered, though; see here and here.)

It doesn’t take much effort to familiarize ourselves with situations where Christians are or have been in danger, though. Walsh’s article is one example. Here are two more: a recent piece and a historical one. In the second link – about the Armenian genocide 100 years ago – the author touches on Walsh’s main point:

Today in Israel, Jews ask me – some of them offspring of Holocaust survivors – “Why aren’t you people doing anything about the persecuted Christians in the Middle East?” In many ways it’s a good question. A divided global Christendom seems incapable of paying close attention, much less protesting or mobilising.

“Incapable of paying close attention.” If that doesn’t wake us up, I’m not sure what will. Are we really such navel-gazers that we can’t be bothered to look at the big picture – the eternal picture?

One last point on this: There are well-worn reasons for not taking action even when we do stop to consider such issues. We conclude that since we can’t possibly pray for everyone that needs help, we won’t pray for anyone because we can’t stand the thought of leaving so many people out. We think that the problem is so big that our prayer, money, or time won’t have any effect. We think that our all-knowing God is obviously aware of the situation, so why do we need to bring it to his attention? We figure someone else will pray for these people.

My response: Who is it that’s putting those thoughts in our heads? It sure isn’t God. If you’re thinking along these lines, take a moment to consider who it is that you’re listening to – I suspect it’s someone who has a long-running, well-documented interest in foiling God’s plans and who has a tendency to whisper in our ears any time we’ll let him.

And it’s all too easy to listen to those whispers when we’re running lukewarm.

The rest of the story

(This didn’t really fit into what’s above, but it’s related, so I include it here as an aside on one aspect of the state of the play in the United States.)

Recently I read a Facebook comment where someone said it must be “terrifying” to be Muslim in the U.S. right now because of all the fringe hate groups, anti-Muslim rhetoric from the right, etc. I’ll grant you that there are hateful people out there, some of whom may consider themselves Christians. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a white man yelled at one of my wife’s friends at a Metro stop outside of Washington, presumably because he thought she was Muslim or Arab. She was neither – she just happened to be wearing a scarf in a way that apparently looked like a hijab. Across the parking lot, he started yelling “USA! USA!” at her. She was understandably freaked out by this crazy person and hurried to get closer to another woman walking in front of her, at which point the man yelled something like, “Oh, that’s right! Try to hide next to a white American!” Ugh.

On the other hand, we have this, a story about a Muslim girl in Alabama who fled home to join the Islamic State. Her parents came to the United States in the early 1990s, and at the end of the article, the father summarizes his feelings about being a Muslim in the U.S.:

But there’s really no safe place and positive place to raise your family as here in this country. We have full freedom to participate our religion, go to mosque, do our prayers and listen to scholars and read books and come back to our homes and live free life. This is the best place for family. It’s a dream for everybody, and it’s still a dream, it’s going to be a dream for all of us.

Amen to that.

When I write about the persecution of Christians by other groups, I’m not minimizing the failures of American Christians when it comes to our treatment of other faiths here at home. To respond to our president, I’m not getting on my high horse. Instead, I’ll tell you that the things that may happen in the U.S. in no way take away from the severity of the atrocities taking place globally, so let’s not be afraid to talk about those and call a spade a spade when it’s appropriate.

Monday night football…

… where I finally punt after not being able to come up with a longer post and instead give you some links to other folks’ writings.

• A lot of people have already linked to this essay by David Brooks, but better late than never. He hits on many familiar but important themes. His book may be worth checking out.
• This piece is from March, but I didn’t read it until last week. It ties together some thoughts from a couple of my previous posts here and here. Key takeaway: “Our end goal is not a Christian America of the made-up past or the hoped-for future. Our end goal is the kingdom of Christ, made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language.”
• A really good FiveThirtyEight article about why we cling to erroneous views (hint: our brains make us do it, no matter how smart we think we are).
• Youth sports insanity finds its way (again) to the courtroom. I have two kids in elementary school who play sports, and they already have friends who play on travel teams, play a particular sport virtually year-round, etc. It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Are we just chasing through our kids?

Equipment failures

I took yesterday off to spend some time with the kids during spring break, but I also had a project in mind: building a computer. I’m no tech wizard, but here is how I ended up trying to build a PC.

Our current desktop computer is decrepit, slow, and undependable. If we had any firearms in our house, I’m pretty sure my wife would have shot the computer long ago. My stepson thoughtfully decided to buy a bunch of PC components and build us a brand-new one, and that was his Christmas gift to us.

Problem No. 1: He bought lots of parts – tower, motherboard, memory card, graphics card, power supply, monitor, keyboard, mouse, hard drives – but he never got around to putting them together before he left for the U.S. Army. Not to be deterred, I gathered the parts, and armed with a Newegg video, Google, and some instruction manuals, I went to work.

I ran into a couple of issues but eventually worked my through them, and I was feeling pretty good as I neared completion. Really the only thing left was to put in the optical drive and install Windows 8.1 using the disk my stepson bought.

Problem No. 2: There is no optical drive. Either it was never bought, or I can’t find it wherever it’s hiding in the house. This means I can’t install the operating system. Ugh. After considering various alternatives, I went online and bought what looks like a decent one. When it arrives in a few days, hopefully that will be the final piece in having a fast, up-to-date PC.

Today’s project was mowing the entire yard for the first time this spring. That meant changing the oil in the lawnmower. I’ve done this plenty of times before, but something went wrong this time. Problem No. 3: I now have a mower that does nothing but run roughly for a little while before cutting off. I’m not sure what I did wrong (if anything), but I ended up changing the oil, putting in fresh gas, changing the air filter, and changing the spark plug. And it still doesn’t work like it did before I first went about “fixing” it this morning.

I kept my cool yesterday in the face of problems, but I didn’t do so well on that point today. Even as I’m writing this, I’m getting preoccupied trying to think of what else I can try or what I may have messed up.

(I’m 400 words in and haven’t mentioned God yet. I’m getting there.)

I tried to pull a lesson out of these experiences, and here is what I came up with: Too often, we are eager to start a project, but we find that we don’t have the right equipment or the required knowledge to finish it off successfully. This causes us to get frustrated. We didn’t think it would be this hard. We see other people do it so easily, so why can’t we? We don’t have what we need to accomplish our goal, and maybe we slack off or even give up. When we do that, we miss out on the fruits that are waiting at the end of the path.

Being a new Christian can be like this. We are caught up in the initial joy but then get quickly hit by the realization that there is real work to do if we want to develop a deeper, meaningful faith in God. We have to get the right equipment, and we have to develop the right skills – this is where the tried and true “Sunday school answers” come in. Study the Bible. Pray regularly. Spend time in fellowship with other believers. Help other people. Earnestly seek God’s will for your life. This is where lots of people may be nodding, but stop and think: Are you really building your life the way you should be?

If a Christian puts his Bible on his shelf for display, prays only when he has time, goes to church when he isn’t too tired, and still runs his life largely according to his own will, then he’s not going to get very far in his Christian walk. He’s going to end up with the equivalent of a half-built computer or a malfunctioning lawnmower.

John Stott sums it up in “Basic Christianity”:

The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half-built towers – the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called ‘nominal Christianity’. In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit the convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.

My Sunday school class is reading the entire Bible in 2015. Seems logical enough – Christians should read the Bible. Now that we’re a few months in, though, I’ve noticed a drop-off in our class attendance. Maybe the drop-off is my imagination, but my fear is that because we’re really doing some “work” to help build our faith, people are slacking off. It’s not comfortable, or it’s too hard to read three or four chapters every day, or other things are more important. I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see what the next few months bring. And maybe by then I’ll be writing this blog on a different computer.