Author Archives: Rob Harrison

This is what happens with a mind set on “shuffle”

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My dear wife, knowing that I was stopping by the store on the way home from work to pick up some more distilled water for the church, asked me to pick up a few things for her as well—including ice cream for the brownies she was making for dessert (courtesy of a good friend down the street). My brain started spinning this out to a familiar tune, and before long had produced this:

Brownies and ice cream and water in kettles,
Jewel-eyed reptiles made of precious metals,
Clockwork automatons trying their wings:
These are a few of my favorite things.

I suppose it says something about the contents of my brain that it moved so quickly from my shopping list to a sort of steampunk-fantasy thing; I have to admit I find the juxtaposition of that with Rodgers and Hammerstein amusing, but your mileage may vary. I may keep playing around with this for my own amusement; if anyone wants to try a verse, feel free to post it in the comments.

Worthy of Honor

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(Deuteronomy 19:15, Deuteronomy 25:4; 1 Timothy 5:17-6:2)

One of the subtler issues facing the American church is the way we regard our leaders. This is one of those areas in which we’ve so internalized the world’s values and ways of looking at things that not only are we not aware of the problem, it’s not even easy to see when it’s pointed out. You see, we tend to look at our leaders—even those of us who are leaders do this—from a human perspective, the same way we look at leaders in any human organization. We look at pastors as professionals, or employees, or experts, or whatever—and we pastors tend to look at ourselves in the same ways, and at our calling as a career, to be pursued accordingly—and we look at elders and deacons as just another set of volunteers. And there is some truth to that; but it’s not the most important truth, and focusing on it leads us into bad habits.

What Paul understands is that leading the church isn’t the same as leading any other organization; to be a deacon, or an elder, or a pastor, is to accept a very different sort of responsibility. (Paul is talking about everybody in this passage; the word translated “elder” here seems to have been an umbrella term covering both overseers and deacons.) Those called to lead the church aren’t called to run it like a business, or according to any standard set of worldly principles. Rather, God calls us to lead his church according to only one thing: his will. Elders, deacons, pastors, all of us, it’s not our job or our place to decide what we think ought to be done, much less to insist on what we want done—our job is to discern, together, what God wants us to do, and where he wants the church to go, and then to follow as he leads us, leading the church to follow him as we follow him. Our job is to be, collectively, the voice and the guidance of God for the people of God.

That’s why Paul is so concerned about those leaders in Ephesus who are misusing their position to mislead the church; and it’s why he lays out such careful instructions here as to how to handle this situation. Yes, those who have sinned must be disciplined—publicly, not sweeping anything under the rug, since their sin has had public consequences in the church—but notice his overarching focus here: this must not be allowed to weaken the rest of the leaders in the church in Ephesus. For one thing, it must not become an opportunity for people to work out grudges by making false accusations; and at a deeper level, there’s the danger that the congregation will end up disgusted with all their elders and deacons, and that can’t be permitted either. Even as Timothy is trying to deal with the false teachers in his congregation, he must work to build up and support those elders and deacons who have remained faithful to the gospel and to their calling as leaders in the body of Christ, or else the church will only be worse off in the end.

Thus Paul sets out certain rules for how Timothy is to proceed. First, he says, don’t listen to any accusation against a leader of the church unless it’s supported by two or three witnesses. No hearsay, no whispering campaign, no anonymous charges, no chance for one disgruntled person to pop up and ruin someone they don’t like—these kinds of things are how the world takes people down, and are not to be allowed to happen in the church. When you’re talking about an elder or a deacon, Paul tells Timothy, you don’t even listen to a charge unless you have strong evidence, and two or three people who are willing to step up, put their names on the line, and testify.

Second, this applies especially to Timothy, who must not play favorites. There were no doubt leaders in the church in Ephesus whom he liked quite well, and others with whom he didn’t get along, but Paul tells him he must be careful not to let that get in the way. Paul underscores this point by invoking the heavenly court, the presence of God and his angels; he reminds Timothy that to use his authority unjustly, to favor some or to hurt others, would be a sin, and that God would judge him for it. It doesn’t matter how Timothy feels about anyone; the only thing that matters is the truth, and Timothy is called to find and uphold and proclaim the truth, wherever it may lead.

When anyone is disciplined, Paul says that their discipline is to be public; and there are, I think, a few reasons for this. One, which Paul notes explicitly, is the deterrent effect on others in the congregation. Two, if you have to punish someone publicly or not at all, you’re going to make sure you know exactly what you’re doing, and make sure you’re justified, before you go forward; kangaroo courts are impossible under those circumstances. And three, this is all part of keeping things above board. You don’t charge people in secret, you don’t allow anonymous complaints, and you don’t punish people secretly, either; everything must be done openly, so that the congregation knows what’s going on and everything may be scrutinized. That’s how the church is supposed to conduct its business.

We have to do this because pastors, deacons, and elders are sinful human beings just like everyone else; ordination does not remove sin or make us immune to temptation. Unfortunately for Timothy, he was confronting the kind of situation no pastor ever wants to face: a group of elders who were in full revolt, not against him—that would have been a personal matter, not necessarily a sin issue—but against God. That was far more serious, and it had to mean disciplining some people, and removing them from office; which, obviously, would also mean finding new elders to replace them. As a consequence, Paul gives Timothy one other major piece of advice: don’t ordain anyone hastily, but make very sure you know them first. Choose people who have a track record, who’ve been around long enough for both their sins and their good works to come to light, so that you know who they are and what they bring to the table. People always retain the right to surprise you, but the idea is to keep the unpleasant surprises to a minimum.

Now, it’s painful to have to discipline a leader of the church; we, sadly, have reason to know that. God willing, we will not become experienced in that pain. Even so, there are a couple important principles for us to take away from this passage. The first, as I noted earlier, is Paul’s concern that the church conduct its business openly—not that every detail has to be published, certainly, but that what can be fairly and reasonably told must be told; the picture we give people, however incomplete, must be true and sufficient as far as it goes. Lies breed in the shadows, but we are called to be a people of truth and light, and we should do our business accordingly. There should be no room in the church for anonymous complaints, backstabbing, or any of those other things so characteristic of our world; we should make decisions openly and honestly, or not at all.

Second, the work of the leaders of the church is worthy of honor, and they are worthy of honor for doing it. As I said earlier, we tend to get this subtly wrong, because we tend to look at their work from a human point of view; it’s not that we don’t honor our leaders, but that we tend to honor them for their importance, or because we agree with their decisions, just as we would honor the leaders of any other human organization. As chapter 6 makes clear, however, this isn’t the way we ought to look at things.

If you were wondering what those verses about slaves are doing here, or what they have to do with anything else, the best answer to that question is that Paul is still talking about elders and deacons in the church. Specifically, he’s offering a comment addressed to elders and deacons who were slaves, commanding them to treat their earthly masters with honor and serve them faithfully; at the same time, as Paul has said, their masters were to treat them with honor, as leaders of the body of Christ. What really mattered wasn’t their status as servants to the people who owned them under Roman law; what really mattered was their status as servants of Christ, called to lead the people of God according to his will.

Those whom God has called to lead his church are worthy of honor because they are his representatives to his people, called to lead in his name and for his sake; and those who lead well, Paul says, are worthy of double honor. Interestingly, in the Ephesian church, part of that honor was monetary; at least some elders and deacons were paid for their service to the church, and it’s clear from verse 18 that Paul felt they deserved it if they did their jobs well. We don’t know if they were all paid, or how much, but it’s an interesting point to note. Beyond that, Paul makes clear that those who lead well deserve the respect of the church—this, too, is part of fair compensation for the job.

Which raises the question, who are the elders who rule well? What does that mean? Well, flip back to chapter 4—if you were here three weeks ago, you may remember me saying (I hope you do) that being a good leader of the church is first and foremost about being a good follower of God. As I said then, this is captured in Paul’s command in 1 Corinthians 11:1, “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.” Leadership is about imitation, because the Christian life is not merely a series of dos and don’ts that can be taught in a classroom—it’s a way of life which must be lived to be fully understood. To learn to follow Christ, we need to see the lives of others who are following Christ. Good pastors, good elders, good deacons, are people who set good examples—and in particular, a good pastor is one who helps the elders and deacons set good examples and thus be good elders and deacons. That’s something I only realized recently, that part of my job is to disciple our leaders as leaders, to lead them well to lead well.

So does this mean that the only good leader is a sinless leader? No; which is a good thing, because there aren’t any of those. Rather, the point is that those of us called to leadership in the church need to have our eyes, our minds and our hearts, firmly fixed on Jesus, and to be dedicated to putting to death the sin in our lives, as Paul commands in Romans 8:13. We need to be all about Jesus and the gospel and the ministry of the kingdom of God, not about ourselves and what glorifies or satisfies us. We need to model in our lives the hard work of spiritual growth—of honesty and repentance when we sin; of the willingness to humble ourselves to make things right when we do others wrong; of resisting temptation rather than just giving in to it; of putting our money and our time where our faith is, setting aside the first portion of both each week for God rather than spending it all on ourselves; of spending time studying the word of God; of asking God to search out the darkness in our hearts and our minds, and to show us what he sees. We need to be people in whose lives others can see what it means to follow Christ, and that for all the struggles that come on that journey, there’s great joy in it; we need to be people whose lives draw others to follow.

Note on the cultural history of Islam

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In defending Islam to the West, it’s common to hold up early Islamic culture as far superior to the Christian cultures of the time for its advances, its supposed tolerance, and so on; the usual implied message is, “Islam isn’t as bad as you think it is, or else it couldn’t have produced all these great things!” The principle is sound—it’s basically the same one articulated by Jesus when he told his disciples, “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Thus you will know them by their fruits.”

The only problem is that the picture we’re usually given is significantly askew from the historical reality. As Robert Spencer put it in Jihad Watch,

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate—not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia—by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

Health care, Whole Foods style

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John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, lays out eight reforms that would significantly reduce the cost of health care without ballooning the federal debt.

  • Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
  • Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
  • Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
  • Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
  • Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
  • Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
  • Enact Medicare reform.
  • Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

I think he’s spot-on with this (and of course, in the piece, he goes into each in more detail); these reforms would remove most of the things that are currently driving up the cost of health care. Mackey goes beyond these as well to offer some additional thoughts and comments; most interesting to me are these, rooted in Whole Foods’ experience.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Absolutely correct. Read the whole thing.

One starfish at a time

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Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That’s not a complaint; it’s probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it’s a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.

The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.

Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.

If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven’t, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, “Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you’re doing can’t possibly matter.” The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, “It matters to this one”—and threw it in.

We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.

And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that’s enough to justify all our efforts; that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

Photo © Jocelyn.  Free use.

Dispatches from the health-care front

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As the ABC News website tells the story (HT: C4P commenter William Collins),

The news from Barbara Wagner’s doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

“It was horrible,” Wagner told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”

Barbara Wagner is not alone in this experience.

“It’s been tough,” said her daughter, Susie May, who burst into tears while talking to ABCNews.com. “I was the first person my mom called when she got the letter,” said May, 42. “While I was telling her, ‘Mom, it will be ok,’ I was crying, but trying to stay brave for her.”

“I’ve talked to so many people who have gone through the same problems with the Oregon Health Plan,” she said.

Indeed, Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old Dexter resident with terminal prostate cancer, learned recently that his doctor’s request for the drug mitoxantrone had been rejected. The treatment, while not a cure, could ease Stroup’s pain and extend his life by six months.

“What is six months of life worth?” he asked in a report in the Eugene Register-Guard. “To me it’s worth a lot. This is my life they’re playing with.”

The thing is, though, to the state of Oregon, six months of these people’s lives isn’t worth much of anything—and it’s the state of Oregon that’s paying the bills. The inevitable result of this, asSarah Palin has been pointing out, is that a dollar value is placed on human life; if the cost of keeping someone alive is higher than that dollar value, then their life is judged “not worth living.” The logical thing to do in that case is to maximize savings and simplify the situation by encouraging the patient to accept euthanasia. This time, euthanasia advocates apologized for this in the case of Barbara Wagner—not because they believed they were wrong, but because the encouragement was offered with “insensitivity,” without “the human touch.” Next time? Who knows?

There’s a reason that in her first Facebook note on this subject, Gov. Palin’s thoughts went immediately to her son Trig: this sort of attitude is already dominant in the medical response to Down Syndrome babies. There’s a reason why over 90% of such babies are aborted, and it isn’t all about what the parents think or want, let me tell you. Or, better, let Gretchen tell you, from her post “Remembering” on the group blog Beautiful Work (HT: Jared Wilson):

It was 2 years ago this month that I was sitting in a chair looking at my unborn baby in 4D. She was precious! We had previously found out that our baby had several “markers” for down syndrome and had enlarged kidneys which may have required surgery upon birth. Thus we were monitored more carefully and had a ton more ultrasound shots at a hospital. This was the first level 3 ultrasound with this pregnancy (I had had one with my 3rd with no problems). I got to gaze upon my baby for almost a full hour—it was wonderful! I was there alone as my husband was out of town. The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.

Read the whole post—it’s well worth it. Like the Palins, Gretchen and her husband opted to have the baby. The irony of their story is that their baby was born two years ago . . . without Down Syndrome, and in fact with no medical issues whatsoever. The automatic reflex of the medical system would have aborted a perfectly healthy little girl.

In all this, I think the reactions of Wagner’s ex-husband Dennis, on the one hand, and euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry, on the other (both quoted in the ABC News article), are telling. Here’s Humphry:

People cling to life and look for every sort of crazy cure to keep alive and usually they are better off not to have done it.

In other words, Humphry believes, people are better off dying than fighting to live. By contrast, here’s Dennis Wagner:

My reaction is pretty typical. I am sick and tired of the dollar being the bottom line of everything. We need to put human life above the dollar.

As it happens, I do believe his reaction is pretty typical among most folks; and in my experience, Humphry’s attitude is usually lurking in there among advocates of euthanasia, even if most of them can’t afford to be as blunt about it as the founder of the Hemlock Society, a man who has already “assisted” one wife into the grave. This really is the line between the sides here.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking that this doesn’t affect you all that much, because the concept of euthanasia doesn’t really bother you that much. What you need to understand, though, is that assigning dollar values to human lives corrupts the whole system—the extent to which that already happens with our private insurance bureaucracy is part of the problem with our health care system—and that when it’s the government doing the assigning, there’s no way to counterbalance that corruption, so it spreads unchecked. As is always the way with consequences propagating through a complex system, that produces changes beyond those which we have already thought to expect.

For instance, in that same first Facebook note, Gov. Palin pointed out a very important point made by Thomas Sowell: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.” She went on from there, as most critics have, to point out that this will inevitably result in the rationing of health care—and so it will, as it always does. But that will not be the only effect of this new reality if Obamacare goes into effect. C4P‘s Doug Brady has also pointed out that the US health care system drives most of the world’s medical innovation, including the creation of new drugs, and that government price controls will bring an end to most of that innovation. This too is true, and important; but it too is only part of the cost of price controls. It’s not merely that price controls will limit who receives medical care, or that they will depress the future potential of that care; they will also, over time, reduce the present value of that care.

To illustrate this, I want to take you inside a world which I hope is unfamiliar to most of you: that of the neo-natal intensive care unit, or NICU (pronounced “nick-you”). Specifically, I want to tell you a couple stories from the Canadian NICU experience. One, highlighted by Mark Steyn a couple months ago, comes from Hamilton, Ontario:

Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.

A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.

Steyn comments,

Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, 5.5 million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half a century.

Unfortunately, as Steyn goes on to point out, whenever the Canadian government starts outsourcing its health care to the US, that creates additional complications:

When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border “security” bureaucracy, you’ll be getting a birth experience you’ll treasure forever:

Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn’t follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.

Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?

The other story I want to tell you is my own. Our oldest daughter has dual US/Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Vancouver, BC; I was a student in the country at the time, so we spent five years as net beneficiaries of the Canadian health care system. I’m not going to demonize it or try to deny its virtues; combined with the medical benefits my wife received for her job, she was without question our cheapest baby despite spending the first two weeks of her life in the NICU. Yet, as I wrote last summer, there were some enormous downsides to the system as well.

We had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.

The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.

I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there.

Nor was our experience unusual, or even extreme; we prayed for people’s friends or family members dealing with serious illness, not just that they would get better, but simply that they would get treatment before they died. Sometimes they didn’t. That’s why (as I noted in that post) there’s an increasing movement against national health care in Canada and elsewhere (though not, as far as I understand, in Britain). That’s the kind of thing that happens when the dollar, not human life, is the bottom line of the health care system. We already have too much of that in our country as it is; what Sarah Palin understands, and why she’s leading the charge against Obamacare, is that letting the government run the system will only make it worse, not better. Yes, we need change; but for that change to bring actual hope, it needs to be changefor the better. Obamacare is the wrong prescription.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

We are systematically sinful

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Our sins are connected deep inside us, more than we see. We compartmentalize. We tell ourselves we can sin in one area and it will stay contained in that area. It’s easier to rationalize that way. But the reality of what we are and how we work is more subtle, more interrelated, more inevitable.

Ray Ortlund is right on with this. As a colleague of mine whom I greatly respect was noting the other day, we tend to have a very superficial view of sin that doesn’t go any deeper than “Well, I did this thing this afternoon and that was wrong”; we think of sin only in terms of discrete acts that are bad in themselves, and we miss the deeper attitudes of our hearts that are opposed to God.

In so doing, we miss the ways that that thing we did this afternoon affects all the rest of life, and the attitudes that corrupt even the “good” things that we do, and the fundamental orientation of our hearts toward self rather than toward God . . . we focus on individual acts and ignore the part of ourselves that has to die if we are to be faithful followers of Christ. In medical terms, we focus on the symptoms and miss the disease.

Divine self-restraint

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Here’s another gem from Tyler Dawn I wanted to share:

Sometimes kids open doors to great spiritual truths.

Matt and Andy were in the living room doing, whatever, I can’t remember. Just a normal afternoon, when Matt says something out of the blue, “God can do anything He wants to do, COOL!”

“Yes, but He doesn’t.”

“Huh?”

“God can do anything He wants, He has unlimited power—but He doesn’t just go around doing whatever he wants. Only toddlers do that!”

And, I thought ruefully, many of us grownups too. How many of us use our desires as an excuse to satisfy the whim of the moment? . . .

How many times did God want to kill off the Israelites? Probably more times than Moses recorded. But He didn’t, because He does not live to satisfy His whims. Such is not the province of one worthy either of being worshipped or of being followed. . . .

The power of God is so unlimited and overwhelming, that if His love was not fully in control of it that we would just cease to exist without His even having to give it much of a thought.

That’s all too true. All of life, even the fact that we continue to live, is only by God’s grace and patient forbearance, only because he doesn’t want anyone to perish, but desires that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). Without that, we’d all be long time gone.

The sad irony of racism

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“This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again, who has a deep seated hatred for . . . white people? Or the white culture?” [Glenn] Beck asked. “I don’t know what it is, but you can’t sit in a pew with [former Obama pastor] Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, have it wash over.” . . .

“I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “I’m saying he has a problem. This guy, I believe, is a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by.”

Predictably, Beck’s off hand remarks created a storm of controversy in the leftwing blogosphere, the same group that had been apologists for the Rev. Wright’s statements of hate against whites and Jews.

Color of Change, which claims to be the largest African-American political organization online with 600,000 members, has seized on Beck’s comment to mount a campaign to discourage companies from advertising on the program.

Color of Change Executive Director James Rucker spoke with Newsmax, and made clear his organization’s goal is for Beck’s voice to be silenced.

“It’s preposterous and absurd,” Rucker says of Beck’s opinion. “It’s insulting to black Americans; and it corrupts honest debate. Anyone who uses such a platform to spew such vitriol, whether Glenn Beck or anyone else, has no place on the air, and we at Color Of Change would use every resource available to us to remove corporate sponsorship from their platform.”

Newsmax, in reporting on this, is most interested in the possibility that the Obama administration is behind this attack, since a former head of Color of Change (one of its co-founders) is a member of the administration; certainly, that possibility is completely consonant with Barack Obama’s typical approach to dissent, and that of his followers. It’s worrisome, no question, especially because it fits a building pattern of behavior.

For my part, though, I’m more interested in the truly invidious double standard here. For Glenn Beck to call the president a racist is a horrible, terrible, intolerable thing; indeed, his attackers seem to be saying, to suggest that any black person is a racist is insulting to black people. For his attackers to suggest that he’s a racist, and to do so at length and in quite loaded terms, however, is perfectly acceptable. There’s no need to consider whether Beck has any justification for his assertion—whether Barack Obama’s 20 years of comfortable acceptance of high-voltage racist preaching might be meaningful, for example, or whether the president’s knee-jerk assumption that the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. must have been racist is in fact significant in understanding his mindset; they feel they can simply dismiss and denounce it as “insulting” “vitriol” without ever even having to disprove it.

Why? Because Glenn Beck is white and Barack Obama is black? I don’t see any other justification here (unless it’s the fact that Barack Obama is the President and Glenn Beck isn’t); and if that’s it, then aren’t they basing their conclusion solely on the respective colors of these men’s skins?

And isn’t that a textbook example of racism?