Mercy and justice

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 11
Q. But isn’t God also merciful?

A. God is certainly merciful,1
but he is also just.2
His justice demands
that sin, committed against his supreme majesty,
be punished with the supreme penalty—
eternal punishment of body and soul.3

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven writes (33-34),

The last of the three excuses attempts to play off God’s justice against God’s mercy. Polytheists . . . do that; they call on one god for protection against another. But our God is one (Deut. 6:4), and in the heart of our Father-Judge are no such contradictions. . . .

You and I have to do with a righteous God. He always punishes sin, temporally, eternally, in body and soul. Now our sins are either punished in Jesus—then it is all over—or we have to bear our own punishment.

Dr. Kuyvenhoven is right: God’s justice and mercy are not opposed, but united; and his mercy does not come by simply ignoring his justice. How it does come, how that happens, is the gospel.

The President’s problem: hubris

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That’s not exactly how Charles Krauthammer puts it, but that’s the problem he’s identified:

Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob—misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest—from drug companies to auto unions to doctors—in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

“Get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.

If you don’t believe Dr. Krauthammer, consider this from the Politico article on Barack Obama’s speech to Congress tonight:

2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”

3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform—taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.

You cannot do both of these things at once. You just can’t. You cannot “make an overture to Republicans” without promising to actually consider Republican ideas and integrate them into your program—and to do that, you would have to confront the Left, to tell them that they’re going to have to give up some of the things they really want and to allow the Right to get some of the things they really want. You have to actually follow through on “taking the best ideas from both parties,” which would require actually forcing the Left to compromise, and scolding them for their dogmatic refusal to do so to this point. It’s not triangulation (and when did that become a dirty word, anyway?), it’s recognizing that you can’t eat your cake and still have it.

That the President doesn’t realize this is clear from the fifth point in Politico’s list:

5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he’s going to meet with them at the White House early next week.

Again, if he actually wants to make a serious overture to Republicans, the public option has to come off the table; that’s completely unacceptable to folks on the Right, and meaningless “concessions” that make no substantive difference won’t be enough to win any meaningful Republican support. But of course, to take that off the table, he’ll have to confront the Left, in a big way, and so far, he’s shown no stomach whatsoever for doing that (if in fact he’s ever actually wanted to). President Obama has a choice: reach across the aisle, or continue to appease the Left. He’ll have to pick.

As a result, the inestimable Jay Cost (who has to be one of the three or four best political analysts going right now) comes to this conclusion:

I think this will be little more than a change in tone—perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.

Which, if that does indeed to turn out to be the best he can do—and if it isn’t, then why haven’t we seen something better well before now?—raises a critical question: what’s the point of this speech? Why is the President doing this? Cost suggests two related reasons:

First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer. President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country—namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton—but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.

Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg—and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.

Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed—nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together—why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?

Cost believes, and has been arguing, that the administration needs to scale its plan way back and go for incremental health-insurance reform rather than trying to revamp the whole system on the fly; I think Cost is right. If President Obama were to take that tack, he could keep the moderates in his own party and pick up the moderates from the other side of the aisle; with a little creativity, he might even come up with something that could attract support from some conservatives without losing liberals, which would be a huge accomplishment. While he would probably still emerge from this whole fight weakened, producing an actual bipartisan reform package would allow him to recover a lot of face and a lot of his prestige—as well as some of his “post-partisan” image—and thus to salvage a fair bit from an initiative that so far has been a complete fiasco for him. As Cost concludes,

If the President scaled back his ambitions, the final bill would not be as far to the left as the liberals like, but since it is not comprehensive they could at least plan to fight for the public option another day. Then, Obama could pick up enough moderates to pass it, and he could declare victory.

Incidentally, this is how most legislation gets passed in the Congress.

Which suggests, yet again, that Barack Obama would be a more effective president if he’d spent enough time actually doing his job as a legislator to actually understand things like that. As it is, all he can do is give (yet) another speech. If Allahpundit is right and the purpose of this address to Congress is really to push hardliners on the Left to compromise without admitting he’s doing so (which would alienate his base a fair bit more than he already has), then the President may actually accomplish something almost despite himself. We shall see.

Thomas Sowell asks a very important question

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one that I’ve been asking as well, in his latest column:

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess—for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? . . .

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Hard to argue with Dr. Sowell’s conclusion.

She said “death panels,” she meant “death panels”

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and for excellent reason, as Sarah Palin told the New York State Senate:

A great deal of attention was given to my use of the phrase “death panel” in discussing such rationing.[7] Despite repeated attempts by many in the media to dismiss this phrase as a “myth”, its accuracy has been vindicated. In the face of a nationwide public outcry, the Senate Finance Committee agreed to “drop end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”[8] Jim Towey, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, then called attention to what’s already occurring at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, where “government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.”[9] Even Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a strong supporter of President Obama, agreed that “if the government says it has to control health care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending.”[10] And of course President Obama has not backed away from his support for the creation of an unelected, largely unaccountable Independent Medicare Advisory Council to help control Medicare costs; he had previously suggested that such a group should guide decisions regarding “that huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”[11]

The fact is that any group of government bureaucrats that makes decisions affecting life or death is essentially a “death panel.” The work of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s health policy advisor and the brother of his chief of staff, is particularly disturbing on this score. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively on the topic of rationed health care, describing a “Complete Lives System” for allotting medical care based on “a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”[12]

(Full text of her testimony below.)

Gov. Palin backed this up with her op-ed this evening in the Wall Street Journal:

In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats’ proposals “will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control” by “cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . .”

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such “waste and inefficiency” and “unwarranted subsidies” in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that “in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through “normal political channels,” they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

As far as I’m concerned, she’s right on. Contrary to the misrepresentations of her position, she’s not accusing the president of wanting to fund euthanasia; the concern, rather, is that people will be denied care because some bureaucrat somewhere doesn’t think their lives have sufficient value (defined in economic terms) to be worth saving. Of course that’s what will happen—it’s inevitable. It’s also unacceptable, and here’s hoping it stays that way.

Full text of Gov. Palin’s testimony to the New York State Senate Committee on Aging:

Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz
Chair, New York Senate Aging Committee
Legislative Office Building
Room 307
Albany, NY 12247

September 8, 2009

RE: H.R. 3200: America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 and Its Impact on Senior Citizens

Dear Senator Diaz,

Thank you for asking me to participate in the New York State Senate Aging Committee’s hearing regarding H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.” You and I share a commitment to ensuring that our health care system is not “reformed” at the expense of America’s senior citizens.

I have been vocal in my opposition to Section 1233 of H.R.3200, entitled “Advance Care Planning Consultation.”[1] Proponents of the bill have described this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients. That is misleading. The issue is the context in which that information is provided and the coercive effect these consultations will have in that context.

Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often “if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual … or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility… or a hospice program.”[2] During those consultations, practitioners are to explain “the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice,” and the government benefits available to pay for such services.[3]

To understand this provision fully, it must be read in context. These consultations are authorized whenever a Medicare recipient’s health changes significantly or when they enter a nursing home, and they are part of a bill whose stated purpose is “to reduce the growth in health care spending.”[4] Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care? As one commentator has noted, Section 1233 “addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones…. If it’s all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what’s it doing in a measure to ‘bend the curve’ on health-care costs?”[5]

As you stated in your letter to Congressman Henry Waxman of California:

Section 1233 of House Resolution 3200 puts our senior citizens on a slippery slope and may diminish respect for the inherent dignity of each of their lives…. It is egregious to consider that any senior citizen … should be placed in a situation where he or she would feel pressured to save the government money by dying a little sooner than he or she otherwise would, be required to be counseled about the supposed benefits of killing oneself, or be encouraged to sign any end of life directives that they would not otherwise sign.[6]

It is unclear whether section 1233 or a provision like it will remain part of any final health care bill. Regardless of its fate, the larger issue of rationed health care remains.

A great deal of attention was given to my use of the phrase “death panel” in discussing such rationing.[7] Despite repeated attempts by many in the media to dismiss this phrase as a “myth”, its accuracy has been vindicated. In the face of a nationwide public outcry, the Senate Finance Committee agreed to “drop end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”[8] Jim Towey, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, then called attention to what’s already occurring at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, where “government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.”[9] Even Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a strong supporter of President Obama, agreed that “if the government says it has to control health care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending.”[10] And of course President Obama has not backed away from his support for the creation of an unelected, largely unaccountable Independent Medicare Advisory Council to help control Medicare costs; he had previously suggested that such a group should guide decisions regarding “that huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . .”[11]

The fact is that any group of government bureaucrats that makes decisions affecting life or death is essentially a “death panel.” The work of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama’s health policy advisor and the brother of his chief of staff, is particularly disturbing on this score. Dr. Emanuel has written extensively on the topic of rationed health care, describing a “Complete Lives System” for allotting medical care based on “a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”[12]

He also has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”[13]

Such ideas are shocking, but they could ultimately be used by government bureacrats to help determine the treatment of our loved ones. We must ensure that human dignity remains at the center of any proposed health care reform. Real health care reform would also follow free market principles, including the encouragement of health savings accounts; would remove the barriers to purchasing health insurance across state lines; and would include tort reform so as to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending connected to the filing of frivolous lawsuits. H.R. 3200 is not the reform we are looking for.

Thank you for calling attention to this important matter. I look forward to working with you again to ensure that we keep the dignity of our senior citizens foremost in any health care discussion.

Sincerely,

Governor Sarah Palin

1 See http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf
2 See HR 3200 sec. 1233 (hhh)(1); sec. 1233 (hhh)(3)(B)(1), above.
3 See HR 3200 sec. 1233 (hhh)(1)(E), above.
4 See http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf
5 See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703043.html
6 See http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/letter-congressman-henry-waxman-re-section-1233-hr-3200
7 See http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434
8 See http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/54617-finance-committee-to-drop-end-of-life-provision
9 Seehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358590107981718.html
10 See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002455.html
11 See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03Obama-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1
12 See http://www.scribd.com/doc/18280675/Principles-for-Allocation-of-Scarce-Medical-Interventions
13 Seehttp://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Where_Civic_Republicanism_and_Deliberative_Democracy_Meet.pdf

 

Sarah Palin and the Kobayashi Maru

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This was posted on Big Hollywood over a month ago now, and I have no idea how I missed it; this is just too fun. A tip of the hat to Leigh Scott for coming up with this:

Sarah Palin is Captain Kirk. Why? Because she just passed the Kobayashi Maru.

For those of you who don’t know what the Kobayashi Maru is, let me explain. In the Star Trek universe it is an unwinnable test. It’s creator, Mr. Spock, designed it to test how Starfleet captains deal with failure and death. There is no right way to successfully navigate through it.

But cadet James Tiberius Kirk found a way to beat it. He rigged the computer simulation to allow him to complete the mission without killing his crew. Starfleet accused him of cheating, but Kirk’s response was simple, eloquent, and very revealing. “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario. I don’t like to lose.” Kirk didn’t change the strategy. He changed the rules. . . .

Palin was faced with her own Kobayashi Maru. How could she effectively govern the state of Alaska while facing ridiculous ethics charges and the scrutiny of the national media? How could she increase her exposure in the lower 48 while staying true to the people in Alaska who elected her? Perhaps if the wingnuts in Alaska didn’t stalk her with silly lawsuits she would have simply put her larger ambitions on the back burner and continued to do her job as governor. But it wasn’t meant to be. She was perfectly set up to fail. Her popularity in Alaska would decline. The national media would point to it as an indicator of her overall effectiveness. The Klingons . . . I mean the left, would have won.

But Palin defied them. She changed not her strategy, but the very rules. She resigned her position, turning the state over to her loyal Lieutenant Governor to continue the plans and policies she put into motion. Like any good story, it was an unexpected twist, yet when viewed in retrospect it was the only way it could play out.

That’s an interesting analogy. You might not like the comparison between Sarah Palin and James T. Kirk in general, but as an analysis of what exactly Gov. Palin did with her resignation, I think it’s a good one.

 

On this blog in history: April 1-6, 2008

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April Fool!
Have you ever thought of April Fool’s Day as a Christian holiday?

Responsibility
A thought on a melancholy little passage from James Baldwin.

Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem
A tribute, and a consideration of his legacy and what we’ve made of it.

Brief meditation on gratitude and discipleship
True discipleship only grows from gratitude.

Thoughts on Jesus’ ascension
Yes, Ascension Day matters.

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong

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Back in May, I noted that gas prices had climbed by 60 cents a gallon in the previous several weeks and predicted that they would keep climbing; I thought there was a good chance they’d be threatening the $4 per gallon mark again by Labor Day. Instead, they’ve dropped slightly over that time (down below $2.40 a gallon here this morning); the weakness of the economy has stifled the rise that I thought I saw coming, at least for now. (For the long term, I still see people projecting a significant rise in oil prices, and the administration policies that would tend to drive that are still in place.)

I’m glad I was wrong about that. I’m glad because higher gas prices would have taken money out of our pocket as a family; I’m glad because part of the picture in all this is that the energy-tax bill hasn’t passed the Senate; and I’m glad because I think the country’s better off than it would have been had I been right.

Sarah Palin knew what she was doing

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when she stepped down and turned the Alaska governor’s office over to Sean Parnell: he’s been able to govern Alaska without the farrago of nonsense and spite that was draining her time and energy, since he isn’t Target No. 1 for the Left and its battalion of snipers, and he’s been carrying on her policies and approaches the same way she would have, as the ADN points out:

Gov. Sean Parnell is playing the state’s cards just right with the North Slope gas holders. Before they’ll invest billions in a North Slope gas pipeline, they say they need more “fiscal certainty” over future taxes than the state is currently offering. It’s too early to talk about more concessions, says Gov. Parnell. The big three gas holders are split between two different gas line projects, including one led by the state’s licensee, TransCanada. When the gas holders unite behind a common project, Gov. Parnell says, then we can talk about whether more tax certainty is really needed.

That’s absolutely the right call. . . .

With so much at stake, a misstep in this business deal could cost the state billions. As Gov. Parnell has said, in business, one rule is that you don’t negotiate against yourself. You don’t give up valuable things early in the process before you are absolutely certain it’s necessary. . . .

Gov. Parnell is not worried about being “friendly” with the oil and gas industry on the gas line. He’s doing what a responsible Alaska governor should be doing. He is taking a strong stand that protects the business interests of his “shareholders”—Alaska’s citizens—in this multibillion-dollar business deal.

So, she got free of the anklebiters and put herself in a position to influence the direction of this country on a national level through Facebook and other platforms, all without jeopardizing the success of the initiatives she’d begun in Alaska, because she knew she and her successor were on the same page and he had the skills and the understanding to finish what she’d started. Not that it’s really needed at this point, but I’d say that’s yet more vindication of Gov. Palin’s political judgment and the wisdom of her decision to resign.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin)

The angle of faith

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There are a lot of folks in this world who try to live the Christian life out of their own strength, according to their own wisdom, as it seems reasonable to them; and there are a lot of churches that cater to such folks, and operate on such principles. That, I think, is part of the reason for the modern desire for legalism that Jared Wilson has written so much about. The problem is, that just doesn’t work; you can’t live a life that is in any meaningful way Christian from the same perspective and the same set of assumptions from which the world operates. You just can’t do it. Following Christ in this life has to begin with the renewing of our minds, with a radical shift in perspective and assumptions, because it’s only from that new perspective that we can even see what the Christian life really is, let alone that it makes any sense at all.

From the world’s perspective, life is all about us; from the perspective of faith, it’s all about God. From a human perspective, the life of faith makes no sense, because we can’t control how God will take care of us; from the perspective of faith, we can see that he will always give us what is best for us, and always in time. And a human perspective on how to live the Christian life breaks down, because it understands neither the depth of our sin nor the goodness of God, into either legalism or lawlessness. The perspective of faith helps us to see just how bad our sin is, and just how thoroughly it permeates our lives—and just how great a gift our salvation is, and how wonderful the grace of God is, and how much better God is than anything this world has to offer; it inspires us to gratitude for that gift and the desire to please God, and to know God, and that is what drives the kind of life that pleases him. Indeed, only that can produce the kind of life that pleases him, because what he wants most of all is for us to seek him.

(Adapted from “The View from Saturday”)