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Christian life: applied

My brothers and sisters, something is on my heart today. It’s this: rumor abounds in the land that we are bad tippers.

The other day I was having breakfast with a brother and he originally put down a tip that was only about 10%. We had prayed before our meal, and I knew the waitress had seen that. It happened to be a Sunday morning, so it called to mind the stereotypes about how wait-staff hate to work Sundays, because they don’t make any money on the church crowd.

Quickly, I added a few more dollars to bring the tip up to a more appropriate level.

I tell this story not to boast about my own tipping. I do my best, but I’m not rich. I tell it as an example for all of us.

When we are out in public and pray over a meal, the world sees “Christians.”  By our public act of faith, we have invited the world to make judgments about “Christians” based on how we act.

I know and you know that judging a whole group of people by the actions of one or a few is a form of bigotry. But this is the world we live in, and we must be aware that, when we publicly identify ourselves by our relationship with God, then all the followers of Jesus are being judged along with us.

Second Corinthians tells us, “We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us.” The case for Jesus is being made through us! How we treat the people around us, helps people get to know Jesus. And “how we treat them” definitely includes tipping them.

The word is full of exhortations to those who employ servants to treat them with love and respect. We must never lose sight of it.

There’s a old trope among us — the idea of “tracting.” It refers to leaving a bible verse on the table. Some believers go so far as to leave a tract in place of a tip, or alongside a very poor tip.

And how well will that be received?

The person bringing our food depends on our tips for their livelihood. If we want to share the word of God with them, how much better will they receive it if we make a nice impact on that livelihood.

Love your fellow humans. Tip them well when they bring you food. When you do, you are increasing the chances that they’ll get to know Jesus for who he is.

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Good cold, bad cold

I’ve never actually measured it, but I think the change happens somewhere around 10 degrees above zero.

Somewhere above ten is the good cold. It braces you, calls out the frontier history in you, and challenges you. You respond by focusing in tighter on getting the fire going, because being sloppy and rushed about it will just keep you cold longer. You respond by loving your zero-degree sleeping bag even more.

In the good cold, I want to run out to meet it. The good cold fills me with the knowledge that this is real life, and I am beating it.

In the bad cold, things are a little different. In the bad cold, I just want to get inside, crank up my electric heat, and not even come near the windows because those will be too cold.

I’m not exactly sure where the boundary is, between good cold and bad cold.

But negative ten degrees is the bad cold. Of that, I’m pretty sure this morning.

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God loves us

There is no one who God does not love. There is not one single person. Each of us makes different mistakes than another, but there is no behavior that can cause God to stop loving us.

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Don’t make things hard for others

This morning I was reading Romans 14. (Actually, I was having it read to me — The Bible App is great!) The line that really stood out to me was this: “make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.”

The kind of person I want to be is this: one who helps people see that Jesus loves everyone, wants everyone. Sometimes in the past, I’ve let my strong feelings about a couple different political issues interfere with that. I express my opinion about those issues in a way that causes people to feel judged and rejected.

When I do that, I am putting a stumbling block in the way of my brothers and sisters.

Loving Jesus is too big for any one thing to sum up the whole point of it. But if I was to try and sum it up, this would be a key element: “when we screw up and hurt people, he can fix that.”

Please help me use my attempts to get back to writing in a way that also makes me a good ambassador for you Lord.

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Trying again

I had to put blogging aside for a time. I found that writing about politics often causes me to struggle with anger. The more I write about Obamacare or gun control, the less and less I want to treat people on the other side of the aisle with respect.

But that’s the whole point of this blog. I want to be a person who is active in politics who does not mock, scorn, and belittle the other side. I want to be a person who speaks with respect. More important, I want to be a person who disagrees with respect.

So, I’ll try again. I will write in a way that demonstrates decency and kindness, or I won’t write.

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Making Obamacare work

Many people in American politics who lean to the left have a strange belief. They believe that Republicans do something wrong when we refuse to help Obamacare work.

Let me explain something:

The individual mandate harms my friends and neighbors. The individual mandate harms me. The individual mandate harms my country.

When confronted with something that harms people you care about, the loving, kind choice is to try to prevent that harm. The loving, kind choice is never to assist in harm.

Here’s an offer to people on the left: If you will join me in saving the people and the country I love from the evil of the individual mandate, I will join you in trying to make this law work.

But of course, when confronted with offers like that in the past, Obamacare supporters have said, the individual mandate is indispensable. The law can’t work without it.

Very well.

No change to the individual mandate, no help from Republicans.

I want all my fellow Americans to have health coverage if they want it. I want all my fellow Americans to have financial security in the event of illness.

But I do not want it so bad that I will destroy the freedom of people I love just to get it.

End the mandate, and Republican “obstructionism” will change.

Keep the mandate, and you are participating in an evil enterprise which must be ended by whatever nonviolent means are at hand.

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Love can never be the law

Many legislators or politicians make a fairly simple chain of reasoning. Jesus says help the poor. Social security, SNAP, AFDC, welfare, medicaid, and many other forms of government spending help the poor. Therefore Christians should support them.

The fact which gets left out of that chain of reasoning is that all of those programs are funded by taxation, and taxation is never voluntary. If you get to choose whether or not to pay, it’s not called a tax, it’s called a suggested contribution. No one may live in a country and not pay its taxes.

Taxation is always backed up by the implicit threat that you will be found guilty of breaking the law if you don’t pay. The IRS will accuse you of tax evasion. A court will find you guilty and sentence you to pay a fine. If you don’t pay that fine, the government will take your money and your things without your consent. If you wont give up your money and your things, you will go to prison.

Jesus does not endorse that relationship. Jesus came to set the captives free, not to put more people in prison. Jesus came to allow people to choose, not to force them.

Choosing to help the poor pleases God. Grudgingly allowing a system based on force to take your money against your will and spend it on the poor does not please God.

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God will never force you.

God is love. –1 John 4:8

Love does not insist on its own way. — 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 (ESV)

God will never force you. He will always let you choose everything about your own conduct. He may make it very clear to us which we he would go, but he will always leave the choice whether or not to say yes or no.

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Kantian Categorical Imperative

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from the 1700’s. He wrote a famous idea of how to treat other people. He called it the “Categorical Imperative,” or “the thing you should always try to do, no matter what your circumstances are.”

His idea of the way to treat people was written, in its initial language, this way:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Of course, the older language makes it harder for us to relate to in the era of 140-character tweets. Let’s try paraphrasing it.

Never treat a person as a means. Always treat every person as an end in themselves.

Here the word “means” is used to mean “something you use” and the words “an end in themselves” means “the goal.”

And so a further paraphrase might read, “never use people to achieve your own goals. Always treat people in a way that works toward their own goals.”

It’s a fairly workable definition of love, frankly. If we accept it as a good way to treat people, it poses a good question for modern American politics:

What does all this say about a system that forces one person to buy health insurance in order to achieve the goal of making it affordable for someone else?

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My hunting rifle hang up

I like cool guns, and I am not ashamed. All guns are good. But I like them better with a black stock, and Picatinny rails, and a pistol grip.

That makes it hard to buy a hunting rifle. I keep wanting to buy a ridiculous contraption with a 40-round mag hanging off it. An ordinary run-of-the-mill AR platform weapon can surely be used to hunt deer. But first of all it’s not very comfortable to have it bumping against my back on a sling, and second — and more important — I like to hunt elk, not just deer, and .223 isn’t really a suitable elk-hunting cartridge.

I know, I know, any cartridge will take an elk if you place it right. I’m just not that much of a marksman.

I also know that one can buy AR Platform weapons in .308, which is a caliber I feel confident about ethical elk hunting with. You can, in fact, buy AR’s in 300 Win Mag and other big game calibers. But they’re heavy, heavy, heavy.

Once I bought a Savage Model 10 with a bull barrel and an ultimate sniper stock. Heavy? The word heavy is inadequate. I actually did carry it around in the field a few times. It’s a good thing I didn’t find game, I was too tired to hold the crosshairs on the target.

So, I have a nice, ordinary, boring Ruger American on the way. It’s light. It’s .308. It’s inexpensive. It’s absolutely positively fine as a hunting rifle.

But man, I sure wish they made an after-market pistol grip and adjustable stock for it!