A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

In his review of a book titled On The Side of The Angels, Paul Starr wrote this opening paragraph:

Partisanship is resurgent in America, and hardly anyone likes it. To say that American politics has become polarized along party lines is tantamount, for most people, to acknowledging that something has gone wrong with the country. And, indeed, the differences between Republicans and Democrats are less easily bridged than in the past: the two parties now stand for different worldviews, not just different policy positions.

Is there really a Republican worldview and a Democratic worldview? If so, I wonder what they look like. The book Professor Starr (Princeton University) was reviewing is about partisan politics, and it is the contention of the book that America has become more partisan in the last few decades, to the detriment of the country.

Whether or not that is true, I find it interesting that we can — or at least someone can — identify a worldview for Republicans and one for Democrats. And the reason it interests me is that it causes me to ask this question: Could they do the same for Christians?

Often times the answer is no, because while differences between the two major political parties may be “less easily bridged than in the past,” many Christians seem to be working hard to see that differences between Christianity and the world are more easily bridged than in the past. It is Christians, I contend, and not those “of the world,” who are trying to blur the differences. And that neither honors the commitment of Christianity nor helps the world.

Partisanship may be a bad thing for the political system in America — in fact if members of any political party care more about their agenda than they do about the country, they will be poor servants of the country. But the error on the side of Christianity, I contend, is that its members have not been partisan enough.

I have a routine of sorts, a commitment that I have made to myself and a promise to the Creator God.

I won’t eat each day until I have spent time in the Word and time in prayer. My standard is to spend as much time feeding on the Word and in conversation with God as I might spend at the table feeding my physical body.

My prayer time is spent walking. If I were more time conscious I’d walk faster or even run and pray to get more out of my time/effort. I used to do it that way. Not any more. Now I just walk, saunter, trod, mosey along because my intent is to pray, think, listen, and pray. To exercise my spiritual self, not my physical self. My prayer walk is not particularly pleasant to the senses. There are lots of houses on one side, busy roads on the other, parking lots and even a large factory and some office buildings. There is one stretch that is especially unpleasant when I look down, so I don’t, remembering that the reason I am out on the walk is to look up. Sometimes, I also push Mia along. Perhaps some day she’ll ask me what I am doing, and I will tell her. (more…)

The great Samuel Johnson famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

I wonder how Dr. Johnson would have characterized the several million people who publish various thoughts on the Internet under what are called “blogs” and pass them off as writing? Are they writing for money, are they blockheads, or are they perhaps writing for some other reason?

All of the above are true. Some write blogs for money, some for fame, and some write because they can’t help but write. None of those make the writing good, except in this way: if someone has a gift, a facility, a talent for writing and uses it, even in writing a blog, that is good because the gift is being used. The worst way to treat a gift is to fail to use it. No one has to convince Barack Obama of that.

The president-elect of the United States seems to have a gift for marketing and public relations, especially when it comes to marketing himself. It is far from clear to me that he has a gift for leading, a gift for making tough choices, a gift for grace, or even a gift for change, because all of those things get swallowed up in the marketing.

President-elect Obama has now created a web site dedicated to — you guessed it — more marketing and p.r. for President-elect Obama. He’s already started campaigning for his second term (in fact he started doing so publicly in his speech on election night) and I’m confident we’ll continue to see that (and more) on a regular basis for the next two months or so. By that time he’ll have to actually start doing the job of President and stop campaigning for a while, and I fear it will be a shock to his system.

So I’m just a little concerned: I want Obama to be an excellent president, and I’m praying for that. And I want him to use his gifts in ways that honor God. But it seems to me that his best gift — self promotion –  is not a gift with which that is easily done.

In the sense of foretelling the future, I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. Eli Stone can’t say that, but I can.

There have been times, though, when I have — and I know this sounds very strange — “known” what was going to happen in the future. Call it insight, call it deductive reasoning, call it a hallucination, or call it a lucky guess, but I have known. You might even call what I have known “prophecy,” but I stick with my earlier statement about neither nor the son of.

Was Minister Louis Farrakhan acting as a prophet when he called Barack Obama “the Messiah?” To be fair, his statement might have meant that Jesus (the Messiah) was speaking through Obama. The proof he offered for his outrageous statement, in either case, was that young people were listening to Obama. Young people also listen to rap music, Shrek, and Big Bird, but I digress.

My point is that I foretold Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office years and years ago, probably during the 1996 DNC. (I used to live in Illinois, and the boy made a splash when Carol Moseley Braun was the first African-American woman to win a senate seat and he was credited with helping her do so.) Had I been a betting man, I would have known to call Ladbroke’s and get down 10 quid on Obama to win. Then on January 21, 2009, I could have retired. Instead, I’ll be continuing to work and pay taxes, only now I’ll probably pay more of them.

Obama himself is prophecying a “changed” future. That’s pretty easy — there is a new sheriff in town, so change seems likely — but what is tough is figuring out where the change will occur. One place that might happen is within Obama himself.

In fact I’d predict that, except that I am not a prophet.

I like to play indoor games, pretty much any kind that relies more on strategy than chance. It’s fun to play people who give their all, even to something as trivial as checkers.

What ruins a game for me is to have an opponent who gets so consumed by the competition that a loss makes them bitter and angry. I’ve seen such players display poor sportsmanship so that they lash out verbally or throw components of the game. Who can forget John McEnroe and his insults and racquet-throwing? 

Running for a political office is another kind of game, albeit one with much higher stakes. We’ve seen candidates do all kinds of things in the wake of an election, hoping somehow to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Does the phrase “hanging chad” ring any bells? Or remember how last year’s electoral corruption threw the supposedly stable country of Kenya into a frightening degree of turmoil?

Something in us wants to fight to get our way, to be recognized for our effort and ability. I’ve been chased all over the chess board, long after I should have just tipped my inept king over and admitted, “Enough!”

It takes a strong person to admit defeat, and to do so with grace and humility. Knowing personally how difficult that can be, I appreciate the way John McCain, during the U.S. presidential election 2008, conceded defeat to Barack Obama as soon as polls closed in California: 

The American people have spoken and they have spoken clearly. . . . I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises, to bridge our differences, and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited. . . . It is natural — it’s natural tonight to feel some disappointment, but tomorrow we must move beyond it and work together to get our country moving again. 

A thrice-quoted statement in the Bible speaks to this: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Proverbs 3:34, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5).

I wonder what shape God’s “grace” will take in terms of McCain? in terms of me?

How do you know when God is trying to tell you something?

That’s a question a lot of Christians ask, and probably a lot of non-Christians, too. The truth is, although it sounds like a cop-out to some people, you just know. Take my brother, for instance, who knew that a knock on the head was a message from God.

My brother and sister-in-law (Bill and Dee Dee) live in Virginia where they are alpaca farmers. (If they did this same activity in the west it would be called “ranching.” In the east, raising anything on the land, including animals, is called “farming.”) Anyway, they have a place called Rivanna River Farm, around 20 acres of very pretty land with hills and trees and the Rivanna River running through it. And they raise alpacas.

Anyway, here’s the part about the knock on the head… (more…)