A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

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.