Perceptions

When I woke up and saw the alarm clock flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, right away I knew what had happened--time had frozen for everyone but me.

--Johnny Bravo

I was thinking the other day about the turn of the millenium and a piece done by some news agency (or all of them) about "greatest events of the millenium". Of the "greatest" events of 1000 years, better than half of them supposedly happened in the 20th century (they threw the sixteenth century the sop of the printing press and modern drama), and better than half of those happened from 1980-1999. Now, even at the tender age of 16, it did seem to me like this was an obvious failure of perception. The twentieth century might be a very interesting century indeed, but it's hard to believe that it had more important events in it than the last nine combined. And having a distressing habit of reading old books, it did seem to me that people in 1930 might have quarreled with the idea that nothing much really happened (besides a couple world wars) in the 20th century until around 1988 or so.

It's easy to make fun of Johnny and the news gang, but the reality is that we all make mistakes in our perception. It's easy enough to see them when other people make them, but not so easy when we ourselves are walking around, amazed at how time has frozen for everyone but us. Two mistakes that Christians make as a group have been before me lately.

The first one is what I'll call the We Must Protect the Republic mistake. Any of you who read this blog with any kind of regularity will know that I don't advocate that Christians stay out of public life, but politics is sort of like eating: good and lots of fun when you do it right, can take over your life if you do it wrong.

Christians in America have a tendency to think that it's our first duty to legislate right and wrong in the country. I won't repeat the old saw "you can't legislate morality" because, obviously, you can--we wouldn't have laws against murder if we didn't think you could--but we go about it backward. We get all upset about something like gay marriage or whether or not the courts are deeming it constitutional this week to have the Decalogue in public buildings. We mobilize support and write our congresspeople and make speeches on television.

What ends up happening is that we expend a great deal of energy that is, therefore, NOT spent on preaching the Gospel. (No, "Gay marriage is an oxymoron" is not the content of the Gospel.) This is surely a failure of our perception-- in 1000 years, it won't matter one whit whether or not Americans had some legal form by which homosexuals could leave their property to each other. It will matter, however, how many people became Christians. You see, those people will still exist, either in heaven or hell.

(Sometime I will write a post and deal with gay marriage in more detail; for now suffice it to look at the oxymoron point above.)

So, politics can be a fun hobby and even something we do for a living, but running the most successful political campagin there ever was is less important than raising up one godly child. If we dwell on eternal things, our perspective will reflect this.

The other failure of perception isn't unique to American Christians or even to modern Christians. I mean the easy way we forget that we have another, eternal life coming and that this life is just Freshman Orientation for that one, as it were.

We get all tangled up in how we're going to pay our mortgage, or whether we'll be able to send the kids to college, or if we're "fufilled as a person", or if we have a "normal" marriage, or if the country is going to the dogs, or fill-in-the-blank. Not that these things should be ignored, but if we have an accurate perception, we'll be able to put them where they belong: primarily, they are just opportunities to learn to obey and trust the Person we'll spend the very real rest of our eternal life with.

This is why the Lord told us to watch birds and lilies as a specific reminder that we're not to worry about material provision or the future.

Me, whenever I see a lily from now on, I'm going to think: "12:00, 12:00, 12:00."

Cheers,

Breanna