I never stop marveling at the way Christian peoples older than 1960 sacrificed so much for the future of their progeny.  Especially the founding fathers, promising and many of them actually giving up their lives   fortunes and their sacred honor.  Then we started passing laws making it almost impossible for families to pass down their hard work to their children.  We started wracking up debt which God knows how many future generations it will take to pay back. And we build national retirement systems and healthcare systems, which are just pyramid schemes on the backs of our children and their children.  

We are selfish. We only care about ourselves, right now.  I think this leads to a couple of large scale problems that are related.  Vaccines and the Church.  Vaccines work on a population level not on an individual scale.  Inoculating a small percent of people doesn’t really do anything.  But when entire populations are inoculated many many lives are spared and many diseases have been irradiated all together.  This is indisputable medical fact.  But today we play the small game.  We find the most diseased tree in a forest more healthy than any forest in history, that we know of (we don’t know much about the ancients), and we make that tree the rule.  But this was always the case.  There are always a few people who react poorly to any medical treatment.  That’s just the way it is.  But we can’t define the process based on those few.  At a certain point, maybe but that’s a first world problem.  You have to solve all the 3rd world problems first.  And you can’t lament every pioneer who got hurt along the way.  Those men of old sacrificed for the greater good.  They put their shoulders to the plow and carved out civilization so that their children would not have it so hard.  They were playing the long game and so they won it.  We amplify every small problem on blog posts and semi-news organizations to the point that we forget all the good that has been accomplished.  We pick nits.  We are focused on our narrow selves instead of the large scale as it relates to disease and many other things.

There are a lot of examples but I am reminded of one concerning air travel.  We all want everything to be safe, but the reality is that accidents do happen. It’s because sin is in the world.  Despite modern man thinking he can overcome anything, the problem is not a lack of education or a lack of government safety.  Sometimes there is no one to sue.  But it might seem like a good idea to demand 100% success in airplane flights.  No accidents ever.  And it might be possible, but it would cost a fortune.  As a result air travel would be so expensive that people would drive instead.  But since driving is much less safe than even mediocre air travel, the end result would be more people dying in cars.  This perceived problem of the imperfect plane is exacerbated very similar to the vaccine that harmed that one kid.  A plane crash makes the news everywhere.  But the fact that over 100 people die every day in auto accidents goes unnoticed.  This is the problem of the seen and the unseen from Bastiat.  Focusing on the small personal thing can result in the greater system going to pot.[I actually wrote this before the recent grounding of Boeing 737 Max planes, but the overreaction proves my point.]

And it’s the same with the Gospel.  We think it’s all about us and our church or our town or our country.  If things aren’t working out then it’s the end times or something.  I always remember old Christians talking to each other when I was a kid.  They reminded me and one other that no one is necessary.  God is doing a big work, he doesn’t need you.  The Church has grown for 2000 years, and is still growing today. There were many losses along the way, caualties, lost battles.   But you can’t focus on these look at the glorious big picture.  I can’t remember the movie, but I  have an image in my head of a War movie where a tremendous victory has been won.  The parades are marching down the streets of the America confetti everywhere.  But even as all the celebration is going on, the military is knocking on the door of small town America and handing grieving families a flag.  There are always casualties in war on the winning side.  And this is a war.  Since the introduction of the camera, we don’t win wars anymore, because we don’t like to see even one casualty.  We focus on the grieving family instead of the parade.

So you had a bad day at work and come home and throw your Christianity in the garbage.  Well maybe it’s not so dramatic but we do the same thing in many small ways.  Because we think it’s about us being saved from our problems right now.  Instead of saving the whole earth from the enslaving rule and reign of demonic powers.  I was surprised to travel the world and hear different people talk about their nations.  Almost every people has pride.  And often it is pride in old accomplishment.  They are in a sense has-beens.  Uncle Rico lived back in 1982, but the Greeks lived back in 300 BC. when Hellenic culture brought many good things to the world.  The Acropolis today is no longer a shrine to a pantheon of gods is is a shrine to a Greek people who founded Western Civilization.  The Italians look back with pride on the Renaissance when their art and culture raised the bar for the world.  The Spanish once ruled the seas.  French once had the lingua-Franca.  The coptic Christians and the Armenian Christians seem to fight over who has the older church.  The Egyptians point to the pyramids.  The Chinese claim an almost-science older than anything in the west.  The sun never went down on the British Empire.  And then there is America.  I think we are at that tipping point.  The MAGA hat is the sign of the end.  We are becoming has-beens, harkening back to those better days when we won WWII and  saved the world.  When we advanced manufacturing of everything, invented the modern world and went to the moon.  This time has the air of the Greek man on the sidewalk surrounded by graffiti sprayed on horrid modern human hives, reminiscing about the good old days 2300 years ago.  Or the Armenian girl in Lebanon assuring me that she is part of the oldest church in the world.

The Jews are still looking for the messiah to bring them back to the glory days of Solomon, and the king who would make the world their footstool.  The Muslims think they were promised the world.  And endless angst fueled destruction has been the result.  But we ‘Mericans are falling into the same trap.  The world was not promised to America it was promised to the body of Christ, the congregation of God’s people, the Church.  It includes everyone.  Maybe God leaves this land barren without one single Christian and moves his focus over to Korea or China or West Africa.  So be it.

It is a strange thing because on the other side from the ‘Mericans living the glory days of the 4th of July , are the crazy secularists, burning everything down.  Even a lot of ‘Christians’ are in this camp, foolishly destroying all the tenants of their faith.  Their misplaced faith isn’t in this nation it’s in multinationalism, globalism, pluralism and ultimately in the uber selfishness of sexual perversion.  This conflict has come into vivid contrast the past few weeks in the Methodist church.  While many liberal branches sell out to the PC culture of perversion, the churches in Africa are standing firm on orthodoxy.  They will inherit the Earth.  Destroying the idols of both the nation worshippers and the diversity worshippers.

We need to pull our heads away from the self centered world we build on our portable phones and look around at what is going on in the bigger screen God lays out for us every day.  We were not promised perfect comfort and ease if we accepted Jesus.  It’s not about us.  Church isn’t about feeling good for the rest of the week.  It’s not a cry in for the gay guy and his supposed persecution.  We were promised that Jesus would rule the world and if we accepted this truth we would be spared the destruction and further, we would be blessed.  It’s a war and we are called to fight for the hearts of the world enslaved to all these old lies.  But we can’t enshrine ourselves in the stone memorials of our past victories never to fight again.  We can’t live in the good old days.  The work is not finished.  We want to finish the race faithfully. Our best day should not be the 4th of July 1776, or the 8th of May 1945, it should be tomorrow.