Author: Tim

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Sometimes it’s Time To Celebrate the Boring

I’m going to build a little on last week’s post. In that post I talked about how sometimes it feels like spreading the Gospel can seem like it’s having no effect or is falling on deaf ears. The post also highlighted the encouragement found in the parable of the sower, which teaches that all sowers (people spreading the Gospel) are fruitful to some degree.

I’ve been writing articles for this blog for some time now. Last month was the blog’s seven-year anniversary. I’ve written on some of the inspiring things I’ve seen, some of the weird things I’ve done, and some of the mundane things I’ve been a part of (and a whole lot of other stuff, too). If every person has a story to tell, this blog is the most centralized record of my story.

In the months leading up to starting this site, it was something I had to wrestle with. I felt led to start blindly sending these little anecdotes from my life out into cyberspace. “But why, God? I mean sure, I know You can use it, but…me? What do I have to say that others haven’t already said?”

I’m an introvert who gets drained by interaction with lots of people, but I still have a lot to say. It turns out the practice of putting these posts online is almost like God saying to me “Look, I know you. I know what’s too much for you, and I know what will break you. There’s a reason you’ve done the things you’ve done and lived the life you’ve lived, and this is Me asking you to turn those experiences into illustrations for people I want to hear something you’ve learned. At the same time, I’m allowing you to do it in a way that suits who you are. You’re not doing speaking engagements. You’re not on the road away from your family, doing events where you’re shaking lots of hands and pretending like you’re going to remember everybody’s name. You’re writing these posts from the comfort of your own home. I’ll tell you what…you just keep going until I let you know it’s time to stop. In the meantime, I’ll bring the people I want to the specific post I want them to see.”

And so here we are. This is post number 400 for DareGreatlyNow.com. That’s a big, round number, and a milestone worthy of reflection. I’m completely oblivious to what kind of impact all those posts (or sometimes individual posts) are having. I’ll only find out the full story after I’ve taken my last breath. I know the site has hosted visitors from almost every country in the world at some point or another, but don’t know the extent to which those readers agree with whatever they’re reading, or if it even has an effect on their thinking at all. It can be a little maddening in that sense. Sometimes I have to remind myself of the attitude I should be having. I picture God saying “Hey…eyes on Me. You don’t work for them, you work for Me, you understand? You just keep going until I let you know it’s time to stop, and I’ll take care of everything else. You’ve been very faithful with this so far, don’t think I haven’t seen it. I’m using your stuff in something I’m working on, so don’t give up now. Keep going. We’ll talk more about it later.”

Sometimes I take a look at what posts have been read in the last month, and it can be surprising. Something I thought would have been a great post gets minimal hits, while some unexpected little ditty from years ago is in the top 10. I guess that’s God bringing the people He wants to the post He wants them to see.

I heard a leadership speaker recently say something you don’t often hear: “Great leadership is boring. You don’t have to be the best to be a great leader, you just have to be consistent.” Then he threw this math equation out there, and it’s one that resonated with me. He said (Consistency + Faithfulness) x Time = Lasting Impact. That was an encouragement as well, because that’s the model I try to bring to DareGreatlyNow.com. Someday I’ll find out the whole story.

So with this milestone, thank you so much to those who have shown support over the years. I appreciate you reading some of my posts!

Lord I thank You and praise You for knowing me better than I know myself, and for a calling that is custom-designed to be one I can embrace. The consistent work on this effort, using what You’ve given me, is what I consider my version of “a living sacrifice,” and I offer it to You as an act of worship and dedication. Thank you that I don’t have to worry about finding the person who’s supposed to read something, knowing You’ll take care of that need. Thank You for providing such a wide variety of experiences to draw from, and for safety (mostly) during them all. I ask that these efforts will be a blessing to someone, and that You’d use at least one of them to grow or otherwise benefit Your Kingdom. With sincere gratitude, Amen.

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Is Anybody Even Listening to What I Say?

Very few people know this about me (or remember it), but I had an odd way of trying to make extra money once upon a time. After college I moved back in with Mom and Dad and my main job was working in construction while I paid back student loans. The money was good, but the job usually only went until about 3 pm and I had some extra time and energy as a young 20-something, so I went looking for a side hustle. Oddly enough, there was a brief chapter in my life where I was a telemarketer.

Now you have to understand, I hate when telemarketers call me, so it was an interesting development. This was more than 20 years ago; back then it wasn’t robo-calls, it was actual pick-up-the-phone-and-call-someone stuff. I got a huge list of phone numbers, broken down by Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones. I didn’t have names, just phone numbers. To provide privacy to our home phone number, the system was set up so I’d call and log into it, and then I’d be able to dial other phone numbers from there.

I had a script to use for pitching the product. Truth be told, I don’t even remember what I was trying to sell, or who I worked for. I called so many phone numbers. Hardly anybody answered. It would be some ridiculous ratio like, call 10 numbers to get someone who picks up, but only one in 10 people you talk to would even listen to your whole pitch, so you’d have to make like, a hundred calls before you even get a glimmer of hope. (And that’s probably being generous.) Between all those calls and tying up Mom and Dad’s phone line, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this wasn’t worth the effort for me. I quit without ever making a sale.

Not to discourage anybody, but it can kinda feel like that sometimes with spreading the Gospel. You can have tons of conversations, you can scatter that seed far and wide, and you can live your life in a way that people know there’s something different about you, but sometimes you wonder if you’re making a difference for the Kingdom of Christ.

For those of you who may feel this way, I’d like to point you to the parable of the sower, found in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As Jesus explained the parable to them, He explained that some people who heard the Gospel received it with gladness but then rejected it at the first sign of trouble, or how others had the Good News choked out by worry or wealth. Finally though, He talked about the good soil. Matthew 13:23 says “But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

This is very heartening news! Although there will be varying degrees of fruitfulness, this verse is saying that all Christians will be fruitful to some degree. Nobody’s wasting their time. Don’t quit spreading the Good News. You might not be there when someone “crosses the threshold,” but your efforts can be part of the collective body of work that it takes to get them to that threshold. Think of a tree branch that snaps under the weight of snow in a snowstorm. On their own, each individual snowflake doesn’t do much, but at the direction of the Holy Spirit, the collective weight of all of them brings them to the point where something big happens.

So keep spreading the news with gladness wherever you are and in whatever role you find yourself. You’ll only find out the full story of your impact in Heaven.

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Quick Hit: What are You Actually Celebrating This Week?

This one’s probably going to rub some people the wrong way, but I just need to throw a little reminder out here: sure, Halloween is a fun time to let little kids get dressed up and walk around to neighbors’ houses to get candy, but there’s a whole lot about it that isn’t so innocent.

In the Northern Virginia area, people go crazy with Halloween decorations. While a lot of it is silly and fun, I don’t have to drive very far to see 9-foot-tall skeletons, some pretty demented-looking blood-soaked psychos, and evil-looking supernatural-themed decorations. People go over the top; one family nearby has a husband/dad who loves the scary stuff, but it’s a little too much for the wife/mom. The compromise was to buy an event-style tent so he could put it on the front lawn and fill it with the sicko stuff, because she didn’t want a yardful of it tormenting the kiddos in the neighborhood.

Halloween celebrates death and evil. I’m not sure how we got to the point where we think it’s a good idea to put up “cutesy” 26-foot-tall (no exaggeration) inflatable slashers in our yards.

I’m not going to sit here and say that the birth of Christ in a manger makes for a flashier lawn decoration than some of the craziness I see in peoples’ yards right now, but it is definitely more consequential. If you’re a big decorator during the Halloween season, I don’t think that makes you a bad person. Lots of people make lots of fun and light-hearted skeleton decorations. If you’re a Christian though, does your enthusiasm for Halloween decorations match that of your zeal for Christ-focused Christmas decorations (not Santa, reindeer, icicles, and gift-themed)? Sure, let’s make dress-up fun for the little kids, but remember that the actions you take to celebrate Halloween are helping shape the perspectives of what’s to be celebrated in younger generations. Let’s steer them away from celebrating death and toward celebration of new life and second chances.

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RSVPing in the Negative

When my two oldest kids were little, I’d often come home from work and be greeted by two little balls of energy. Mommy stayed home with them, so when I came home I’d try to give her at least some kind of break by taking them off her hands even if it was for just a few minutes. One particular day was very pleasant outside, so I went into the house intending to come back outside with one or both kids in tow shortly thereafter.

I walked in and got some big hugs from everybody. My little guy looked like he was up for a walk, so I said “Hey Buddy, I need to go get the mail. Would you like to go to the mailbox with me?”

In about as sweet a tone as you can imagine, he said “Umm, I don’t, but I wish I did.”

That little memory makes me think of some people’s walk with God. Some of them honestly and earnestly seek to do God’s will for their life. Others know they should pursue that goal, but for whatever reason, it takes a back seat to other priorities. They wish they had the time or the drive, but they don’t really have their hearts set on it. Others don’t even aspire to that much.

My little guy didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want to disappoint Daddy, either. I wasn’t mad or disappointed in him; I knew he might very well turn me down. God knows before we do how we’ll arrange our priorities. He’s not surprised when we choose not to prioritize the things He offers us.

Although it’s super easy to be distracted by the urgency of the things we encounter in this life, the Christian life is about living your life according to how God wants you to. Give it a try. I think you’ll be blessed in ways you didn’t expect.

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It’s Tough for Me To Care About That

While visiting my parents one summer, my wife and I took our three kiddos out for ice cream. As we stood inside, waiting to order, I looked around the place and noticed a fun little bit of décor that caught my eye.

Framed in a corner of the room was an autographed picture of the group “Fighting Gravity.” This group was a blacklight performance act on the talent show “America’s Got Talent” (AGT) in the year 2010. I had watched the show that season and thought they were very entertaining, and thought it was fun to see some kind of local connection.

I don’t remember what year this was, but I’d ballpark it somewhere in the early 2020s. I thought it a little odd for this place to have an autograph from that group, and figured there must be some kind of personal connection between this ice cream shop and some member of Fighting Gravity. As we were waiting to place our order, I asked someone behind the counter about the picture. She wasn’t sure, and turned to ask one of her coworkers. Turns out she didn’t know either, and taking a quick poll, nobody at the store knew anything about that signed picture. In fact, nobody seemed to even know what “Fighting Gravity” was. It had only been about 10 years and I could understand that nobody working there had watched the show, but already none of them knew anything about the picture’s significance. Maybe if the proprietor had written something down it would have been easier to convey the story to people curious about the connection.

Did you ever wonder why God took the time to include all those boring genealogies in the Old Testament? Odds are you probably skipped over them or only skimmed them. Since it’s just a bunch of names of people nobody remembers, there’s not much purpose to them, right? Well if 2 Timothy 3:16 is correct, there’s purpose for all scripture. Here are a few reasons why they might be important.

  • The listing of all those individuals helps demonstrate scripture’s accuracy. By listing the physical existence of actual people you can trace back, we can verify that the Bible contains actual confirmed records of things, and isn’t just some collection of fictional stories. It’s authentic and contains historical records.
  • They confirm prophecy. The Messiah was prophesied to come from the line of David. By the time Jesus walked the earth, those lineages were long in the past, but recording those lineages helps check more boxes in the “prophesies fulfilled by Jesus” category.
  • Each name represents an actual person’s lifetime. God doesn’t see Israel as a collection of vague characters all lumped together; He sees them as individuals, each with highs and lows, victories and failures. Those are real people, and God is involved in the details of each of their lives.
  • Some genealogies reveal God’s favor for gentiles, even though they weren’t part of His chosen people. Ruth and Rahab are both part of Christ’s ancestral lineage, even though they were not Jewish. The Lord cares about each person He’s created; He values them all, and He invites them all to come to Him.

The bottom line is that genealogies reinforce the significance of God’s promises. Yeah, they can be pretty boring if you’re not very interested in that kind of thing. It’s important to remember, though, that all of Scripture and all of God’s plans tie together; if He takes the time and care to arrange fulfillment of the “boring” promises, it suggests He’ll fulfill the other ones, too.

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Be Very Aware of the Power of Your Words

Did you know your words can have an impact that lasts for years, or even decades?

I used to work with a dude I’ll call Marcus. This was a guy who used to be a Green Beret in the Army. When he was growing up in the Midwest, still a young teenager, Marcus had a cousin who was some kind of all-star football player at the state level. I guess this cousin was also a beast in the weight room, because he could bench press, like, 400+ pounds, while he was still in high school.

I guess he started making a name for himself, and the cousin got to be something of a local celebrity athlete. As you can imagine, it lit a fire under his younger cousin, Marcus, to start hitting the weights. He began visiting the weight room pretty regularly, and started making some significant gains. He was excited when he finally put up 225 pounds. Now, you’re not going to win any competitions by benching 225 a single time, but it is a substantial milestone. This is kind of when you graduate to being able to lift some serious weight. Up until now, putting weights on the bar consists of a large iron plate on either side, accompanied by a smattering of smaller weights. Once you hit 225, you get to put two of the largest plates on each side, and this much cleaner appearance makes it easy for everybody to know exactly how much you’re doing.

Proud of his accomplishment, Marcus informed his grandpa of his progress. “Grandpa! I bench pressed 225!” The response wasn’t what Marcus was looking for. Instead of an “atta boy!” or “great job, Son!,” he got a different answer. “Oh, looks like you’ve got a ways to go!”

Much later in his life, when I worked with him, Marcus was 41 years old and had just benched 345 pounds in his basement gym. Twenty-five or so years after they were uttered, Grandpa’s words were still echoing in Marcus’ mind, taunting him.

Be careful with your words. The positive ones are nice, and are often encouraging, but they get drowned out pretty easily by all the noise out there. The negative ones stick around longer and have a lot more staying power. While it’s true that negative criticism can drive people to do things they might not otherwise be able to do, is it your place to offer that kind of “help?” Not everybody is able to turn those hurtful or thoughtless words into motivation and drive. Of those who can, many of them carry around needless stress because of it. Consider offering encouragement, and if that’s coming up short, only then consider alternative ways of helping them move toward their goal.

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This is not a Situation Where you Want to Panic

I used to go skydiving out of this tiny little drop zone outside a tiny little town in Texas. This place was out in the sticks. The airport also served as the base for at least one cropduster. There weren’t many drop zones nearby; this one took about 90 minutes for me to drive to. The little single-engine Cessna we used seemed to groan each time it lifted off the ground. The people were nice, and I just really wanted to go jumping, so I couldn’t be terribly choosy. I began showing up consistently and started getting to know some of the regulars.

One weekend something a little different happened. I’m not sure of the reason, but the regular pilot wasn’t available, and we had a younger, much less experienced pilot flying loads that day. I didn’t really think anything of it. Nobody seemed to have a problem with it. We had a very experienced jumper at this drop zone, Chad, who seemed to know a lot about not only skydiving, but also flight operations, so he was good to have around. (Incidentally, he probably saved my life one time.) Thankfully, he was on the same load as I was that day.

A bunch of us got in the plane and began our ride to altitude. Normally when people get on a plane, they’re actually headed to a destination on the ground somewhere. When you’re skydiving, your destination is “up high.” You pretty much just want to gain a bunch of altitude so you can hop out. That ride to altitude can look very different depending on how busy the local airspace is, what the winds are doing at different altitudes, and the aircraft’s capabilities. The pilot might fly a corkscrew pattern, a box pattern, or some kind of racetrack pattern, just for a few examples. These are methods used to gain altitude without venturing too far away from the drop zone.

On this particular occasion, whatever pattern our pilot chose involved a bad call. I’m not sure if maybe he didn’t do his homework, or if this is something that could have happened to anyone, but we ended up getting downwind of the drop zone, fighting against a pretty strong headwind. The climb to altitude took about the same amount of time, but we spent longer in the aircraft because it took longer for us to claw back lost ground distance.

It wasn’t really a big deal to me at the time, but the pilot started getting agitated. It turns out we were pretty low on fuel. The strong headwind meant we needed to burn fuel faster to reclaim ground, and the analog fuel gauges didn’t give very descriptive readings when they were very low, especially as fuel sloshed around in the wing tanks. You can imagine how this all added to the anxiety level of a young, inexperienced pilot.

Chad noticed what was happening, and that the pilot kept switching the fuel feed back and forth between the left and right fuel tanks. With a cool head, he advised the pilot to relax and to stop switching; use up one tank until it’s dry, then switch to the other one. That way you’ll know for sure what you’ve got in that tank. If the second one runs out, it runs out, no amount of switching between the two would prevent it. Getting a little higher should help get us above the air current, so let’s press on before considering more drastic measures.

It started dawning on the rest of us what was happening. We weren’t real nervous; after all, we were all wearing parachutes and planned to get out of the plane before landing anyway. If that happened, our biggest problem would be figuring out where we landed and how to get back to the drop zone from the middle of what seemed like a thousand-square-mile field. The pilot, on the other hand, had an obligation to get the plane safely on the ground. Chad would probably stay with the pilot in the plane, and dropping several hundred pounds of skydivers should help improve the plane’s fuel efficiency, increasing the likelihood of safely getting back on the ground.

This is a little anticlimactic, I know, but thankfully we didn’t have to bail out early. We did end up jumping from a little lower than planned, but otherwise we made it to where we were supposed to go. The plane had enough gas to make it back to the airport safely. I’m not sure exactly how close the pilot (and us) came to disaster that day, but I imagine those wing tanks were much more full the next time the aircraft took off.

Sometimes in the midst of a crisis, all it takes is a steady hand and a calm demeanor to avoid catastrophe. Being present and just listening to someone who’s coming a little unglued, or offering insights that might be helpful can really walk someone back from panicking. While there are occasions where you kind of need to push somebody out of the way and seize control of the situation, as long as safety or time aren’t major issues, why not just offer support (and maybe guidance if they need it) as they work through the problem? Common sense and problem-solving seem like they’re becoming a little too rare these days, and helping someone walk through an issue can help pass along some lessons on good judgment, keeping calm, and solving problems. You might just find yourself in a position to make those rare qualities a little more common.

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Many Parts, One Body. Many Personalities, One Mind?

There are a lot of different kinds of people out there. Think about all the different personality types you’ve dealt with. There’s usually something specific that characterizes each one. Some people are amazingly creative. Others have a strong sense of loyalty, or compassion, or are optimistic, or have a dangerous temper.

It’s interesting to me that when you consider all the different personalities out there, when you boil down the essence of each of these types, that central thing is usually something that can be considered a trait of God. The things I just listed…there are examples in the Bible of God displaying each of those characteristics:

  • Creativity – With no point of reference, God just kind of…invented a huge diversity of living things, from centipedes to elephants, mosquitoes to squids.
  • Loyalty – How many times did the Lord get sick of the Israelites complaining and abandoning Him after leaving Egypt, but He stuck with them anyway?
  • Compassion – Multiple times in the Gospels, Christ was moved with compassion to help people, either because of their spiritual plight or because of the faith they displayed.
  • Optimism – Despite all the evil in the world, God knows how this story ends, and He’s shared enough of the story with us to give us hope.
  • Wrath – There’s some pretty intense stuff in the Old Testament about God’s wrath: putting down an insurrection against Moses, 10 plagues on Egypt, destroying the world with a flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, kicking the money-changers out of the temple, etc.

Normally when I think about the character of God, these “right brained” aspects are the first to come to mind. Something we don’t often think about is the highly ordered and symmetrical side of God’s character. There’s actually quite a bit of orderliness and symmetry God displays. We don’t often think about it because it’s usually in more macro terms than we think in, or it’s captured in parts of the Bible we don’t like to read.

For example, did you ever stop to think about how the Old Testament is arranged? There are 39 books in the Old Testament. You might think they’re thrown together in a random order, but their layout is quite deliberate and makes sense once you realize the arrangement’s significance. Those 39 books encompass history, wisdom/poetry/praise, and prophecy.

The book of Ezekiel captures a lot of God’s orderliness and symmetry. In the Millennial kingdom described in Ezekiel, the land of Israel will be broken down into 13 “zones,” one for each tribe plus one for the temple and public use. Within the temple/public use section, there are very deliberate instructions for how the land’s boundaries and layout are to be set up, including where the temple grounds are to be situated. This includes the temple itself, areas for the temple priests to live, areas for growing crops, other areas dedicated to public use, and two very large areas dedicated to the prince (the human governor or administrator of the land at that time).

Zooming in even further, Ezekiel chapters 40-43 describe the layout and dimensions of the temple yet to be built. The largest building’s main opening faces east. There are inner and outer courtyards, multiple gates, kitchens and storage areas for the priests, and the altar. It’s arranged in a very detail-oriented manner, with each element serving a purpose.

This is one of the things in the Bible you probably don’t pay all that much attention to, but it’s definitely some supporting evidence that God doesn’t just cater to those who are strong on intuition/creativity/holistic thinking. He definitely has a logical/analytical/detail-oriented nature to Him, too. If you’ve been looking at the Bible and wondering why there’s so much emphasis on the emotional, artsy side of things, maybe you just need to look in the right places to find more rational thought, sequential logic, and specific instructions.

Praise You, Lord, for the immense variety of life and personalities You’ve created. Since we are made in Your image, the good things in us are reflections of some of Your personality traits, and we thank You for that ever-present reminder. Help us remember even if someone is different from us, they, too, are made in Your image, and need to hear the good news about You. Amen.

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How Did We Get This Bad?

Well, the Charlie Kirk saga has been covered pretty extensively by now, but I figured I’d throw in my two cents, too. Prior to a week or two ago, I don’t think I’d even heard of him, but now he’s a household name.

Sorry, but I have to get political in this post. I ordinarily try to avoid that, but it seems necessary to help explain some of this. There’s an old political saying that goes something like: “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head.” The strategy of the Left (by which I mean Democrats/Liberals) is to appeal to peoples’ feelings; they tug at the heart strings rather than appeal to logic.

Donald Trump has effectively confounded the Democratic Party in the United States. Right now Democrats struggle to even articulate what their platform is. All they do is oppose whatever Trump advocates for. Party leaders stoke anger in their base because when you keep people seeing red, it reduces their capacity for rational thought. At this point fostering rage is the only thing they have. That’s how we’ve arrived in our current absurd situation; even if something is a good idea, if Donald Trump happens to support it, it is to be violently opposed. We now find ourselves in an environment where the Left opposes cracking down on violent crime and drug use, releases those with violent criminal histories, and opposes the enforcement of laws that have long been on the books, simply because Trump supports them and they believe there’s no possible way to find common ground with someone they label as so terrible.

The politicians themselves don’t believe the statements they’re making about how dire the situation is. It’s theater. It’s for the cameras. They don’t really believe Trump is going to throw them in jail for opposing him. If they did, they’d flee the country or go into hiding. It’s simply the rhetoric they use to keep their base engaged and fired up. A normal human being understands these people don’t believe the things coming out of their own mouths. For a while they tried the whole “he’s a threat to Democracy” thing, but that approach lost a lot of its effectiveness when the landslide electoral victory which installed Trump in the White House a second time was the direct result of Democracy in action. The Left, decimated and leaderless in the wake of the election, then had to crank up the rhetorical intensity, to the more recent claims of aspiring fascist dictator.

The problem is that when you keep things at a boil for so long, even if you don’t buy in to what you’re saying, there are people listening to you who do. They figure “a Representative/Senator gets to see it up close each and every day, they know even better than I do what a $@&#! that guy is.” The average Joes and Janes who get hyper political tend to spend time surrounded by people of the same opinion. Then, when they search things on YouTube, it follows each video with suggestions on similar videos. They don’t hear any other viewpoints, so they get further entrenched in their own. The boil builds further.

After living in an echo chamber of hate and vitriol for so long, eventually somebody from the more easily influenced among us says to themselves “here’s this threat, this guy who’s a danger to the country, and even to the world, who shouldn’t be president. Everybody I talk to knows it, but nobody’s doing anything about it! You know what? If nobody else is willing to do anything about it, I will!” This type of rhetoric and environment already radicalized two men enough to attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. One guy actually pulled the trigger and even struck then-candidate Trump, and the second attempt was foiled before the shooter had Trump in his sights.

For a while people on both sides started to realize the heat had been turned up too high. They backed off for a little, but a 24-hour news cycle demands something to report, even if nothing’s there. News cycles of this sort are incapable of toning things down; they can only ratchet things up. (Case in point – the word “unprecedented” has been used so often the word’s now lost a lot of its impact.) News channels simply cannot throttle back; they have to up the ante just to maintain ratings. Try going back and watching news coverage from the days of George W. Bush, who at the time was a highly controversial president. You’ll long for those “simpler” times. Is it any wonder people who watch a lot of news coverage for any length of time experience increased levels of anxiety?

Well, imagine you’re someone who’s been radicalized enough to become violent. You’ve seen Trump survive two assassination attempts, and figure he’s a pretty hard target to reach and his security has only increased. So who else can you take a look at?

Details are still emerging, so I don’t want to speculate on specifics, but evidently the shooter at the Utah Valley University campus determined it was acceptable to snuff out the life of someone who espouses a viewpoint contrary to his own. Charlie Kirk voiced such an opinion, was a known Trump supporter, and presented an opportunity. The gunman saw an opportunity and took it.

I’ll concede that while neither side is completely guiltless of exaggerating the rhetoric, it’s far easier to find inflammatory remarks from the Left than it is from the Right. (For every Marjorie Taylor Greene there’s a “Squad.”) I’m not sure why higher numbers of radicalized criminals come from the Left than from the Right. Maybe it’s the Left’s dependence on emotions, or would-be Right-leaning radicals having the viewpoint of “as long as Government stays out of my business, I don’t care.”

We need a reset. We need to be willing to listen to people with different opinions. Republicans: continue pointing out that this level of highly charged rhetoric contributed to the loss of life, and it can’t continue. Democrats: turn down the heat and for goodness’ sake, come up with a platform that appeals to people in the center rather than on the fringe. You’re on the wrong side of just about every 80/20 issue. Both sides: You need to work together to get something done. Start with some bipartisan stuff like stopping Daylight Savings Time or something easy for both sides to agree on. News media: diversify your coverage! With multiple 24-hour news channels there’d better be more than six to eight main stories…there’s more going on in this world than politics; mix in some good news, too, even if it means your ratings take a hit. Don’t worry, you’ll still get sponsors as long as people are watching you.

We’re losing our capacity to accept that not everyone thinks the way we do. Charlie Kirk didn’t spread hate; he challenged the basis for viewpoints. Healthy debate over ideas used to be an important thing in this nation, but we’ve moved from attacking ideas to attacking their supporters. Pray we’d all take a step back from the brink and see those with opposing viewpoints for who we are…fellow humans.

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This Year’s Patriot Day Message

Today we mark another somber anniversary. Believe it or not, it’s been almost a quarter century since one of the darkest days in the nation’s history.

For those on the younger side, I’m sure you’ve heard of 9/11 and you know what happened and all that, but it’s hard to really convey everything the nation went through that day and how it changed things for us. Imagine the nation as a whole feeling a blend of confusion, horror, fear, anger, grief, patriotism, and rage, all at the same time. As strange as it sounds, people of just about every political persuasion got along with each other in the weeks that followed, because being Americans united us more than it divided us.

There were three sites physically impacted that day: the field in Pennsylvania where the plane whose passengers rose up against their hijackers ended up crashing, the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Pentagon near DC. Watching the images from the site in Manhattan had the biggest effect on me; I had been up on the observation deck multiple times before, and within the previous year or two I’d had lunch with my Mom, Dad, and sister in a park made famous by a picture of an exhausted firefighter. Even though the Manhattan site was the most personal to me, there were lives lost in all three areas, either airline passengers or unassuming souls on the ground. Even though it’s 24 years later, that memory is still powerful to me, and I’m sure many people have similar powerful memories of that day.

This probably isn’t the last time we’ll get a bloody nose (or worse) as a nation. What I can tell you for sure, though, is that it’s not going to be the last time you see a wicked scheme succeed.

The Bible addresses incidents where wrongdoers seem like they’re getting ahead in life. David saw it and wrote about it. In Psalm 37:7-9 we read some of the most difficult instructions in the entire Bible: when you see wickedness seem to prevail, be patient.

“7 Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.

8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil.

9 For those who are evil will be destroyed, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.”

This Patriot Day, take the time to pause and remember the innocents who lost their lives, but remember as a Christian that two wrongs don’t make a right. When you witness evil succeeding, be patient and wait on the Lord; He sees it and will deal with it in His time.