When your heart and soul belong to a kingdom-oriented system rather than a world-oriented one, things get tough.

Especially around election season.

The early Christians weren’t willing to concede that Caesar was God or even “god-like”. They fed the poor when others wouldn’t. They viewed people as more than “shadow” as was the prevalent worldview fed on by the masses from Grecian philosophers.

In today’s political climate, there’s a lot of demagoguery. People pander to whichever group they’re speaking to and truth becomes hard to separate from fiction.

I’m under no illusions. I don’t equate Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians or Independents as Christian. I expect the lost to behave as lost people. My base of expectation is that “all have sinned” and are fallen. So the notion of “trickle down” tends to sink in the wake of sinfulness. It’s just easier to buy a jet ski than it is to give money to the poor. At the same time, those who are interested in creating systems to capture people tend to believe that people need capturing. And yet the Christian believes in the freedom of personal choice. God allowed us to choose Him even as He pursued us.

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Republicans seem to have no cohesive narrative and this seems obvious. Democrats are losing their cohesive narrative and again, this is almost a no-brainer. To anyone who is watching the news or paying attention to the rhetoric floating over the internet and across television screens, it’s rather difficult to understand what narrative thread will actually unify our country. Let me suggest that it’s because the new narrative thread isn’t one of unity, but one of division.

We must pause, though, prior to jumping into the 21^st century to consider the unifying narratives that have characterized our country and in fact, these narratives have come to form the core values of the United States. We pause to review the overarching stories, not for nostalgia’s sake, but because in a real sense, we’re in danger of losing them.

It is probably a result of my immaturity and inexperience that I need to add an addendum to my last blog.  I was trigger-happy, fired a few shots at the problem, but ended up missing the target.  Let's see if I can get it with a little more patience.

What I was driving at was that, as is evidenced by eight years of Republican rule and now 30 days of Democrat rule, they are not our Savior.  The "if only Bush wasn't in power, the left wing would be more responsible" people have just been met with the cold water of this stimulus package.  As I said, we just traded one money pit for another.  Both sides of our government have their agendas, and those agendas have gigantic holes in them through which those truly in need fall through.  As Christians, the government cannot be our Savior.

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The past couple months I've noticed a swelling, silent void around me.  You know that feeling after you've been to a concert; when you walk from the club to your car, open the door and get in, and in the silence of your car your ears ring as they adjust back to a normal environment?  That's kind of what it feels like.

It seems up until recently everyone had a cause to rally behind: Darfur, Uganda, AIDS, clean water, adoption, breast cancer, global poverty, depression - and on down the list of thousands of worthwhile causes.  Everyone was doing it from Bono and Chris Martin, to the GAP, to local kids who organized benefit shows at their local rock clubs, to Facebook friends who sent benefit invite after benefit invite.

The void that I've noticed is the one left by those voices.  Those voices that were so vigilantly campaigning for the defenseless or vulnerable have oddly gone mute.  And, my question is why now?  Why, as our government just crammed an 1,100 page stimulus package through congress and is about to flush a Scrooge McDuck amount of money down the toilet is everyone scattering?  Why, as we're about to spend $500 MILLION dollars on improvement projects to the National Institute of Health's facilities is no one asking if that tremendous amount of money could be spent on cancer or AIDS research?  Where are the urgent voices crying out for food and clean water for Africa when we're about to spend $450 MILLION dollars so NASA can do climate modeling (a government agency that already receives money in the annual budget)?  I guess we'll be able to help them graph or map where their rain isn't falling instead of actually giving them food or some kind of agricultural assistence.  Where is the pleading for social justice as we're about to spend $150 MILLION dollars on a museum instead of creating jobs or putting food in mouths and clothes on backs?

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