Back in the swing.

For months I have been stumbling through a dark night of literary isolation. No longer, though. The published pending website is back up and running and I am connected to my writing comrades once again. Praise be to our wonderful web manager for he has delivered us from the demons that cleverly work internet destruction! How I have missed the blog. And by 'missed' I mean 'been thankful not to have had one more thing to get done.'

Unfortunately I have written nothing since the last post. Since I am out of the habit of writing, I thought a personal post about my topic would help get me back in the swing of things. Here goes:


Reconciliation was nailed hard up against my heart muscles years ago when my college dating relationship ended. Those painful nails entered my heart and gathered the heat of my memory to forge a weapon of bitter un-forgetfulness. The memory of these hurts was like yesterday's large helping of chocolate Moose Tracks ice cream slowly creeping back up my throat in the form of hungry fire ants. Deep and visceral, these hurtful memories initially wakened mighty feelings of righteous vengeance and an infantile desire to strike out against my 'old flame'. I was a righteous man internally working out justice for the wounds of my heart, only offering lip service to my own transgressions. For months, my rightness in the relational break-up lay uncritically examined by myself; and so I acted like the myopic old man who blames all the words in books for being 'so fuzzy these days'.

My righteousness never demanded I open up my memories to scrutiny, mostly because I fabricated this story about how I took the moral high road in the relationship. Every time I rehearsed this story my heart was filled with resentment about how she wronged me. Regular baths of bitterness cleansed my heart from all personal wrong doing and gently nourished an outwardly projected judgment. Today as I reflect about my inner monologues of that bitter time I realize that the meaning of the word 'I' took on the general sense of 'morally good person.' In my dating relationship I was patient in communicating, I was a true lover, I was concerned about her well-bing. Likewise, the word 'she' was used as a synonym for 'morally flawed person.' In my dating relationship she was uncommitted, she was unwilling to talk, she was selfish. In philosophical terms she became my evil other; the one upon whom I projected all evil with regards to our relational break up. She was evil and I was good. She was condemned in my thinking, and I was justified.

Fortunately I was righteous to this extent for only a period in my life. Time passed and the LORD called me behind the water shed for a whipping, as my brother-in-law would say. In fact I was reading Romans 12 when I came across the passage that reads:

"Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,' says the Lord. 'BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM, AND IF HE IS THIRSTY, GIVE HIM A DRINK; FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL HEAP BURNING COALS ON HIS HEAD.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."


In a moment, in the twitch of an eyelid my bitter self-justification was demolished. Wrecking balls have never brought down walls as quickly as this Scripture brought down my own righteousness. The standards are high. How could I escape the fact that I had come nowhere close to feeding my enemy? I was repaying evil for evil in the inner chambers of my heart. I was being overcome by evil.

Like the Psalmist, I was hemmed in behind and in front by the righteousness of YHWH; I had no where to turn that did not remind me of my own vile heart. A confession spewed out of my insides, "My born-again, sanctified heart is evil and in desperate need of salvation." At the moment of this confession my heart was liberated from a cold and slimy prison of bitter memories. I believe it was the same LORD who hung on the cross forgiving His enemies that also swept through my heart and set it free. This liberation was powerful and transformative enough to in time subvert my bitter memories with a new spirit of reconciliation. At the heart of this spirit was a realization that I was never and never will be a morally right person as long as I live on this green earth. I could see that I was not right by the standards of Romans 12 because, ironically, I was stuck on rehearsing my own rightness and was forgetting to take care of my 'enemy'.

Not long after the LORD gave me this spirit of reconciliation He began to bolster it further with another work. He was pointing out the thoroughly depraved state of my heart. This happened as I became deeply convicted of my inward sins of lust and anger and greed. YHWH looked at my heart from afar and with holy wrath pronounced it unclean. As I reflected back upon my dating relationship I realized that while I was pointing out my lover's external flaws I was ignoring my own internal flaws. Like Jesus' hypocrite with the log hanging from his cornea, I was attempting to surgically remove the splinter from my lover's moral soul without worrying about my dirty hands and contagious diseases. Once again the LORD'S spirit of reconciliation was at work in my heart teaching me that I could never consider myself to be right.

I have learned that I am always and unconditionally wrong. And I do not mean this in the sense of being wrong in a logical argument (although I am usually not a very thorough logician and am frequently wrong in the arena of logic). Morally flawed is what I mean when I use the word 'wrong' here. Never am I morally superior to another person. Try as I might to justify myself and put myself in the right, I am always wrong.

If you have read my blog at all this far you will know that my interest is international politics. At the root of this interest is this same spirit of reconciliation. The LORD has given me a spirit of reconciliation and this spirit does not cease to be active when I think about nations and governments. I continue to anchor myself in the fact that American is not right. Terrorists (eg: AlQueda) who kill 'infidel' civilians are not justified in doing so because the terrorists themselves are evil. Likewise, a government which kills terrorists (eg: the US) is not justified in doing so because the government itself is evil. When history comes to its climax and the Word of God will slay the nations with a sword will the American government appear right before YHWH'S righteousness? Absolutely not.

And so you can see that my thinking has its origins in Romans 12 and has progressed from there to Romans 13 as I have broadened my thoughts to the world level. So I have moved into the territory of Romans 13 and should probably write a post working within this text, a text that has been used throughout Christian times to justify war. I will begin my next post by highlighting the history of Israel's wars. First, I will look into the Old Covenant where God used Israel to destroy nations with violence and then used these same nations to destroy Israel.