A Greater Hope

I guess I’ll never learn. I wake up in the morning and read the headlines and they’re always the same – that is, they seldom deal with anything of real importance, and even when they get close, they do it in a way to please rather than inform the audience.

Because outrage sells, I guess. Plucking the high-tension strings of the viewers keeps them glued. Enough of this and it’s no wonder we all end up believing their crap.

Maybe I was some kind of Pollyanna when I thought that there was this vast swath of people across the nation who were actually moderate. Who just want to get by enjoying life and helping others generally enjoy theirs (or at least not standing in the way). But I’m constantly being led to believe that I’ve got to fall into one of these two camps, and there’s just no other way around it. That I’ve got to be either for something wholeheartedly or against something wholeheartedly — or I’m not going to matter.

But maybe it’s just that people believe they’ve got to make the big splash to get anything done. They make outlandish claims and flood the media with their side to the extreme to get the attention they think their issue deserves. And yet, it’s still all about what they think is right, and so what they think everyone else should believe.

That’s not how it works. Because there will always be someone on the other side of it pushing for their view of how it should be done. Because that’s what we are. Self-interested people who value (cling to) our opinions so desperately that we’ll fight you for them. Come to think of it, wasn’t that what the founding of America was about? But back then, we had British tyranny to unite us. Now? We only have each other and our wildly varying opinions.

But you know me. I can’t help but think that the key to hope is to appeal to something outside of ourselves as a standard for life. Something that tells us to value community and humanity and work ethic and love not because they’re our own hobby horses – boxes defined by us into which we get to cram the rest of the world – but because they’re a standard established by someone who knows their true value.

And yet, so many of us run from anything like that, screaming at the top of our lungs that there is no such person [who threatens my deeply-held belief that my opinions are always right]. Or they treat any thought along these lines as a joke, not to be taken seriously.

And yet the evidence bears it out. That there’s something to be said for a strong, loving, and supportive family. That sleeping around is ultimately unfulfilling and fraught with dangers of disease and violence. That building one’s life around political movements damages one’s satisfaction with that life. That exposing oneself to excessive amounts of social media has serious consequences on one’s mental health.

But we just can’t help ourselves, can we? We’ve got to get that shot of adrenalin or dopamine or whatever chemical is affecting our brains. We’ve got to appeal to our own crowd to affirm and reinforce our opinions. We’ve got to attack the other to do the same.

And where has it gotten us? Well, right where we are, I suppose. Living in a divided land being governed by divided people who can’t get anything done because those people have somehow worked out a system that’s so balanced that neither side can push very far before the pendulum swings us back to the other. And they want it that way. Because as long as we have the other to blame, we won’t see the failings of the one who’s supposed to be working for us.

And COVID hasn’t helped either – especially here in Korea, where the choices to do things that might encourage us to actually survive are limited by both a foreign government and a military bureaucracy (of questionable competence, particularly in understanding cross-cultural issues).

So maybe the issues are more pointed for me. I have a lot of time to sit and think. And wonder “what makes this work?” “What makes this worthwhile?” I’ve got to look at it from as many sides as I can muster, but I’m an empirical data kind of guy – a bit on the pragmatic side. You’ve seen my thoughts on our self-centeredness in the past if you’ve read any of my writing before, so you know I already have a slant there…but even that is based on empirical observation. I know from personal experience that I tend to favor myself, and I can see the same in others quite easily.

So where does that leave us? Again with the broken record. Again with me asking for you to consider this very basic thing about ourselves as a starting point for your consideration of a God that is bigger than you or anything else you may have thought of him up to now. Ask the questions. “Why do things seem so messed up?” Yeah, some people use the same question to work against the existence of God, but if you start from the point that the messiness is because of our rebellion against him and the standard by which he knows we can be at our best, maybe you can step back and actually admit to yourself that if maybe we really believed there was something greater than us, we would know better what to do to make this all work.

But what about these people who make these claims of a God? What about the damage they’ve done? Remember this – that those people who claim the name of Jesus and yet treat their neighbors as anything less than image-bearers of the God they worship fall under the same umbrella as the rest of us. They’re damaged too. They’re selfish. They let their own opinions seep into their witness to the world, and it doesn’t come out well for anyone.

I’m just asking that you actually appeal to the reality and not to the straw-men – the easy targets we can all set up to tear down, much to our own satisfaction. “Our own satisfaction” only gets us so far, most often in the shallow end of the pool. Maybe it’s time we all face a bit of the truth and turn ourselves to something greater than us to order our lives.

While it may not cure the common news maladies we face in our headlines today, it might just give us all a little better insight into why this is happening to us…but even more so it’s a greater hope in where we can go from here, if we only believe.