Category: reflections

The NY Times reports:

Alarmed at the possibility that the Republican Party might pick Rudolph W. Giuliani as its presidential nominee despite his support for abortion rights, a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate.

It’s interesting to me to see the “you’re either with us or against us” ideal of many conservatives on the abortion issue and others. Don’t get me wrong, I’m against the practice as well and honestly I’m not a Giuliani fan, but this article really makes Don Miller’s point in “The Search For God Knows What” that much clearer.
Miller argues that we view life as riders in a lifeboat. He tells of a question an elementary teacher asked his class (I’m probably butchering this since I don’t have the book in front of me), “If a lawyer, a teacher, a doctor and a cripple are stranded in a lifeboat and one of them must be thrown overboard to keep the lifeboat afloat, which one do you choose?”
Miller remembers people arguing for various people right away – as if one person somehow is more valuable than the other.
Miller continues to point back to the lifeboat illustration throughout the book and just last night I read his thoughts on the war on popular culture between the “godly moral right” and the “godless immoral left” (my words not his).
It seems that many Christians want to rage war against everyone who don’t measure up to their/our moral standards – yet we can pick and choose which moral standard(s) we want to hold them to.
Miller makes the point that if we’re really “waging war” against someone the only option is to either handcuff them or kill them. Doesn’t sound very Christian to me. Yet we wage war against others as if to prove that our side is really better than their side and that somehow we, or the person we chose deserves to stay in the lifeboat.
My boss and I talked about this lifeboat phenomenon a couple weeks ago and he made the observation that in reality, as Christians the answer should be – we’ll jump out of the lifeboat. I agree, “What greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for his brother.”
What are we saying to the lost when rather than showing them love, we simply bolt and say we want nothing to do with them?