"Ask Me About My Divorce"

These last few weeks have been some of the most worrisome that I have seen in a long time. I realized Friday that I was absolutely in a frenzied state of mind. I have this mellow professional persona that belies a passive aggressive tendency. See, I can take a few not-so positive things happening in the world around me, but lay on several more and I begin to see conspiracies. This happened to me Friday, and I will not go into the specifics, mainly because they are ridiculous and would make me look like a moron if I spelled out what led to my psychotic break. Things are fine now, but I am beginning to see that I might need to be more honest about things that bother me than to passively say they do not until twelve things pile up and I have an aneurysm.



As everyone in the world, I am concerned about the crisis in the financial markets. I have no money, but I always thought one day I might. Maybe not. Some people told my wife yesterday they could not vote for Obama because Democrats are socialists. Only Republicans stand for democracy and free market enterprise. I thought this was funny, considering that Congress is debating a bill to bail out Wall Street from a very Republican president that sounds very socialistic to me. I thought Republicans were all about personal responsibility. This bill does not sound very Republican to me. Dear God, does that mean President Bush is a socialist? Okay, there go the conspiracy theories again. It is also striking that the same person who told her Democrats were socialists was also opposed to Obama's idea of making community service a more integral part of high schoolers' education. This at a school that requires parents to log in at least 20 hours of volunteer service to the school each year. The question comes back: "Would you have a problem with an idea like this if John McCain had thought of it?"



It is just funny to me that we hear what we want to hear. I have heard people say that at the debate Friday night Obama kept talking in circles. I wonder how many times we needed to hear about the surge from McCain to make his point clear. Point is, they are both politicians and they will say what they think needs to be said to stimulate their voters. And has anyone noticed that McCain has gotten considerably more conservative over the course of the last two years than he ever was before? I remember thinking he might be the devil in 2000 because he was not very kind to the religious right. So, it is difficult for me to hear him talk so pretty about Jesus when I am not convinced this is not a political ploy.



So what is it with evangelicals? It is like some kind of Pavlovian response. We hear somebody say Jesus is their homeboy and then we tune out the rest. That's enough. He passes the test. I am frustrated by my tribe. I think I may need to move to Oregon. I guess I wish people would spend more time educating themselves than waiting until the last couple of months and then looking for the key things to check off the political list. Pro-life? Check. Pro-Marriage? Check. Pro-Jesus? Check. Pro-Corporate Greed? Check. (Sorry about that last one.) At least with McCain we do have the option of looking at his long legislative history to discover what the man believes, not just what he has said over the last couple of months. And, not to leave Obama above the fray, his record on some things that are very important to evangelicals is checkered at best, and absolutely frightening at worst.



I plan to leave any substantive discussion of those VP candidates until after their debate this week. I am scared of both of them. Someone asked me what I thought of Biden when Obama announced his running mate. I told them I thought Biden was a loud mouth, that he did not always think before he spoke, and might cause problems for Obama if he said the wrong thing. I am still waiting to be proven wrong on this one. I mean, give me a break. He said FDR got on television to calm the nerves of the American public right after the Wall Street crash that led to the Great Depression. Okay, Roosevelt was not even president and who had a TV in 1929? There is no excuse for that.



No one has asked me what I think of Sarah Palin, I think because her background is in the Assemblies of God and most people who know me know I was once in that great fold as well. God love her, she is really cute and I love to hear someone from the great white north talk, dontcha know. I particularly enjoyed her interview with Katie Couric, the she-devil, asking Palin about foreign and domestic policy issues. And what was that bizarre comment about Putin flying over Alaska and all that talk about trade missions to Russia? Funny. I kept wishing she would say "I can see Russia from my house!" I think she will be well rehearsed for the debate and will surprise a lot of people. I just hope Biden does not have his foot surgically implanted in his mouth.



A friend was blogging about grace the other day, and in the course of his article he mentioned that divorce tends to be a sticking point for many Christians. They have grace for everything else except divorce (and homosexuals, but that is not the point here). I come from a fellowship that had a strong stance against divorce. None of the ministers could be divorced, until recently when the General Council allowed for pre-conversion divorce. I always wanted to ask which conversion this meant, since I was always of the mind that one sin meant I had to get converted all over again. Anyway, I never got the idea that the fellowship believed divorced people were not called by God to do ministry, they just could not do it in the Assemblies of God. The great concern that I heard in debates about this topic was that we would be descending to the culture to admit that divorce was an issue that affected as many churchgoers as it did non-believers. Again it goes back to the idea that we erroneously hold to that some sins are worse than others.



Last Wednesday night a man came to church with a button on that read: "Ask me about my divorce." I didn't. Part of me wondered why this man would be broadcasting this to the church. The other part of me thought it was just weird to air one's dirty laundry that way. I wondered about social boundaries when maybe I should have been worried about the individual without said boundaries. I guess I am working on grace myself.



And last but not least: You might be interested to know about Bill Maher's new movie Religulous which sounds to me like a scathing diatribe against evangelicals and other extremely religious groups. Here is the New York Times review of the movie. I kind of love and hate Bill Maher. He is completely anti-religion (he thinks anyone who is religious is incapable of rational thought) which bothers me a lot, but he makes me think more than most. So I have to give him credit for that. I am not suggesting you go see this movie. I won't. Granted, I don't think they show socialist, Democrat movies in Panama City.