The Prophets Dilemma

The following comes from my political blog
Is George Bush a modern day prophet? Because the story of the prophet Jonah is quoted by Jews for Yom Kipper this week, two editorial writers, Michael Oren and Mark Gerson, were inspired to editorialize in the Wall Street Journal regarding the plight of prophets.

Ordered by God to go down and call the people of Ninevah to repentance in order to escape destruction, Jonah found himself in a Catch 22. He realized if the people of Ninevah listened to him, destruction would not come. Then when nothing happened, they would be furious at him for making them give up their good times for no reason. On the other hand, if he did not go and they were destroyed, he would have to live with that. So Jonah cut and ran. Forced later to prophesy anyway to the people, everything happened like he expected. The people were angry with him.

The writers then give modern examples of Jonah’s dilemma. Churchill predicted that a rising Germany was a threat. But, if he pre-emptively attacked, would people thank him for averting World War II or accuse him of unnecessarily starting it. Truman prophesied that Japan would never surrender and that a quarter million Gis would die taking the mainland. He dropped the bombs, ending the war. Then he faced the judgement of historians who claimed it was unnecessary. God alone knows if those two made the right decisions and He is not telling us.

Which leads to George Bush. He prophesied that Islamic fascists would get weapons of mass destruction. He took the battle to them. Has that action kept the jihadists off balance for these past five years of no attacks on our homeland, or caused the problem, as some charge? Only God knows. We can never know.

The next president also has to be a prophet. Should we nuke the rogue nations before they use theirs and risk accusations of provoking Armageddon? Or, do we wait and see what happens? No wonder Jonah tried to high tail it out of town. Why does anyone want to be a leader?
Posted from the WSJ 9/21/07

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Cast Out Demons, Heal the Sick and Get Lynched

Our teacher taught a timely message for me this week. To His disciples, Jesus laid out the outline for their ministry in Matthew 10. I think if I had been there and He had said, “I am giving you power over unclean spirits and you will heal the sick,” I would have jumped up and down shouting “hot diggity dog!”.

But then He said, “that’s the good news.” “And the bad news, Lord?” “Oh that,” the Lord would answer. "Well there is this little matter that they will deliver you up to councils and they will scourge you and you will be a lamb among wolves.”

The pastor pointed out though, that that model of ministry, was exactly how it went with Jesus Himself–cast out demons, heal the sick and get lynched. Because that is the pattern, along with this is the realization that as we follow in His footsteps, the rougher it gets, the more we know we are in His presence.

There was also some small print in the contract. He said to be as wise as a serpent, and as harmless as doves.

The reason this sermon was important to me was what was going on at that moment in my life. I have created a politically conservative blog for local Conservatives. My best friend was concerned that getting into the political arena cannot only put me among wolves but also turn me into one.

Sure enough that is exactly what happened. For several weeks I had fun. Then the night before church, the left wing bloggers in town discovered me. They attacked, including having my blog temporarily shut down. Because they were people I knew and who knew me, storms of emotions were unleashed in me--hurt, rage and desire for revenge.

Then at church, I had to ask myself, how much of this did I ask for, and how much was unfair? “Harmless as a dove” jumped out at me and I spent the time during the sermon going over every attack article I had written and repenting where needed. I came away refreshed and full of the goodness of the Lord. In the future, I promise to try to be both as harmless as a dove, but not giving up “wise as a serpent.”

I do believe the 2008 election is pivotal for Christians as well as for Israel and worth getting involved.

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Time Out

I had hoped to make my blog mostly about spiritual matters, however this political scene is getting so exciting, I can't stay out of it. I will have to apologize to any readers on the Left, but I just came back from being a delegate to our state GOP Party Convention. Going to a convention is like going to a revival meeting. I came home so pumped that I have been using my writing energy to fire off Letters to the Editors of my local papers. So far, they have been publishing them although like so much of the media, they lean left. I know my letters must pain them. Here is one of them:

BUT WHERE DO WE GO?

As conservatives and libertarians, for the sake of truth in advertising, suppose we grant that we are not comfortable with the war in Iraq. We can even tell ourselves that when we voted for George Bush, he promised he would not get into nation building. We may even confess our uneasiness of having to support him, not because we now believe his mission of creating a democracy is doable in this sick part of the world, but because he is our man and we must stick by him.

We have not been attacked in five years. Now where do we go? We do have an enemy. They speak clearly that they intend to either convert us or if unable, then to kill us. What part of those words are hard to understand? The desire to conquer us did not start yesterday. Historians say conquering may have been in some people’s minds and pursued off and on since 630 A.D. What makes today different, is that some of the worst of this group now have the weapons, the money, the communication abilities, the leadership, the expertise, and the will, to be serious. They also sense a spiritual vacuum in our part of the world.

In front of this peril, those against our president appear clueless. Instead of telling us how they plan to protect us, each candidate scrambles over top of the other trying to convince the base that he or she can hide deeper under the bed than the other guy. That is scary.

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The Movie Bobby, Barak Obama, and the 60's

Last night, I watched the new movie Bobby about Bobby Kennedy. I don’t know if the producers were simply trying to take us on a walk down memory lane, or if they actually thought they were making a political statement. If it was a statement, then the movie is scary, because we have a presidential candidate, Barak Obama who obviously thinks it is time to be Bobby Kennedy.

For us who lived through the 60's, the movie was nostalgic. The 60's was an emotionally charged time and because I was in a university, I lived them to the fullest–marching in the streets, sit-ins, meeting with Freedom Riders in Mississippi, protesting the war, possibly being the first to hire a black professor in a southern university, serving in the Peace Corps, listening to Bob Dylan. Now, as a psychologist looking back, I know what caused that amazing time.

The 60's started with the end of WW II. The veterans came home and catching up with lost time, they had children by the millions, producing the “baby boomers.” Those millions hit adolescence at the same time in the 60's.

Today, we know a lot about adolescence. For example, we know the adolescent’s brain is rewiring itself, producing a higher type of reasoning ability. This new-found intellectual ability comes with both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they can now hypothesize about complex matters. The curse is they believe they are the first people who ever had such incredible ideas for solving the world’s problems such as: “If everyone would just love one another, we could all get along.” Or, “anybody can see that if we stop polluting, the planet would be saved.” Their naive minds believe if they can see how simple the solutions are, why can’t everybody. With all the energy, impatience and arrogance of youth, they took on everything in the 60's. dominating our values, our music, our politics, and even the way we dressed and wore our hair.

In the movie, clips of Bobby Kennedy’s speeches are played. Looking through the lens of the past 40 years, I began to wonder, “Did Bobby really believe what he was saying, or was he just a smart politician giving the young people what they wanted to hear?” It was such a naive time created by so many innocents.

Fortunately, the brain continues to mature after adolescence, producing an even higher type of thinking which may be better adapted to our times. The next step in brain development is dialectic thinking. We lose our adolescent naivete and experiencing a complicated world, we can hold contradictory ideas at one and the same time. We can only hope the boomers get there.

Every problem we face today seems to include both good and evil mixed together. The most evil enemy we have ever known comes at us calling us the Great Satan. We try to fix global warming only to find that we put our people out of work and fall behind other nations in productivity. We create a welfare system to help people, only to discover that we have dis-empowered them. We try to give people a better life through cheaper goods, only to realize we are building up competing countries such as China and India. We give jobs to hungry people from south of the border only to wake up one day to find portions of our culture overrun and it is too late to make them go back home.

Through it all, many of us have the uneasy feeling that no one who is putting himself or herself forward to be our leader, is really up to the job. As Christians, we understand a world in which both good and evil exist side by side. But the answers to our problems we are getting today, especially from the Left, carry the same naive ring of those bygone innocent days of the 60's. Barak Obama’s followers look familiar.

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Anti war colors

Did anyone notice today the banner colors for the anti-war protests? On one side of the street, we saw red, white and blue. On the other side, we saw yellow. Al Queda
says they can beat us because yellow is American's favorite color.

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Liberal Flip Flops Conservative

Charismatics I know, all became politically conservative, including myself. My hope is this blog might provoke some comments. As a psychologist, I like to make sense out of my behavior.

Like most young people, I came forth from my university experience as a thoroughly indoctrinated lefty. I have the bona fides to show for it. In Mississippi, I met with the Freedom Riders trying to undo segregation. As a result, I had to flee with my family. Over the years, I stealthily indoctrinated my students. I served in President Kennedy’s Peace Corps and President Johnson’s War on Poverty. In Mexico, I studied with the radical priest Ivan Illich, along with many of the radicals of that time.

I  protested the Viet Nam War, was nearly arrested in the March on Washington, and was pelted with rotten fruit on my campus as one of a handful of anti-war professors.

Then I was struck down by God and came off the floor a radical conservative. I look back asking myself. ”What happened?”. Following is an attempt to explain that to myself.

My entire adult life has been dedicated to empowering others. When the palpable power of God poured into me that night, I arose empowered with full confidence that I could now lick this life.

I then saw that much of what I had been doing was not only not the best way to empower, but much of it was disempowering. First, it was disempowering, because our paternalism was creating what we psychologists call “learned. helplessness.” Secondly, by taking the money from those who were succeeding, we were disempowering them, and finally and most relevant, we were impeding the discovery of finding true empowerment.

Politically, along came Ronald Reagan singing: “Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people.” I heard empowerment

He was followed by Gingrich: “Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.” Gingrich had and still has the creative ideas that will release the power in people.

So, a 60's radical, who marched in the streets chanting “Power to the People!”, became an 80's radical marching in the street chanting “Power to the People!

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