(Salutes) And I pledge allegiance to the.....

Is there anything for us to do about the state of the nation? With church change almost becoming chic, I wonder if we will lose touch with what everything is about in the first place. I hate that the images I see around me are almost high school-esque. Cool kids and cool churches, the not cool ones being the ones that aren’t listening to Jesus.

What the???

I don’t know when the heart of it all got left behind but it feels like it sometimes. I know it is difficult, so difficult sometimes, to not get caught up in ourselves, but if we start listening to Jesus I think we can make it. If we just read his word and follow his laws, not the laws of man, listening to our hearts conviction from the movings of the Holy Spirit, we will get by. I have been up and down, learning and growing. I have been cultivated, drenched, and starved. The drought never lasts long enough for death, and the rain and sun visit me often. There are blessings all around, there is God among us.

So our responsibility to our nation lies not in the duties of that nation, but rather to the one in which we were called most resemble.

Movements or allies, enemies and politics, why do we cling to you? Or…why do I? What am I looking for that Jesus does not already offer me? Nothing. That is why offering myself to others is the greatest way I can love Jesus. Simply one of the only ways we can love him here on earth. Yes, we honor him with our lives, and we honor him with our specified acts of worship. Yet how many times do we mess up, sin, live for ourselves, have our minds completely wander off to that new CD or where we will visit for lunch in our supposed “worship moment.” If we are serving others in the midst of our flaws and messups and hang-ups, is this not far better than having the same flaws and messups with a totally self-serving attitude. Belief that loving Christ is separate from how we treat others? He made us all. He MADE us ALL. The cross was for us all. Yes, it was for us all.

All: lovers and haters and fighters and Germans and and artists and Fascists and Socialists and Chinese and Buddhists and Catholics and Reformed whoevers and Eckists and saints and sinners and Jews and actors and the poor and the rich and the Gentiles and the Colombians and the Canadians and the hunters and the writers and the teachers and the Swiss and the chocolate lovers and the immigrants and the Americans and the George Bushes and the Tom Cruises and the minimalists and the anti-Semitics and the anti-Gays and the unionists and the Belgian and the Soviets and the lesbians and the Asians and the whites and the atheists and the Satanists and the crazies and the killers and the rapists and the child molesters and the young and old.

And in His way, let us not only love but reach out to and care for the poor, oppressed, the homeless and the widows. Lest we will stray too far from our calling.