politics Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

World Gone Mad

Gone mad

The whole world has gone mad.

That’s what people are saying. It’s the only way to make sense of what is happening in our nation at this moment. People must be crazy.

The temporary insanity plea is handy, and comforting, in a way. Madness is for a moment; one bad election season, we console ourselves, and people will wake up. They will get this madness out of their collective system, and the pendulum will swing back the other way.

Insanity provides us with a reason for the unthinkable while conveniently releasing us from any semblance of responsibility or taint of participation.

Madness is convenient.

There’s something in our souls

It is easier to think there’s something in the water than to accept the truth that there is something in our souls that could be causing a nationwide outbreak of recklessness in regard to our national elections.

It is far more difficult to face the reality that what we’re witnessing is not madness at all, but the inevitable outcome of a chronic disease. Our nation has been sick for a long time. But not only have we neglected the symptoms, we have contributed to the decline.

Decades of unchecked sin and selfishness and a gross abdication of roles and responsibility have led to where we are today. People are not crazy. They are infected. We are infected.

Our nation, far from being mad, is symptomatic. We are plagued with wrong thoughts about ourselves, our leaders, and our God. Wrong thinking, left unchecked, quickly solidifies into wrong beliefs, and wrong beliefs lead to wrong expectations, and wrong expectations become the demands that shape policy.

That is where we are today. It is not madness that infects us, but something much longer in the making and much harder in the healing: we have allowed our minds to become darkened.

We have forgotten Who is on the throne, and like God’s people of long ago, we have clamored for a king when we had a Sovereign. We have begged man to do what God has done while smugly calling ourselves a Christian nation.

We have no intention of being a Christian nation.

We do not want God’s truth, we do not want his righteousness, and we do not want his responsibility.

We have given the government the job of the church and given the church the job of the individual. With nothing left to give away, we have collected our rights about us and horded them with jealous suspicion. Those who do not think like us—worse, who do not vote like us—are enemies because they threaten the thin livelihood we hide behind.

Rage boils up in our mouths and blisters our speech. Differences are as unthinkable as a civil debate. We do not know how to have a conversation with someone who differs from us because we view those differences as a threat to our very existence. Instead, we throw around hate and justify it by talking about how much is at stake.

After all, we say, no one stopped Hitler.

In truth, we are afraid. We are afraid because we have forgotten that the Lord in heaven laughs—he knows what is to come. And he is in control of all of it.

We crouch about in our fear because that is all we have that is truly ours—fear. We fear what will happen if so-and-so is elected, or if so-and-so does not. We worry over the policies of the leaders we demanded to have and the politics of the neighbors who do not think like us, as if God is not still on the throne. We spend more time watching the news so we can remember what to be afraid of than we do reading the Word so we can remember why we should not fear.

We fear losing even one of our self-proclaimed rights as if anything we have is ours to keep, as if in any way we deserve the right to speak or think or live as free men.

We are not free men. We are slaves to our own flesh, and we cannot do better for ourselves in and of ourselves. We are sick.

The Lord in heaven laughs–Psalm 2

We are incapable, except by the grace of God, to choose well. We are incapable, but by the grace of God, to do well. We cannot even watch and pray long enough to raise up the next generation. We have abdicated our responsibility to captivate our own minds and teach our own children because there is something on Facebook that needs our immediate attention.

If we spent half the time conforming our minds to Christ as we do worrying over politics, we might have a hope. If we spent but a moment meditating on the truth of the Word, we would not fear. If we understood the reality of eternity, we would beg for God’s refining fire and the singe of sanctification because we would know how much we need it.

It is easy to chalk this election up to madness. But oh, that we would see it for what it is. It is sin-sickness, and it will not change with one election season. It will not change until we let go of the fear long enough to pray, “Come, Lord Jesus. Make us holy. Keep us humble. Be our Sovereign. Let your kingdom come and your will be done no matter what it costs me.”

That is madness, of course. But then, the world has gone mad.

Gone mad

I Don’t Want an Equal Marriage

This week, my Facebook stream was commandeered by an army of red equal signs.

At first, I didn’t know what that meant because I’ve always been a little socially awkward, even social media awkward, and I was oblivious. Was the entire nation suddenly becoming more interested in math?

Thankfully, before I had the chance to make a fool of myself, some other clueless person asked and the secret came tumbling out. That equal sign stood for marriage equality.

I had no intention of stepping in to the marriage equality debate on Facebook or anywhere else where meanings can be misconstrued and misapplied, where allegiances divide friendships and shut down communication before it even starts.

But I stopped when I saw the words marriage equality coupled with that great big equal sign because I realized something that might make the culture cringe, and it really has very little to do with the current debate and much more to do with my own heart and my own home.

I realized I don’t want an equal marriage.

Before my husband was my husband, back when we were just two kids talking marriage on a park bench in the forest of Chicago, we asked ourselves this question: Can we be better together than apart? Because we were both self-centered enough to know that equal wasn’t worth it. We wanted to know that together, we’d be more than the sum of our parts.

We wanted a marriage that was exponential, not equal.

Of course, we could have just taken our two equal selves and done some simple addition. After all, 1+1=2, and two is already better than one, right?

An equal marriage might work that way. But I didn’t want an equal marriage.

I wanted a marriage in which 1+1=1, and then somehow equals 3 or 4, or in our case, 7. That kind of math meant sacrifice, a dying to self, a setting aside of rights. It meant elevating the needs of the other above my own. That kind of math requires submission—mine and his.

If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not be the mother of five children. If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not have dropped out of school to help my husband finish two graduate degrees. He would not have taken the kids on vacation without me because I needed a break from everyone more than I needed a break with everyone. He would not have put a PhD program on the way back burner because he knew I couldn’t do it again, not yet.

We have both subtracted a lot out of lives and God has multiplied the remnants into something more than I could have imagined. But it wouldn’t have happened if we were both more interested in being equal than submissive.

Submission isn’t a popular word these days because being submissive means you have to consider someone else as better than yourself. You have to put someone else’s needs above your own and some days, that goes against every fiber of our being because deep down inside, we’re much less concerned about sacrifice than we are about rights. Our rights. Marriage rights.

That term—marriage rights—makes my heart a little sick every time I hear it, and it has nothing to do with homosexuality or Christianity or being gay or being straight or being something in between. It has to do with what I believe marriage is, not who it is for.

The term “marriage rights” cuts at my heart because I believe that when we reduce marriage to nothing more than a battle of rights, we’ve already lost. The beauty and reality of marriage is that it is a place to die, not a place to elevate rights. It is a place to subtract self and will and equality and all that other stuff that is in our nature but is not in our God and love someone more than ourselves.

That is sacrifice. Submission. Tough stuff.

It is tough because self is the hardest thing to die and the hardest thing to make submit, especially if there’s another self in the room. Self will proclaim, “He’s no better than me!” and “I have the right to be happy!” and while that kind of talk is normal and perhaps even logical, it is not biblical, and it does nothing to make a marriage that multiplies because self-talk constantly reduces the multipliers to 1.

Any number times one always equals itself, nothing more.

I do not want to struggle through marriage for nothing more than what I went in with. I do not want an equal marriage. I want an exponential marriage.

So while the debate over marriage rights rages on, I am battling to keep marriage equality out of my own home. It is hard because I am selfish. But I am choosing to keep my focus on the math that matters, the subtraction and division that will build up my husband, my children, and myself into more than just the sum of our parts.

I am choosing to have a marriage that multiplies.

We Are, All of Us, Americans

I remember the flags, the flags flying at half-staff in almost every yard in Wenham, flags carefully hung up on the sides of houses or draped sorrowfully over white-railed porches. Flags flew from the backs of pickups, and children stuck them in their backpacks and taped them to the mailboxes. When the hardware stores and shopping malls sold out of their summer supply of flags, people made their own.

It was almost a compulsion, this need to fly a flag in the days that followed 9/11. We needed to identify with the victims and their families, to stand with this violated country, our country, and to proclaim with vehemence, “We are, all of us, Americans.”

An attack on any one of us is an attack on us all. We crouched in our living rooms, huddled around our TVs, watching the horror of innocence lost, and wondered how such an evil could come into our own harbor. How dare they step onto this soil where so much blood was shed in the name of freedom. How dare they try to control us with fear.

We flew our flags in defiance to tyranny and we proclaimed, “We are, all of us, Americans, and we will never again bow to fear.”

Nearly a year after 9/11, I stood in the sweltering heat and looked down at the gaping wound where two buildings once stood. The streets had been cleared of debris but plywood boards still covered the broken out windows of the buildings surrounding the Twin Towers. It was still so fresh, still so agonizing, even though so many months had passed. Up above me, the neighboring buildings stood like empty sentinels, marked with shrapnel from the shattered buildings. They would never be the same.

But someone had draped those ragged walls with flags, and as we came from all across the country to look at what our minds could not comprehend, we stood under those flags and felt a certain sense of solidarity. We are, all of us, Americans.

Today, Ground Zero is a memorial, and 9/11 is a day of remembrance. Flags are flying on my street, and I am telling my children. Each one of us has a story of where we were on that day. Each of us has a memory that will stay with us forever.

We are, all of us, Americans, and we will never forget.