
Indulge me for a moment and imagine a couple of scenarios...
President Obama issues a decree stating that following Easter no one will work Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. This is on top of the Thursday and Friday that were already consider a part of the holiday weekend. At first it might be met with mirth and glee, yeah, a 7 day weekend. Then it sinks in. That's a week without pay. Now you're bugged and maybe a little nervous about getting your bills payed. Then someone explains that Obama's new heavy handed government style put emphasis on socialism and militaritism and neglected basic infrastructure. The already anemic power grid of your country, that ill-advisedly almost completely relies on Hydro-power, is failing. There is a drouth. A particularly nasty drouth that caught your "eggs in one basket" leaders somehow by surprise. Now your mad but it's too late. You and your circle of friends can do nothing more than sit on your hands and hope that the goverment takes care of you down the road.
Or this... You go to your mailbox to see what is there and still no mail. In fact, there hasn't been any mail for the last two and a half months. The last time anything was in there was the middle of January.
You go down and talk to your disgruntled Postman and he fills you in. When the earthquake happened a couple months ago it destroyed a bunch of bikes, some scooters, and a couple of trucks. Also, the post office collapsed and, though there was a group of postal employees who tried to salvage the mail from the wreckage, noone has even considered rebuilding yet. He assures you, however, that they are starting to try and deliver the mail again now. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that you leave this exchange feeling heartened and impressed by the progress that you have seen and heard there. After all, you recall one of your friends mentioning that none of those postal workers have gotten a paycheck since October, a full two months before the earthquake even happened.
I was listening to a news program entitled The World today and both of these stories were reported to be taking place somewhere in our world.
In Venezuela, the gruff dictator Jugo Chavez is running the world's seventh largest oil producing country into financial obscurity by his cruel and disastrous policies. His answer to a failure in their power grid? They are imposing fines on businesses that use too much power and forcing everyday people to stay home from work.
In Haiti, a previously inept goverment has been brought to it's bony knees by a 7.0 earthquake. This, former French colony, was poorest country in the Western Hemisphere before the disaster. Now, thanks in no small part to the corruption and incompetance of a pathetic excuse for a governing body, Haiti has suffered an estimated 230,000 deaths and $14 billion in financial losses. But, they started delivering the mail again this week.
On Sunday Obamacare became law. Since then I have been frustrated and disenchanted with the country, that is all around me. Today God helped me to gain some perspective. While we might say that we have begun down the slippery slope of bad government that is bankrupting Europe, suffocating Venezuela, or quite literally killing Haiti, we would do well to remember that we still do not live in any of those places. Did any of us truly believe that our fore fathers had written a perfect constitution or had setup an infallible system of government?during one of the debates this weekend someone pointed out that many of the processes in our goverment demand that everyone involved engage in fair play and observe a certain amount of gentleman-like self control. Guess what? We live in a country run by lawyers for whom phrases like "fair play" have no meaning. Someday our nation will fail. All man made institutions fail. The second law of thermodynamics states that "the entropy of an isolated system, that is not in equilibrium, will tend to increase over time". In other words, everything is breaking down. This mainly applies to our physical earth, but I would say it applies to our government too. We live in a fallen world people. However, Christ came here and validated our human existence. Phil. 1:21 says "To live is Christ, and to die is gain". Enjoy life and remember that it will only get better once we move through death.
- Posted from my iPhone