The Truth About Life

Posted on November 14, 2025 by LAW

“Life is pain,” the Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Westley) tells Buttercup in The Princess Bride. Frank Capra, on the other hand, says “it’s a wonderful life” in his Christmas movie by that name. One Sunday, as I filled in for our Sunday School teacher, I asked the class which movie had it right. After a little puzzlement (some had never seen The Princess Bride) – and some nudging from me – the consensus was that they both did. Life frequently is hard and painful, as both Westley and George Bailey could attest, but also often filled with beauty and wonder.

Right now, many people I know or know of – including in my own household and family – are navigating those hard and painful times in life. No doubt, many of you are navigating those times, as well, or you know of those who are. And even those of us enjoying a momentary personal respite – and it’s always only momentary – from those hard, painful times need only look at the news fed to us continuously on our phones and other devices to be tempted to despair.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and forest fires, along with wars, famine, hunger, and disease, all constantly afflict the world. As if those horrors were not enough, human beings also have an infinite capacity to devise evil to inflict on their fellow human beings. All of which is brought to our screens in living color regardless of how close or removed they are from where we live. So whether close or distant, in our own lives or the lives of those we know and care about, we’re daily reminded of the pain that permeates human existence.

Yet, we don’t have to go far to see the wonder and beauty that also permeate human existence. I live in a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the last vestiges of a slow-starting but glorious fall are slipping away. Last year, my husband and I visited the Grand Canyon, the beauty of which is impossible to describe. Despite the destructiveness of natural disasters, in places like those and others throughout this country and around the world, the physical beauty of God’s creation is still visible. And for all the evil and cruelty people can perpetrate on each other, the beauty of God’s image in fallen man is also still visible in the kindness and care people can demonstrate toward others.

As Christ’s followers, we have a calling to do what we can to mitigate this world’s pain and to show the world the wonderful – if not pain free – life Jesus offers. Jesus told the disciples to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecuted them, to do good to those that hated them and to bless those who cursed them. In our highly polarized culture, that’s a command Christians ought to take more seriously. The early Christians were known by their love – a love different from any the world had heretofore seen — and it changed that world. Christians today can do the same.

Christians have the one thing the world can’t give — hope. Hope for an angry, hurting world. Not hope in America. Not hope in political leaders. Not hope in world peace. America may fall. Political leaders can’t be trusted. World peace is but an empty dream. The only sure hope is hope in Jesus Christ. It’s a hope to love for, a hope to live for and, ultimately, a hope to die for. Because of this hope — and only this hope — Christians can love their enemies, do good to those that hate them, and thereby do what political leaders never can — change the world.

In a world so broken and beset with the consequences of the fall, the temptation to despair is always with us. But as people of hope, as Westley might say, despair does not become us. Instead, Christians can affirm with Westley that, yes, life is pain, yet, because of this hope, at the same time still say with Frank Capra, “It’s a wonderful life.”

Cross-posted from my Substack account Aging in Faith

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Teach Your Children Well

Posted on August 9, 2024 by LAW

“Did you watch the Trump/Biden debate?” a dear friend’s middle school-aged grandson — a big history fan — recently asked her. She hadn’t, so he asked her if she would watch it with him on YouTube. My friend really didn’t want to, but for the sake of her grandson, she did.

After they watched the debate, she thought about how she could show him a contrasting example, then asked him to watch a Bush/Gore debate with her. When they finished watching the Bush/Gore debate, my friend asked her grandson if he’d seen a difference between the two.

“Yeah,” he said. “In the Trump/Biden debate, they attacked each other, but in the Bush/Gore debate, they attacked policies.”

“That,” she told him, “is what a debate should be.”

Not only was the Bush/Gore debate a better example of what a civil debate should be, my friend’s willingness to watch a debate she didn’t care to see with her 13-year-old grandson, then to find a contrasting debate to discuss with him, is a great example of how parents and grandparents can help young people learn how to be civil and respectful in today’s bitter political climate.

Sadly, political discourse has devolved into nothing more than personal attacks and name-calling. Instead of debating policies and ideas with civility and respect, politicians prefer to label their opponents as evil in the crudest possible terms. This sort of labeling serves both to discredit and to dehumanize opponents and to make them appear not worth listening to.

This is the atmosphere young people are growing up in — the air they breathe on social media and in their schools and universities. Instead of learning how to make good arguments for the positions they hold, they’re learning to demonize their opponents. Instead of learning to respect the opinions of those they disagree with, they’re learning to shout them down in public forums and to demand that they not be allowed to speak.

And, yet, our young people are our future. We live in a huge, diverse country held together mostly by a set of principles and to some degree a shared heritage. But as the country grows more and more diverse and a shared heritage is less and less a reality, our only hope for continuing as a nation is to teach young people how to engage others with civility by respecting other points of view while arguing clearly and well for their own.

Young people also need to learn how to choose and support politicians who not only share their values but who can also civilly and clearly make the case for their own policies and ideas without demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.

Helping young people learn to argue well, to treat opponents respectfully, and to make wise political choices won’t be easy, yet our country’s future depends on it. If more parents and grandparents would take advantage of opportunities to show kids a better way — as my friend did with her grandson — twenty years from now, our country could be in a much better place.

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Commenting Guidelines

Posted on August 4, 2024 by LAW

I’m thrilled to see some new readers and commenters on my blog. I hope you like what you’ve read and will come back again. And I very much appreciate comments in response to what I’ve written. I won’t, however, publish comments that promote a specific organization or event, unless it’s an organization or event I’m familiar with and/or have mentioned or recommended myself — and the comment is related to what I’ve written.

To be approved, comments must be both civil and kind and directly related to one of my posts. There’s far too much incivility and unkindness being published these days, and I have no desire to contribute to the rancor and hatred that pervades our culture. Comments that don’t meet these guidelines won’t be published.

I’m both a Christian and a conservative, and I’m concerned about how best to live faithfully in a culture that is growing increasingly hostile to my worldview. As a result, the purpose of this blog is to help readers, as well as myself, engage with the issues that are shaping our culture and our public policies, and to think about how we can best live out our faith as we grapple with how to respond to those issues and policies.

Thank you for checking out my blog. If you share my concerns, I hope you’ll hang out here with me and participate in the conversation. And, of course, send your likeminded friends my way. 😊

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What is Truth?

Posted on June 5, 2024 by LAW

“What is truth?” Pilate asks Jesus prior to sentencing him to crucifixion at the demands of the crowd. Was it a retort, as the NIV translates it? Or a scornful question, as the Amplified Bible suggests. It’s possible. Most translations, however, just say, “Pilate said,” and I imagine it could have been said with a certain world weariness.

Things had not gone particularly well for Pilate as procurator or governor of Judea. Whether through his own insensitivity as a leader or perhaps disgust for the people and place he’d been given to govern (as some commentators believe), Pilate had engaged in actions that infuriated the Jews and caused unrest among the population. And now, once again, they were near to rioting and clamoring — for no legitimate reason Pilate could see — for the execution of Jesus.

Did Pilate really want or expect an answer? Probably not. And we have no record that Jesus gave him one beyond what he had already told him — that he had “come into the world — to bear witness to the truth.” So, to keep the peace and to protect his own political future, Pilate gave in to the mob’s demands, and — despite his wife’s pleading — had Jesus crucified. How successful Pilate was at protecting himself politically is hard to know, since he was later recalled to Rome, and the remainder of his life lost to history.

In America today, our politicians seem to be taking a page out of Pilate’s book. Whether they ask or even care what truth is, their primary objective seems to be protecting their own political futures. Their goal isn’t to serve the country but to serve themselves and their careers. And so whichever mob makes the most noise (or donates the most dollars) is the one they give in to. Any principles they once may have had were sacrificed long ago at the altars of personal profit, political power, and prestige.

So as our political leaders discard truth for political advantage — a la Pilate — we, the citizens, are the ones asking “what is truth?” with the same sort of world-weariness that, in my imagination, Pilate expressed. How do we discern truth from the lies we’re often told, and how do we decide who is worthy of our votes? This is where we have to be the ones to hold onto our principles, regardless of what our political representatives do.

Whatever happens in our upcoming elections, God is ultimately in charge, and he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. While we should be good citizens and thoughtfully exercise our right to vote, America should not be our idol. Christians and Christianity survived the fall of Jerusalem and the fall of Rome, and, should it occur, Christ’s church will survive even the fall of America. While God has certainly blessed this country, Americans are not God’s chosen people, and our nation is not exempt from failure.

So, however world weary you may feel as you attempt to navigate this election season, seek the truth regarding our political leaders as best you can, and base your voting choice on biblical principles. But don’t look to any politician to be the savior of this country. While Pilate may not have realized it, ultimate Truth stood before him that day. But, like so many of today’s politicians, he tossed it aside for the sake of political expediency. Let’s make sure we don’t toss it aside for the sake of an idol called America.

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Why I’m Posting Again

Posted on April 7, 2024 by LAW

When this year began, I hadn’t posted to this blog in quite a while, so I decided to save a little money and quit paying for a site and domain name it didn’t look like I was going to use. But when I thought about how AI seemed to be taking direct aim at human writing — not to mention many other creative human endeavors — I changed my mind.

In his book, A Mind for God, James Emery White says that human beings are “made in God’s image, and one of the most precious and noble dynamics within that image is the ability to think.” Emery is right, and right up there with the ability to think is the ability to write. Though thinking comes naturally, and writing must be taught, the ability to put our thoughts in writing and preserve them for others is an equally precious aspect of the imago dei that all humans bear. God even chose writing as the means by which His Word would be passed down to future generations. And AI is threatening to make the need for that ability obsolete.

With that in mind, I decided I ought to exercise that precious ability and get back to writing a few blog posts now and then — without the helpful assistance of AI, though Jetpack kindly made me the offer. I’m pretty rusty but, at the same time, a little excited about getting back into writing before my own skill — such as it is — atrophies completely. There’s much to be commented on — and lamented — in the intersection between politics, culture, and faith in these troubled times, so today I’m jumping back into the fray, and we’ll see where it goes from here.

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