The apostle Paul, in his second letter to the church at Corinth, took a fair amount of time addressing the issue that some in the church apparently had regarding their attitude toward him. As impossible as it is to envision today, during Paul’s earthly ministry he was not universally loved and revered by believers. This had nothing to do with his pre-conversion persecution even unto death of Christians, but rather that ol’ demon pride taking root and convincing some that when it came to disciplining the faithful, Paul was all hat and no cattle.
By the humility and gentleness of Christ, I appeal to you—I, Paul, who am “timid” when face to face with you, but “bold” toward you when away! I beg you that when I come I may not have to be as bold as I expect to be toward some people who think that we live by the standards of this world. For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.
You are judging by appearances. If anyone is confident that they belong to Christ, they should consider again that we belong to Christ just as much as they do. So even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you with my letters. For some say, “His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.” Such people should realize that what we are in our letters when we are absent, we will be in our actions when we are present.
”You are judging by appearances” is occasionally translated as, “You are looking at the surface of things” or variations thereof: different wording, same meaning. In either case, the thought is clear. The individual, or group, who values immediate response without genuine thought and analysis prefers reaction to action. In fact, they are incapable of action, only reaction for better or worse. Usually it is the latter.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of strictly reacting rather than acting; taking everything at face value, or if you prefer, surface value, while neglecting to spend time in contemplation that would reveal or reinforce the underlying truth behind daily events. It’s much like paying way too much attention to your emotional state at any given moment rather than taking a second to think, “Why am I feeling this way?” instead of focusing on what I am feeling at this particular moment. Frantic reaction is not powerful. It is a response to laziness. The ironic truism about why there is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over, comes to mind.
Extending this to the political realm, we have all seen the bitter fruit of disillusionment among the body politic by those decrying the perceived shallowness of it all. To be fair, there is much pettiness and petulance among both the doers and the talkers. As my friend Amy Curtis reminds us in her excellent book Gaslight: How the Democratic Party Lost Its Mind to Radical Leftism and Abuses Voters in the Process, not long ago the Democrats in the Texas Legislature hightailed it out of the state rather than do their job by voting on a Congressional district restructuring bill. On a civilian level, X is littered with the burned-out shells of accounts that once upon a time tweeted both fast and furious until they realized they were spitting into the wind while preaching solely to the choir as they brought nothing but vapid fleck and phlegm to the day’s issues.
To avoid burnout, it is vital to look past the surface of things, always keeping in mind the deeper motivations. We know that for the Left, the endgame is power and wealth. The two are inexorably intertwined. We cannot forget for a moment the hard-core Left’s commitment to its idealistic fallacy that somehow it can make communism, no matter what they call it, work although it has never worked, is not working, and never will work. They do so out of the misguided belief in themselves as tiny little gods, thinking they can somehow overcome the failures of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, along with lesser lights such as Castro and Kim Jong Un. They believe they can do so, yet when confronted with the slightest suggestion of history repeatedly pointing out the fatal flaws behind their philosophy, they run away. On a somewhat lesser, or should I say a bit more benign, level we have the not quite communistic, but still progressive left doing everything it can to ensure power by registering illegal aliens to vote, doing so in the belief that said individuals will take kindly upon their masters (even though they will never call themselves that) and will always do, a.k.a. vote as they are told in return for trinkets and baubles in the form of government handouts financed by taxing the middle-class into oblivion.
The wise person takes rhetoric lightly. As I mentioned a few days ago regarding Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), the surface message from progressives shifts shapes more often than an alien in a ‘50s science fiction novel. It is the underlying meaning that requires digging out, for it never changes. It is that government is the solution to all problems and the sole entity qualified to tackle societal ills, real or not. In the progressive mindset, it is not the strength of the individual, free enterprise, or morality guided by Judeo-Christian principles that can and should guide society, individually and collectively. It is bureaucracy. Never mind how, in every instance where fully implemented, this has resulted in the direct via mass murder or indirect via starvation deaths of millions.
The surface is often discouraging. Shallowness has that effect. But when we take the time to look under the surface at the entire breadth of today’s issues, we see a whole lot of cattle in dire need of proper wrangling before they become permanently branded with progressivism’s hideous mark. Don’t stop wrangling the herd.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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