Can You See Him?

I am a left-brained artist.  I am a critical thinker, and tend to be more critical than artistically creative.  This is probably the only reason that I can produce art at all.  I am so critical of my own work that I will not complete a drawing or painting unless it meets my minimum standards.  As a result, any art I produce tends to be realistic.  I do fine copying a scene or a picture, but adding any “artistic flare” has been a challenge.

This left-brained thinking also means that I have had to force myself to see things differently if I am going to produce art.  For most people most of the time a look at the world around them does not produce automatic awe and wonder at the beauty they behold.  There are moments of beauty, such as sunsets, or on vacations in “scenic” places, but the everyday world seems drab in comparison.  This is where I stand if I let myself get stuck thinking critically.

Thank You, Jack

Jack was the name C.S. Lewis preferred that his friends call him.  Here is a quote from Lewis that has become my favorite non-scripture quote.  I think it is appropriate as we consider the walls we build and maintain, and as we consider our job of evangelism in general.

More Persistent Walls

I better stand on my soapbox a little longer before someone starts beating me over the head with it.  I feel compelled to bring up another wall that is not recent, but has taken on a new look.  If you haven’t read my previous post about walls, then I recommend doing that first.

Sometimes we maintain walls that we think we have good reasons to maintain, when, in fact, we do not.  For instance, for many Christians the problem with illegal immigration is not so much that it is illegal, but that it is immigration.  Illegal immigration is used as a convenient avenue to express what really amounts to fear of the unknown.  We hear people talking in languages we do not understand, and we fear that they are talking about us.  Our fears are confirmed when they laugh, because we know they are laughing at us. (I hope my sarcasm is obvious.)

So, Christians make statements like, “All immigrants should have to learn English if they are going to come to our country.”  All the while, maybe they do not realize that the United States has no official language.  And, they make comments within the confines of a discussion about illegal immigration since “illegal” means we can take a moral stand on the issue. But this is not even the real problem.

Why the Walls?

Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun, and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”  It wasn’t walls in general that Frost wrote about, but walls that seemed to put barriers where no barriers were needed.  After his neighbor recites the old adage, “Good fences make good neighbors,” Frost replies, “Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.  Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense.”

What are your walls?  Who or what are you walling in or out, and why? There could be any number of answers to this question.  And, if you thought about it long enough, you could probably divide walls up into the kind that you put up based on your convictions, the kind that remain simply because of tradition or culture, and the kind that you may not be able to express reasons for, but you still act accordingly.  There are walls that you put up, and there are walls that your parents left standing for you.  There are walls that protect, and walls that just divide.

Perhaps the most obvious walls are ethnic.