Nothing Remains the Same and Love Doesn't Always Win

In today's through-the-looking-glass world, what we once took for granted seems like a distant memory. And it's not just you feeling it. Many people looking out at the larger world through the lens of the media and popular culture feel like our leaders are unmoored from reality, paying lip service to false gods. It's what happens when you reach a certain age as a country. In a way we are the victims of our own success, taking for granted the hard fought liberties and rights passed on from generation to generation of Americans. We're not certain who the good guys are; we're unused to discerning a reality more than skin deep. Our values aren't rock solid; they're more permeable, just as our reality is more multi-faceted and counter-intuitive.

When we hear someone like Lt. Col Vindeman, the army officer who testified in the impeachment inquiry this week, we seem amazed that such a man could still hold to such core beliefs as duty, honor, and loyalty to a cause beyond self-interest, while his boss, our president, flouted his constitutional responsibilities in seeking a political favor.

And yet many people can state boldly that they believe the president is some God anointed savior at this moment in time. Savior of who, I wonder? Surely not the American people who have long relied on the rule of law as the uniting principle of our republic. Such is the topsy-turvy nature of our political divide that the rule of law could be seen as an expedient to be discarded at the appropriate moment.

Clearly, we are not far from a crisis of national identity that may spell the end of America as we know it.

In  my new book, Yet Today, coming out May 5, I try to spell out the proper role for adults, individuals who feel the need to step up and do something, to pull their weight to get this country back on track again. There is a role for everyone, I believe, in this enterprise, no matter what you do, whether it's flipping burgers or flipping equities. Our interconnections are deeper than we can ever realize, and God does play a role in shaping our destiny as a people. But it is up to us to discern the way forward when so many of our fellow citizens are in such deep pain that they can see no way out except to vote for a con man and support his mob rule at all costs, even to the point that they can claim that it is ordained by the hand of the Almighty.

God does not put criminal gangs in charge of the destiny of the world for us to support, but rather to resist.