Dear Reader,
There’s plenty to read in this week’s Second Drafts, so I’ll keep this week’s intro short. Suffice it to say that I’m once again thankful for you reading what I’ve written, and I hope it’s a workout worthy of your time in the midst of your other summer activities. Let’s get to it!
Thanks for reading Second Drafts.
Craig
PS: This week’s newsletter is a long one. Gmail clips emails at 102K, so you may need to continue reading it in your browser (just click “View Entire Message” at the bottom).
Programming Note
July’s podcast for paid subscribers drops tomorrow (Saturday). Here’s the official write-up:
“From cries of ‘defund the police’ to critiques of why law enforcement doesn’t do more to stop mass shootings, it’s a hard time to be an officer of the law. In this podcast, Peaches and I interview fellow Trinity Church member, Joe Pravetz, who spent 30 years as a New Jersey policeman and forensic detective. We talk about his police work, his perspective on the Second Amendment, the dead-end of trying to live a ‘good’ life, and God’s gentle but relentless pursuit culminating in his coming to Christ at the age of 60 (he’s now 80).”
For those who have yet to subscribe, just $5/month gets you full access to past and future podcasts and book reviews. Decide it’s not worth it? Cancel anytime, no questions asked.
Know someone who might appreciate the topic and want to gift a subscription for the month?
Hot Takes (Video Edition)
I’m coming at Hot Takes a little differently today, as there seemed an inordinate amount of cringe-worthy video clips in the news cycle this week.
Let’s get things started with our President, whose job approval rating of 33% (along with 64% of Democratic voters who say they would prefer a new candidate in 2024) perhaps should have informed a better selection of an opening joke.
You and me both, Mr. President, you and me both. However, 9.1% inflation aside, it’s not just the President who is having trouble being humorous. First Lady Jill Biden got called out by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) for calling Latinos “breakfast tacos” in this speech at the 2022 UnidosUS Annual Conference held in San Antonio, Texas.
As per usual, the American media gave her a free pass on the gaffe, so I’ll move on.
Speaking of food, when she’s not solving the problems at our southern border, Vice-President Kamala Harris continues to toss up some creative but incoherent word salads in interviews. Unfortunately, those laughing go far beyond our own borders.
There are plenty of other (and even more head-scratchingly hilarious) examples of the Vice-President’s word selection on YouTube, but I only have so much room here.
In the meantime, let’s not miss Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s incredibly unconstitutional proposal to shut down crisis pregnancy centers “who are there to fool people looking for pregnancy termination help.”
Letting her last comment about “a pregnant person” (as opposed to a “pregnant woman”) slide, don’t miss her acknowledgment that crisis pregnancy centers outnumber outright abortion clinics in Massachusetts three to one (blame the Christians, I guess). It’s amazing that Warren and Massachusetts’ Attorney General think so little of their constituency, assuming they can’t tell the difference between a crisis pregnancy center that provides help for mother and child before and beyond birth and a Planned Parenthood, whose only objective is to abort the child.
Warren may have met her “special-kind-of-crazy” match, however, in law professor Khiara Bridges, whose head almost explodes in response to Senator Josh Hawley’s “transphobic” question about (you guessed it) who can biologically get pregnant and why definitions matter. I’m no fan of Hawley’s past pro-Trump views, nor of his tendency for grandstanding, but I’m glad he held his ground against Bridges’ progressive modus operandi of name calling, accusation of words leading to violence, and badgering tone of condescension (though as this insightful article in The Atlantic points out, the tribalism on both sides eclipsed any transcending truth hitting home).
Let’s switch things up and swing to the other side of the political spectrum with a twofer from retired United States Army lieutenant general, Michael Flynn.
You might remember that Flynn was the 25th U.S. National Security Advisor for the first 22 days of the Trump administration. In these clips from his Reawaken America Tour, Flynn trots out his Christian Nationalist message with ignorant aplomb.
But as if that clip isn’t enough, let’s not miss this one, in which Flynn gets things fairly backwards in terms of which text makes a way for which.
Regardless of political party or what you think on this or that issue, my general take (with only a few exceptions) is that we are a nation run largely by clowns who have no idea they are clowns, nor any real idea of what they are to be doing otherwise. This is evidenced by inexperienced leaders praising themselves for solving problems created by their own inexperience. For instance, did you know:
“A survey of the employment history of 68 top officials in the Biden Administration—starting with the president himself—shows most of the nation’s senior executive branch policymakers have zero experience in the private sector. This analysis by The Committee to Unleash Prosperity explains why the Biden policies on the economy have been such a failure. Almost none of the key policymakers know anything about business, commerce, or finance.
The median years of business experience is zero.
62% of the Biden appointees dealing with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy, and finance have no practical experience working in the private sector.
The vast majority of the Biden economic/commerce team consists of professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, academics, lobbyists, and government employees.
What’s a solution to all of this silliness? For starters, people. We have to raise up and elect better people experienced in things other than government if we’re to have a hope of solving problems. We need more Republicans like Steve Daines, Ben Sasse, Tim Scott; more Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema.
As former President Ronald Reagan once famously said,
“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
No more progressive Democrats; no more far-right Republicans. In November, let’s start electing competent people with some common sense and see where that gets us.
Hearing from the Heavens
“The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
Psalm 19:1
“He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they made it simply the heavens. The heavens which declared the glory.”
Ransom’s thoughts as captured by C.S. Lewis in The Space Trilogy
The sky on the night I trusted Christ at the age of 14 looked a lot like the image released by NASA this week from its James Webb Space Telescope. Okay, so the stars in that 1985 west central Illinois sky didn’t look exactly like the picture to my naked eye, but here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about all week:
Those stars were all there declaring God’s glory, whether I could see them or not.
Gather round the campfire here and I’ll tell you the story.
Arguing with Galaxies
It is a warm July evening on the east side of the wide-stretching Illinois River valley, the last night of my first weekend at a campground called Green Pastures, a few miles east of a little Illinois river town called Meredosia.
I’ve just spent three blistering days of heat and humidity with another 100 or so junior high and high school-aged kids somehow recruited from their rural environs to attend this strangely unique and Christian performing arts camp in the middle of west central Illinois.
The year is 1985; I am 14 years old and am in the strange process of responding to Jesus drawing me to himself, forgiving me of my sin, and calling me to follow him.
But this is no cornball campfire profession of faith, initiated by “positive” peer pressure, guitar chords and tears, and warm and fuzzy platitudes about Jesus.
On the contrary, what I perceive the stars in the heavens declaring of the glory of God has driven me from the campfire and its congregants down the hill and onto the small, deserted, wooden stage of the Green Pastures amphitheater where this most important of conversations is to take place. And this conversation does take place—awkwardly, passionately, desperately, honestly. I am there with God and His glory as declared by the heavens, which speak louder than any words I could say.
Despite my best protestations, God wins the debate. It’s hard to argue with galaxies.
Active Passivity
One of the themes of my life has been learning to live with ambiguity—in relationships, with regard to the future, in experiencing God’s Presence (and what has sometimes felt like his absence). While I never set out to function like this, the little progress I’ve made in learning to live this way has been of aid in the realm of both the spiritual and the mystical, as I have (finally) stopped trying to analyze and over-analyze my walk with God to death, which was the tendency of my younger self.
By God’s grace over time, I have learned to live in relationship with Jesus, none of which I can easily explain, but all of which (in some spiritual, mystical, ambiguous way) is very real. Am I truly in Christ? My 51-year-old self says I have to be, as it’s too spiritual and mystical (and too downright hard to fake) to be anything other. It’s vine and branches stuff straight out of John 15. I can’t explain it; it just is.
It just is, but not by my doing. The Christ, Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation of all the stars and all the galaxies in that picture and beyond, deserves all the credit:
“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things [including Jesus and me] hold together.”
Colossians 1:15-17
How does one respond to this Christ? What are we called to do as His? Francis Schaeffer wrote in The Finished Work of Christ: the Truth of Romans 1-8:
“Our calling is to active passivity. God will bring about our sanctification, but we are called to be active partners in the process as we yield ourselves to Him.” (p. 72)
Active passivity. This has been the hardest of all lessons of the past 37 years. It would be one thing if the lessons of active passivity could be learned only in school, only in isolation, only with God; it is completely another thing to learn in the context and complications of life’s experiences (particularly when those experiences include your wife and daughters, who are impacted by your lesson-learning as well).
Yet we are called “to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” as Paul says in Philippians 2, helping others even as we struggle ourselves. In His sovereignty, the glory in doing so becomes God’s, not ours.
The Cure Has Begun
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, [it] seems like an awful waste of space.” Carl Sagan in Contact
God’s glory is what the heavens declare, and the stars do not need a human audience for them to do so (though the ones farthest from us got their first human audience this week). NASA’s new pictures should remind us that the universe is not “an awful waste of space,” but the ultimate concert hall with the music of the spheres playing 24/7.
Even more glorious a thought is that we, as God’s human creation, get to contribute to the symphony. Borrowing from another C.S. Lewis classic (this one more Earth-bound, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), he writes of an annoying boy (who had to be 14) named Eustace, who learned his own lessons and came out a better declarer for it:
“It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”
Like Eustace, I am not yet healed of what ails me. Unfortunately also like Eustace, I relapse more than I care to say concerning my general legalism, my preoccupation with right and wrong, my pseudo-justification by works, and my nagging guilt and shame at failing to change these dysfunctions immediately or on my own.
But, as Aslan the Lion (the Christ-figure in The Chronicles of Narnia) did for Eustace in tearing away the dragon skin of his self-inflicted imprisonment, God is painfully and slowly peeling away leathery layers of skin I’ve worn most of my life.
Like Eustace, I can be tiresome to many, but I trust the cure of grace and growth is still in effect for this sometimes 14-year-old boy who can still recall being both enamored and silenced by God’s stars and finding himself asking with the psalmist,
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?”
Psalm 8:3-4
The answer that came clearly to me then is the same one I cling and clutch to now:
Because I am loved.
The heavens (and I) declare this glory. Is it your declaration as well?
Post(erity): “Life on Other Planets”
Each week, I choose a post from the past apropos of something in the newsletter.
This week’s Post(erity) post, “Life on Other Planets,” is from August 2009 and was a first attempt at some thoughts as to whether we’re alone in the universe. An excerpt:
“I recognize that just because the Bible doesn't record the existence of life on other planets doesn't mean there isn’t. Remember: the Bible is a historical-redemptive narrative, not an all-encompassing science book. And speaking of science, there are plenty of scientists who do not share my doubts, running huge scientific initiatives and spending a boatload of money in hopes of making some kind of contact with other beings.”
Fresh & Random Linkage
“The ‘90s Is the Most Popular Decade for Music” - According to this survey, Gen Xers, millennials and “zoomers” (Gen Z) all appear to love ‘90s music.
“Joggler Michael Bergeron Sets a Pending Guinness World Record for Running While Juggling” - Everyone needs a hobby, but this seems an odd mix of two.
“Stormtrooper Helmet and Blaster Used in 1977's Star Wars Up for Auction” - I get that it’s Star Wars, but why pay so much for two items that never worked?
Until next time.