Reflections

I'm excited about the Christian Legal Society (CLS) at OCU. We're planning to help OU's CLS start a legal aid clinic. We're also thinking about planning a statewide conference for pastors and other interested parties who want to learn about the legal issues that a church can become involved in or, better yet, how to avoid legal issues as a church. Everyone likes to learn about avoiding legal issues (or maybe just the lawyers)! Lawyer jokes aside, it really looks like we're going to do some serious outreach stuff this year, so I'm very excited.

"I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once - (1) the job of seeing how 'Do as you would be done by' can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how."
---------- C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

This, I believe, is the reason that Christians should, and do, get involved in politics, in the schools, and in society in general. This is why I believe that pulling out of the public schools is a bad idea. This is why I believe that Christians secluding themselves is a bad idea. If we are truly called to be light, the city on a hill (Matt. 5:14), and all that, then, we must not sequester ourselves away from the very people we are to be light to. After all, what good is a light without someone who can use it to see? It'd be like that forest and tree question (if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Who cares? There's no one to hear it!). Lewis always says things much better than I can, so I like his quote better than my explanation about it.

In other news: gas prices keep going up, and we really need to be praying for the survivors of Katrina and all the people affected by that very bad storm. I love that song by Natalie Grant, "Held", and I think it has great application here:

Who told us we'd be rescued?
What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares?
We're asking why this happens
To us who have died to live
It's unfair

This is what it means to be held
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved
And to know that the promise was
When everything fell we'd be held.