Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
It’s been another busy (or “full”, I guess) month for Ed and me, with travel to visit out-of-state friends and family, catching up on work and sleep after travel, and an unexpected houseguest for a few days.
We had a lot of fun talking to people we haven’t seen in a while and people we’d never met before, eating delicious things, seeing (and sometimes feeding) cool birds, and more.
But this month was also the month of the Indiana primary election—yes, our primary is that late—and weeks of weeding through election mail, replying “STOP” to campaign texts I didn’t sign up for, and researching candidates for three competitive local races.
The gravity well of politics seems to warp all adjacent space-time, distorting the appearance of everything until it seems like certain people—mere humans—winning or losing certain races is more important than anything else.
I spend little time in its pull until an election is approaching. And as the election ends, I float back out of the influence of politics—not completely, as its gravity is great, but enough that it’s more like the moon on Earth’s ocean tides, and less like a black hole.
And I remember that for a Christian, these races aren’t the point. We do our duty and use the power we’ve been given to vote, and we try to vote wisely, and if we’re among the few called by the Lord to run in an election ourselves, we do our best.
But our goal is not to “preserve our lifestyle”, a promise I saw one politician running on. It’s not to persuade people that they must fear every outcome except the outcome we want today, a tactic I saw employed by nearly every local politician this election season.
This was the primary, which means it was people running on very similar platforms trying to persuade everyone that the other, similar people were very scary in comparison.
I acknowledge that the outcomes of various races have real impact on real people every day. But for Christians, that reality is often a temptation to myopically pursue human salvation instead zooming out and reading the bigger story.
Our goal is to be in relationship with God and to preach the Gospel, the good news of the Kingdom of God, of Jesus Christ. And while I voted as wisely as I could, given the information I had, to bring the best tangible outcomes I could imagine at the time, I also don’t think the best soil for the seeds of the Kingdom is inherently the comfortable lifestyle we all want.
So whoever wins any election, may God use each candidate to do His will, to bring His Kingdom, and may His people focus on His mission alone.
May we rejoice in the mission field He gives us and follow Him faithfully into it.
May we see the Kingdom as more valuable than the republic, may we ever see the bigger picture, may we follow Christ in our words, actions, and choices and not the politician who promises the society we wish we could see.
[Also worth noting: James Emery White, “The Mark of a Political Christian”, Church and Culture, 29 April 2024. Spoiler alert: It’s the same mark of any Christian.]
A show I liked this month: Goodbye Earth
Goodbye Earth (종말의 바보) is a new Korean show on Netflix. Based on a Japanese novel, the premise of the show is that an asteroid is heading toward Earth and is going to hit the Korean peninsula directly. Not everyone living in Korea is able to migrate to other, presumably safer countries. How do the remaining Korean people live, knowing their days are very specifically numbered?
The Korean title and the original Japanese one translate to something like, “Doomsday’s Fool”, or “Fool at the End of the World”.
The Korean word used for “fool” in the title is 바보 (babo), which, I’m told, has a sense of affection with the accusation. I personally imagine a gentle pat on the head when I hear 바보.
The show takes some weird plot turns, not all of which make sense, but the thread throughout is crystal clear: people’s choices change when faced with the end of their world. They might become, by the standards of normal times, fools.
Some background characters join cults, some cling to normalcy as long as they can, some take their ending into their own hands, some try to perform new acts of hope. Many choices seem to make less logical sense as the end approaches.
I think this is at least partly why God declined to tell humanity the date of the end of this age. We are supposed to be faithful until the end, and it might be harder to do that if we know how many days remain, whether many or few.
The show served as a reminder that we don’t know whether the end is near or far off, and we should live well in either case, prioritizing what’s truly important now.
Goodbye Earth is not an action-packed show, and it’s not a normal K-drama romance, and I think that’s why many of the reviews are bad—people were bored and expecting something else. But I liked it exactly as it is: a beautiful, slow exploration of humans trying to find, or keep, hope during a time of hopelessness.
Its portrayal of some of the Christians is unfortunately typical of modern media, where faith is based on circumstances and the evil of fellow humans, and it doesn’t occur to any member of the church in the show that evangelizing the lost is the most important act in the last days. Nevertheless, I appreciated the story.
Writing Updates This Month
Besides ordinary editing and writing this letter, I’ve just about finished drafting a chapter of my novel.
Music I Liked This Month: The Oh Hellos
The Oh Hellos are a band I stumbled upon recently. They’re apparently Christian, yet not just “good for Christian media”, which is sadly a common phrase, but good, enjoyable, lyrically poetic, musically like The Lumineers, or Mumford & Sons but with unexpected C.S. Lewis references instead of unexpected expletives.
I don’t know yet if their newer music holds up the same way, but the albums I’ve checked out so far are worth listening to: The Oh Hellos EP (2011) and Through the Deep, Dark Valley (2012).
“Foundational Thinking About Immigration” by Dr. White
Pastor James Emery White of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC is generally very good about finding the Biblical line through challenging topics, and I appreciated a recent blog post of his on the topic of immigration: James Emery White, “Foundational Thinking About Immigration”, Church & Culture, 25 April 2024.
“Those of us who follow Christ,” White wrote, “should say to our nation that we must work to resolve the tension between the value of compassion for the stranger and the security for our citizens. For the Christian, it can’t be an either-or—it must be a both-and.”
That’s it for this May! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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