Gavin Halliday @HallidayGavin

Joined September 2015

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Sarah Salviander @sarahsalviander

4 years ago

A high profile conservative who espouses family values is revealed to be a jerk to his pregnant wife. A high profile progressive who publicly worries about climate change has a mega-mansion and flies in private jets everywhere. There are conservative, Christian leaders who cheat on their wives. There are progressive leaders who step all over the little guy. There are political activists who raise millions of dollars for a cause only to spend it on themselves. The point? If you're looking to politics and the virtue of other people to reinforce your morality, you're going to be sorely disappointed. But it's not just our leaders. In a way, they're just symptoms of the bigger problem. Which is that every one of us is a hypocrite in some way or other. Every one of us falls short. And while it's disappointing and annoying to see leaders, icons, and role models turn out to be the opposite of what they portray themselves to be, it doesn't get me down. Why? Because I look to one person, and one person alone, as the epitome of virtue and the embodiment of morality. Y'all know who I'm talking about: Jesus Christ. And the good news is, as terrible as we are, God still loves us, and he values us enough to involve us in his plans. Moses and David were murderers, and God still put them in exalted positions. Paul zealously persecuted Christians before he served God and became the #1 author of the New Testament. The Apostles were all various degrees of miserably flawed, and look how God used them to spread the good news. And God is using flawed but valuable you to do great things, too. The lesson in all this – for me, anyway – is to temper admiration for other people with realism, to definitely not look to politicians or political activism to solve our problems, and to focus attention on the one thing that matters most, which is to obey Jesus' commandments to love God and love each other.