I have started and abandoned a dozen posts since my last school board update post.
The short of it is this: school is out for the summer.
I’ve been in meetings that established some things—meetings where I’m welcome and meetings where I am not. Of course it’s never fun to be explicitly uninvited, and it puts me in a position to feel a bit insecure—a natural instinct of mine.
So I’ve been quiet, thinking.
Ought I be involved in policy? People I know, love, and respect refuse to be involved. Is speaking up a worthless endeavor?
Should I post about it on the internet? If I post about it on the internet, will I lose ground in the uphill battle?
Are intimidation factors at play? If I am publicly and vocally honest, do I forgo any future influence I might have as a parent in this culture?
But as I keep telling myself—I don’t have much to lose that I haven’t already lost. I don’t have a resume to speak of—I have chosen to raise my kids instead of following a career path (props to a bread-winning husband).
I have no other agenda than protecting kids, advocating for parents, and proclaiming the gospel. I can be utterly transparent with a school district and expose “dark deeds” without worrying if I will lose my job.
And here is the risk you take, Christian friends, if you should choose to follow Jesus in the public arena (which, let us clarify, is simply the world—unavoidable in our human existence):
You risk losing face, losing friends, losing respect. You risk time, money, family, freedom, dreams.
It should either encourage you in your steadfastness or prompt you to abandon faith completely, because this is the story of Christians throughout history: unless you are willing to risk everything in this world, you cannot be a disciple of Jesus. (Luke 14:26-33)
Christians are in the business of counting the cost and losing what is valuable to find what is precious. What good is it, my brother, if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?
Then I consider this: if rules are to be made and enforced, then someone reasonable needs to be drafting them, not people who are willy-nilly on behavioral expectations, or folks that won’t think past their own, most base desires.
One of the reasons I became a Christian was because it is loads and loads more reasonable than putting faith in some iteration of humanism where “people are mostly good.”
A friendly acquaintance of mine parroted this and I sat there, stunned, because if people were mostly good we wouldn’t be in this troubling situation. People are entirely not good.
People, left to their own devices, destroy themselves and other people and call it freedom (see abortion—murdering unborn infants,
see cheating and divorce–ripping apart families,
see covetousness—looking, lusting, despising on the internet for hours,
see pride—wanting and consuming in excess and bragging like it’s the American Dream).
If we draft policy that assumes people are mostly good, we intrinsically assume we as policy-makers have the moral upper hand—that we replace Divine Law—what a Christian might say is God, or what an atheist may say is Science.
We allow people to become perverted versions of themselves, to act like animals, for criminal behavior to invade society, for evil to prevail. We, thinking ourselves gods of a sort, begin to assume wild notions like it’s only kind to let men and boys use the women’s restroom. Or, the right sort of non-girl will use the women’s restroom with the proper intent. You can see where this leads. People get hurt, kids, abandoned, futures, destroyed. Society decays, and folks that desire what is selfless, pure, and Good are hiding in their locked houses while outside, chaos reigns.
I was learning about water treatment with one of my kids on a fifth grade field trip. A student asked why the facilitators wouldn’t add more chemicals to the water, if, as they had just said, chemicals were good.
“Great question,” the engineer said. “There’s a thing in science we call the Law of Diminishing Return. You see, we can add chemicals to a point, but then we find that continuing to add more doesn’t give us a better output. So we stop.”
I love that—the reasonableness of it! A law of nature, tested by nature. Here is the line, and we cannot pass it and achieve a better outcome. Lawmakers in civil policy ought to follow suit.
Bathrooms separated by gender, and not gender identity: meet Law of Diminishing Return. But progressive lawmakers ignore this law of nature and prefer to think of people as generally good, and themselves as lowercase gods.
If we draft policy that assumes people are mostly not good (and what I mean by good is this: of an others-first, ethically moral persuasion)—however, that not good people still have the capacity to understand the benefit in having rules and consequences
(you shall not murder, murderers go to prison,
you shall not steal, thieves get arrested,
you shall not drive recklessly, you will be ticketed, etc.)—
then our freedom is greater, and the spirit of the law (which imparts positive or negative consequences to our actions) imprints on our conscience as good.
Isn’t it convenient when people aren’t running red lights when your light turns green?
Isn’t it a relief when a murderer is no longer on the streets, murdering?
We do like laws!
I sat in the parking lot of my grocery store early one morning last week and watched as a dozen people passed a stray cart—one that had been shoved, I’m guessing, toward the cart corral, but not quite delivered. The entire lane was blocked by this cart. Either a car was going to hit it and send it crashing into other parked cars, or some human force of goodness was going to roll it out of the way.
Not a single soul bothered to move the cart.
And this is what is wrong, but I suppose we already knew it from our Good Samaritan lesson in Sunday school where the guy goes out of his way to stop and help someone who can never repay his kindness.
People who think they are good (but are, in fact, not good) also think they can avoid or look past the thing they ought to do— the cart that is in the way–because it isn’t really their problem.
When we stick the “good person” tag on our lapel yet have this entitlement of avoiding civic responsibility (that which benefits the greater good of all people), we establish rules that are fundamentally biased.
The I’m-a-good-person progressive agenda says, me first, my desires, my wants; now put it into Law.
Divine Nature and Wisdom say, learn to submit to Law, then you will begin to understand freedom and true compassion.
This is fantastically spelled out in Scripture, over and over. God’s Law was given to His people, which ultimately showed them His holiness. Jesus came, perfectly followed and fulfilled the Law, and extended His love by self-sacrifice, but also pointed out that the Law itself ought to make us humble, not proud. His Law is reasonable and just, yet makes room for forgiveness as well as generosity of spirit that compels a person to return their shopping cart (and maybe someone else’s, too).
And Jesus, God-in-flesh, Father of compassion issued the challenge: Will you follow me?
He didn’t mean follow Him into a “love is love” bumper sticker sort of freedom, He meant will you follow me even if it costs you everything?
Your job. Your family. Your friends, your health, nice house, good paycheck, cushy bank account, easy lifestyle, the car you’ve always wanted, cute Insta account, your methods of raising kids, cultural traditions, organic food preferences, your control issues, your identity.
So this is what I’ve been pondering in regards to school board.
I’m praying my progressive-leaning friends will also think this through, how our policies must have firm boundaries because the truth is, we are not fundamentally good. None of us naturally wants to go out of our way to return someone else’s cart to the cart corral. All of us need to be reminded of diminishing return—our permissiveness will be our doom.
And I’m praying for my more conservative Christian friends, too, that live a “good” life, and find their identity there, instead of in Christ. May we loosen our grip on the things we think we control.
Did you truly count the cost when you declared you would follow Jesus? How often do you place yourself out of the picture instead of painting a world around you? The big, bad, dangerous world holds no fear for the person who has given King Jesus the reins.
It’s pretty freeing to play by the Rules.
