Riding the Fine Line

Honestly, I am afraid of judgments. A poorly aimed judgment can bring us all sorts of grief.

From my personal annals, the following story will suffice to show the dangers of judgments. I hope it is instructive or at least cautionary (in the sense that a car accident or a crack addict is cautionary). When I was 8, my dad came home and confessed to my mom that he had blown an entire paycheck at the racetrack. My mother had apoplectic fits for days in a row. This was not the first time dad had gambled away the family’s food money (and rent money and going to the zoo money). But it was the first time that I really formed a major opinion of how I felt about it all.

Years later, I would recall exactly what I said in my heart about him: “When I grow up, I will never hurt my kids like that. I won’t be a jerk

Friendly Fire: Bombs from 29,000 feet

In one of my favorite lines from a Vietnam era movie, the pilots are sitting around the circle in a bar in the Philippines enjoying some of the local brew. One of them leans back and says “Nothing beats high altitude bombing, does it”. They all laugh and go back to ogling the girls in the bar. Their conversation revolves around their job: To go up above the 20,000 foot level and using precision targeting drop their entire load and head on back to relative safety. Actually, unless they had a plane malfunction, they were safe the entire time. No artillery was going to hit them up there, let alone a non-existent Viet Cong Air Force. They never once saw a single victim of their bombing attacks. They never had to face the damage they were inflicting.

Here is what this looks like in today’s church culture. People are sitting in a Bible study decrying the state of marriages today. The happily married co-leaders of the group tell story after story of wretched people they know who