Acceptance / Approval

Since I made some confessions in my last post I’ll start this one off just the same.  Confession: no, I haven’t spent more time doing research on current social and political events than I have watching TV.  It is not excuse but Barbara and I have discovered “West Wing” and are binge watching our way through its seven seasons.  Wait a minute!  Can I count that as doing political research?  If that is the case then I am doing great.  It’s all in the metrics and how you interpret them.

So, let me use that as an example.  I never watched “West Wing” because of my perception of its liberal bias.  There is a liberal bias to the show but the White House administration had to be one or the other and they have done a pretty decent job showing both sides of the issue, though that seemed to be more prevalent in the earlier seasons than in the latter ones.  Did you notice that I said I didn’t watch it because of my perception of its liberal bias.  I didn’t even give it a chance because of that perception, not because I actually watched the show and was told it had a liberal bias, but because I was told that and never bothered to investigate for myself.

And that is all too often the case with all of us and part of my extreme frustration that prompted this line of blogging to begin with.  We are being told what horrible things President Trump is doing just as we were told about all the horrible things President Obama did from the other side when he was in office.

So, what I have been doing is I found a website (White House) that lists all the executive orders and other artifacts for this administration.  There are over 55 web pages of executive orders and it is going to take some time to get through them all.  But instead of reading what others are saying about all this I want to actually see what is being done, insofar as I can, and form opinions based on that.  We are back to that thing I have been trying to avoid all along, the work it is going to take to get beyond what everyone else wants me to think and to form opinions based on my own review of the facts.

Which brings me to the title of this blog.  One of the things that ideologically driven people lose sight of is that to accept someone is often far different than approving of them and how they behave.  In particular, many evangelical Christians are afraid their acceptance of another will be interpreted as approval of a particular lifestyle or orientation of any kind.  Yet that is one of the most un-Christlike behaviors we can have.  God demonstrated His acceptance of us through Jesus Christ in the context of radical religiosity, governmental brutality, and the sinfulness of us all.  Thank God.  If God needed to approve of everything I think and do I would be up the proverbial creek.

Once again, I need to go (this time to work) but let me conclude this mental meandering with this.  I don’t approve of the petty behavior I see from President Trump.  Just last night I watched a bit of the news where he belittled an opponent calling them stupid.  Name calling is wrong no matter how much appeal it may have to “them” out there.  But I haven’t decided yet whether or not I accept his leadership.  I will let you know as I work through his executive orders, and I will comment on what I see after I have enough of them under my belt to have an informed opinion.