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Ends of the Spectrums


Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. (Proverbs 14:34)

          This morning’s prayer focus was our spiritual centers of influence. As I prayed for righteous for various roles within the Church, I found myself thinking about two spectrums: orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and personal and systemic.
          Orthodoxy is thinking righteously. Orthopraxy is doing righteousness. Some people think we should do one, or the other. Scripture makes it clear that we are to do both. Thinking right produces doing right and doing right produces thinking right. Some folks also preach the notion that everything is OK as long as no one gets hurt. But if we work with a number line spectrum, hurt is a negative number. Nobody getting hurt runs from zero upward. So, nobody getting hurt can mean that you’re actually not doing that person any good. Our goal should not be “nobody getting hurt” but something far more positive than that. Our goal should be for people to benefit, not just to not be hurt.
          Shifting from that soapbox to the other, I thought about the protests that have been taking place, and about someone who has said “Shame on you!” to a group of women gathering to pray. His problem isn’t the virus, it’s that, as he sees it, gathering to pray is a waste of time. We should be protesting, acting, doing! And in the sense of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, he’s right. It’s not enough for us to gather to pray. We must act as well. But the thing about the protesting and the acting that he advocated is that it tends to do more harm than good, especially if a systemic fix is the goal. 
          The purpose of protesting tends to be to force someone(s) seen as being in power to submit. It’s a quick fix, but chances are as good as not that the person(s) forced to submit are not going to change their beliefs. They will resent those who forced them to submit, or perhaps suffer from Stockholm syndrome, but they probably won’t actually convert. For those who are forced into “righteous” action, righteousness is vain, or empty. On the other hand, those who have been converted are often strongly committed to that change in their lives. The adage is that there is no one so eloquent on the topic of not smoking as the one who had been a chain smoker. 
          I’m not saying that protests never have positive results, or that there should be no protests but that that the same complaint made by the guy about prayer – that prayer is not enough – is true of protesting. Protests that does nothing but exercise power over another individual has failed miserably. It’s worthless.

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