What If There Were No Longer Any Conservatives?

What if there were no longer any conservatives in the world?  Would it end all political, moral and cultural debating?  Would it change the way social structures operate?  Would it make things better for us?  What if there were no liberals left?  How would it shift the moral compass?  Where would the economy skew?  If libertarians became extinct, would it matter?  Could we see a difference in the world?

Labels are more than just markers, they are checks and even funnels that position the ebb and flow of things.  Labels give us parameters but more than that they take us out of other parameters, they stonewall shifting matrices.  If you think I am a conservative, then you have made not an analysis but a comparative determination.  I am more of something than someone else or less of that same thing than another but it doesn't say who I am.  I am no longer a morphing living being if I really am a "conservative" or more so, a "liberal"; I am a snapshot of one.  Rather than video, I am now a single frame.  Conservatives are never completely conservative and Russians are never completely Russian.  There is a spark in us that keeps us from crystallizing.  That spark prevents the label from really fitting.  There is not a perfect or even an imperfect match with that spark shaking up the drink.  No person is a Smith or a White or a Protestant or a Democrat and that is that.  In the picture we have of people, it is never quite right or in focus.  We can't "get it" about people because we are not two-dimensional or three-dimensional or a billion-dimensional.  

Each one of us is in the image of God and that jack-knifes all label marking.  If God would not and perhaps even due to the shallowness of our perception could not give us a sturdy label to mark Himself, why would we think any one of us could be boxed into a label.  YHWH is not in any real sense a name or even an identifier, it is more a signifier.  YHWH, which we really don't even know what it means and probably Moses didn't either, simply gives us a glimpse into the Presence of God rather than a box where we can store Him for analysis at future dates.  All we know from the Name is that God lives.  And that is the problem with every label we use for any image of God.  We live but we are more than alive, we are living within the unbounded dimension of our Creator and so only He can know us in any real sense.  The more we look into a person, the more there is to her, the more astounding she is.  We are wrecked when we stop to mark someone...whether that mark is "stupid", "talented", "funny", "Hindu", "Japanese" or "Conservative".  We can never be the sum of our parts because the infinity of God living within us will not stand for it.  You are not the combination of your potential and accomplishments.  You are the image of God and that strips away the boundaries of even a billion labels.  Live within the Kingdom of God and you are the most you will ever be...Free.

Why Noah, Why Not Noah

What is it that went so wrong so quickly with Creation that God made the call to wipe out everything? There are two ways to look at the Flood account. Why did God destroy the world...animals and people? Why did God save a remnant? It is quite easy to just take the righteousness of Noah argument to explain completely God's decision to save His family but there seems to be something running much deeper in the psyche of Yhwh that makes the Noah family and (the Noah creatures?) saveworthy. If success is measured in all the variables I mentioned below, then we are hardpressed to define Noah in a success assessment. He wasn't at all cool like the Nephilim. But there is something more there that cannot be separated from the saving decision of God to hold on to Noah. Yes he was good and right but he wouldn't always be so and the generations that followed made a mess of what they were given. Most of Noah's descendants were nothing to make one proud. But Noah was grabbed and held by God and that is a fascinating consideration. Why? Some might say "why not" but only because they have not considered the pain God suffered over what came out of His Creation...Here is the key verse in all of this discussion. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Genesis 6: 8 NIV Why? What makes God want us when we have so little to offer Him? That I think is the key question that when answered unlocks the mystery of Job and his sufferings. If we get at the answer to why God kept Noah and his family, we can reconcile the troubles we face with the mercy of the Cross and the love God professes for us. Why Noah?