Bags

March 2, 2020

No more single-use plastic bags in New York State. Our nanny-governor who knows so much better than the rest of us what we ought and ought not be doing, has decreed them illegal, much like he has outlawed fracking and scary-looking guns. Our forebears came to this continent to get away from such invasive governmental oversight, but that was then; this is now. 

I’m no apocalyptic prophet. It doesn’t take much of a casual political conversation before someone asks the question, “How much worse can it get?” Plenty, I would say, as would the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis in the middle of the last century, or the ten million Russians and Ukrainians starved, tortured, exiled, and murdered by their own government. Mao’s millions, Pol Pot’s decimation of Cambodia, Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, or Castro in Cuba—we have no idea how bad things can get. Jesus said there would be wars, rumors of wars, famines, and earthquakes, but “the end is not yet.”

There are times I would like to play the Hobbit, feasting, dancing, smoking their pipes, and drinking their beer, oblivious to the drama stealthily sneaking towards the Shire from the east. Actually, I don’t like beer, and can’t see the attraction of tobacco, but that’s beside the point. The point is, there is always danger on the horizon. Most don’t see it; it takes a visionary to awaken a few lone adventurers to the potential within them and the challenge before them. 

Most of us don’t have a Gandalf calling us to faraway places, but we all have Jesus Christ calling us to awaken from the stupor of this world’s comforts, pick up a cross, and follow him. It may take generations, but most governments collapse from the weight of their own oppression and the apathy of their people. History documents the rise and fall of civilizations; the patterns are clear, if we are willing to see. Our forefathers thought deeply, and created a governmental system that has given more people opportunity than ever before in history. One doesn’t have to travel much to know how blessed we are. But it is a thin and delicate thread that connects us to the past and to the future. Like most valuables, freedom must be treasured and protected.

In Luke 17, some of the religious leaders of his day asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. They expected a military leader who would free them from Rome’s oppression. As he did so many times, Jesus turned their thinking upside down. “The kingdom of God can’t be detected by visible signs...the Kingdom of God is already among (or within) you.” What he was telling them is that the freedom they sought is not secured by political or military means. We are only free if we are free in our inner selves. I look around me and see societal systems that increasingly squeeze the freedom out of people, all in the name of their own good. We can vote and volunteer, but much of the machinations of our culture are beyond our control. 

But I can control my own thoughts. Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Nazi death camps, said that the one thing the Nazis couldn’t take from him was his freedom to choose his own state of mind. So like Frankl, I refuse to relinquish to the Enemy of my soul the freedom I have in Christ to choose my attitude. Paul said, “Let this mind be in you, which was in Christ...” When I do so, I am free. Even if I can’t get tomorrow’s groceries in plastic bags. Our governor is not God, even if at times he acts like it. For that, I am thankful tonight.