Black and White
The best personal story I can think of, to fit this topic, is the molding of my personal views towards abortion so hold on…
When I was a young adult (and thought I knew everything), I was comfortable being opposed to abortion personally but I did not feel comfortable mandating that others concur with my beliefs let alone make it illegal.
In my first career job, there was a lot of waiting time. By that I mean that we would code a job to select data from some mainframe file, submit the job, wait for it to be given access to the computer (the brains of the mainframe), and review the result to see if was what we wanted. We were writing fairly complex coding to do things that the software package we were using was never designed to do. But hey, we were students and not programmers (it would have taken 4x as long if we had to work through the IT department), and honestly, didn’t care if what we were writing was efficient for the mainframe.
But I get off course. One of those days, there were a couple of us waiting for our job to run (or crash as was as likely to happen), and one of the older guys overheard our conversation on abortion and felt compelled to challenge me. To his credit, he did so privately. He asked me what the purpose of laws were. He guided the definition to protecting people from each other (if you think about it, every law is protecting you from someone else). He then asked me when I thought life began. That was easy. I said from conception. He then asked me if that unborn life deserved the same legal protection from murder that I demand from society. He had me. From that point on, I could no longer distill a complex issue like abortion into a simple choice matrix.
But that is just my intro into a broader topic of black and white versus shades of grey. I remember the first time I challenged my wife (today’s answer would be radically different) with whether it was possible that Hitler could be in heaven. I thought she was going to bite my head off. Now, before I go any further with this thought exercise, I want to make it clear that I just don’t know and I won’t judge. It’s not my job. It’s also not my job to conjecture whether he did accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior or not. I do, however, assert that it is possible as a means to understand my own sin stain.
One of my interests has been history and especially the history of famous people. One of the earliest tidbits I learned was that Abraham Lincoln proposed, before he became president, that to facilitate the end of slavery, the US should purchase all the slaves at that time to compensate the owners for their loss. However, the twist to this was that he suggested shipping them to Liberia to govern themselves as an independent country and not incorporate them into the US citizenship. Puts a less than ideal spin to him, yes? To go even further, Abraham Lincoln was a dirty politician who bribed, threatened, and cut deals to get what he wanted legislatively to happen (think of the 13th and 14th amendments to the constitution). The bottom line is that every famous or infamous person has their own sin stain that must be dealt with.
What we try to do, as a society, is gloss over the negative aspects and highlight the positive ones in every situation. All you have to do is pick a news source and that bias is usually built into what is being reported. That is why discernment is so important. If you rely on any one source, you implicitly pick up their bias as well. The only exception to this is when your source of information is God’s word in the Bible.
“So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him,’“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’” - John 8:31-32 ESV
“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” - John 14:6-7, 12-14
Put your faith in God and check twice everything from man.
