Tell Me I'm Right

I think one of the hardest lessons any person has to learn growing up is how to take correction. It can be really difficult. And there is something within us that resists being corrected, told what to do, or told that we are wrong. Our fallen nature doesn't want to do the one thing that it must do to be redeemed -- admit that it is fallen. Before a sick person can be healed, they need to acknowledge that they are sick. Well, part of our sickness is not being able to acknowledge that we are sick.

I would dare to propose that many people in our modern culture either avoided correction most of their lives or never learned to accept correction. It seems that sin has become so rampant in our society partly because of people being unwilling to accept that their sinful tendencies or actions are not good. Let's take pornography as an example. This has historically been looked down upon in this country as taboo. And I would venture to say that most people's consciences tell them it is wrong. But when you ignore your conscience for long enough, your conscience dies. And when you no longer think you are doing something wrong, then you can't stand when someone (those with alive and well formed consciences) tells you you are doing something wrong. So, over time the collective conscience of a secular society only degrades without anything to lead it back to the truth. And as things in a degraded society start to look in favor of your sinful behavior, then it is all the more affirming to have someone in authority tell you that what you are doing is okay. This is how sinful behavior becomes permissible by civil law. When mom tells you to stop something, you go to dad. It is typical.

We want to be told that what we are doing is okay. We want affirmation of our behavior. I would dare again to say that this is exactly the issue that people living a gay lifestyle are struggling with. Their consciences may be telling them they are wrong and they want someone to tell them otherwise, or maybe their consciences are dead and they are tired of history telling them they are wrong in wanting to be married. Dana Mack gave a good perspective on this idea of homosexuals trying to win affirmation using the age old institution of marriage in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

"For those same-sex couples in California and elsewhere who are striving for deeper affirmation of their sexual partnerships, Judge Walker's decision —while hardly the final judicial word on the subject—is balm. Gay couples have moved closer to sewing lives in patterns borrowed from their own birth families' cultural histories and traditions. The question, however, is whether giving them license to piece together remnants of so decayed an institution as marriage will not aggravate all the more the fraying of its fabric." (Wall Street Journal)

I think Dana's reflection is very insightful. In trying to make marriage something that it is not for the sake of their own feelings, gay activists will wind up destroying marriage. A virtuous vocation is no longer a virtuous vocation when you redefine it with vice. Yet true marriage as Dana also discusses will always be defined by being "principally an arrangement for bearing children" not by being "primarily a romantic, or even an economic, bond." The divinely ordained institution of marriage can't be changed by any court or law but only by the one that instituted it. And He doesn't change.

The truth is, that no matter how hard we try, we can NEVER get true affirmation of our sins. God loves us too much.