Well, here it goes. I don't know if anyone will read this but I couldn't help but start one. Actually the impetus for creating my own blog came the other day while listening to a radio talk show. I began arguing with the host about his reasoning for the existence of government. As a mother of three young children I don't have the opportunity to converse with very many people about serious subjects (except with my dear husband). I thought this would be an interesting way to preserve my thoughts and perhaps communicate with others.

As to my argument with the talk show host, it went something like this. He said that government existed to protect his rights. Now, even though this guy is conservative, that doesn't mean his arguments always line up with Scripture. Sometimes I have to be careful to filter politically conservative viewpoints through the lens of the Bible. As I understand it, government is an instrument of God to restrain evil (see Romans 13). If you start with the premise that gov't exists to protect your rights without a basis of what those rights are, then you can call any behavior a right. He went on to explain that if certain behaviors (i.e. incest, homosexuality, etc.) don't affect him personally then they're OK by him and the gov't has no right to restrain them.

What this man fails to understand is the long term effect of sin on the family and society as a whole. We don't live in a vacuum. The individual, the family, the culture and those institutions which make up the culture are interrelated. For example, the atrocity of abortion affects not only the individual who has an abortion (not to mention the unborn child), but the family, the way our culture views the sanctity of life and how the institutions in that society create law and support certain attitudes concerning the issue. I'm convinced that the answer to many problems goes back to the individual and the family. Unfortunately, the gov't has decided to take on these problems by creating programs that hardly scratch the surface in solving them.

We (and I) need to get back to the "dirty" (and holy) work of loving one another, serving one another and practicing the other 40+ "one another" verses in the New Testament towards our brothers and sisters in Christ and to our neighbor.