February 16, 2007
Wrong
A newspaper columnist wrote the other day that Iraq has become a “quagmire of the vanities” — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won’t admit that they were wrong.
My tendency is to jump all over these same men, to get one of these little square black and white “W for Wrong” bumper stickers for the whole lot of them. But on the other hand maybe I should give them some slack. I know myself from personal experience that it’s not all that easy just plain knowing you are wrong, let alone having to admit it. Maybe this is a trespass — albeit a rather big one — that the Lord prayed that I should forgive.
Trouble is the same folk who are so wrong now started out then doing what they claimed God of all people told them to do and which they of course thought surely must be right because God said so even if everything else seemed to suggest otherwise. Further, to admit that they are wrong now is all the same as saying that God was wrong then, and one needs to be real careful about that sort of thing. Pity is, they seemed so sure about that then and convinced a lot of us also short on vertebrae who seemed itching to believe them, anyway.
But that’s the problem dealing with God. It takes faith, and whatever you say, you can never be all that sure about faith. That’s why some say that faith is risk and wonder about whether the light at the north end of the tunnel is just plain daylight or whether it’s a south bound freight train. Jesus, himself, wondered about that sort of thing out there in the garden that night when he asked God to let him off the hook of what had been his puzzled certainty all along since that time in the wilderness with Itself who was so sure about everything.
But then and according to the columnist, there’s that “quagmire of the vanities,” a matter that just can’t simply be ignored any more than Br’er Rabbit could get his own vanities unstuck from the Tar Baby.
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