Matt Smallbone

My rock-n-roll swagger is slowing to a limp. I’m 32, have three kids and am starting to listen to nothing but talk radio. The final blow to my once hip exterior occurred at 8pm central last night… when I sat through the entirety of President Obama’s first State of the Union address.

I only really started to develop a real interest in politics after spending some time with Michael W. Smith’s tour manager (the real mayor of Springhill, TN). This guy just cares so much, and I felt like I cared so little.

I acknowledge that I have a poor man’s education in USA partisan politics. I learnt what the left thinks via Rolling Stone Magazine, and the right, via Fox news and every single church friend that I have in Nashville.

Last night I was surprised by the size of the socio-cultural-economic-blahblah gap between the Republicans and Democrats. They won’t both stand and cheer for tax cuts. They can’t even agree whether health care is a problem worth fixing or whether the planet is suffering from ecological abuse, or even which war is more important.

How did it get to this?

In Australia we are mostly born centrists. Everyone is required to vote at elections or you get fined. This means one thing to those who are running for office. They must appeal to the center. If you colour outside the lines too much… you have no chance. You may do enough to pick up a Senate seat or two and be a pain in the butt to the major parties every now and again… but that is about it.

In the USA, non-compulsory voting has pushed the left and right much further apart. To get elected, an American political aspirant must appeal to their base. This means that a Republican (conservative) must passionately defend the right to life, the right to bear arms, protect big business and limit the power of the Federal Government, whilst a Democratic (liberal) dude must pretty much stand for the opposite. You hear a lot of claims of socialist and fascist policy on any given day, and I guess after 200 years it is no surprise that common sense decision making in Washington has ground to a standstill.

I hope that they can figure it out and make some positive changes.

My health care costs about $400/ month, and from what I can tell the only thing it does is save me from bankruptcy if I get really sick one day. I was almost better off without it.

Unfortunately, the Christian worldview that powers my vision suggests that things are only going to get worse until we burst into flame and the earth is renewed. So what now?

Despite all that is wrong with the world, I must say that as every day passes, I feel happier, healthier and more at ease with myself. This is the fruit of placing one’s life in the hands of the loving Creator. It is a great mystery as to why God placed that tree with delicious fruit in the garden. Was it a cosmic set up? I don’t know. I’m glad that He did.

I am glad to have a go at life. It’s been a lot of fun.

If you are a Christian, please don’t spend today complaining about the state of the union. Remember that the Bible begins with man and God in a Garden on earth in perfect unity, and then concludes the same way. God desires heaven on earth.

Let us be known as a people of grace and love who usher heaven to earth, rather than a bunch of whiners who advertise the Hell that surrounds us.

We are in the middle of the story, a story with a happy ending.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 10:12 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.