Grounded

I’ve always been a fan of the airline industry, despite my own fair share of flight disruptions over the years. I still find the jet-age enterprise of connecting people and places to be an invigorating and critical dimension of life in the 21st century.

That being said, what we’ve just observed over the holiday has been shocking. I don’t mean to pick on Southwest Airlines, but I think it’s safe to say that they fumbled the ball in egregious proportions. What happened here in Nashville alone, in terms of unexplained cancellations and abhorrent customer service, was apparently just the tip of the iceberg. Winter weather was a contributing factor, no doubt, but certainly that explanation falls far short of justifying a nationwide debacle that will be felt for weeks to come.

What’s happening in America? We seem to be failing in numerous key areas that include both sophisticated technological systems and basic people skills. Such widespread and public disasters do nothing to boost consumer confidence on any level. Our citizens are expressing a general lack of trust in everything from transportation to health care to social media, and perhaps with very good reason.

I’m not a social scientist, but I am a student of history, so I’d like to share four simple observations that may or may not be helpful. I share these from the conviction that we, as Christ followers, ought to do our best to understand the times in which we live (1 Chronicles 12:32; Matthew 16:3).

We’re losing our commitment to the common good. We’ve known affluence for generations, but now the preoccupations of selfishness and vanity seem to be replacing at a steady clip the virtues of sacrifice and duty. We seem to have bought into the foolish notion that we can worship ourselves while somehow thriving as a society. It simply doesn’t work, and I think we’re seeing evidence of that in nearly every sphere of our culture right now.

We’re losing our commitment to hard work. Our age of information seems to be drawing us away from the value of a job well done. I would submit to you that large numbers of people with cell phones, but without jobs, can’t be sustainable for very long. We can entertain ourselves into a stupor, and even steadily consume the latest data on the subject of our choice, but all of that leaves a deep void at the end of the day. You and I were made to work, and to reflect the goodness of our Creator by doing every job as unto Him. (It’s another blog posting for another day, but I contend that we desperately need a restoration of the Protestant work ethic in American life.)

We’re losing our commitment to integrity. The deeper our cultural commitments to the tenets of evolution, for example, the more poorly we tend to treat one another. Is it not the image of the Lord God in every person which motivates us to honor others? This is much of the discomfort that we now feel on the streets, as a lack of trust in nearly every institution translates into a low-grade angst and anger.

We’re losing our commitment to the truth. In an obsession not to offend anyone with unwelcome words, we end up inflicting incredible harm on each other through systemic misinformation. Said another way, the more that we muddle moral clarity in our generation, the more that we annihilate logical cogency as a bedrock of our civilization. I believe that it is this very tension that is ultimately frustrating and unnerving to so many people right now: “I know that you know why my flight is canceled, and if I can’t trust you to tell me the truth about that, can I trust you with more important things like my personal safety?” Excellent question indeed. Last time I checked the Scriptures, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” proved to be a recipe for inevitable disaster.

I don’t mean to be a downer in your life this week, friends, but I share this with you in the hope that we will pray diligently for a monumental gospel advance in our day. God can do it! Christ is able! Hard times for a nation can prove to be good times for the gospel. We should have known it all along, but the good news of Jesus is our only hope. Christ is the only hope of a needy church, and of a desperate world.

So, if we have to be grounded, let’s stay grounded in Him.

Pastor Charles