Out for the Kill

In recent news, a leak to a New York newspaper reporter resulted in news conferences, name smearing and conspiracy theories within Major League Baseball regarding players and illicit use of performance enhancing drugs. A variety of speculations abound as to whose name is on this emphasis list of "users"; who didn't play by the rules, who is the next big thing in the soap opera that is professional sports.

This got me to thinking about Jon and Kate Plus 8, tabloid parades at the market, celebrity television news and cut-throat entertainment blogs. Maybe I'm crazy, but it just seems as though our nations culture is thriving off of the failures of others. It's almost as if we celebrate in exuberance when someone makes a bad choice. We are most certainly not a culture of grace. We take pleasure in the failures and envy the successes. We are only happy if everyone else is less happy than we are. Anyone else find this totally and obnoxiously out of whack?

I'm reading a book by one of my favorite Christian speakers, Christine Caine. Stop Acting Like A Christian, Just Be One, is a really great book so far discussing the hypocrisy that exists within the global church; the one we all secretly know exists and the one the rest of the world and nay-sayers eagerly point out. It's the hypocrisy of how we focus on acting the part of what we perceive being a Christian is all about, but how in reality, in the quite of our own homes, we stop keeping up the act. We sit in front of our televisions or reading our celebrity rag and openly criticize those in the more public of eyes.

Why are we this way? Why do we call ourselves Christians and turn on our fellow men and women when they make a bad decision? This doesn't just happen in entertainment, but in our local PTA groups, our child's baseball team, at work, even, yes even, (gasp) at church. We are, as humans, programmed by our culture to jump on the judgment and criticism train...and boy do we.

How wonderful it would be if we could love each other with the love we were created with. If we encourage people through times of trouble rather than continue to push them down, the results could be amazing. I guess I just want to believe that my child will grow up in a world that will encourage him to be better tomorrow than he is today, rather than celebrate when he does wrong. I want to believe in a Christian community, a global community that nurtures each other in the love of God, the love that God has nurtured us with, that redeeming and forgiving grace-filled love.

I'm not sure if the Red Sox player Big Poppy really used performance enhancing drugs or not. All I know is, destroying someone during a trying time, especially without proof of any wrong doing, seems like a great injustice to me. I pray that we stop going for the jugular in the midst of others times of trouble and darkness, but rather seek out the heart for healing. I hope that we all can do better tomorrow than how we have done today. I believe in us, do you?