Is a broken society shaping our conversation? 

I’ve noticed we have Narrative Cycles 

A narrative cycle goes like this: 

Tragedy strikes. We instantly join the narrative of a divided, political world instead of speaking as representatives of a Kingdom of peace and perfect wisdom 

It makes me wonder how much of current social and news media content shows up in our narrative versus the theology of the Kingdom of God. 

When a shooting happens we instantly start a left/right narrative cycle. Gun control versus 2nd amendment rights. The narrative cycle kicks in. 

It’s almost always met with overly simplistic solutions that never seem to lead us anywhere and certainly aren’t producing change or progress in our world. 

One side of the conversation instantly goes to gun control. My heart grieves for the victims of these shootings. I have to believe we can put in practical regulations that would help. 

The problem is laws don’t always get enforced and criminals certainly don’t abide by laws.

Also, we are experiencing a government that is increasingly overreaching its role and removing rights. The rights of people especially those of parents and, in some instances around the country, the right of religious freedom has been challenged. My personal trust of our government right now goes about as far as I could throw a sumo wrestler holding 2 bowling balls. 

The other side of the conversation instantly goes to protecting our 2nd amendment rights. As stated before I’m concerned with the infringement of Governmental control as well. 

None of that negates a needed conversation on respecting rights, but putting in common sense legislative change. Such as pushing back the age of gun ownership, adding mental health into the equation as to whether or not someone should lose the right of gun ownership. 

Both sides of the narrative deserve to be discussed. However, the narrative cycle avoids any complexity of the issues. These two issues in themselves in no way reflect the complexity of the problem we are dealing with. 

This isn’t exhaustive, but there are two other big pieces of our civilization that in my mind contribute to the degradation of our community. It needs to be a part of the narrative from a kingdom perspective. 

The first is simply faith. Post modern philosophy has been applied to our society and it is leading to the deprivation of the soul. Souls deprived of hope and minds void of truth dive deep into the darkest places of humanity. A hopeless and empty mind is the devils playground. Faith is where we find purpose and purpose makes the pain of life make sense. Without purpose young men are taking their personal pain out on our nation in the most painful way possible. 

The second is family. The building block of nations are its families. We were created to have two sources of family. The first is a natural family and the second is a faith family. It’s from these two God given sources we discover an identity. A purposeless soul absent of identity is a frustrated and lonely person. What boils out of that climate of frustration is rage and outbursts of anger. 

I don’t have all the answers on how this applies on a national or even global scale. The simplistic answer is build the family unit around faith in Jesus. Those families become pillars of a spiritual faith family called the church. 

That still leaves a lot of questions around how we move in that direction and I don’t have all the solutions. However, I have to believe breaking the narrative cycle we are stuck in has to be a good starting point. 

We break the narrative cycle when we don’t simply point left or right, but we point up to kingdom principles that transcend politics. I don’t believe we should avoid politics. It’s the opposite. I believe we should bring kingdom principles to the political narrative. 

I love you. I’m so sorry for the pain people are experiencing. We are literally groaning and waiting for the day of redemption. In the meantime, I pray our communication will be echos from a kingdom that is not of this world. 

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