Putting the Win Back Into Winsome

Got to be on the Ride Home with John and Kathy yesterday, about the 15 min mark, but what was really more interesting was listening for the next segment–to Katelyn Beaty talk about her recent piece on prominent evangelical women and their decisions to speak, or not to speak, about politics. First of all, it’s a treat because she uses the word Winsome, which is such a fantastic word, not least because it does absolutely and completely encapsulate the true ethos of every Christian woman with a public platform in the modern age.

Anyway, the article caused me to spend thirty seconds gazing over the past two years of campaign insanity and the very nature of politics itself–a subject I love almost as much as the Bible.

The fact is, we are political creatures. We organize ourselves into groups and families and towns and cities and then we machinate for and against each other. The choice not to step overtly into the political fray is itself a political calculation. What will keep my readership and platform? What will grow it? How can I get that person to be on my side?

These sorts of considerations are not very different from trying to organize a church kitchen so that everyone gets along and no one gets angry and leaves. In the smooth, elegant halls of power you have politicians trying to decide how much money we should give them, and whether or not to pay off the national debt, and in the badly lit cupboard of my parish hall you have the pantry for poor parishioners and how to deal with the fall out of me stepping on the bottom shelf and breaking it, causing an avalanche of issues about who is Even Allowed To Go In The Pantry.

We are but dust, but we are political dust. We think and relate strategically. We, even in the smallest ways, try to influence the people around us. Every single relationship involves the juggling of one consideration against another. And this is ingrained, so much a part of our humanness that we don’t even think about it.

Well, not me. I think about it constantly. I love to think about it. I love to look at the political landscape and try to guess what’s really gone on behind the handshakes and the smiles. I love to read those after action articles and books where you find out what candidates were really doing, published, of course, when it’s far too late for me to change my vote. Incidentally, how perverse is that–only finding out what people were really doing when there’s no recourse, that someone saw and knew but saved it for his best selling book.

But I also love reading the Bible with an eye to God and Man’s political calculations. My favorite political after action report is the long sweep of chapters dealing with how David managed to really become king without having all of Israel fling themselves into devastating civil war. David gathering up the disparate threads of power is so clever, so on point, so wise. He knows who he has to keep close and what he needs to do publicly. But much later, when he’s older and more settled, he falls into complacency and laziness and doesn’t apply the same shrewd wisdom to the management of his children. He ends up with a catastrophe not only with his family and his heart, but with his nation and land. Politically, it’s a mess.

The peculiar thing about God is that he does not disdain the perversity of our political ugliness. He does not stand afar off, judging the wretchedness of our lying and our weakness and our cowardice and our pride and our unquenchable thirst for power. Quite the opposite. He is not only sovereign over the politics of his creatures, he is intimately involved in them. But most of all, he uses them to accomplish his plans. It’s not just the cross–that pinnacle of political wheeling and dealing–it’s the incarnation. It’s the trouble of taking a census, of Herod being petty and weak, of the elders of Israel trying sort out their records. It’s the powers and principalities of the age, all perusing their own ends and desires, that constrain Mary and Joseph to turn their steps to Bethlehem, the very place God intends for them to go.

This is a great comfort to me. Whatever trouble my motivations and limited vision might cause, none of it is beyond God. He is going to do what he plans with us all. That includes channeling my relational and writing decisions, both for good and for evil, towards the ultimate glory of his character and nature over mine. But it is also a helpful caution to me. I am stuck in my own self. I can’t know what other people are thinking and calculating. I may want them to speak up or not speak up, but I can’t possibly know what their calculations are and what it will cost them. In my daily reckoning of whether to virtue signal to the right or to the left, I can’t know how what I say will trouble or console, will spur on or hinder.

In other words, let me just muck around being Winsome. After all, it has the word Win in it. What could possibly go wrong.