This is the first of three blog posts on how we treat the elderly. This post will focus on the ways we are destroying what the elderly are meant to be. It is a negative post. The next post will focus on the results of cutting off of the elderly. The final post will focus on what we can do to fix the problem. 

You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the LORD (Leviticus 19:32).

As Christians we have fought hard against the massacre of children that masquerades as a right our society. We march against the clinics. We set up counseling centers to offset the lies of Planned Parenthood. Pastors set aside a Sunday to preach against the murder of the unborn. But abortion has a younger sister. She is not yet full grown. She has not reached the power and domination of her older sister. But give her time and she will pick up her shovel and begin burying people, just as her more mature sister has.

It should not surprise us that killing unborn children and hatred of the elderly go hand in hand. Both groups are weak. Both groups are or will be a drain on time, energy, and money. Both groups, by our society’s values, contribute little. Both groups are physically weak and therefore easily dispensed with.

“But our society is not killing the elderly,” you say. It is true. We do not put them down, as we do the unborn. Yet our society is killing what the elderly are meant to be. The idea of the elderly is being put to death. Is it that far fetched to think that one day we might kill their bodies as well? Here are four ways we kill the elderly in our society.  If you think of more, put them in the comments.

First, we have exalted youth culture for decades.  The Church has drunk in this idea as much as the world has.  What demographic are movie makers most interested in seeing their movies? Here is a list of the top 25 money making movies in 2013. Which of them had a strong, mature elderly character? The closest I saw was Kevin Costner in Man of Steel. What group are the TV executives most interested in watching their shows? Who do most of the advertisements appeal to? When an elderly person is exalted it usually is because they are acting young. For example, Christie Brinkley was recently praised in a magazine because she could wear a sexy swimsuit at sixty. Our society loves an old person who acts young.  Once the young aspired to be like the old.  Now the old are required to act and look young.

Second, we have an unbiblical love of youthful beauty and strength.  If wearing bikinis and looking cut is the most important thing, then the elderly will have no place among us. If we want smooth skin, tan legs, mini-skirts, skin tight t-shirts, and white teeth then again the elderly will not have a place among us. There is a place for enjoying youthful beauty. When we see an NBA player  throw down a dunk or a woman whose beauty is striking we should stand back in proper admiration. But there are other types of beauty. If we cannot see the beauty of wrinkled hands, blue hair, men who walk with a limp, poor eyesight, and false teeth then we have lost something vital.

Third, we refuse to bring our parents and grandparents into our homes to die. There are exceptions to this. Sometimes the physical needs of a parent are so great they need care which cannot be provided at home. However, in many cases putting a parent in a home is not necessary. It is just convenient. What could we glean if we got to listen to our parents and watch them die? But we don’t like death, except on the big screen. Who wants the burden of changing adult diapers, bathing an older woman, or getting up in the night to care for a parent? What does it say about a society when the people who poured out their lives for us are left to die alone?

Fourth, we do not long for wisdom and maturity. We want to remain forever young, holding on to sixteen as long as we can. But wisdom resides with the aged. Not all the elderly are wise. But many of them are. They have fought battles we have not. They have seen things we have not. They have made mistakes we can learn from. They have endured loss and pain we have not gone through. But in our culture wisdom lives with the young. It is embarrassing how the young treat the old. At times I am ashamed of my age bracket.  We get angry because they are slow in super market. We don’t talk to them because they haven’t seen the latest movie.  We organize our church services so they cannot really participate. We get irritated when they tell us the same story again. We are so sure the way they did it was wrong. We snipe at them or worse ignore them. The way the young treat the old would make our forefathers blush. The biggest problem is not that we do it, but that we think it is a virtue.

There are other ways we have cut off the elderly. Our love of the newest technology comes to mind. But these four points should give you the picture. In a culture where youth and beauty are exalted and where we despise wisdom is it any wonder that the elderly are put out to pasture?<>рекламные щиты стоимостьpagerank а

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“Sin lives at the center of this show.” Maureen Ryan on Breaking Bad. 

(Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t seen the show and plan on watching you should stop reading.) 

I am not sure I can win with this post. Some will wonder why I spent my time watching such a dark, depressing show that ends with a broken marriage and almost all characters of consequence dead. Others will wonder why I “moralized” the show. Couldn’t I just watch for enjoyment? Some will chide me that the show was not very good to begin with.  Others will find different complaints. Yet I plunge on. Why? Breaking Bad is one of the best depictions of sin’s nature and effects ever put on screen.

Summary: the show is about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and begins cooking meth so that he can leave an inheritance for his family. Throughout the series he becomes a drug kingpin, destroys his family, and ultimately dies. The show covers two years of his life from his 50th to his 52nd birthday.

Content: There is some sexual content throughout the series though it is not frequent. There is quite a bit of profanity. The violence is frequent and when it occurs it is graphic and disturbing. The second episode contains one of the more graphic scenes of violence. And of course, drugs, drug dealers, and druggies play varying roles throughout the series. The drugs are not viewed positively. The tone of the show is dark, tense, with a general foreboding hanging over the series.   Whenever something good happens, you know it is only temporary.

What can we learn about sin from this series?

The unintended consequences of our sins cannot be contained.  Walter White thinks his hands are on the reigns. He believes he is in control. But time again things happen he never wanted to, but do as a  result of the choices he made. Season 2 ends with two passenger jets crashing because he chose to watch a girl die instead of save her. Dealing drugs leads to a vendetta against him and his family. His wife and teenage son end up hating him because of his lies. But the most brutal unintended consequence is the death of his brother-in-law in the last season of the show. Walter never intended for this to happen. He begs for it not to happen. But all his choices from the first episode to this have led inevitably to that point.  For us, it is often the same. We make sinful choices and assume those choices are self-contained. We assume we can manage the consequences. But sin has a life of its own. If we let the snake out of the box why we are surprised when the people we love are bit?

We justify our sins with pious excuses. Throughout the series Walter keeps telling himself that he is doing this for his family so they can have money when he dies and his children will be taken care of.  He repeats this narrative throughout the entire series. Even in the final season he still believes he can save his family. Along the way, he makes meth, lies to his wife and son, steals, poisons a child, bombs a nursing a home, has inmates murdered at prison, kidnaps his own daughter, get his brother-in-law killed, and kills one of his partners. The series ends with him estranged from his wife and children. He does get his son money, but he can’t do it in his own name because his son wouldn’t take it.  The show ends with him dying alone in a meth lab.  How often do we cloak our sins in righteous language? I have to spend 70 hours at work so my children can be taken care of? I wasn’t flirting. I was just being nice. I wasn’t lying. I was protecting my family.  Pious excuses do not turn our sin into righteousness.

Side Note: Breaking the 6th Commandment

Murders are a dime a dozen in modern TV shows. In most of these shows people kill other people and the impact of the killings are minimal. In Breaking Bad the killing that Walter and Jesse do has long term impact. Walter agonizes over his first planned killing carefully making a list of pros and cons as he prepares to kill a drug dealer. By the end of the show, he will kill a man without hesitation for very little reason. After Jesse murders Gale he spends the rest of the series haunted by the murder of a “problem dog” who never did anything wrong. Even when their actions indirectly cause the death of someone, such as the shooting of the boy by Todd, the characters are changed by those deaths. So many modern shows take death lightly. There are places where Breaking Bad does that. But the main characters are forever changed when they take the life of another. Men murder and find part of their soul dead.

Pride is the great destroyer of men. In the fifth episode of the series, Walter is visiting an old business partner who has become rich while Walter is making pennies as a high school chemistry teacher. Walter’s wife tells this partner about his cancer. The partner offers Walter a way out.  He tells him he will pay his medical bills, give him a good job, and take care of his family. Walter refuses. This was one of Vince Gilligan’s, the creator of the show, key moments in the series. The viewers saw Walter as a “creature of such pride and such damaged ego that he would rather be his own man and endanger his family’s life than take a handout like that.” And so Walter White’s descent into pride begins. Time and again his pride keeps him from escaping, from doing what is right. He believes he is immune to all the things that destroy mortal men. He can escape anything. And for a while he does. No scene demonstrates this like the famous “I am the one who knocks” scene. But of course even as Walter says this he is on the verge of falling. We watch him on the screen and ask, “Can’t he see what his pride is doing to him and his family?” But do we? Do we realize how our soul rots as we nurse our ego along? Do we realize how badly we want to be powerful, feared, and well known? Do we realize how self drives our lives?  Pride comes before the fall. (Proverbs 11:2, 16:18, 29:23) For the proud the closing scene is always the same.

When we are enslaved to sin we use people. One of the saddest parts of the show is the relationship between Jesse and Walter. Jesse is a young, small time drug dealer who Walter recruits to help him make meth. Jesse is looking for a father. Throughout the show we keep hoping that Walter will fill that role. Occasionally he does. But normally Jesse is just another tool to be used by Walter. He uses Jesse, lies to Jesse, and ultimately betrays him to Neo-Nazis for torture. He does rescue him in the very end, but that gesture is hollow by that point.  Walter ends up using his wife, son, baby daughter, brother-in-law, friends, everyone. Sin eats away our love for people. When we are bound by sin people become disposable. When their minutes run out we just throw them away. We see in Walter a piece of ourselves. As sin grows in our lives people get smaller.

Sin blinds us to ourselves. The viewers can see where Walter’s path is taking him. We know where the story ends. But he cannot see it. Throughout most of the show he thinks of himself as a middle aged suburban man who loves his wife and children. He wears nice shirts and khaki pants. He packs a sack lunch to go make meth. He drives a very normal car. Jesse is the scumbag, lowlife drug dealer. It is not until very late in the series that Walter even invites Jesse into his home. But Walter’s view of himself is twisted, like a carnival mirror.  Right before Hank is killed he tells Walt, “You are the smartest guy I ever met and you’re too stupid to see.” He is talking about the fact that a Neo-Nazi is about to kill him (Hank). But he could be talking about Walt’s entire rise to power as a drug lord.  He can see so much. Yet he cannot see himself. All of us live like this to one degree or another. From the outside others can see our sins. They often point them out to us. But we can’t or won’t see them. For those who refuse to look in the mirror of God’s Word the end is the same s; we find out too late that the picture of ourselves in our heads is lie.

Side Note: The Ending

It is very difficult to end a show like Breaking Bad. The expectations were high.  There were so many ways it could have gone, so many loose ends to tie up. I was happy with the ending. Walter paid for his sins with the loss of his family, friends and his “empire.” Jesse went free. Walter takes revenge on the Nazis. Walter dies in a meth lab. Vince Gilligan described it as Gollum being reunited with the ring, his “precious.” I can see that. However, I think an ending where Walter lives, but all he loves is gone or dead would have been more appropriate. I think of the end of The Godfather III, which was not a great movie, where Al Pacino, as an old man, living in exile, and totally alone just slumps over in his chair and dies. Sometimes living with your sins is worse than dying because of them. It was a very good ending, but still Gilligan gave Walter White a better ending than he deserved.<>mobi onlineпродвижение интернет ов оптимизация

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I grew up reading books on the military. My father is a military history buff. The books I read focused on the experience of individuals as they went to war, like We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.  However, over the years I stopped reading war memoirs. Recently I dipped back into war stories by reading two accounts of Navy SEALs who were involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Paul and Christ often describe our life as one of battle. So it was not surprising that as I read those books I came across lessons that translate  easily to the Christian life.

Book Reviews

The first book I read was Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor.   The initial part of the book is the account of Luttrell training to be a Navy SEAL. The second part is his account of a ill-fated recon mission where his three friends were killed. The book is excellent. There are things I disagree with, but it was well written. The reason for the training becomes clear in the second part of the book when they are attacked. His rescue by Afghan villagers was also fascinating. He showed the interplay between the Taliban and the local villagers. He explained a law in the villages that once you promised to protect a man the whole village is responsible for him. Thus it was a huge risk for the village to take Luttrell in. Overall it is a very good book to get insight into the training and mindset of America’s military elite.

The second book I read was American Sniper by Chris Kyle. I did not enjoy this one nearly as much. It suffered from a scattered narrative. Also there was a lot more machismo in this book. Kyle seemed to enjoy the bar fights he got into. Kyle is America’s top sniper. He has over 160 confirmed kills and probably killed over twice that many men. The most fascinating part of this book was his relationship with his wife. In the book he notes that over 90% of Navy Seals get divorced. It is not hard to see why. There are short sections of the book written by his wife that give insight into the difficulties of being married to Navy SEAL. Eventually, he refused to redeploy and stayed home. Kyle was killed in February 2013 by a fellow soldier at a shooting range in Texas.

Lessons Learned

Mental Toughness

Nothing stuck out to me when I was reading Marcus Luttrell’s book like his mental toughness. The Navy SEAL training, the firefight on the mountainside, the refusal to stop fighting despite three broken vertebrae, crawling across rocks and throwing himself down mountains all made me realize how easily I give up on things. As Americans, we are not very tough. We think we are. But most of us have not had to endure cold, hunger, deprivation, berating, and absolute physical exhaustion and then be asked to keep going. Yet toughness is an essential ingredient of the Christian life. The life of Paul, Peter, John, and Jesus all remind us that mental toughness, the ability to keep going and not give up, is basic to our spiritual walk. (See Hebrews 12:2)  Do I give up too easily on hard work? Do I complain about the labor the Lord has given me to do? After reading this book I found myself whining less and working harder.

Loyalty to Each Other

These men have a deep loyalty to each other. In Luttrell’s book, when he was MIA for several days, fellow SEALs gathered at his Mom’s housed and stayed there all week until they found out about whether he was alive or dead.    These men know what they went through to become SEALs. They know the hardships they endured and the lengths they would go through to save each other’s lives. This creates strong bonds of friendship and loyalty. This loyalty did not prevent disagreement.  But it did usually prevent a breach of fellowship.  I wish churches could display more of this mindset. We are bound, not by our training, but by our redemption.  This unity in Christ should give us a great loyalty towards our fellow Christians, yet so often we tear each other to pieces instead of fighting the enemy (Galatians 5:15).

Accountability is Good, but the Fear of Man is Dangerous

Throughout both books the men and their superiors were constantly asking the question, “What will the media think if we do that?” Accountability like this can be good.  Chris Kyle was very careful about who he shot. He had to have witnesses and the person had to be a threat.  He had to give a report on each kill.  Accountability like this can keep men from making foolish choices.

However, in Luttrell’s book you see the negative side of this. Luttrell and his men were on a recon mission when they came in contact with some goat herders. These men carried no guns, yet one of them had a long range radio. They were clearly Taliban, yet they posed no immediate threat. There was debate about whether or not they should kill them. In the end, they let them go, which I think most readers feel was the right decision. Luttrell indicates this decision was made in part because of the fear of what would happen if the media found out they killed unarmed men. But letting those men go cost the lives of three of his fellow soldiers on the ground and sixteen other military men who came and tried to rescue them in a helicopter. I think if he had to go back he would kill the goat herders thus saving the lives of numerous American soldiers.

As Christians, there is a need for us to be accountable to those around us. We need checks and balances, which members of our local church usually provide. People should be in our lives who know us and keep us from making bad decisions. However, there is also a need to have freedom to act in the way we see fit.  . We need to give the benefit of the doubt to our brothers and sisters who make different decisions. In some circles there can be a fear of man that paralyzes us from making the right decision.  That is not accountability. That is bondage.

Single Purpose

These men are good, very good at what they do.  There is a singular focus on their task that is worthy of emulation.  I am sure there is something about war that causes you to focus.  The threat of death will strip away all other concerns. As a Christian, especially as a pastor (II Timothy 2:4), the way the SEALs focus on their job was convicting. We are too often like  soldiers who forget we are in a war. We wander around spiritually fat and out of shape with our guns filled with sand and our minds on the pleasures of this world.   As Christians, we need to have a laser beam focus on the task  given to us by our Lord and we need to remember that we are at war.<>siteкопирайтинг для ов

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