Jeff Howard

Associate Pastor, Family Life Fellowship

Let’s BE the Church

Two years ago during the last national election cycle I was blessed to be out of the United States. Not only was I out of the US but I was in a place where the only regular news source was Armed Forces radio and television services. Why do I consider this to be a blessing? Because the Armed Forces Networks do not run advertisements which meant I did not have to endure the plethora of negative campaign commercials that pervade the airwaves during such a time.

Before I was deployed with the peacekeeping force to Kosovo, I was a bona fide news junkie. I couldn’t get enough Fox News (and sometimes, but not often, CNN). If I listened to the radio it was usually talk radio, most of which is typically conservative in nature. Being in Kosovo changed all of that.

During the deployment I was assigned to a small unit called Liaison Monitoring Teams (LMT). Our purpose was to patrol a designated sector and make contact with the local population- everyone from municipal leaders to the lowliest goat herder- and gauge their opinions based on various topics. The simplest way to explain this is that our mission was to listen to the locals complain. They had a lot to complain about.

We were there for a nine-month rotation. Sometimes I think that was not long enough even though I was separated from my family. By the time you figure out just what you really are doing, it’s time to hand it off to the next rotation and it’s as if nothing really gets accomplished. For example, there were two schools in the sector where my team worked that were under construction when we arrived in June 2008. When we left in March 2009 they were nowhere near being completed. Although they complained about the lack of progress, the local folks were quite used to it. This is just how things are done there- or not done you might say.

By the time I got back home in 2009, I just could not take the ranting and raving of either those on the liberal left or the conservative right. I will not make any apologies for being conservative in my personal perspective. But I am at a point in my life where I cannot stomach people with opposing views publicly vilifying each other. All of the negativity turns me completely off.

In case you haven’t figured it out, our political system is somewhat broken; our government is broken (and just plain broke). No matter how hard we try to elect the “right” candidate, overall government is not going to provide the solutions the world needs. The only answer for what ails our country in particular and the world at large is Jesus. Yes, I understand that this is not a politically correct statement in our present time, and frankly I don’t care.