Dear Fellow Spectators:

It’s an old joke: The patient goes to the doctor and says, “Hey Doc, it hurts when I bang my head with a hammer.” The doctor responds, “Then stop hitting yourself with a hammer.”

I was reminded of the joke when I was watching the impeachment hearings last week. It seemed I couldn’t go ten minutes without a visceral pain response and some extremely unchristian fantasies. Fueling my dark side, I found myself becoming addicted to indignance, seemingly powerless to divert my attention to less injurious and more productive activity. That’s when I realized how politics was taking residence in my heart, a place where it does not belong.

Of course, I am not advocating for Christians to detach from politics. Especially in a democracy, we are to remain informed and ready to participate in voice and vote. But I am concerned that political drama can become so intoxicating that our capacity for sober judgment becomes impaired. It dawned on me during one of the particularly charged hearings that I was conflating my political anger with holy righteousness. In my head I was parsing every word, determining right from wrong, truth from fiction and good from evil. And, at the conclusion, I had all the feelings of having fought a good fight; my heart stood in victorious celebration of the power of my superior wisdom. But, while I was exhausted for my efforts, nothing in the real world had changed. It was a video game victory with no consequence in material reality.

That’s how evil works. It plays off all the emotional receptors in our brains, creating the illusion of contribution without any of the useful impact. We allow the confidence of our superior understanding to substitute for compassionate action. It’s all the warm and generous inclinations we have towards the needy, with no genuine giving. It’s all the good feelings we have towards our spouse in our heads, with no helpful contribution in our homes. Interrogation replaces conversation, insight overwhelms intimacy, and interpretation silences understanding. In the process, we become increasingly smug in our delusional righteousness and less useful for the kingdom of God.

I had a growing realization that my pain was self-inflicted. The antidote was obvious but seemingly so difficult: turn off the news feeds and go do something useful.

Clearing my head so I can help, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
You Pastor