The previous was from a letter I sent to a professor at a Reformed Seminary, who makes a living off of royalties from Biblical texts.

I take Al Mohler’s advise, and prioritize the issues before I vote. So here they are according to Robert Murphy’s take on Scripture: Abortion, it’s corollaries, War, Small Government, and Immigration (just to name the top five). The three Republicans all get the first one right, the Democrats get it all wrong. Next, there are all things that should come out of a real understanding of the sanctity of life, like issues relating to stem cells. If George Bush hadn’t held his ground and withheld Federal money from embryonic stem cell research, they never would’ve found pluripotent stem cells in adult skin cells. Huckabee called this one right, and Romney had to face the whole Massachusetts legislature over this. McCain gets the War right, but we can’t skip over priorities; he’s already out by now. To separate Huck from Mitt, we have to move on to Big vs Small government: the Huck was a tax-and-spend, Bush-esque governor of Arkansas.

Outside of the list of priorities, is the concern as to whether our nominee could have a hope of battling Hillary or Obama. There gonna have a ton a cash and a ton of support. Only Mitt has that kind of cash, and anyone but McCain could united the Republicans to battle Clinton or Barack. The Democrats reveal how easy they are gonna push over McCain when they admit that he’s likable and nearly one of them. Ugh!

Elections in America are about winning a party first and independents second. McCain can’t unite his party and if he is indistinguishable from Obillary but less charismatic, then he won’t win independents either. Mitt could unite the party and win the folks in the middle, like he did in MA. Huck is just sticking it out for the glory.

When we read a story, see a film or hear a friend telling us an anecdote, we automatically fill in the bigger picture.  When we are handed the metanarrative, instinctually we fill in a bigger one.  When an author tells us the thoughts of a character, we imagine the feelings behind the thoughts.   God purposed to be in the middle, just giving us the story (most of the time), forcing us to think of the bigger picture and the inner life of those involved.  Anything else would’ve lead us to overvalue thoughts and feelings, or philosophy.

There are a lot of things that start to get me down when I take the wrong perspective on them: the hours I work for the money I make, the time I spend away from my family, my lack of academic and career achievement and the time I’ve wasted in my walk with Christ in this short life. However, on the broadcast from September 14th, I saw that I’m way ahead of the curve on at leas one key issue: marriage. The 2006 Census reports the number of people younger than 30 who are married and have children has plummeted. As Dr. Mohler says, only in times of pestilence, plague, famine or war have the numbers been so abysmal. I feel pretty good about having gotten married at 23 and having two kids by 30. But that wasn’t all.

The subtle hint that the President of Southern Seminary tried to communicate was for young people to consider getting married in the church service on Sunday. I did that! No one else in our experience has had their wedding be part of the worship service in a church. We still spent $3000 on food, flowers and everything else, but that’s way less than the national average of $18,000 per wedding. It was nice to hear that on somethings that really matter, we’ve already begun to build a godly legacy the future generations of our family.