Politics and Religion

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian.

Neither is former Presidential candidate Rick Perry.

I’m sure most of you saw his “Strong” ad, as it’s more than a month and a half old at this point.  Earlier this week, Perry withdrew his candidacy, which I don’t think was surprising to anyone given the fact that much of his campaign was a train wreck.

To be perfectly honest, the first time I saw this video, I glazed over his comment about “gays serving openly in the military.”  I guess I just misunderstood him or wasn’t really listening. To me, at first, it seemed like he was excited about servicemen and women being allowed to be openly homosexual, but I realize now that’s not where he was going with the statement.

I’m not writing today to debate that argument however, I’m moreso interested in discussing the reason I glossed over much of the video when I first watched it.

You see, with those opening lines of “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” my thoughts were immediately transported to a time when I wanted to be a politician.  I’m still not opposed to public office, in fact I’ve held leadership positions in just about every organization I’ve ever belonged to, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about when I watched Rick Perry’s ad.

I started wondering how I would approach a political campaign, even for something as small as city council member, etc.  Would I talk about my religion as part of my campaign?  What about 5-10 years down the road, I will presumably be a Pastor at that point in time if I continue on the path I’m going now, would that have an effect on a campaign?  Would I ever be seen on television proclaiming to my neighbors, or even the entire country that “I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a Christian… Vote for me!”

And it was in thinking through all of this that I came to a realization about what seems to be a problem in political campaigns of late.

I have no problem with a politician openly stating their religious beliefs.  Nor do I have a problem with that politician’s decisions being affected by their religion.  But there’s a fine line between being a politician whose comfortable speaking about one’s faith, and one who’s pandering to people of faith.

While in the strictest sense of the word, Christians ARE in fact a demographic, we shouldn’t be treated as one in the American political system.  No politician should ever be discussing with their campaign manager “how can I win over the church-goers vote?”

I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian, but I sure am ashamed of Christian politicians who try to flaunt their religion to win votes.

God in the Back of an Ambulance – Part 3

Finally, the long-awaited finale to this series of posts has arrived.  My apologies to those who’ve been grappling with the cliffhanger in the last post…  Life happens, and I had some other projects that needed more desperate attention.  In the past two posts, you’ve learned a lot of important things about me:

• I’m really interested in stuff related to emergency services: Fire, EMS, Law Enforcement, SAR, etc.
• I was really excited about finally being able to get my EMT license… That is, until my class got cancelled.
• As part of my call toward ministry, I have a specific interest in someday extending that ministry towards emergency services workers as a volunteer chaplain.
• I’m an optimist who fully believes that even when crap happens and you don’t get what you want, that good things can still come out of it all.

In the last post, I promised a teachable moment.  A way that I turned being upset about not being able to take my EMT class into a “glass half-full” situation…  Well, here it is, but, as always it requires just a wee bit of backstory.

My love of reading and learning has led me to constantly researching my interests.  Looking for new information and new books.  Several months ago, while looking for information about emergency services chaplains, I discovered Wally Johnston’s “Sent to Serve: the Chaplains of 9/11″ on the Amazon Kindle store.  It seemed interesting, but the fact that it was self-published made me a bit leery.  I downloaded the “Free Sample” of the first chapter as a way to remind myself to give it another look at some point to see if it might actually be worth reading, and then promptly forgot about it.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Thursday night, my family and I were staying in our hotel in West Virginia after an afternoon of cross-country skiing, getting ready to go skiing again the next day.  Alone with my parents, I was bored, there wasn’t anything good on TV and while we had drinks and snacks, it wasn’t really helping the fact that I was wide awake without much to do.

I pulled my iPad out of my backpack, opened the Kindle app, and, very much as anticipated, I had read all of the books I had loaded on to it.  I decided to pull up the free sample I had downloaded weeks, maybe even months earlier, and started reading.

It was enthralling, I promptly finished the first chapter and had to purchase the rest of the book.  I spent 10 minutes letting it download, moving back and forth across the hotel room trying to find the place that got better signal, and thus a faster download.  By the end of the night, I had finished 3/4ths of the book.

Numerous chaplains shared their stories and experiences at Ground Zero throughout the book, and as someone who feels called to eventually minister in this sort of capacity it was absolutely fascinating, but I think anyone who has an interest in 9/11, emergency services, and faith (or any combination of the three) would also find it really interesting.

I highlighted a lot of bits and pieces throughout the book, but I think the one that resonates the most, and the one that I really needed to read was this:

I’ve had officers say to me, “Chaplain, I couldn’t do your job.”  I respond to them, “I couldn’t do yours.”

If I’m interested in emergency services, that’s my own prerogative.  I will likely continue my involvement throughout the rest of my life as time and situation allows, but if I do, it will be out of a love of public service and desire to serve the community.  I don’t need to have been a volunteer fireman to minister to firefighters, nor do I need to be an medical provider to minister to EMTs and Paramedics.  I don’t need to keep up my volunteerism to gain credibility as a chaplain, I will gain credibility as a chaplain simply by being a good chaplain.

And that’s it.  It seems like common sense, and maybe it was something I already knew myself, but reading that paragraph on that night helped drive it all home for me.  My apologies to anyone who was expecting a “Jesus lightning bolt moment” at the end of this story.  It’s not often that God truly and visibly comes to us in the wilderness, but if we have faith, I think we can all look back on our journeys and see the way the Holy Spirit has shaped where we are and who we’ve become, and that even though we didn’t seem him at the time, God IS with us in that wilderness.

God in the Back of an Ambulance – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series drawing connections between my faith, my interest in emergency services, and the theme of what happens when things don’t go your way.  For part 1, simply scroll down (if you’re on the main page of my blog) or CLICK HERE.

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As I had mentioned in the last post, I had signed up for an EMT class just over the PA state line from where I go to school at WVU.  The class was set to start last Saturday, January 7th.

That Thursday, January 5th, while I was driving over the mountain into Canaan Valley for a day or two of skiing with my parents, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.  A little bit later, when we arrived, I checked my voicemail, only to find that the phonecall had been from the school responsible for the EMT class.  My class had been cancelled because of low enrollment.  I wasn’t very happy.

As a side note, aren’t you glad I saved the heart-breaking part of the story for the second post?

Honestly, I’d like to think that an EMT class with only 5-6 people in it would be a lot better for the students (and their eventual patients) in the long run, but I’m aware that there is a point of diminishing returns as far as how much it costs to actually host such a class, so I’m not terribly upset.

Here’s the thing…

Throughout my life, I’ve been blessed with wonderful experiences of not getting things my way.  But how can not getting what you’ve been hoping for be a blessing?

Well you see, in high school, I really wanted to be the drum major of our high school marching band.  I had the leadership potential, and would like to believe I had the musicality, but when it came time to audition and select a candidate at the end of my sophomore year, someone else was selected.  At the time I was heart-broken, but just a few short weeks later, I was offered a job at Camp Lutherlyn, which I’ve blogged about in the past.

The responsibilities of being drum major required a lot of running around; attending various trainings and being at all of the band’s summer rehearsals.  If I had been selected drum major, I never would’ve been able to take the job at camp that first summer, and might never have worked at camp at all.

Think of the “butterfly effect” implications of me never working at camp…  During my five years on staff, I directly and indirectly worked with hundreds of kids.  I’m not naive enough to believe that I made lasting impressions on all of them, but let’s say I made an impact on at least one.  Where would he/she be today if I had never worked at camp?  Maybe they’d be in only a slightly different place, on only a slightly different path, but those campers that I interacted with would be different.

We could spend hours mind-numbingly analyzing and guessing (because it would only be a guess) how different things in the world would be if I had never worked at camp, but you could easily understand the magnitude of change by thinking about how I personally would be different.  I can tell you for a fact I wouldn’t be the same person.  I wouldn’t be as confident, as goofy, or as compassionate, and while I’ve always been fairly mature and responsible, I know for a fact that camp has boosted both of those traits infinitely over the years.  Furthermore, who KNOWS what sort of state my faith might be in.

The simple fact of the matter is that as much as I hoped and prayed to become the drum major, good things happened in spite of not getting it.  Great things, which were made possible specifically by the fact that I did NOT get what I wanted.  This isn’t the only time that such a thing has happened, I often try to see the proverbial glass as “half full” in anticipation of similar occurrences, and it’s amazing just how often your glass can turn out half full if you just have a little faith.

And so, it was with that anecdote in mind that I realized that I could not allow myself to be upset about missing out on taking an EMT class.  I knew that somewhere along the line, God was going to give me a different opportunity, a teachable moment, a way to see my glass as not only half-full but overflowing.

Who knew that moment would come so quickly… BUT, unfortunately, it doesn’t come until part 3, posted tomorrow or Friday.

God in the Back of an Ambulance…

What follows is the first in what I imagine will work out to be around a 3-part series about my passion for emergency services and how it relates to my faith.  This was initially going to all be one post, but I decided to split it up into the three different pieces to make it a bit easier to digest…

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Throughout most of my life I’ve had a pretty intense interest in emergency services.  I can’t even remotely pinpoint where it all started, but I do know that my older brother who is 8 years my senior shared the interest and undoubtedly played a part in fostering it in me.  Together, we watched Rescue 911 and ER and dozens of other shows and movies.  It all fascinated me.

I was about 10 years old when my brother became an EMT.  I had always looked up to my brother and that pretty much cemented my desire to someday, somehow become involved in emergency services.  Around a year later, on September 11, 2001 the nation was glued to its television sets as countless first responders rushed into collapsing buildings “so that others may live.”  There wasn’t much I could do as an 11-year old, but my interest grew even deeper.

When I was in high school, I was able to join a local wilderness search and rescue team, a volunteer commitment that I have continued throughout my time here at WVU, and something that has only made me want to dive deeper into the world of public safety.  Search and rescue is particularly interesting because it gives a much larger picture of emergency services.  Any time I go out on a search, I’m typically working with not only my fellow members of the SAR team, but typically a combination of fire, EMS and law enforcement personnel.  You get to work with a wide variety of people, amazing people, coming together toward the common good of helping their fellow man.

As I’ve started discerning a call toward ministry, it seemed natural that I might someday want to pursue  emergency service chaplaincy.  And logically, I thought to myself, the best way to develop credibility as a chaplain would to be to stay involved.  Unfortunately, it seemed like I might have to give up on SAR after 5 years of volunteering with two different teams, there simply weren’t any volunteer teams near any of the seminaries I was interested in.

So what other options did I have to “maintain my credibility” in hopes of someday being able to as a Pastor, also volunteer my time as a chaplain for a local police or fire department?  It definitely earned a certain ELCA seminary some brownie points to know that it had a local volunteer fire department nearby that I could volunteer with for EMS and rescue.  I just needed to finally get my EMT license that I had been looking forward to for years.

And so, I took advantage of my liberal amounts of free time this semester that come as a perk of being a second-semester senior to register for an EMT class across the state line in my home state of PA.  I wanted a PA license rather than one in WV because while Pennsylvania would allow me to transfer a West Virginia license, it would be much easier just to get it in PA.  The class I found was perfect, fairly close to Morgantown, and only met on Saturdays, so even though the drive was slightly longer than I’d like, I would only be doing it once a week… (continued in part 2, posted tomorrow, January 10th.)