It’s been a long, long time since I’ve posted to this blog, but I find myself with a growing disgust with what’s going on lately, so I’ll get a few things off of my chest.

As I sit here, trying to decide how to limit the scope of this rant so that it doesn’t take pages, I’ve decided not to talk about my faith in Jesus Christ.  I’ve also decided not to talk about my own personal beliefs on a number of current hot-button issues, whether or not those beliefs would meet with wide acceptance.

Instead, I feel like talking about swimming pools.

Many of us have been in that position before, standing on the side of the pool, dipping our toes in to test the water.  Depending on the temperature of the air and the water, this situation might cause in us a number of possible responses.  If we are in very hot air, very cold water is a put-off, because of the significant difference in temperature. If we are in warm air, warmer water is more attractive than colder water because it’s closer to where we are. In those cases where we want to cool off very badly, we dive in, for better or for worse. The good news is that, after taking the dive, you acclimate very quickly to the cold water and –after a few minutes– the water doesn’t seem nearly as unbearable as it had.

I’ve heard it said that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right back out, but if you put the frog into room-temperature water and bring that pot to a boil, you get frog-legs!

The great news about the war between absolutism and relativism is that, for starters, people are rarely ever convinced to do things that fall very far beyond the boundaries of what they normally do. The bad news is that it’s a general process of small steps to move from where we are to where we don’t really want to be and each of those steps, RELATIVELY speaking, isn’t that big of a leap to take. For the frog who doesn’t want his legs eaten, what’s the difference between 75° and 200° is too much to take. But, the difference between 75° and 80° isn’t that bad, and neither is the difference between 80° and 85°.

A fictitious example: I would never cheat on my wife. Such a move would be significantly beyond what I normally do. But, I might stare at the woman at work who is dressed attractively. What harm does that do? Then, after days or weeks or months of staring at this woman at work, I might flirt with her a little bit? What harm does that do? Then, after days or weeks or months of flirting with this woman, maybe we’ll go out for a drink after work. What harm does that do? Then…frog-legs.

You get the picture.

So, in the war between absolutism and relativism, we take steps down a road that leads to a place that we don’t want to go –not because that’s where we want to be– because each of those steps doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And, as confrontational as it might be to say so, we ought to go back where we were when we find out that we are heading down the wrong road.

But, we usually don’t