Life Lessons from Calvin and Hobbes

 

Last night, as I was strolling along the sidewalk, I was thinking about the definitiveness with which people can say, “Republican,” or, in turn, “Democrat.”  I was thinking specifically about my family, and how, in this upcoming election, they make it seem so simple.  They say that there is a right way to vote and a wrong way to vote.  Period.

There is something about the effect of this that sits terribly wrong with me.  If there is a right and a wrong way to vote, that can be equated to a right and a wrong person to vote for.  Now, there is nothing that I see inherently wrong with that.  But!  If you begin to head down this road, isn’t it awfully easy to turn these candidates into good and evil?  And this is what I see happening during my family’s political discussions.  There is a candidate that is riding in on his horse, prepared and able to sustain our great country, and there is a candidate that is creeping in the back door, ready to devour any semblance of goodness and purity.  We have moved from critiquing the act to critiquing the actor, from despising the book to despising the author, from throwing out the food to throwing out the chef…from hating the belief to hating the person.

And then I ask myself, ITSTJWBLTR?  Is This Something That Jesus Would Be Likely To Recommend?  That’s my lame attempt at spinning a cliché.  I’m sorry.  But really…Did Jesus, the greatest teacher on morality, ever attack a person based on something they did or someone they had become?  While not being tolerant of the wrongful actions in one’s life, he seemed much more inclined to simply love on them.  Sharing a meal is not something you readily do with a person you hate.  Instead of showing disapproval for the person, he said love them and instead of teaching us to fix people, he said to leave that up to God. 

But, I wonder, if John or Barack showed up on our doorstep, with what kind of attitude would we treat them?  Would we invite them in with a genuine hospitality and lovingness or would we begrudgingly serve them warm tap water and stale cookies?  And to make this more evident, what will we say when asked, “What do you think of the election?”  Will we criticize the policies or the person?

In his fabulous book titled The Gospel According to America, David Dark writes, “The biblical witness, in my view, is a countertestimony to all our antihuman reductions as it calls us to pray for, love, and radically seek the welfare of anyone we’ve come to view as the enemy.  And God’s faithfulness to all generations will always surpass whatever we think we know about people and what they deserve.”

I remember this Calvin and Hobbes comic from the good ol’ days.  

If Jesus cannot teach us something, maybe Calvin can.