Wisdom 11 What’s Your Story?

 Three histories operate in everyone. If we are looking at secular history, the history we read in school, it is loaded with the names, dates and movements of people who made recorded history, as we said previously. But what made their personal history was their choices. What influenced their choices was the good or bad influences behind them, their spiritual history. People act from within based on what they believe and trust.

 The problem with secular history is not having a perfect grasp of the internal way a person felt and analyzed issues nor the social atmosphere in which it took place. Most of it is speculation and personal interpretation of records. We have only their writing, observations and second-hand assumptions by outsiders, but never the whole invisible reality that shaped them.

 To understand what I mean here, I’ll use an observation of a past event, the internment of great numbers of Japanese-Americans in this country in 1942, which is now considered to be a blot on our history. But we have differing world views now. We look at events from a totally different perspective. We are not at war. Socially, verbally and economically maybe, only partially military. We see the past through the eyes of instant media communication, advancing technology, dying regionalism, the social acceptance of people in general, the civil rights movements, changing ethnic attitudes, jet and space travel, a lush economy and a doubled population. At least half our population has traveled to other places and are more geographically informed. The present assumption is how terrible our government was to treat people that way. Just sending people to relocation camps was a horrible idea. However, at the time, there was no way to determine if Japanese here were possible spies, saboteurs or sympathizers. They all had the same features, and most were either aliens or first-generation Americans, many of whom spoke little English.

 A milder form of action was taken against those who had German names, who were aliens, spoke with an accent or sympathizers (the German-American Bund was a well-known group). They looked like everyone else. So instead of internment, their houses were raided for simple radios and any other form of communication equipment, all of which were primitive in our view. It was possible to convert them into short wave radios. We can also include the treatment of the American Indian which is a story of its own.

 Each historic movement has both its unique and common dynamics. So, what was it really like back then? The problem is we will never know. We have only second-hand observation and present-day assumptions. Personal history is a mystery except to God who knows it all. Remember too, the government is run by people with a personal history in a secular atmosphere.

 Returning to the internment issue---back then, there were no TV’s, computers or sophisticated electronics. We were separated by two oceans. Germany and Japan were distant subjects in geography classes. What news there was came over local and short-wave radios. There were very limited pictures of action and briefly reported spoken accounts in theaters. Newspapers carried most of the stories. Magazines, like Time, Life and the Saturday Evening Post, were the best sources for getting a minor feel for things happening thousands of miles away.

 Patriotism was a way of life. Posters on billboards and telephone poles, gasoline ration stickers on cars, it was Spam instead of beef, bacon fat saved for processing and everyone in uniform treated like superstars. The enemy were the ‘brutal Nazis’ and the ‘dirty Japs.’ Men not in uniform were often asked openly, “Where is your suit?” They had only two ways to reply, “I’m 4-F (physically unable),” or “I fought in the first one (WW1).” Children in schools as young as ten volunteered for service but were obviously denied. Iconic Bob Hope went from one military base to the other entertaining troops. It was all on radio, war movies or glimpses seen in theater newsreels or in flags proudly displayed in front of homes or children playing war with toy guns.

 You better believe the Germans and Japanese were the enemy and no chances could be taken with them or even their relatives in this country. Stories came back of the brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners especially by the Japanese on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines. Submarines were the dreaded weapon against us and they were right off the coast communicating with the ‘Fifth Column,’ a secret group of Nazi spies and sympathizers living here. “Loose lips sink ships’ appeared on signs and gave everyone a suspicious sense that the enemy might be next door so don’t say anything about troop or Navy movements.

 What all this is pointing to is ‘the feel,’ the unseen atmosphere of anger and anxiety, caused by the horrendous attack on Pearl Harbor and the Nazi scourge spreading over all Europe. People thought it could happen here. And these were just threads in the unseen social fabric influencing the country. You had to live in it to know it. I grew up in it. Words were the only pictures. As far as news is concerned, we were visually impoverished. Maybe now our past can be understood. Not accepted but understood.    

 Today we are visually and digitally over-saturated, slammed. Not only that, our secular history seems to in the process of being vacated, revised and edited to fit the present culture. Our young people suffer the indignity of anxious self-centeredness because of it. Demonstrators burn our flag, riot and tear up property, screaming awful obscenities, insulting our military and political leaders of whom they have no personal knowledge, while professional athletes openly abuse the very symbols that stand for the freedom and rights their forbears fought and died for. Go figure.

 Secular history has it drawbacks, namely the inability to personally feel history outside our own. We have only the imperfect recollections of past personal accounts to rely on. This is why nostalgia, for instance, is a deceptive distraction that relies on replicating past physical objects to recreate the irretrievable. The ‘good ol’ days’ are simply that, old and impossible to dredge up.

 But seen in the light of spiritual history, we can sort out the good from the bad and not repeat the bad. This is also why present idealists can never understand the stories of past harsh treatment of juvenile delinquents, the quick justice for murderers, the bitter recollection of war veterans, past discrimination, institutional squabbles and boundary disputes. They see the world through the eyes of current personal ideological and emotional eyes rather than spiritual eyes. Idealism is basically ideals uprooted from their source. They die as culture changes.

 Spiritual history (biblical history) has access to eternal eyes, the unchangeable Mind of God and His values. Take the current views on sexuality to see cultural change and its advocates. Something that God created good, but now separated from Him, has been spoiled. Secular history avoids and can’t understand or accept the idea of sin, the reality behind all division, dissension and disruption. Personal history understands imperfection but, having no root apart from God, buries it within. Spiritual history, with the Bible as its measure, gives us the ability to sort out the inner and outer conflicts in a more reliable context.

 Jesus becomes the measure for our personal history and we look at secular history through Him and His teachings to define its issues. While we can’t feel what the past has felt we can feel the dynamics that made it what it is and learn how to be better witnesses for the Lord God in it. Another ‘for instance’ is the role of women. The Bible makes clear that spiritually, there is neither male nor female, but children of God given spiritual roles, different in purpose but equal spiritually. Men are husbands and women are wives. Men are fathers and women are mothers. Those are the two most important roles in human society and both depend on their Creator for how they work best.

 Jesus made history, all three we have presented here. Most importantly, He made spiritual history. He made it as an individual which makes individual spiritual history the most important history. He lived and died that way to show how important we are to God. Spiritual history is what reconciles the world of people to Him.

 We have a choice. We can make secular history by working hard and being successful. I can make personal history by doing what I think is best. Or, we can, each of us, believe in the One Lord Jesus Christ in every next moment and, by faith in Him, make spiritual history for the Lord and others. The first two, secular and personal, may end up recorded in a history book, a diary or memoires. Only a miniscule number are. But they end. The third is written in a far more important book, the Book of Life (Ex.32:33, Lk.10:20, Rev.3:5), the eternal record. It never ends. The question for both believers and non-believers is this, “Which history am I choosing to make?”  

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