I’m falling out with Christian friends.

The reason is hard to say. I guess the best way to describe it is that I’m tired of trivia. Not that what I’m describing is trivia, but the mindset I mean. I see it most on Facebook. We have The Big Christian Issue of the Day. Abortion is a big one, especially when we focus on some clinic five states away and try and expand what happens there to Planned Parenthood as a whole. Or homosexuality. Or how the prosperity gospel is bad, Or something else. To be defined as trivia, there are two things it must have:

1. It must take up an enormous amount of mental energy.

2. It must be something we cannot do a single thing about.

Why yes, Church A is going to court over their gay organist being fired. That’s nice, except they are in Oregon, the case will probably take three years or more if it isn’t quietly settled, and every single one of us can do nothing about it. There’s a term called “virtue signaling,” in which we do things not so much because they are vital to our lives, but because they show to others we possess virtue. This is why we all care about what the latest celebrity pastor who falls from grace does, because by lining up on sides, we establish our own bonafides to our cohort of friends.

I’ve done the same, but recently I’ve grown weary of it.

I’ve had to do a lot of self-examination recently. I don’t talk much about myself here, as not to bore you, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found I have mild panic attacks while driving. A bump makes me fear I’ve hit someone or run over something. Anything out of the ordinary, like a team cleaning the road, makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong just by passing them slowly like every other motorist. The attacks generally have subsided once I realized that they were not rational, but I was suddenly introduced to the fact that I might suffer from mental illness. And looking back on the past makes me wonder just how much of who I am, and all the mistakes I’ve made, might be due to that. It’s a rather horrifying idea, because you are now are that you are part of a web of actions, and freedom might more of an illusion than I thought. If your own body can work against you, it tends to destroy explanations and ideas.

I think this in part is what makes me weary of virtue signaling. In our lives, the fight is dearer than we think. We don’t have the luxury to care about someone aborting someone somewhere. Those things, the need to signal we are right, are things that take time and strength from us when we fight the battles that do matter. Our energy is a scarce resource, and we cannot spend it wastefully. Our power to change is also scarce, and we must be frugal.

Like homosexuality. I will get eviscerated for this, but I will say this here and now:

If you confess Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, and believe God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

I don’t care any more if you are chaste, practicing, or gay married. If you trust in Him, you are saved: all else after is between you and God, and I cannot butt into your life. I can and will say that practice and gay marriage cannot be affirmed by the church, and that I don’t believe God intends it: it’s a sad part of our fallen world. But I don’t have the energy to try and pray the gay away any more: increasingly my prayers need to be on my own life, and those of my family. That doesn’t mean if a gay couple tries to push into my church or the internet watering holes I frequent I won’t respond, but the days of endless argument are over. If you believe the above, i will try to keep the peace. If you don’t and are mistaken, I will tell you about the above. But no more arguing.

We’ve been conditioned by the media to look at things like Kim Davis as vital issues of the day, but they aren’t! The vital issue of the day is your life in Christ, and the small circle of people you are in contact with. Satan distracts us with that, because its easy to do nothing if you are focused on things you can only do nothing about. As we grow older, I think the difficulties in the fight grow harder. The illusions of who we are and our virtue fade away. We know ourselves too well. And I think our cry becomes more “Father, rescue us!” than a witty defense of doctrine. The change in life hits us all hard.

In the end, that’s all we can say. What’s funny about the Gospels is that if you look at all the apostles, they don’t argue about abortion, or the religious freedom under Herod, or any current issue like philosophers. They most stumble around, follow Jesus, act annoying, mess up, miss what is being said in front of their faces, and, well, are jerks. But what they do is follow Jesus around, do what they can do, act perplexed, but still do it all the same. This is us, now. We follow a Christ we can’t always understand or fathom, and in a life full of absurdity. It’s hard enough to do this: trying to be stand up philosophers arguing over the leading issues of the day may now be beyond us.

The fight really is dearer than we think. It might be a time just to be silent, and focus on ourselves.