With Friends Like These

It would be nice to be able to count on people. Especially in the world I inhabit, working mostly with people who are at least nominally Christian, you hear a lot of lip service paid to high standards of behavior. But in reality, when push comes to shove, the truth is that most people who claim to be Christians don't act any differently than those who don't.

Oh they dress it up nicely, and say all kinds of platitudes--but if you judge them by conduct rather than speech, they fail miserably. When I read stories of the old days, when a man's word was his bond and you could count on what people said, I wonder if that was reality then, or just the gloss of history covering the pockmarks of human nature from a distance. I think perhaps it was real. It's not hard to believe that character has declined to the point that things really are different now.

It's just sad. It shouldn't be that way.