Quiet please

As most of you probably know, my weekly newspaper columns come from my journal writings and blog writings, so after a bit of deliberation, here is the final column... I think all of it has shown up in a blog entry at some point this past week. This might give you the best example of how my column comes together each week.

In the third century, St. Cyprian wrote to a friend named Donatus: This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden... But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out... you know very well what I would see; brigands on the high road, pirates on the seas, in the amphitheaters men murdered to please the applauding crowds...
Yet in the midst of it, I have found a quiet and holy people... They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are Christians...
What a compliment! A quiet and holy people. Quiet. Not obnoxious. Not boastful. Not demanding. Just quiet. Holy. Set apart. Pure. Decent. Honest. Wholesome.
On Monday, Pat Robertson, 75, and president of the Christiann Broadcasting Network told a Monday broadcast of “The 700 Club” that U.S. operatives should consider killing Venezuelian President Hugo Chavez by “taking him out,” saying it would be “cheaper than starting a war, and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.’’
“We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,’’ Robertson told the broadcast.
Robertson, a one-time candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, also blasted U.S. authorities for failing to provide enough support for opposition leaders when Chavez was briefly overthrown in a failed coup in 2002.
In Caracas, Venezuelian legislator Desire Santos Amaral said Robertson’s comments outraged her, adding: “This man cannot be a true Christian.”
When did we move from our third-century mindset to our current mindset that we have to have everything the way we want it?
This may upset some people, but I wish James Dobson, Pat Robertson and others would quit using their pulpit to condemn and instead use it to show the world the love of God instead.
Maybe we could all take a lesson from third century Christians. Instead of standing up and demanding our ways be met, protesting every little thing we don’t like, maybe we should take a Christlike attitude towards politics and the like. What would that look like?
Instead of yelling at the lost, why don’t we calm down and show them how we were once lost as well and now found.