Sometimes I think the country would be a whole lot less divided if people were just more polite to each other. One thing I try never to do is interrupt a person. There's no better way to lose all of one's persuasive powers, it seems to me. This sentiment was inspired by a conversation (if you could call it that) between radio talk show host Laura Ingraham and the hosts of the View, including first and foremost Whoopi Goldberg. Part and parcel of the problem, I think, is the medium. I can't really blame Whoopi or Ingraham on this. A ten-minute television segment that masquerades as a debate will almost inevitably be more about who can get more clever jabs in than who really is right or wrong about the issues. Ten minutes is just not enough time to listen thoughtfully to someone and ask questions. It is only enough time to listen to the first half of what someone wants to say, and then presume to know where they're going and argue against everything they have said and were probably about to say. Even if one accurately predicts where someone else is going, isn't it better to let them air it out and then ask questions and make sure we understand what they're really saying and what they mean? But we're not that patient today. We want three sentences from one side and three sentences from the other, and what we get is a garbled mess of interrupted words and clauses from both sides. All these people really do is interrupt each other. I guess on television you have to, but in that case how much closer are we to understanding what is really going on here? Not very. I think St. James said something about being slow to speak and quick to listen. The ability to do so is a strength, not a weakness, and in my opinion lends credibility to a person who can master such arts.

"Church and State" is nothing new. The human race has a long history of divinizing the State and state-izing the Church. We often hear that for a long time religious institutions like the Catholic Church carried out functions that today are largely considered the exclusive prerogative of the State. And for a long time governing authorities were considered vested with a certain divine authority, if not the divine authority.

When Jesus said "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God," that was a revolutionary statement because it implied that there are some things in this world that do not belong to the government. Who or what kind of government it is doesn't particularly matter. Back then it was Caesar. But the temptation and tendency of man to vest divine authority in government institutions did not stop with him.

Fast forwarding to the 20th century it was the various Fascist, Communist and National Socialist (Nazi) regimes that sprung up in Europe and almost destroyed the world. The goal of them all was to create a secular religion, a super-commune that made the traditional God irrelevant and unnecessary. The State and the Church were one and the same. And because they were the same, there was no need for a hierarchical ranking. The State did not have to subordinate itself to some traditional God because the State was God.

Those are only some of the more recent and explicit manifestations of the temptation to vest the state with divine power. Other subtler instances of the temptation litter the human race's history.

The genius of America, to me, is that it is a reaction against that very temptation of men to divinize the State. The United States of America is an experiment in what happens when the State itself recognizes that not everything belongs to it. Its citizens do owe some things to it, but they owe the most important things to something else. Something greater.

The genius of America, or at least certain great Americans, has always been in recognizing the difference between A) vesting divine authority in the State, and B) allowing principles of right and justice that are rooted in religious traditions to guide the development of policy. There are many today who still say that the government is doing A when really it is doing B. When a nation does A, it tries to set itself above God. When it does B, it recognizes that its values are not its own. It did not create its values, and it cannot change them.

The anti-slavery movement, for example, was a fiercely religious one. The members of the movement were very religious, very narrow-minded, and they absolutely wanted to impose their morality on everybody else -- and they were right to do it. Their morality was not just their morality. It was and is the morality of a power that is greater than the State. And as soon as the State marginalizes that power or tries to defy it or become greater than it, the State falls.

The temptation has always existed within the United States to abandon its foundations and to give up the constant struggle to better reflect them. But the genius of it, the idea that a government can just get out of its people's way so they can live their lives and give to God what belongs to God, is what makes me a patriot.

I find that a lot of folks have been bothered by gas prices lately. And I do admit, I have been one of those people from time to time. But I find that it helps, when I am becoming bitter about it, to remind myself that Jesus died for my sins. I've heard it said that holding a grudge against a person for a past wrongdoing against me is like allowing the person to pay free rent inside my head. If that's true, I think forgiveness is the eviction notice. Max Lucado wrote: God loves us just the way we are, but he loves us too much to let us stay that way. That's a great message because it tells the whole story. God loves us too much not to challenge us. He loves us too much not to want more for us than we would choose for ourselves. I've heard it said that prayer is a way of refueling. I agree that that could be one of its benefits, but it is not valuable only because of that. It's a trap to measure the value of prayer by one's professional productivity following prayer. Prayer is a way of stopping what we're doing and just being with God. And that's valuable regardless of anything else. I think it says something about modern culture that "random" is one of its most popular words. "random thoughts," "random stories," "random encounters," etc. It indicates to me a general attitude that the course of events in our lives and the world are guided by nothing. While I don't think that people are puppets, or that the world is God's chess board, I do like to think that God in some mysterious way guides our relationships and the things that affect us daily. So personally I try to use the word "random" as little as possible. If I thought there was any more fulfilling intellectual, spiritual, or emotional endeavor on this planet than being a Christian, I don't think I could be one. Jesus heals the soul, invigorates the spirit, and blows the mind.