I love movies. I particularly love movies with lots of twists -- where you expect the story to go one way and it goes another. When nothing is as it seems. When you expect a character to be a bad guy and he turns out to be good. Or you expect him to be weak and he turns out to be strong. Or you expect him to be dead and he turns out to be alive. Generally, predictable is boring. I prefer the unexpected. The life of Jesus Christ is like the best kind of movie in that sense. It is an exercise in the unexpected -- a marathon of irony. Consider, for now, His birth. Based on coming attractions, brought to them for centuries by the prophets, the Israelites knew that the Messiah was "coming" -- maybe not "soon" but at some point. Based on the teaser trailers and on whatever spoiler information they could find, they knew that the one to come would be a King, and that His glorious coming would bring freedom to the House of Israel, once and for all. So we go in expecting all the flash and pomp of royalty. After all, that's how they rolled in ancient Rome, where there was no God but Caesar. Royalty was big, rich, political, fashionable, flashy, and elite. It was also predictable. It was also boring. But it was what we all expected. And what did we get? A feeding trough. Instead of a throne, a manger -- a receptacle into which feed is poured for farm animals. The instant Jesus enters the world, nothing is as it seems. Caesar, the imperial government leader hailed as "Savior of the World" and "Son of God," is now just a mere mortal, as much in need of salvation as the next guy. His gilded throne is worthless. The feeding trough is transubstantiated into the true vessel of royalty. It's nothing like we expected. We expected a red carpet, paparazzi, a sycophantic mob, dignitaries and heads of state elbowing each other to shake the hand of the Big Man on Campus, the King of Kings, the Buddy Christ, as he descended from the clouds for his grand entrance. But there was no room for Him. Not back then, not in the inn, not anywhere in Bethlehem except a cave surrounded by drooling, hay-eating quadrupeds. Is there room for Him today? Is there room for him in Hollywood? New York City? Washington D.C.? Is there room for Him in the hearts of regular ordinary people? Is there room for Him in my heart? Is there room for Him in the hearts of sinners? In the hearts of the morally assured and upright? Things are not always what they seem. The answer is not always what we expect. "Hope" isn't always the real thing. What's popular isn't always praiseworthy. The powerful don't always deserve it. Two millennia ago a child was born in the least dignified, least royal, least popular, least hopeful of circumstances. He was the last person we would expect to save the world, and He would do it in a way we could never imagine much less guess when the screen first lights up. Because what do we see when the screen first lights up? A feeding trough. With a little boy sleeping inside it. He may look small, but He's anything but helpless. And He may seem quiet and peaceful, but the last thing He will ever be -- is boring. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Not only are state officials seeking to satisfy the collective social conscience despite protests, they seem determined to even pursue happiness on our behalf, and on behalf of those less fortunate than we (the uninsured), by expert central-planners who decide how to best use other individuals’ property. “Happiness” – in the form of a health insurance plan. Yes of course. I’ve never known a single happy person who did not have some form of health coverage. That of course is a joke (or at least a bad attempt at one). On the other hand, in all seriousness, I have known a few unhappy people, many of whom had coverage plans for health, life, death and dismemberment, and other such things. This is not to say that insurance is not necessary, only that it will not precipitate happiness. But again – people know this. That’s why medical insurance coverage has been reframed as a “right” rather than a personal, individual responsibility. A “right” for one means a responsibility for others. Usually the responsibility is a negative one. A right to life means a responsibility for others to refrain from killing. A right to free speech means a responsibility for others not to impose silence (it does not oblige others to provide an audience and a microphone). But a “right” to medical coverage is different – in that it imposes on others a positive responsibility: to provide and to pay for medical care. Put another way, one person’s matter of happiness is made another person’s matter of conscience. Someone may counter that, while a health plan may not in itself precipitate happiness, not having a health plan may make one even less happy. Health coverage may not be the key to happiness, but it may be a necessary precondition. One may also counter that if material goods are so immaterial to one’s happiness, then sacrificing some portion of them in order to give all persons health coverage should not make one less happy. To the first, I would say that many will in fact lose their existing health plans in lieu of a new, and likely inferior, government one. Even if access to medical care is a necessary precondition to happiness, government-supplied access is not. What is a clearly necessary precondition to the pursuit of happiness is liberty. This leads to the second counter, which, yes, may also be true – in so far as one freely chooses to sacrifice a portion of one’s material goods, like Scrooge. No end is so righteous that the free choice itself can be rightly sacrificed. The benefactor is losing not only his property, but also the choice as to whether he may keep it. Without his material property, he may yet be happy. Without the freedom to choose how to use his property, for the building of God’s Kingdom, he may be quite unhappy. Most reasonable, thinking people understand this. The only way to persuade someone to give up his freedom regardless is to convince him that whatever happiness he would have by retaining it would be overpowered by his sense of guilt at not having met the requirements of his conscience. In other words, supporters of centrally-planned, freedom-dissolving medical care reform must appeal to conscience. They have no choice but to take on a morally superior air. Arguing that the willful surrender of one’s freedom, to an end so clearly fictional, will make us happy is simply too ridiculous.

It's my belief that if I am trying to persuade my friend to do a certain thing, I stand a much better chance of convincing him if I appeal to his happiness rather than his conscience. That doesn't mean my friend is selfish, it just means he is put off by people who have an air of moral superiority. So am I. And the beauty of appealing to his happiness rather than his conscience is that the two are by nature connected. It is at least in part by doing what is right and never doing what is evil – for ourselves and for our loved ones – that we find happiness. If something is moral, it should in some way, however remote it may seem, facilitate our happiness. What I can’t help noticing is that no proponent of government-run medical care that I have encountered has even tried to make the claim that the medical overhaul sometimes called “Obamacare” will help facilitate my individual pursuit of happiness – a pursuit to which I am entitled by my Creator – much less the practice of personal liberty to which I am also entitled by the Same. (In a way, this observation is almost too obvious to make. Clearly, the ethos behind such a massive distribution of wealth for a “universal” benefit has nothing to do with any individual’s pursuit of happiness, per se. It is a collectivist, social-ist initiative by definition.) No, the appeal has been entirely to “conscience” – a term I hesitate to use because a conscience properly ordered will not trigger feelings of guilt for refusing to support massive, government-run medical care. What we are told is: We will all have to suffer. We will have to sacrifice – sacrifice money in the form of taxes, liberties in the form of choice (either between coverage plans or whether to be covered at all). And since a person cannot pursue happiness when his or her liberty is constricted in such a fashion by authoritarian mandates, we will all have to sacrifice some of our happiness – even our ability to pursue it. After all, how could we skeptics so selfishly insist on retaining our liberty and our property against such a worthy cause as supplying aid to those less fortunate? And in the thick of the Christmas season no less? Such inquiries are no doubt sincere, at least usually. Certainly Ebenezer Scrooge himself was shirking a duty to his neighbor and acting and speaking callously of the have-nots. And clearly he satisfied not only his conscience but his desire for happiness by taking on a more giving spirit on Christmas Day. But Scrooge's was a freely giving spirit – not a state-mandated one. Further, he imposed costs on nobody other than himself. All individuals, like the Christmas Day Scrooge, must embrace our obligations to give freely of what we ourselves posses. In doing so, we find happiness. There is no Divine mandate to generously give of what is not rightly our own, which means doing so will satisfy no one's conscience, and bring misery, not happiness. The nationwide ruckus over the proposed and soon to be voted on reforms are fueled by that principle – that state officials are neither qualified nor permitted by the Creator to satisfy other people's consciences with other people's resources.

“Life without passion is unforgivable.” – Sean John

I saw this quote and attribution in a cologne advertisement, “Unforgivable” from Sean John “Puff Daddy” “P-Diddy” “etc.” Combs, while looking for Christmas presents at the mall with my fiancé. I never know if I’m going to actually find anything worth buying for myself or a loved one when I go to the mall, but I can almost always count on observing something that borders on ridiculous. This cologne ad crossed the border. It’s the Puff Daddy himself, wearing a black shirt and a bling cross around his neck, staring at the camera while draped longingly around him are two of his, er, lady friends. Anyway I thought it ironic because I would hazard that Mr. Combs is more correct than he realizes when he says life ought not to be lived without “passion.” The classical, Christian understanding of the word passion comes from the Latin verb “passio,” which means “suffer.” If a man is passionate about human liberty, it means he is willing to suffer defamation, physical harm or even death in his defense of it. If someone is passionate about virtue, it means he is willing to forgo and sacrifice lesser goods in his practice of it. To be passionate about a person is to be willing to suffer and sacrifice for his or her wellbeing above one’s own. The irony is that this is precisely the kind of “passion” that we so often try to avoid today. We run to other things to avoid this real passion. Sometimes people may run to fake passion – the kind advertised in Mr. Combs’ cologne ad. Is life without that kind of passion really unforgivable? Yes, but only because there is nothing to forgive. Life without fake passion isn’t forgivable or unforgivable. It’s commendable. It’s life without real passion that, at the end of the day, most of us could not forgive ourselves for. Because real passion is what happens when you really love someone. To love someone is to hurt with them when they are hurting. To allow ourselves to hurt and to be hurt. There is nothing fake, for example, about the Passion of the Christ. Fake passion is what happens when we fake love someone. We take only the good that someone can offer us, and abandon them in their pain and their weakness. For better, but not worse. For richer, not poorer. In health, not in sickness. Refusing to really love makes it impossible to really be loved, to really receive love. All because we didn’t want to hurt, or be hurt. Until one day we look back and realize that if we had it all to do again, we would gladly suffer and sacrifice anything and everything – especially fake passion – if only we could know what it’s like to love and be loved by someone. Nothing is unforgivable for God. He can and will forgive us for anything provided we are really sorry. The question is whether we could forgive ourselves once we realize we’ve lived a mostly fake life because we’re afraid of the hurt that comes with living a real one.

The desire for answers is a very human one. And it is natural and not at all uncommon to want the answers "now." My whole life I have searched for the answers, and wanted them now. At every step along the way, I wanted to know where the path was leading. What I see so clearly now is how necessary it was for me to be kept in the dark – not forever, but for a time. I could not have known everything at once. None of us can. God must parcel the answers slowly out to us. I now have in my life something I have so long desired. Something I wanted to ask God for but was afraid to. If at any point before the moment when it finally happened God had revealed to me what He was up to, or if I had tried to figure Him or His plan out, I imagine that I would have found some way, despite my best intentions, to sabotage it. So instead of demanding all the answers immediately, I stopped trying to figure things out. I let the desires of my heart lead me to where God wanted me to go. We should never stop asking God for answers, as He is the only one who can ultimately give them to us. But we should always remember that when we ask Him a burning question about where the path is heading, and He is silent, it is probably because He is up to something. Something wonderful.