Honeybee or housefly?
Do you have big, unanswered questions about a cause, a business, a religion, or a political party? Can you build on all the good those institutions, parties, and causes do?
Yes you can. It’s not merely possible to be in a cause or movement, helping it become its best version of itself. Those institutions need you, at your best, helping them be their best.
Maker or destroyer? Builder or decomposer?
We all have our moments building others up, or tearing others down. Or helping strengthen good institutions, or chipping away at them by focusing on their flaws. Maybe it’s the thing in their history, or maybe the history of their founder, that we don’t understand, or find unsavory by today’s enlightened standard.
Honeybees make life
Bees build impressive colonies as storage, they make honey, and they literally carry and distribute the material that enables flowers to repopulate. Yet their contribution is tiny: in one lifetime a single bee might produce one thimble full of honey. Yet, as a collective species they beautify the world, working in massive numbers to make a worldwide positive impact.
Houseflies are destroyers
They spit their saliva on things to break them down before they eat it. They eat filth. They literally carry and distribute the material that causes living things to die and dead things to decay. Yet, like the honeybee, their contribution is also tiny. They engage the world by surrounding themselves with their kind, in a dirty swarm.
How do you judge?
Some people would throw out Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because he was unfaithful to his wife Coretta? Was Christopher Columbus a conqueror bringing pestilence, or a liberator bringing education, farming, and organization further West?
How can both Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow claim Christianity as their motivating force? Are you ready to throw out your parents’ ideals because they got some things wrong? Are you ready to become a socialist — giving all the power to the government — because corporations and their lobbies seem to have all too much power?
The list may seem endless because there are endless ways to be flawed. Or maybe in some instances they’re not, but our understanding is incomplete, or the lens of our current worldview is bent, and so warps our view of things as they really are.
Are noble people flawed? Yes. Jesus said, “be ye therefore perfect, even as I, or your Father are perfect” all while knowing perfectly the state of the people he is talking about. Church leader Jeffrey R. Holland recently clarified, “be ye therefore perfect, eventually.”
A rubric for judging our times
Jesus took some of the burden off of us when he said, “judgement is mine,” meaning it’s not our place to decide if someone else is going to heaven, or hell, because He’s the judge. But in terms of living our lives, and deciding what to do he said, “judge righteously.”
We can question things, or wince at the unsavory aspects but we can’t abandon our faith in the good. America has flaws, but is ultimately good. Our parents have flaws but overwhelmingly our parents gave us the best they had. Columbus brought illness to the native Americans but he didn’t come as a conqueror (that was the Spanish Conquistadors). The religion of your upbringing has flawed people in its ranks, but the teachings of Christ are more needed now than ever.
So, housefly or honeybee? Helper or agitator?
Which one are you becoming?
