Stuck At the Intersection of God and Life

In the time in History when there was no King in Israel the Bible says that every man did what was right in his own eyes.

In today’s Christian movement it seems that we want to boycott every other business or investor who makes a stand in support of a group of people that we disagree with. I would like to use the example of Mr. Howard Schultz, CEO of the Starbucks Corporation. He was harshly and, in my opinion, rudely challenged by an investor with very conservative morals and very loose Christianity if any. I won’t focus on the comments to Mr. Schultz, but rather on Mr. Schultz’s response. He said,

“Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don’t know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds.”

I would like to pose a question to my Christ following friends. How on earth could Mr. Schultz have responded any better or any more polite given his decision making criteria? While I disagree with his financial support, I applaud Mr. Schultz response. I applaud his love for people of all kind, I applaud his business acumen, and I applaud his professional demeanor in the face of harsh statements.

May I remind us all that Christ did not come to this world to condemn this world, but that the world through him might be saved. The failure in this country morally is primarily a failure of Christians. We have been intimidated by laws like the separation of church and state which was put in place to keep the states from setting up one religion as the only religion which a people may practice. We have been intimidated into feeling like we can’t worship God in public. We have been intimidated into trading our moral compass for a politically correct GPS. We are the ones responsible for dethroning the King in Israel, so how can we expect anything more than what we have today?

 If we can start loving people like Christ did, if we can start introducing the King to the people, I think he can do a pretty good job showing them his investment preferences. I will promises you this though, if any of us truly allowed the King to reign in our hearts we wouldn’t be boycotting groups, telling the darkness that it is dark, or hiding out in a cocoon of religious safety. We would be out there seasoning everything with the salt of his word and touching every darkened life possible with the light of his gospel.

Salt is effective only when it is applied to the subject. Light is only effective when it is shown in darkness. Photo credit