Letter to the editor

Dear editor,
Against my better judgment, I am writing to address the Great Tee Shirt Debate going on in Dodge County. Like most people involved, I have an opinion about the shirt. However, I choose not to voice that opinion in your newspaper. Someone once said: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” Someone else said: “Opinions are like [insert body part of your choosing]; everyone has one.” These statements are both true. However, greater than opinions are the core beliefs that are deeply engrained in us. They may have been taught to us by our parents. They may have been imparted to us by the Spirit of the Living God coming to dwell within us. They may be a result of the unique human experiences that each of us had growing up, our race, our religion, our socioeconomic status. They may be the result of the selfish human nature with which we were all born. They may be the result of basic standards of human decency that most of us possess. These beliefs are part of what makes us all different from one another. You will not change my core beliefs. I will not change your core beliefs. Only God can do that for a person. And while some of these core beliefs are absolutes worth staking our lives on, others are mere personal preferences that matter not in the grand scheme of things.
As I see it, our country is divided like we have not witnessed since the Civil War. From Washington, D.C. to Atlanta to Dodge County. We focus so much on the things that divide us from one another. Those in government have an agenda, which is to defeat their opponent at any cost. The ends justify the means. Their supporters fall right in line behind them. Tune in to CNN or Fox News depending on which way you lean and see the other side trashed. Meanwhile the people suffer. Lincoln was correct when echoing the words of Christ Himself in the Gospels that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
And like everything else, it eventually trickles down to Dodge County. We have poverty. We have fatherless children and struggling single mothers. We have a drug epidemic. We have numerous murders over the last few years. Our jails are filling. Our churches are closing. We wonder when we hear about the next mass shooting if it could happen here. We finally have industries in town looking for skilled workers, and we have a shortage of those. There are so many problems that we should be focused on solving, and yet we are focused on a tee shirt. On the one side, you have those who want to talk about bending a knee at the Cross-when the fact is the majority have not told anyone about Jesus in years and may not even know Him. On the other side, you have those on a crusade against everything Godly paired up with those who are just looking to be offended by something.