Plenty good and worthy points in your post.
Thx.
You may or may not have noticed my continued adjustments of my own posting time and energy foci.
That is indisputable! ;-) One or the other pretty much exhausts the possibilities, huh?
But yeah, I was getting a hint.
The deal, for me -- or one of the deals -- is that if we are called in Christ, we have what Catholics call "an apostolate" of our own. So when I reflect on the bloodier parts of these threads, and on my snippier posts, I have to judge them by an evangelical standard: Would a 'gentile' seeing this say, "These Christians, how they love one another!"
I'm guessing, not so much.
Today I have the kind of cold that hurts. You know the kind I mean, the nose hurts, the throat and chest hurt, coughing hurts, not coughing hurts, blah blah blah.
To some extent this sharpens my focus. The issue, more and more obviously in an age in which a woman in an interview can calmly talk about smothering her child with a pillow, is perhaps even more important than whether Catholic theology and practice makes the non-Catholic cut.
The issue is can a woman with an unwanted pregnancy come to any one of these combatants confident that she will be treated with sacrificial mercy and understanding? Can she trust that a pedal-to-the-metal Calvinist and a guy like me could and would want to cooperate in DOING the Love of Christ for her and her child?
The differences are important. But the difficulty we have in resolving them should encourage us to turn to God and trust in Him to bring about reconciliation. I don't think we're going to get there OR to give this starving world the true bread by mocking each other or by being needlessly contentious.
If that means I'm thin-skinned, I'm okay with that.