conservativism

I have these two friends who I respect a lot who happen to be conservative.  And there's this super-conservative church in Washington that they really like, and my friend posted one of their sermons online.  So I listened to it (while I was writing a research paper for music history, incidentally).
I was expecting to start listening to it, become annoyed and/or infuriated, and stop.  But I was surprised to realize that it actually made a lot of sense.

Okay, so there were a few moments that made me cringe, like the part about the man being the head of the household and the woman being a passive helper.  ("It's a man knowing what he's doing and inviting a woman to participate.")  But the point is that despite the patriarchal emphasis, a lot of it sounded good to me.  Because the truth is that I still believe in marriage that lasts forever.  I believe that loving someone deeply is not about happiness, it's about holiness, and happiness will follow.

This idea of my views meeting with conservative views has been confronting me a lot lately.  I'm not becoming a Republican or anything -- I'm still a long way from that.  But I've been challenged to accept people with different (conservative) beliefs, and even more than that, I've been realizing that we may not be as different as I used to think.  I've also been realizing the importance of the middle ground.  I really believe you can find common ground with anybody if you try, and yet it's so hard for us to do that with people who we understand to be "different" from us.

On the Mars Hill website, it says this:
WELCOME
it's all about Jesus, it's only about Jesus, it's always about Jesus

I mean, I can't really argue with that, right?  In a sense, the rest is just details.
It's not that nothing else matters.  Lots of other things are really important; but I think that if together you have a foundation on something like this, the other things should never keep you from getting along.

So, hey.  Maybe we should start looking at the people who seem completely, radically different from us and find ways to relate to them and to love them.  I think that would make the world a better place.