One of the struggles in my life has been accepting that I’m on the losing side, and there’s little I can do about it. When I was younger I tended to act on the implicit assumption that if only I argued more clearly, wrote more eloquently, reasoned more impeccably, I could change people’s minds. People didn’t believe the truth because they hadn’t been told or had it explained properly.
Eventually I realized that it wasn’t so easy. People didn’t believe truth because they didn’t want to. For instance, they favored legal abortion because it enabled their lifestyle; debate with them was a merry-go-round, get them to back off of one argument and they’d be back to it twenty minutes later.
This realization came slowly, but it was quite depressing when I realized that all my efforts were almost certainly futile. My civilization seemed to be declining, and nothing I might do could stop it. I was on the losing side. And I found peace there, for, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “ours is but the trying, the rest is not our business.” I’d make a very bad savior of civilization. I can argue, but I’m irritable, and arrogant, and well, as Captain Malcolm Reynolds said of sins, I’m a fan of all seven. Fortunately, it’s not up to me to save civilization. It’s not even up to those meeker souls who are better at moving hearts than my arguments could ever be. It’s up to grace.
It’s always up to grace. We’re always on the losing side, because we can’t know when God will bestow a special grace upon our efforts and enable us to see success. Yet we are graced even in defeat, for we rise again.
