Aug.9.2008 at 10:13 am | joshua
…on john edwards affair
i’m really tired of reading “christian’s” opinions on the john edwards affair thing. what happened to grace and forgiveness? if elizebeth edwards can forgive him (which she has) why can’t we? back the crap off… it’s none of our business anyway. we write up long and eloquent posts about praying for the families of broken christian relationships, yet we skewer the living hell out of a politician who does the same thing. yesterday i was ashamed to call myself a christian… how hypocritical can we be?
it’s easy to forget that the edwards family is full of real people, going through real issues. it’s easy to think of him as a sleezy politician, but i’m fairly sure that’s not what his family thinks of him, his friends.
i can’t stand the hypocrisy of christians. i watched in awe as twitter came alive yesterday with people referring to john edwards as a “scumbag” or even his actions in a horrible way. where were you hypocrites during the haggard scandel? i can’t wait for all of you who’ve been destroying john edwards over this to have some moral failure. lets all conveniently forget the command of love and grace when it happens to you as well.
truth is we are all just one or two steps away from a path that will lead us to some sort of moral failure. christian or otherwise. so how about we cut john edwards some slack. he is dealing with it with his family, and that’s what matters.
in closing, here is a quote from elizebeth edwards on the whole thing. i hope you read it and take it to heart:
“John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.”
I agree completely. Just leave him alone about it. It’s been plastered all over the major news networks for two days now. For some reason I don’t remember this much coverage when John McCain had an affair.
It’s so true. I made a a moral mistake several years ago, and so many people that I considered brothers and sisters in Christ quickly turned their backs on me, and it really hurt. I have moved far past that mistake, but I still remember the hurt I felt.
We have no room to judge anyone, because like you said, we are all pretty close to heading down a similarly wrong path. We are all capable of it.
Great post.
[...] up. Judging and pretending that any of us are better than anyone else is just naive and wrong. As Joshua pointed out on his blog, all of us, at any time, are only a few steps away from going down the path that leads to [...]
I feel sorry for Elizabeth Edwards. This is the last thing she needs.
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amen brother, amen.
[...] edwards made the news this week. joshua said everything there is to say about [...]
oh there was plenty of crap being thrown during the haggard scandal. I was relatively close to the center of it all at the time, and heard a lot of it. Still do even.
You’re absolutely right though, that Christians need to shut up.
I don’t care for Edwards. I don’t care for any politician. But it says something about a person when they come forward with something like that. It also says something about his family when they stick together like that.