Mean, Median & Mode

SCRIPTURE: Among the gods there is none like you, Lord; no deeds can compare with yours. All the nations you have made will come and worship before you, Lord; they will bring glory to your name. For you are great and do marvelous deeds; you alone are God. Psalm 86:8-10 NIV

THOUGHT: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” David wrote in Psalm 33, adding here that all of the nations God has made will come and worship, bringing more glory to the already glorious, one-and-only King.

I can’t help but think of these United States when I read these words. However the truth may be spun or doctored or downright mutilated, we are a nation God has made, and we are a nation that has called God our Lord. If there is anything that is systemic to our whole, it is that truth. “We are all children of God,” shouts the arc of our history. However ripped with the tragedies of slavery, greed, hatred, and violence, that truth is the fabric that has held us together, calling us to a higher road: love to cover a multitude of sin, forgiveness, reconciliation, and respect for the dignity of each human, made Imago Dei.

But, like I learned in statistics, there is a mean, a median, and a mode. If all you consider is the last forty years of our history, the numbers have been slipping, sliding, morphing toward no truth except individual ‘truth’ where people become gods unto themselves. The averages all shift as you consider those decades, skewing perception as our larger history is discounted, forgotten, or re-written. We are no longer greater because of the sum of our parts, we are parted into lesser sums and told it is the whole.

Still, there is this ancient truth we claim as our own: Among the gods there is none like you, Lord…you alone are God.

PRAYER: We are not God, oh Lord. We are not even gods. We are humans, gratefully made in your image, longing to live in a country that acknowledges you like David, a king himself did, saturated with truth: You are God alone.