Seeing what isn't there

My son has a 103 fever from the shots we gave him today at the doctors office, and that got me thinking, as a parent it's easy to be on guard against the things you can see, but it's really difficult to be on guard against what's missing.

It's easy for me to look at him and say, oh, he has a fever, we had better call the doctor because this added pathogen is not good for him, but it's really hard for me to look at him and say, he's got a deficiency due to a lack of nutrition.

It's therefore easy to look without wisdom at the Liberal churches and hear them talk about how Jesus was a man, and how He lived a life as a man, and agree to all that, or to talk with Catholics and see how zealous they are for protecting the unborn, and how they pray to Christ, or to listen to a Rick Warren sermon and think that he didn't say anything wrong or offensive.

What's really hard to do is to look at something and see what is lacking. To look at the Catholic church and see that they lack grace, or that the liberals lack the divinity of Christ, or Rick Warren lacks any real substance or knowledge of justification by faith alone. What's even harder is trying to help someone in this situation, because they immediately default to the thought that you were attacking a positive belief, rather than the deficiency.

What you must do in those circumstances is look at the results of what is going on, the fruit. Or if you have a knowledge of what the finished product should be you can see where the deficiency lies. This is why we left the Churches of Christ, because at some point we figured that the lack of talk about repentance, and justification, and election were such serious things, and why when we tried to talk about it, nobody seemed to understand.
The older I get the more I see the need for a church to be integrated across the age groups, so that we have a number of old people telling us what we are missing. I used to think of it as a painful burden "You kids these days need to blah blah blah work with your hands" but now I wonder if they are not actually out of love doing the hardest thing of all: telling us what we are not seeing for our own good.