A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
A Personal Perspective
By David R. Currie
Executive Director

I love baseball. Most of you reading this know that. I cried for days when Mickey Mantle died and wrote an article about it. I love playing games, following sports, rooting for my teams and players, but baseball is a game, a diversion, like a good movie. Yes, it can touch your soul, but life, and how you live it, is what is truly important.

2003 has brought many changes in my family that have caused me to reflect on “my personal perspective.”

In late January, Mother, 86, fell from a stool in Paint Rock, breaking her left wrist and shoulder. She had shoulder replacement surgery and finally, after an initial struggle, is recovering well and will soon be back home living alone in Paint Rock.

The same week of Mother’s surgery, Candi, my 38-year-old stepdaughter, was diagnosed with breast cancer. It had spread to the lymph nodes. This was not easy to keep in perspective. The world stood still for a while. The road ahead is still uncertain, but we are encouraged and we are learning to treasure the little things and opportunities.

In reality, the way we live has changed. We all say, “I love you” more often. We do not put things off like we once did. During Spring Break, Lance, Chad, my nephew Craig, and I went to Florida to watch spring training baseball. I had been promising my boys we would do it for years (as my Dad and I had done it 1979). Vicky asked me what the highlight of the trip was? My answer was “just being with my boys.” On further reflection, the other highlight was praying with my sons, as we used to do every night when they lived with me.

We are all terminal. We have no guarantees of tomorrow. I have never seen a daily newspaper that did not have obituaries in it every day. Death is a daily occurrence.

The Christian perspective is: death is but a door to more life with God. So what does this all say for us who are Mainstream Baptists?

For me, it says press on. When the SBC International Mission Board is firing missionaries who have been winning people to Christ because they will not sign the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 statement, the SBC leaders have lost their perspective.

When associations meet and kick churches out of fellowship over the gender of ministers and other church leaders, they have lost perspective and do not understand the value of cooperation or Baptist principles.

When state conventions fire Baptist editors and control the information shared with Baptists in their state, these Baptists have not only lost the perspective of what it means to be Baptists, they further do not even understand the first amendment to the United States Constitution and the value of a free press.

When Baptists urge in print and in other kinds of media that America join church and state, comingle public and private funds, urge churches to be free to give money to political candidates (see Jones bill), they again have lost all perspective on the true value and genius of religious freedom and what truly makes America, America.

When SBC leaders cut funds to the Baptist World Alliance and threaten to pull all funds to the BWA if CBF is accepted into the BWA, those SBC leaders again have lost perspective and do not value cooperation and the priority of winning the world to Christ.

For me personally, I will try to keep things in perspective. I have a wonderful wife and family. I want them all to know how much I love them and I want to remind them often.

I also have a wonderful calling from God, to help preserve the authentic Baptist witness in America, so that generations of Baptists in the future will experience Bible freedom, church freedom, personal freedom and religious freedom—and most importantly, so that more persons might come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

April 2003