Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about how we talk about each other.

I’m going to go on a journey here, and I’m going to have to do it fast to stay under my five-minute self-imposed podcast limit, so let’s try.

I was in Lowe’s shopping yesterday and heard over the PA the song Betty Davis Eyes, which I had to look up.

It was a Kim Carnes tune from the early 1980s.

As I was in there, I realized the only reason I knew that tune wasn’t because I’d heard that song.

I mean, I’ve heard it a few times maybe on the radio since, but because when I was a youth at home, Rush Limbaugh had commissioned a parody of that song, which he played frequently on his radio program.

It was called Billy Clinton Thighs, and I’m sorry for that in advance, but it was there to mock President Clinton.

I’ve seen the pictures of Clinton and Gore out jogging in their short shorts, and I won’t comment on that.

But regardless, what it put me in mind of was how Limbaugh and people like him enabled and encouraged this sort of not just critique, but ridicule and name-calling and attacking that we have so broadly today.

I don’t want to fully dive in and interrogate what within our religious community, when I was a young person, decided that it was much more appropriate that we could listen to Limbaugh for three hours every day than, say, to listen to a radio station where we might have heard the Betty Davis Eyes song.

But that’s probably another topic for another day.

After I got back from Lowe’s, I turned on NFL football game in the afternoon.

And every commercial break was the most toxic political advertisements that you could have.

I mean, if you’ve had TV on in the last month, you’ve heard them, especially here in Iowa.

Everything talking about how these political candidates are horrible people.

And there’s ads like this on both sides, but calling them names, calling them, you know, describing them in the worst possible ways.

And then I bounce that up against the gospel reading I heard in church on Sunday morning, where it said, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Welcome the immigrant and the stranger.

I think about all the teaching about not slandering, about not bearing false witness.

And I just wonder how we’ve gotten ourselves to this point.

Now, I’m not expecting Jesus-like behavior out of everyone, and particularly those who don’t claim to follow Jesus.

But so many people in our current environment who do claim to follow Jesus then still seem to think that this sort of dialogue, this sort of talk about other people is acceptable and is okay.

And I just think it’s not.

One of the things I found change in my life over the last several years is an attitude towards how I look at people and how I think about them and their motives.

And I think largely this is healthy, although I don’t necessarily always play it out in the best ways.

My wife certainly has a right to be irritated when I too often play devil’s advocate, arguing against maybe her opinions or frustrations by trying to discuss the other person’s potential point of view.

But it’s been so helpful for me to think with compassion and empathy towards other people, to try to envision their perspective.

I think this can be a way that we think about how we love our neighbor, is how we talk about them and how we think about them and how we recognize that they too have a perspective that makes sense to them and is driving their thinking and their behavior.

And we don’t understand all that as we look at them, but it can be helpful for us to think through what those could possibly be, to take that as some added perspective as we think about how to react and interact with them.

And then if we have the opportunity to hear from them, to actually ask and learn and care about them and their perspective and their experience.

I don’t know how all that’s going to play out in terms of election conversations, and I’ll certainly be glad when the election gets here in a week and we don’t see these ads anymore, or at least for another year or so until the cycle starts again.

But it makes me think again about how I talk about and think about my neighbor, and not just the ones who might agree with me, but also the ones who don’t.

We’ll talk later.