on the other hand

There is always an other hand. No matter what the situation may be, there is always an other hand.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Rev Tevye is talking to himself about his daughter’s marriage to one he considers an infidel, a Russian Orthodox man. He keeps considering on the other hand, this and on the other hand, that. He finally comes down to the end, realizes that she has broken with his faith and, at least in his mind, with his trust and tradition, and says, There is no other hand! And he counts her as dead.

There is always an other hand. When you are in a church where things are one way and never another, there is something wrong with the church. You are never in an absolutely closed-ended situation. There is always an other hand.

I spent 44 years in the Church of Christ, 20 of it as a minister. I have two degrees with them. But I suppose that part of my problem with the Church of Christ was that I always saw the other hand. The doctrine was so repressive that most considered it was this way or not at all. One of the biggest comments made on stuff was, “Honest scholars say …” In other words, if something that was said disagreed with what you already thought, the scholars who were “behind it” were dishonest. It was an ad hominem argument.

An ad hominem argument is appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason. Another definition is: attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument.

If they do not agree with you, they are (choose one): dishonest, lazy, have an agenda, evil.

A man in my church (the last Church of Christ I was with) came to me one day and told me that when I came, he thought I was pretty smart. But now, he wasn’t so sure. I had said some things he didn’t agree with and my intelligence went down considerably in his sight.

Since he had his mind made up, and I said something different than what was in his mind, I was no longer smart. I now had some kind of agenda and no longer knew what I was talking about.

I guess the problem was that I began to see the other hand too clearly to ignore it.

My schooling was all very conservative Church of Christ stuff, in very conservative Church of Christ schools. So conservative, in fact, that when it came time to leave the Church of Christ, I found that I could not go into the more progressive side of the Church of Christ because they were afraid of my conservative schooling.

It seemed that they too were not progressive enough to see the other hand.

I finally had to leave the Church of Christ completely and go into a whole ‘nother denomination. That was not what I wanted. I loved and still love the Church of Christ. But they no longer loved me. I had begun to see the other hand and realized that there were other arguments and viewpoints than the ones they held.

That has been the problem my whole life. But it only came to a head in 1994 when I left the Church of Christ.

When someone looks at something and says that there is no other point of view, they are being fools. Psalm 53 – The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Anytime you say that God cannot be in something you are wrong.

Unless – and there always is an exception to every rule – God himself says it is wrong. There is no service to God in homosexuality, nor in division nor lying. Those are wrong and always will be.

But, on the other hand, God can change anybody to be what he wants.

The point is, when we get so bollixed up in our own viewpoints that we cannot see any others, we are wrong.

There is always an other hand.