Let’s face it — we all love shortcuts. It’s like the kid who was told to clean his room but he stuffs all his things under his bed ‘cause he’s in a hurry; or our friend who tried to take a shortcut to Death Valley through a desert route – gotta love GPS! The shortcut didn’t work out and he eventually had to backtrack. Really – there is no shortcut to anything worth doing right. As someone once put it: “A shortcut is sometimes the longest distance between two points.” 

   Shortcuts – they can certainly be convenient, and for the most part they are quite harmless. But really – there are some things that we just can’t afford to shortcut – think diets, safety measures with equipment, or — our relationship with our Creator. 

   Many believe there are shortcuts to God. But Matthew 7 tells us this: “Don’t look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don’t fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do.”

   Donald Miller once quipped – “The problem with Christian belief – I mean real Christian belief, the belief that there is a God and a devil and a heaven and a hell – is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe.” No – it’s not fashionable because it’s a narrow way and most people want a shortcut – a broad way to God. 

   As one Biblical scholar put it, the broad way has all kinds of tolerance for sin. Every ‘man-made’ religious system is part of the scenery of the broad way – the easy way – the shortcut. But think about it – people often criticize Christians because we believe there is only one way to God. But, as a pastor once commented: “If God said there were forty-eight ways to salvation I’d preach and write about all forth-eight of them. But there aren’t.” Jesus said of Himself, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from Me.” No short-cuts. 

   Tiger Woods starting golfing when he was three. On the pro circuit he would hit as many as 1000 practice balls each day. There are stories of him practicing 14 hours a day, putting on the green for hours with bleeding hands, all the while he was number one in the world making 50 million per year. He would tell you in a heartbeat that he took zero shortcuts on his road to success!!

   The trouble with short-cuts is that in taking one, there is a very real possibility that you might not reach your destination! They often don’t lead where you really want to go! (Think God) Buddha can’t lead you to God. Mohammed can’t lead you to God! None of the millions of Hindu gods can direct you to God, nor can Joseph Smith lead you to God!! Taking the ‘God shortcut’ can lead to a lifetime of regret. And actually – that shortcut will lead to an eternity of regret. 

   There’s an amusing narrative about a guy who was driving his aunt and cousins to Georgia from New York. When he got near Georgia, he was exhausted and started looking for a shortcut. He soon found one and left the main road for parts unknown. Soon enough he realized that he was on some type of road through the Smokey Mountain National Park. 

   It was three am in the morning, on a scary, narrow mountain road – no guard rails, and…by his own admission, it was the most terrifying drive of his life! Instead of doing 55 on the highway, he was now crawling at 15 mph with his family having a nail biting contest in the backseat. Shortcuts are just not always what they’re cracked up to be!  

   As Gary Busey once said, “If you take shortcuts, you get cut short.” This one is big – please don’t shortcut yourself out of a life with God!  Selah!

Bob and Susan Beckett pastor The Dwelling Place City Church at 27100 Girard Street in Hemet, CA. For more information, you may contact them at DPCitychurch.org

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion are rallying cries of Democrats and the left, spawning an entire industry dedicated to achieving these goals, regardless of necessity, practicality, fairness, or cost.

Diversity simply implies differences, an innate feature of humans as no two people look, act, or think the same. Here is a definition from one such organization whose goal is that we all march to the diversity, equity, and inclusion drumbeat.  Notice that most characteristics cannot be discriminated against by law, not hiring or firing someone over their race or religion, for example. At the bottom of the list is a surprising focus on diversity, namely political perspective.

This means that companies and institutions that proudly practice diversity and virtue signal over their wokeness, should themselves be leading the charge of making sure that their organizations seek diversity in not only gender and sexual orientation, but also political perspective. How are the woke companies and institutions doing? Are they walking the diversity walk or simply talking the talk? The College Fix answered this question, “Zero Republican professors found across 33 departments at seven universities.” What are these universities? “The Ohio State University, University of Nebraska-Omaha, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Georgia, Cornell University, University of Oklahoma and the University of Alaska-Anchorage.”

These are all large elite institutions, a mix of public and private, and even a school from the uber-woke Ivy League. Taking their analysis further, “The College Fix identified just 61 Republican professors across 65 departments at seven universities. In contrast, 667 professors were identified as Democrat based on their political party registration or voting history in party primaries.”

How is that for diversity of political perspective? It’s not the university locations either, “Six of the seven states analyzed are primarily Republican, with the exception of New York. Yet, all universities showed a strong Democratic tilt among their faculty.” These school are far left islands, as are most major universities, even if surrounded by conservatives outside their ivy-covered walls. “When broken into Democrat and Republican, 92 percent of professors identify as Democrat and only 8 percent identify as Republican.

That amounts to Democrat professors outnumbering Republican professors by a ratio of 11 to 1.” Yet these schools allocate enormous resources toward diversity. Cornell, for example, has a website devoted to diversity and inclusion, including restroom and facilities guidelines and supplier diversity.

But there is no section emphasizing political diversity, hence Cornell and other similar universities only selectively creating diversity, becoming politically homogenous. Ohio State has a similarly flashy website emphasizing “inclusive excellence and racial justice” but no acknowledgement of political perspective diversity. American universities have always leaned left, but it has become more pronounced in recent decades, as research from the Higher Education Research Institute found, “In 1989-1990, when HERI first fielded this survey, 42% of faculty identified as being on the left, 40% were moderate, and another 18% were on the right. This is not a normal curve – it is a clear lean to the left.” Flashing forward, “Almost three decades later in 2016-2017, HERI found that 60% of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared to just 12% being conservative or far right.

In 1989, the liberal: conservative ratio of faculty was 2.3. So in less than 30 years the ratio of liberal identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5.” Another study from a Brooklyn College professor found, “Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.”

This analysis of liberal-arts colleges ranked highly by US News and World Report, “Found no field in which Republicans are more numerous than Democrats.” It’s not only academic institutions not walking the diversity walk, but also tech companies. These are the companies quick to pressure customers or even entire states that for example feel it is inappropriate for young girls to use a men’s bathroom, all in the name of tolerance and diversity.

But when it comes to political diversity, these companies fall short and feel no need to practice this type of diversity themselves. Here is a short list of woke tech companies and the percent of their employees’ political donations going toward Democrats. Netflix 98%, Nvidia 93%, Adobe 93%, IBM 90% Salesforce 89%, Alphabet (Google) 88%, Microsoft 85%, Apple 84%. From a 10:1 to an 81 ratio, there is no diversity of political perspective in big tech.

One gem in the recent Twitter Files reveal was that Twitter employees contributed to Democrats over 96% in 2018, increasing to virtually 100% in 2022. How is that for political diversity? Twitter was likely, at least pre-Musk, staffed by representatives of most of the 72 genders, making them gender diverse. But for politics, only one perspective is tolerated.

Those who screech “diversity” the loudest, are the least diverse when it comes to that one pesky aspect of diversity, namely “political perspective”. While they gush over how progressive it is that America has an Assistant Secretary of Health and an Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition who are both grown men who dress as women, within their own companies, only one political viewpoint is encouraged or tolerated.

One can argue against the entire concept of “diversity”, where people are categorized and promoted based on superficial characteristics rather than following the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Imagine how much richer educational and corporate institutions would be with diversity extending to differing political viewpoints. And at the least giving credibility to other aspects of diversity, allowing the woke virtue signalers to practice what they preach.

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