Christian

When You’re an Ignorant Christian, Satan Wins

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If you’re really genuine in your faith, you live in steadfast fear that Satan will use you for his will. And yet, too many Christians do the devil’s work for him by acting like ignorant assholes about major newsworthy topics. For example, this post that came across my Facebook feed today.

abortion

When you fail to understand the scientific facts of abortion (or any other topic), yet you share asinine pseudo-science about things like third trimester abortion, you look stupid. You’re an asshole. You give all Christians a bad name simply by being an uneducated, head in the sand twat.

Are you mad yet? Hate all the name calling? GOOD. You should be pissed. You’re actively causing others to turn away from God! You’re the reason souls aren’t being saved, the very reason that other people look at Christians and turn their backs! Instead, you should be pissed at the idiots who are preaching to YOU with their inaccurate information, and angry at the people who are reading your stupid social media posts and believing them.

Whew! Am I done ranting? Not by a long shot!

If you wish to be a God-fearing Christian who actually leads others to Christ, then get your act together! Stop sharing ridiculous Facebook posts, stop showing the world how stupid you are, and educate yourself on the facts. Get it together this year, and be an educated force for good instead of an idiot who makes all Christians look bad with your stupidity. Learn the facts, read a scientific article once in a while, and be prepared to answer non-believers’ questions. Only then can you really claim you are doing God’s work.

Oh, and if this post made you angry, GOOD. It should. Because Satan’s hand is in it anytime one of us so-called believers causes someone else to go astray. If you’re angry, it could be because you’re guilty of this. But it’s not too late to open your heart, open your mind, and open your eyes to those around you who are just trying to make sense of it all.

Are You the Face of Love? I’m Not.

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I’ve seen so many horrible posts since the election about an individual being attacked (verbally or physically) by someone hateful, and a bystander stepping in to help. From the very first day, I knew I’d be ready. I’d keep a close watch for people around me in need, and I’d step in to help that person without hesitation.
 
Instead of seeing others in need, my experience has been this: I’ve been mistaken for a hate supporter THREE times. Just since November 8th, I’ve had people in public mutter something like, “Just wait til January 20th, and we won’t have to put up with these [insert group name here] anymore.” The groups have included everything from immigrants to “lazy welfare” n***ers, right to my face.
 
Each time, I’ve fired back on the individual and hopefully put him in his place. Just last night, it was a Lowe’s employee who couldn’t find the cutting tool he needed to help me with a piece of piping. He said, “Well, the problem is every night about thirty minutes before closing, the place fills up with Mexicans and they steal everything that isn’t nailed down.” I snatched the piece of piping from him and just said, “Wow.”
 
I went straight to the front and reported him. The manager wasn’t available, but the young woman whom I spoke with was horrified. She promised she would mention it to the manager, and then here’s where she stepped in it: “He shouldn’t have said something like that, for all he knows, you’re married to a Mexican!”
 
As if THAT is the reason it was wrong? Not because these are human beings but because I (the white lady) might be offended?
 
I leaned in close and said, “Pass THIS along to the manager…he should be far more worried that I *might* be married to someone from corporate.”
 
But it left me asking myself a very important question: WHY am I giving off the impression that I would be in support of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc? What is it about my mannerisms, my words, the look on my face when I’m not even mad, the way I dress or the way I stand while looking at the shelves…what is it that makes me look like someone who does not have love in her heart? More importantly, how are people supposed to look to me as a friendly face in a crisis if other people think I look like a bigot?
I’ll admit that I inwardly dismissed the “safety pin” when people started sharing it, not because I thought it was ridiculous but because too often, we change our Facebook profile pictures or slap a car magnet on our vehicles and think we’ve done enough. It’s the same reason I don’t typically wear a cross necklace; if my wardrobe accessories are the only thing that lets you know I’m a Christian, then I’ve failed at being one.
It’s certainly given me a lot to think about, especially how others–from victims of hate crimes to just the every day citizen around me who needed God’s love today–see me.

Where Do You Go When You Have Nowhere To Go?

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I started this blog some time ago because I wanted others to know that not all Christians are the people who make the headlines. There are those of us–and honestly, there are plenty of incredible people who don’t identify as Christians–who are working for good on a daily basis. They might be the world changers, or they might just be the people who smile at someone who needs it.

But in the past several years, my family has felt the suffering of not having a church home. We’ve bounced from one church to another, testing them out and never really settling in, attending a church until they did or said something that made us walk away. We’ve been criticized for this practice by people who know us quite well, people who insist that it’s our Christian duty to fellowship with other Christians, even those who don’t see eye to eye with us, recognizing that the church is filled with flawed and sinful people (as it should be).

I agree. I do understand that notion, and yes, it’s fully Biblical. There is no perfect church and there shouldn’t be one, at least not until we are taken home to the Lord. So that leaves us struggling, cringing in our seats while the pastor spouts off about something unBiblical or while two old biddies standing in line for the bathroom talk about why there will never be a black person in their congregations so long as they have breath in their bodies (a fact that I’m happy to help relieve them of). We grab our kids and head for the hills, distancing ourselves from hatred and bigotry.

Truthfully, this election cycle has tried our Christian beliefs in ways I’d never thought possible. The sheer ugliness out of the mouths who claim to profess a love for the Lord has left us feeling empty inside, lost in our own Soddoms. Hopefully, come November, God’s will for loving one another will be done, and we can set our hearts right again.

Where Was God?

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These posts are always a lot of fun to write because they address one of the most common questions non-believers have: “If God exists, why do bad things happen?”

Bad things… very bad things, mildly bad things, genocide-level bad things, bad things that shake a nation.

Of course I’m referring to the Charleston shooting.

Why did God let a man enter a church and kill eight people, some of them grandmothers, if he’s so real? It doesn’t get any more religious than sitting in a place of worship and praying to your god than what happened that night. There is literally nowhere else those people could have been that would have made them closer to God. And he didn’t save them.

Why? Why didn’t he stop it? The Bible is full of examples of God’s earth-shaking power–literally earth quaking–and he couldn’t stop the shooter than night?

Oh… so you mean to tell me he just DIDN’T stop the shooter. He could have because he’s God, but it didn’t suit his purposes so he didn’t so much as send a cherubim to blow dust in the shooter’s eyes, giving all those people time to flee.

This is one of the many, many times it’s hard to be a Christian, or any kind of spiritual believer, for that matter. Not only are we stuck trying to make sense of it, we’re stuck defending ourselves to the non-believers in our lives. No one was rejoicing over the news that eight people were savagely murdered by a man who said he almost didn’t go through with it because they were so nice to him, but I know plenty of non-believers who are asking the same question:

“Where the hell was your God on that one?”

The answer is I don’t know. Was he busy? Is he not really as powerful as I think he is? Is evil stronger than God?

NO. Of course not.

So here’s what I do know: God’s will is perfect. Ours is not. If the events of this evil place suit his purposes, then it shall be done, no matter what we think of it. We can’t see the eternal, but he can. So this is when I have to sift through the hurt to find any shred of good.

Good: the people of Charleston have come together like never before.

Good: whites and blacks have joined hands at that church to honor the ones who were killed and to say, “It has to stop.”

Good: a decrepit rag that symbolizes fear and hate in so many people’s hearts has finally come down from the government offices.

Good: Eight people who loved the Lord with all their hearts, and who looked the shooter in the face and let him do his worst because their Bible says to turn the other cheek, are sitting in the bosom of the Lord right now. It hurts to lose them, but they have attained the very thing they have prayed for their entire lives: salvation.

It’s so hard to remember these things when evil shows its face, and it’s even harder to force yourself to so callously say, “Those victims are the lucky ones, they’re with God now.” But that’s what we must do when evil tries to get the best of God. Remember that he has a plan, and it is good.

 

Of course I’m going to have to say SOMETHING…

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The Internet is currently awash in both love and hate right now. Rejoicing advocates and friends are painting the World Wide Web with rainbows and celebration posts while hate-mongers declare this to be the end of days. 

Yes, SCOTUS has handed down a decision that declares the legal institution of marriage to be available to all couples. Not threesomes, not human-goat partnerships, certainly not adult-child molestation…just two consenting adults whose genitalia happens to look similar. 

Is it an abomination unto the Lord? I don’t know. He didn’t consult me. 

Is my marriage or my status as a believer affected? No. 

Has my Bible been ripped from my hands and burned on the trash heap? No. 

Has anything at all about my life changed? No. 

So why are so many Christians so furious?

Because they’ve lost their privileged status. They no longer “own” America, and it’s pissing them off. They’re being forced to look around and acknowledge that they’re not the only ones here, and they can’t stand it. 

Face it, folks…this isn’t a Christian country. The founding fathers never intended it to be, but more importantly, God himself doesn’t intend for it to be. God has a Christian country waiting for all of us, and our job as his believers is to bring as many people as we can when we go. We can’t do that if we spread hatred and nastiness. 

We can’t reach out to non-believers if we don’t open our hearts and acknowledge them as people. This decision didn’t change a single thing about my life except this: there is now more opportunity to spread the gospel because the government has just officially recognized an entire segment if the population as being humans. You can’t hear the word and believe if you’re not bring recognized as one of the Lord’s own. 

We have work to do, Christians. It’s to love. 

God Don’t Make Mistakes

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“God don’t make mistakes.”

If I have to hear that one more time from a backwoods hillbilly who’s suddenly become an authority on what God does and does not do, I’m going to need s lot of forgiveness in a hurry. 

Of course, when I hear these words, it’s from someone blasting Caitlyn Jenner for her not-recent decision. They’re making this pronouncement to indicate that God made the person we knew as Bruce, and Caitlyn had no right to interfere with that decision.

Let’s break it down. 

Once again, for the millionth time about the hundredth issue, your/my beliefs in God don’t dictate others’ choices. Whether it’s abortion of gay marriage or buying beer on Sundays, if we’re forcing others to conform to the standards of our beliefs simply because we hold those standards dear, we are NOT welcoming others to the Lord. We are putting the thou-shalt-nots ahead of God’s love. 

More importantly, we have a fundamental inability to mind our own business and shut our own mouths. If we have a religious problem with Caitlyn Jenner’s choice…who cares? Certainly not Ms. Jenner, who obviously did not ask our opinions or permission. All we’re doing by speaking out is letting others know how intolerant we are. 

Finally, God might not make mistakes but he does change his mind. Aside from the Biblical passages in which he literally changed his mind, we have everyday examples to follow. People who were at death’s door who make miraculous recoveries, people whose marriages are on the brink of collapse when one party makes a dramatic change and saves the relationship. Who’s to say that wasn’t a divine mind change? And who’s to say that God didn’t change his mind and finally put it on Caitlyn’s heart that it was finally time to let Bruce go?

There is so much good we can do as Christians when an event like this makes headlines, but only if our first priority is to demonstrate love and acceptance. If we’re waiting with baited breath to demonstrate hate in God’s name, we’ve failed our brother or sister and we’ve failed God. 

Why I Won’t Be Watching the Duggar Interview

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Yes, America is waiting with baited breath for Fox News’ resident spiteful b**** (sorry, I should have said ONE of Fox News’ resident spiteful b****es) to sit down with the Duggars and ask that they explain themselves. The interview with the parents was slated for Wednesday night but the interview with two of the victims will be aired–making the Duggar family even more money for letting people gawk at their strange ways while judging them on Twitter–Friday night for our prime time enjoyment, a veritable Roman circus of sideshow freakhood.

Here’s where I stand on the Duggar scandal:

If you made a mistake, if you committed some sin, yes… as hard as it is to explain to non-believers, once you truly repent of that sin and confess it to God, it is done. It’s over. It’s forgiven.

And that is the only thing that keeps me going each day, knowing that every single screw up in my life (even the ones I haven’t thought to do yet!) are forgiven and washed clean.

But here’s my other take on it: we can rant all we want to about the hypocrisy of being a confessed child molester then going on to become one of the loudest voices against tolerance of the LGBTQ community. Josh Duggar is an a**hole for knowing he had this sin buried nicely in his past–and it’s allowed to be buried and forgotten if he’s truly confessed and repented–and then daring to blame the ills of society on people he doesn’t like.

Here’s where it’s really hard to be a Christian: Josh Duggar, flaming jerk and piece of human filth that he is, is forgiven. He does not have to hang his head in shame for the rest of his life and never have a home, a family, or a career because of a sin that God has already promised is washed clean. Jesus died so Josh Duggar could molest little girls, then go on to have a lucrative career as a TV personality and professional loudmouth.

It hurts to even write those words, but it’s true. Look it up.

The real reason I dislike the Duggars? They’re horrible ambassadors for Christ. They espouse the extremes of our faith, they paint a freakish picture of true faith and spirituality, and they espouse hatred and discrimination for people that GOD made. The LGBTQ community that they’ve worked so hard to squash is made up of people who were formed in God’s image, whose bones God knew before they knit in their mothers’ wombs. The non-believers who watch the overbreeders and woman-haters on TV are pointing their fingers at all Christians because of the Duggars.

Yes, they should all hang their heads in shame, not because of a sin and crime that they committed and covered up years ago, but because they are turning people away from God with every televised word that comes out of their mouths. Every long-haired, long-skirted, “courtship” episode tells non-Christian viewers that THIS is what it means to follow God, and they’re wrong.

There is nothing that the Duggars can say in this much-anticipated molestation interview that will lead anyone to Christ, and they should be ashamed of themselves for smearing the name of the Lord.

Every once in a while…

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  I’m one of those people who feels the presence of God most completely when I’m out in nature. It doesn’t really matter where, as long as there’s a sky overhead and a beautiful view of some kind in front of me. All I need to feel Him near is to be outside. 

And that hasn’t happened as richly as this week, at least not in a long time. My girls and I went to the beach and spent several days just enjoying each other’s company and playing in the ocean version of God’s creation. 

And I took more pictures than I can ever remember taking!

 

 

 

 

 

That one’s a dolphin…I promise! We watched him play around our boat for about ten minutes, just enjoying the happiness he gave off.  

What Are You Trying To Say, God?

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Many years ago, my husband and I were at a crazy point in our lives, let alone our marriages. No, things between US were fine. It was the typical young couple stuff, though: I was teaching full-time and had just finished my Master’s, and my husband had finished his bachelor’s after years of selflessly working all day and then taking a full courseload at night, driving an hour each way to school in order to do it. With our degrees behind us and our jobs settling down, we decided the time was right to start a family.

And it didn’t go so well at first. Don’t get me wrong, all the attempting was nice, but there were no results.

Then one morning, I had a revelation. It wasn’t the kind where God speaks to you in a booming voice or where angels come down with a banner. No burning bushes, no tongues of fire… just the knowledge of something, and this feeling that it was 100% correct.

We’d let church attendance slip by. We’d been raised in church, dated in church, and were married in church, but between grad school and night school and coaching the cheerleading team and trying to keep up a house we’d just bought, we’d let that “day of rest” concept go a little farther than we should have. Instead of going to church, it was the time we usually slept in and got ready for all the crazy of the week ahead.

So this knowledge I woke up with that day was that we were never going to have a baby if we didn’t put our relationship with God back on the front burner. I told my husband my theory, and he kind of scoffed: “It doesn’t work that way, God doesn’t hand out presents for good behavior.” But he did get up and get dressed for church, mostly because I explained it this way: WHY should God trust us with a baby if we’re not going to raise it in church?

We were pregnant the next month.

Now, however, we’re in another dry spell. A house we’ve had on the market for four years finally had an offer and we had a signed contract… they backed out yesterday. We had a tenant renting the house for several years, just to offset the cost of us having TWO mortgages, and she skipped out last summer owing months of back rent and an $8,000 repair bill. We filed the paperwork to recover that money in small claims court, and three days later she declared bankruptcy… for the FOURTH TIME. We cannot do anything to her, and we now have a $10,000 loan to pay back for the repair and cleaning of our house, on top of the fact that we aren’t selling it next month like we’d planned.

And where is God in all this? He’s sitting back, watching us struggle, waiting for us to come to him.

I know, I just painted a picture of a really vindictive God, and that’s the farthest thing from the truth. He didn’t DO all of this to us, but I know in my heart that he isn’t lifting a finger to get us out of our troubles so long as we have been neglecting going to church. And yes, for a variety of reasons, it’s been several weeks since we’ve gone. (I know, you’re probably wondering why you’re reading a post by a Christian blogger who hasn’t been to church since early March!)

Yesterday, when our realtor texted me to tell us the deal had fallen through, I didn’t panic. I didn’t get upset or get angry. I’ve already spent the last week and a half creaming internally and plotting revenge about the horrible woman who left us with a nasty debt. I’ve wasted more than a week of my life in totally pointless anger, and I don’t want to do that again. Instead, I felt a really firm sense of peace and conviction and I knew the answer just as surely as if God had actually spoken it: I can’t help you until you come back to me. I can’t do anything about your troubles until you bring them and lay them at my feet.

Make no mistake, we haven’t “left” God, and there’s no way in the world he’s “left” us. But we are learning for ourselves what it feels like to try to do it on your own, and let me be the first to tell you that it’s not possible. You will hit every obstacle head-on, even a few that you made for yourself, if you don’t place your trust where it belongs.

Wrapping up this post now… I have to go wake my family for church.

Faith Like A Goldfish

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No, not “faith like the kind a goldfish has,” I mean, “faith in God like I have faith in my goldfish.” Well, now that you think about it, that’s hardly any better. Let me explain.

I am an EARLY riser, and by early, I mean 4am. It’s a long story, but it works for me. I get up without waking the rest of my family, let the dog out of my daughter’s room, head downstairs to take the dog for a quick walk, make the coffee, etc. Somewhere between getting downstairs and taking the dog out, I feed my other daughter’s fish. It’s one of those cute little wispy black fish with the bulging eyes, and in the dark house it’s hard to see him.

But I know he’s there, and I feed him.

I used to cringe while turning on the lights, expecting to see he’d betrayed my by floating belly up during the night. But no, every time, he’d swim to the top and wait for his food. Now, I don’t need to turn on the lights, I just drop in a pinch of fish flakes before heading out with the dog.

And that’s how my faith works, too.

I don’t need the proof of turning on the lights or demanding a sign of some kind. I know God’s there. I can’t see him, but he’s never let me down by floating dead in the tank (that was a metaphor). I don’t have to wait to see if he’s still swimming (and deserving) before feeding him my morning prayers. I know he’s there, swimming around happily looking back at me.

That’s how faith works. Faith is just believing, even when you have absolutely no reason to believe. It’s trusting, when all you have to go on is your gut feeling that you’re being loved and watched over. And really, when it comes down to it, it’s also deciding. You decide to put your life and your trust and your faith in God, even when you can’t turn the lights on.