Being single doesn’t diminish your value as a person or as a Christian. Don’t let anyone tell you or make you feel otherwise.
“You’re a flavor in my mind that’s back and forth between…
Sweeter than any wine, as bitter as mustard greens
and it’s light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread…
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead.”
You know, if you’re going to be a Christian, there are certain things expected of you:
1. You are NOT to be a hypocrite.
Loving others is such an important part of Christianity. How could we possibly say we know anything about the God of love and grace if we can’t try it on ourselves?
So there’s this girl. I hate to be like this, I really do, but I haven’t ever felt this level of repulse before. She is such a hypocrite. She judges the spiritual walks of people I dearly love, ruins relationships, starts fights amongst her youth group, all that good stuff. Yet we sit in worship and I look over and she is lifting her hands, acting as if she is the closest to God of anyone in the room.
Our resident patron saint.
It makes me SICK. The other day, I physically felt sick. And I hate to be like that, I really do, because as a Christian it’s so easy for me to point at other peoples’ noses and say “ooh, look at that sick nosebleed!” when I’ve got fractures in my skull and a bleeding heart. All day long I can point out what everyone else does wrong, yet I can’t acknowledge my own need for patchwork, ever.
Still I feel this wasn’t one of those things. I prayed to God in that moment I felt the wave of sickness wash over me, saying “God, please. Don’t let me pass judgement on her. Don’t let this hold me back from you. Take it away.”
And still it was on my mind. Still. The sick feeling went away, but the overall understanding of her true colors has been ringing in the back of my mind since.
And you know what it got me to thinking?
How discouraging- as an athiest, an agnostic, a muslim, a mormon, a Catholic or a Jew- that would be to see. If I were searching for answers about eternity, about love and loss and overcoming the grave, and I saw that. Saw that parading around with a WWJD bracelet, saw that telling me “repent or burn”.
I say this not to condemn her- that is God’s place, not mine. Though what she is doing is wrong and I pray she sees it, it isn’t my job to tell everyone in the world how awful she is. What I DO feel convicted to do is help my fellow Christians understand the weight of what they claim.
If being a Christian, a true Christ-follower, seems easy, then WE ARE DOING IT WRONG.
God didn’t call us to easy and comfortable. He called us to do the hard stuff! The stuff that’s scary and uncomfortable. But he tells us to do it because its worth it. It’s worth it to live differently and purely.
Guys, there is so much at stake here. We have to come to grips with the treasure we hold behind our backs. It’s time to let this secret out. And it’s time to start living the love, not hiding it underneath our pillows to dream on.
It’s our gift! Why do we not share it? Why do we live our lives as if we are not marked by grace? Because when the mark of grace is on you, and when you have been set free from your sin, you are NOT the same.
Not ever the same.
What else could possibly be worth the time? The lovely God that is our God has called us, and we must go. We must go because He is beautiful and we love Him more than words could ever say. We can write all the love songs in the world, and throw all the money at charity we could muster…
But have not love, our God’s love… we. are. nothing.
“Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” -Ephesians 5:14
Made a hoop of that bald-headed monkey, Karl Pilkington!
If you haven’t heard of him, you should probably check out An Idiot Abroad, or the Ricky Gervais show.
Up for grabs here.
Yesss <3 Love that man!
By their own description, this installation by Dutch desginers SpaceOperaForm sounds like sheer magic: Huge sheets of “thermally-bonded polypropylene filaments” hang from the ceiling at an old Austrian salt factory; and, as people walk between them, their own static charge causes the curtains to billow outwards, creating a “reactive experience” meant to explore “the phenomenological and visual affects of extreme weather conditions.”
