Am I becoming liberal?...
I'm shy to acknowledge that up to this point in my life, I have spent very little time with people who don't like me or look like me. I'm not so sure how this happens, but if you don't fight against the tide, this lifestyle by default sucks you in and duck tapes you into a happy little corner of Christianity. Like, Truman, I'm figuring out I'm in a false reality and I want out.
Last week, I spoke on Reaching out to the world. It was a call to take into consideration how queer (I use this term in the sense of odd) many of our Christian practices appear to a world unfamiliar with our beliefs and behaviors. After the service was over, a man came to the front and sat down on a chair next to me. I was praying for some friends I have that I want to extend love to, and I felt his hand on my shoulder. I tilted my head to see who was by my side. He started to share, "This message really got to me. I don't want to be one of those people that just come to church and leave unscathed. I want to get off my %ss and show the world love." Now if you're indocrinated anything like I have been, it's hard to hear what he's saying behind what he said. I immediately fixate on the swear word and internally question the merit of the rest of the sentence. But then I say to myself, "He is passionate about what he's sharing. He believes it." He just came to Christ this last year and he honestly doesn't know any better. I have to take a second look at my responses to swearing and God's responses to swearing. Don't you think?
A guy stopped into my office yesterday. He's 25, divorced, and recently engaged to a new girl. He's hard, bitter, and angry, but for some reason two weeks ago he asked if he could talk to me after the service. He shared about his fiance going out to a bar with her friends and then taking her old boyfriend home at 4:30am that morning. He said that he had given her a curfew of 12:oo and she disregarded it. He wanted my advice on what to do. Tell me where you would start giving advice? I stumbled through a couple sentences and finally landed on the topic of how to admit the things that you're guilty of before condemning the other person of what they're guilty of. At the end of the conversation I felt like a heel and I'm sure he felt bored. And what do you know, he's standing in my office cause he happened to be in the area. He started in with how bad his life has been the last several years and how he caught his wife cheating on him. He told me of his move to Florida and his bar hopping days filled with drunkeness, knife fights and womanizing. He told me of his militant fundamental religious background with a hard and harsh father who was sweet at church and a "bastard" at home. Again, I heard the word bastard and I hesitated inside for some reason...it's like there's a nerve it hits rendering me paralyzed momentarily until I recover. As I asked more questions and navigated my way to his heart and closer to the wounds that covered it, he began to swear more and more. Sh&%, D#mn, He**...I thought that was interesting...the closer you get to heart, the dirtier you can plan on getting in conversation. I told him that I thought their was a soft part of him that somehow got buried under coping mechanisms and survival modes. He noded his head. I think it's only a matter of time before he sheds the skin of survival and meets the real God...not the one he met in his childhood.
I then went to supper with a guy who just got saved about 5 months ago. He is just kicking his alchoholism and repairing fences in his family. He is on his second marriage and is trying to be a good father to someone elses children. As we talked over a seafood platter, he started sharing more about his background and the deep, dark places that represented his history. As he did, he graced the conversation with a couple choice words which you could tell came out without his knowing it. It was like second nature. As he was decribing the plight of his heart before he met Jesus, he said, "Before I came to know Jesus, I was fu*#ed up, really fu*&ed up. But God has just changed the way I look at myself and other people and it's getting better." I'll have to admit, I wasn't expecting him to have this language based on our previous conversations in the church narthex. But think about, how many real life conversations are had in the foyer at church?...not many, if any. Granted, he would preface his sentences with, "Pardon the expression" or "excuse the language", but you know this was how he had conversed for 40 years. You don't learn a new language over night, not matter whether Jesus has come in to take residence or not. Again, you come to Jesus and ask him to help you grow.
There is a crisis of belief going on inside me as I interact with almost daily conversations of this nature. I currently hang around some of the most passionate Christians I have ever met that aren't trying to cover up the fact that they are a work in progress. I wonder if that is the very thing that makes them passionate...it's hard to be passionate when you're fake.
What is swearing anyhow? A culture list of words that we use to fill sentences with spice and to make a point or to add an exclamation point to our ideas. A bit of filler to communicate emotion when we're not quite sure what to say. A group of phrases originating from questionable moral places that have become commonplace expressions to attempt to relay emotion more than facts. They are at the core emotional words. Just like tears speak emotion, these words say something more than what they mean. I'm just thinking out loud here.
I continue to wonder how to translate this life I'm living. Somehow, I've never been so excited to wake up in the morning and also so full of questions as to whether I'm becoming liberal.
Last week, I spoke on Reaching out to the world. It was a call to take into consideration how queer (I use this term in the sense of odd) many of our Christian practices appear to a world unfamiliar with our beliefs and behaviors. After the service was over, a man came to the front and sat down on a chair next to me. I was praying for some friends I have that I want to extend love to, and I felt his hand on my shoulder. I tilted my head to see who was by my side. He started to share, "This message really got to me. I don't want to be one of those people that just come to church and leave unscathed. I want to get off my %ss and show the world love." Now if you're indocrinated anything like I have been, it's hard to hear what he's saying behind what he said. I immediately fixate on the swear word and internally question the merit of the rest of the sentence. But then I say to myself, "He is passionate about what he's sharing. He believes it." He just came to Christ this last year and he honestly doesn't know any better. I have to take a second look at my responses to swearing and God's responses to swearing. Don't you think?
A guy stopped into my office yesterday. He's 25, divorced, and recently engaged to a new girl. He's hard, bitter, and angry, but for some reason two weeks ago he asked if he could talk to me after the service. He shared about his fiance going out to a bar with her friends and then taking her old boyfriend home at 4:30am that morning. He said that he had given her a curfew of 12:oo and she disregarded it. He wanted my advice on what to do. Tell me where you would start giving advice? I stumbled through a couple sentences and finally landed on the topic of how to admit the things that you're guilty of before condemning the other person of what they're guilty of. At the end of the conversation I felt like a heel and I'm sure he felt bored. And what do you know, he's standing in my office cause he happened to be in the area. He started in with how bad his life has been the last several years and how he caught his wife cheating on him. He told me of his move to Florida and his bar hopping days filled with drunkeness, knife fights and womanizing. He told me of his militant fundamental religious background with a hard and harsh father who was sweet at church and a "bastard" at home. Again, I heard the word bastard and I hesitated inside for some reason...it's like there's a nerve it hits rendering me paralyzed momentarily until I recover. As I asked more questions and navigated my way to his heart and closer to the wounds that covered it, he began to swear more and more. Sh&%, D#mn, He**...I thought that was interesting...the closer you get to heart, the dirtier you can plan on getting in conversation. I told him that I thought their was a soft part of him that somehow got buried under coping mechanisms and survival modes. He noded his head. I think it's only a matter of time before he sheds the skin of survival and meets the real God...not the one he met in his childhood.
I then went to supper with a guy who just got saved about 5 months ago. He is just kicking his alchoholism and repairing fences in his family. He is on his second marriage and is trying to be a good father to someone elses children. As we talked over a seafood platter, he started sharing more about his background and the deep, dark places that represented his history. As he did, he graced the conversation with a couple choice words which you could tell came out without his knowing it. It was like second nature. As he was decribing the plight of his heart before he met Jesus, he said, "Before I came to know Jesus, I was fu*#ed up, really fu*&ed up. But God has just changed the way I look at myself and other people and it's getting better." I'll have to admit, I wasn't expecting him to have this language based on our previous conversations in the church narthex. But think about, how many real life conversations are had in the foyer at church?...not many, if any. Granted, he would preface his sentences with, "Pardon the expression" or "excuse the language", but you know this was how he had conversed for 40 years. You don't learn a new language over night, not matter whether Jesus has come in to take residence or not. Again, you come to Jesus and ask him to help you grow.
There is a crisis of belief going on inside me as I interact with almost daily conversations of this nature. I currently hang around some of the most passionate Christians I have ever met that aren't trying to cover up the fact that they are a work in progress. I wonder if that is the very thing that makes them passionate...it's hard to be passionate when you're fake.
What is swearing anyhow? A culture list of words that we use to fill sentences with spice and to make a point or to add an exclamation point to our ideas. A bit of filler to communicate emotion when we're not quite sure what to say. A group of phrases originating from questionable moral places that have become commonplace expressions to attempt to relay emotion more than facts. They are at the core emotional words. Just like tears speak emotion, these words say something more than what they mean. I'm just thinking out loud here.
I continue to wonder how to translate this life I'm living. Somehow, I've never been so excited to wake up in the morning and also so full of questions as to whether I'm becoming liberal.
Comments
I think that the when the white horse left the white-horse-ranch, to follow the dark horse, he most likely felt very similar to the feelings I hear you expressing from your heart.
Etou! ... you are a faithful God-follower, Jay.