Most people don’t get out of bed in the morning and declare “today I will neglect my health…” or “from today onward I will only make decisions that increase my bank account and neglect my family”. Yet we all have revelation moments where we stop and realize ‘how did we get here?’ Almost no one gets married with divorce in mind, yet, in 2009, for every ten weddings there were five divorces in this country.
As humans we have to realize that the small, subtle, seemingly meaningless decisions that we make daily all have cumulative value in some arena. We have to embrace this. If you neglect your family or health for one night it probably won’t ruin you, but if you subconsciously repeat the pattern for a year you may very well be disgusting and single. The American church and Christianity at large are not immune to this same set of principles. Sometimes I observe church politics and wonder ‘how did such grounded people lose their perspective so bad?’ or I think ‘is it just me or are we really missing the point?’…
It’s not that the church has made a conscious decision to substantiate the claims of the world; claims such as: being judgmental, hypocritical, holier than thou, self-righteous and narrow-minded; rather I feel that our lack of attention in the subtle, daily tasks have led the church to place where even some Christians are looking at our reflection and are finding it hard to believe what we see.
I think it’s time to start making better decisions. I think that it has to start with each of us on an incredibly personal level. I need to come to grips with the guy in the mirror. How can we, as Christians, expect the world to be interested in our message of hope if the world doesn’t trust us? I think that for most of us, especially Gen-X and Gen-Y’ers, we have become uncomfortable with our redemption story.
God sent his son into this world to redeem His people. Scripture says that “All have sinned, and fall short of God’s glory”. I think where we get mixed up is when we start assigning specific actions to the word ‘sinned’. Somewhere along the line we got fed a bunch of garbage theology that in order to tell others about our Jesus we had to blow their mind with tales of rags to riches.
Now is the time for honesty. Most of us grew up in good homes, with loving families and stable boundaries. We went to Sunday school and VBS. We knew all the camp songs. We were good kids. Somewhere along the way we were pressured to believe that we had to make the story more attractive. We had to make the before Jesus part sound worse than it was and the after Jesus part sound better than it is.
Christians are broken and wounded people. Christians are not perfect, nor do I believe are we called to be perfect. When will we stop pretending that we don’t struggle? When will we stand up and say “I believe in Jesus and I struggle!” There could be no greater witness of the hope that we have found in Christ than to be transparent, to look in the mirror and acknowledge that our faith does not make us perfect, rather that our faith gives us the hope that we can make an impact that is bigger than our struggles and short comings.