I'm the kind of girl who wears her heart on her sleeve. Take me or leave me, it's the way that I am.
As I grow and hopefully mature, I have learned (or am learning) not to bleed all over people. Nobody can be around a negative, winy, complaining person for very long, nor do I want to be that.
But I am hurt and angry and wrestling through it.
Someone who has called themselves a close friend to me, "precious and dear to her", has written me not just out of her life, but off of her Facebook. If you want to know where you stand in your relationship with someone, what says it more clearly than being defriended?
This has made me revisit what has caused "division".
At the end of the day, what it all boils down to is that even though she has never had a conversation with me about it, she thinks she knows what I believe about a religious topic and disagrees. We have never discussed it and her assumptions may in fact, be all wrong. Sad point #1.
However it is, I keep thinking about this simple question: Why should our differences poison the water?
It comes down to this: what do we do about our differences? As Christians, as people.
If we have to think alike, talk alike, act alike.... Well, have fun with yourself.
For the Christian who claims to follow the Resurrected Christ, is being a Body 1) tasking together or 2) doing life together?
Most of our relationships in the church have become task-based, not family-oriented.
The dynamics of relationship and freedom and safety and openness and honesty- if those are things that are really critical to the community, then it can't be first about a task and then hope relationships happen.
But if the relationship and caring about each other is first, even where we disagree, then we have a chance at being a family.
To be authentically myself. Wow. Imagine the freedom to live where you are in your journey, and allow others to live where they are in theirs... Weaknesses and all.... then we have a shot at some kind of relationship that is going to make a difference.
But if you are in friendship, a relationship or part of an institution where you can't have any kind of disagreement or different thought then, well, maybe that's why the avg. church in America splits every 6.9 years.
Maybe that's why the reality of the friendship can hurt so bad. One that you trust and feel safe in suddenly turns into friend who has publicly DEfriended you.
To those that believe you have "the Truth" on all things spiritual: Do you ever disagree with God?
(you can pause here or come back to it)
(your answer, you will find, is probably yes. You do, in fact, and realize that you don't have him all figured out.).
So now I will ask: Can you still walk in relationship with him?
Truthfully, I don't know how many people that I am in relationship with are safe people that I can be truly myself with. Relationships that I can live freely and authentically myself - weaknesses and all.
When did agreement become a necessary ingredient for relationship?
If its about people feeling safe and feeling loved, then what else is there?
From now on, I aim to do my part in living more freely and truly as I am, where I am at. When I can't be honest inside certain relationships, I need to look for the log in my own eye. What role am I playing? What about me isn't free enough to express what I need to express?
Instead of being so worried about being processed by others, I will remember how loved I am by God.
In that, and only in that I will find my security.
I don't need to pick fights. I don't need to engage in a sword fight.
And lastly, how can I create an environment for others to feel safe and free in?
I am so hungry for friendships and environments to question what I need to question, doubt what I need to doubt, disagree with what I need to disagree with and then demonstrate the same safety I seek.
And no, that doesn't make me a heretic, or someone who "is being tossed in the wind" (because I am sure someone holy will want to quote me Ephesians 4:14).
I know a lot of Christians who believe that the enemy's tactics are to divide and conquer. I couldn't agree more.
And then they preach doctrinal unity.
However, the craftiness of satan is that so many believers then believe that we all have to agree. That there is one Truth, and they know it.
Agree with them or be ex-communicated.
Imagine what it would be like to put theological differences aside and follow Gods leading in our own lives?
Many of us could use a little "Pharisectomy" me thinks.
