Depending on when you met me in the course of my life, I can be one of two things for you:
1) If you met me when I was in high school, I can be the high-stress, sarcastic, crazy b.... witch. I'm still amazed that I had friends in high school. It really is a miracle. But now that I look on high school, many of my friends (certainly not all) were just as high-stress, sarcastic and dramatic as I was... is... am.
2) I can be the happy-go-lucky, scarf knitting, blog writing, Guatemala-going, get-married-really-young, freak.
But I noticed something about myself. I'm sure if you've been on my blog for longer than half a second, you realize that I am a Christian. And yes, I'm from the Bible Belt, but my school pretty secular. My friends consist of those inside my campus ministry, and then friends from the outside that are mostly non-Christian.
Anywhoodles, enough of the background, time for the good stuff. The time where I get on my soapbox and tell you something that takes some of my dirty laundry and airs it out for the whole wide world to see.
I was talking to one of my non-Christian friends (I refuse to say "unbeliever" because that sounds cultish and the first thing I think of when I say it is "shun the nonbeliever!!") about one of my other non-Christian friends. Something I like to call "conversing by proxy" while the bible calls it "gossip". But anyway, I was talking to my friend about this other friend and how mad I was that this person was doing something stupid. My friend's response was "You know, [Ginger Spice]? Sometimes people don't want to feel like they have to live their lives a certain way. This person wants to do what she wants and she doesn't want anyone else to give her flack about it."
Now, this is true. I know it is. Seeing this typed out seems pretty innocuous, but his tone is what got me. He wasn't telling me something I knew. He was telling me something that I didn't know. He acted like he was explaining the ground to someone that didn't believe in gravity.
Just because I believe in Jesus doesn't mean I don't know how this world really is. Just because I believe in Jesus doesn't mean I cannot relate or understand someone who doesn't. Believing in Jesus isn't like believing that gravity exists, or that the world is round.
The world is UGLY. It is one ugly ugly place. People do stupid crap. Because they can! Jesus isn't like gravity! You can't choose against gravity. If you jump off a bridge and turn off the gravity like you can turn off a Christian moral center. I could just as easily go off, find some drugs, sleep around, and end up in jail as someone else. Because I have a choice. I am not a perfect person. No one is perfect. Just because I am a Christian doesn't mean I can't do something stupid. It means I have a means by which to repent and ask for forgiveness. So don't talk to me like I am in an alternate reality just because I don't agree with something that you say.
Gravity keeps me on the ground. The world is round. And Jesus is very very real.
The world IS ugly...and selfish. The paradox of finding freedom in surrendering isn't something people are willing to come to terms with easily, and that doesn't make it easy to be loving. While it's difficult/impossible for us to turn our moral centers off, it can be the same for non-Christians to turn theirs on. It makes me want to shake some people, too, believe me. Just Ephesians 5:2 them to death. Yes, I used a Bible verse as a verb. I love you, chickadee.
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