I clearly remember the first time I ever heard about divorce. I was in grade 6, and a classmate of mine couldn’t stop crying at recess. When asked, he explained that he had just found out his parents were splitting up. I was bewildered. My young mind could hardly fathom such an event. Up until then my biggest worries included which of the dozens of TV’s in my dad’s shop I would watch after school. Life was naturally about play and friends and birthday parties and summer holidays. For the first time I realized that things meant to last forever could be broken.
I was grateful that my parents were Christians, because I knew that going to church was a guarantee against such things happening to me personally. Heartache could be left on the playground each day when classes were over. I was a Christian too, and thus from a young age I learned that my role was to help people see that if they would only ask Jesus into their hearts, life would be so much better. After all, nothing tragic ever befell anyone who attended First Baptist Church.
At thirteen years of age circumstances, church culture, and youthful ignorance were already weaving together the fabric of my first stained-glass blindfold. Unable or unwilling to see the truth, I started fabricating for myself a religious worldview that best fit an increasingly uncomfortable reality.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you call yourself a Christian- you probably have images or words that immediately come to mind when someone presents the idea of church or Christianity. The life experiences that planted those images could be a number of things that together with mine would create a list too long to analyze here.
What your blindfold is made of isn’t the matter in question. The issue is that your blindfold, my friend, is coming off. The only questions are when, and how.
Hey Jack, do you think the church is made up of a bunch of hypocrites? Something will begin to slip when you meet someone who is the real deal.
Hey Jill, are you feeling pretty comfy in your padded pew? Wait until a loved one commits suicide or your marriage ends or the doctor gives you some really bad news or you go on a mission trip to a place half a block from hell.
Jack and Jill went up the hill,
with two homemade GPS’s.
When the batteries died, they did collide,
And gained clarity and bruised... butts.
