I’m a cynic. I know that. In the past few years I’ve slipped into this position, and I’m fully aware of it. I’m okay with it. But being a cynic is very difficult when you go to church. Anything religious is a mental accident for the cynic. But it’s very helpful knowing this as I walk into any Christian setting. I know my mind will be mocking half the people I see, the comments I hear, the amen’s at broad generalizations. But there’s also part of me that knows the rest of me is a cynic and tells that part of me to shut up. There’s this part of me that hasn’t been taken over by the cynic, and it knows that God can still work through the perky woman who adores pithy phrases. It knows I might need to hear something said by someone my cynical side wants to ridicule. And so I enter religious settings like I’m walking on glass, trying to let God come in and speak to me, and trying even harder not to ridicule his mouthpiece.

Continue reading Too Easy to Mock →

Take off your shoes, for the place you are standing is holy ground.

Something tells me the soil around the burning bush wasn’t holy ground in its own right. The presence of something more earned it the title ‘holy ground,’ and so the shoes came off. So come we don’t attend church barefoot?

Sometimes I wonder how my current dilemmas fit into God’s view. Does God care that I spent three hours trying to design a web site, only to shake my head because it’s not quite right? Does God care about the comma I missed while editing my work? Does God care about the tag in my shirt that makes me squirm and wiggle until I drop everything and find the scissors to cut it out and throw it away?

Come on, it’s a comma. Why would God worry himself with a comma? Of all the things in this vast universe, why would he take time over my comma?

It seems completely ludicrous to think that God would care about such trivial things, but I like to think he does. Maybe it’s the crazy theological notion of God being outside time which enables me to believe he just might care about my comma. If he’s not bound by time, then it’s not like he has anything better to do. And if he does have something better to do, my comma will still be here waiting for him when he comes back. Do you think God is compulsive about things like that? You’d have to be if you cared about one person’s comma. There’s six billion people in this world. That’s a lot of commas.

I know my comma isn’t that important. Nobody’s going to die if I leave it out. But yet God still cares. It’s a matter of doing the best job I can, of mastering my language as well as I can, of showing the world that I will not accept shoddy craftsmanship. I think God is concerned with all of these things. He demands the best from his people, and that means he cares about the comma.

At the same time, I think God knows when to let it go. After all, it is just a comma. That’s what I like about God. He cares enough to see that I put the comma where it goes, but if I screw it up I’m not immediately bound for hell.

What amazes me about Christianity is how utterly lost we are. In the past few years I’ve transformed into a cynic, and Christianity continues to puzzle me. How can we be so blind? Everyone seems to think they’re right, that if someone else believes something different, they must be wrong. I continually fall into this trap. I look down on others because they have a different view, as if I have the one, properly ordained theology. This gets tricky, because as soon as you begin claiming Christians can believe different things and both be correct, others jump all over you claiming your one step from saying all religions must therefore be correct. I just struggle with the different ways we see God, and we always think our view is the only correct one.

Continue reading When Will Jesus Flip Our Tables? →

And you’ll know we are Christians by our T-shirts.

You’ve got to get over this cynical attitude.

That’s what they tell me. But I don’t care. I know I need to. I need to do a lot of things. I need to go to bed right now so I can get over this illness that propels me to curl up in the fetal position and rock myself to sleep.

Continue reading Cynical Attitude. →

I’m finding it more and more and difficult to sit through church without being bothered and put off by something. Whether it’s the giddy new music leader, who used to lead children and now leads the congregation with the exact same style or the pastor’s sermon that never gets around to answering its own question. I’m a cynic, and I can’t stand it.

Continue reading Can God Use a Cynic? →

Have you ever felt like you’re on the outside looking in? Being a college student has done that to me. I’ve lost all sense of home and belonging and there are very few places I can call my own. The result is that I’m an outsider wherever I go. The most interesting thing is how I’ve become an outsider in the one place I should truly be an insider–church. And let me tell you, the view from the outside is a little strange. I never before realized just how odd of a bunch we Christians are. We’re constantly preaching to each other and constantly not listening. We’re like robots pretending not to be robots, which was a phrase I saw on the back of a t-shirt today and thought it was rather appropriate.

Two days after I turn 21 I’m sitting around a table cluttered with at least seven beer bottles. Three Coronas and four Heinekens. They’ve all got slivers of lime floating in the foam. A can of Pepsi is sitting in front of me, and I feel like an outcast. Having grown up in the church, I have a tremendous stigma associated with alcoholic beverages. It’s to the point of lunacy. Most people who’ve grown up in the church have this overblown defense mechanism for anything that can be remotely considered a sin. And it’s usually the trivial things. It’s evident when I assume that anyone who smokes or chews tobacco simply cannot be a Christian. It’s evident when a pastor gives a sermon about how husbands and wives relate and uses whatever awkward technical words he can to avoid saying “sex.”

Continue reading I’m a Hyper-Sensitive Christian →

It’s really embarrassing when you see some of the books that get published. Especially when you know they’re full of bad advice. It’s especially embarrassing when these are Christian books. Why is it that Christians always have easy answers for everything? No matter what problem you’re having you can find a book for it at your local Christian bookstore. It’s probably right next to the Left Behind Headquarters display. Jesus never gave easy answers. Sometimes we like to act like we understand Jesus’ words, but we really don’t. We can study his words all our lives and probably never grasp what he really meant. We continue to pass by the stranded motorist and look the other way. I think if people really grappled with the words of Jesus they wouldn’t be so quick to pump out books of answers. I think people would be dumbfounded and wouldn’t quite know what to do. It’d be quite a sight.