Judgmentalism

Trying to Get By

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This evening I was struck again by a thought that comes my way about once a month. It’s not a provocative thought. It may not be worthy of a post. But I think there’s some truth in it that we needHomeless to consider before we set the barrels of our collective Gatling guns on “blazing” mode.

Most people are just trying to get by.

It’s easy to paint great swaths of humanity with a specific color of sin that’s apparent to us. I know I do it with relative ease. As Christians, it’s almost second nature for us to scrutinize some group of people and candidly tell others exactly what that group’s besetting sin is. We’ve got it down to an art form.

Americans get painted with plenty of those wide brushes, especially by other Americans. We’re greedy, materialistic, the-world-revolves-around-us kind of people. We’re loud, stage-hogging, patriotic zealots who drive insensitive gas-chugging vehicles. And we’re fat, too. See how easy those labels come? How many of the seven deadly sins did I just name? I lost track.

I like to watch people. As a writer, people are my domain. Restaurants are an essential place for this. Just last week I witnessed a family that consisted of a young dad and mom that had three girls and a boy. The dad was dressed in a mechanic’s uniform, while mom wore one of those unfortunate summer outfits that heightens the very things she wished no one noticed about her. The three girls had nine months of spacing between each of them, bam, bam, bam.

But then there was the boy. He was probably fourteen, at least eight years older than the next-oldest child. You could almost envision mom and dad as sixteen-year olds finding out they had a male heir on the way. Years of struggle put off any chance of having more children, but when times got modestly better for a season they came one after another. The boy looked just like his dad and has a shared destiny, knowing how those things go. The girls mirrored mom, each unique from the other, yet all their mother’s daughters.

I watched how they interacted. Obviously drained, the parents poked at their food and exchanged few words, parenting relegated to the older boy in that moment. The girls were all bright smiles. Still, you could tell they were just getting by.

No one wakes up in the morning and contemplates how they’ll be materialistic. The CEO of the company wants to get his kids into the best school possible—and so does the company’s janitor. The brazenly loaded patron of the arts shops at Wal-Mart, intent on a good value, just like the starving artist. The dad looking for a birthday present for his son wants to get something that will put a big smile on the little chip’s face, not thinking he could feed ten Sudanese kids for a year with the amount of cash he’s going to drop. Meanwhile, mom isn’t considering how the birthday party’s wake will result in sixty pounds of trash. And a worn set of young parents of four kids is deliberating whatever blow tomorrow will bring, worry carving gouges in their faces.

You can say what you will about any of these people. All of them are trying to get by using whatever means seems best. All them will die some day. Some are destined for glory and some destined for the second death.

I aspire to great things, but when it comes down to it, I’m just trying to get by, too. My eternal hope is that I’m always plugged into the Lord and that nothing I do is outside His perfect will for my life. I also know that I fail miserably in that regard as I suspect that most people, Christian or not, do. Life is hard whether you’re surrendered or not.

When [Jesus] went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.
—Mark 6:34 ESV

Some people feel compassion for dumb animals, but not for their fellow man. Those folks confound me—and not in a good way. I hope that my view is like the Lord’s. People are just trying to get by, but what confusion attends them!

If it’s hard for the righteous to live daily in the world, how much harder is it for the lost? Is it just me or are we tougher on them in the midst of their clouded existence than we are on ourselves, we who know the Truth and yet still have a difficult time of life? Despite the fact that we’ve already been taught many things, most of us do a terrible job of incorporating that teaching into our day to day reality. What should we expect of those who have no such teaching?

This is not a post about excuses. No one has an excuse before God. If our stories were all that important, then salvation would be like the old TV show, “Queen for a Day,” wherein the biggest sob story wins a pedicure and the washer and dryer set.

Yet grace is still present. Are we dispensing it? Are we making it any easier for people, both lost and found, to make it to the finish line? Are we helping the persevering saints become more than conquerers or have we forgotten them in our own attempts to muddle through? And what about those additional burdens that we so easily load on the backs of people already struggling? Do only the strong survive?

God, help us.

Has the Christian Blogosphere Lost Its Collective Mind?

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Okay, so I go away for the weekend only to come back to what appears to be a collective nervous breakdown in the Christian Blogosphere.
Out of Control Midget Wrestling
Folks, I know that no one cares to read us out there in the secular world, but still. If we're going to act like imbeciles, then our witness is destroyed, toasted, racked on a spit, and baked to a crackly crunch. Is that what we're about? Does it lift up the name of Jesus for us to go postal on each other?

I understand that even now a horde of Slice of Laodicea commenters, brows knit in consternation, is marching up to the Great White North, torches in readiness, to roast Tim Challies' backbacon. Ingrid's already apologized for the unintentional outcome of the post that created this stir, but when you can't tell the trolls from the real commenters on your blog, you've got deep blogging issues.

James White is ranting that some Baptist Web site won't answer his e-mails from almost three years ago. The way things are going over at his blog, I expect to see him drop the term "semipelagian poopyhead" on some minor heretic any day now. Loved his take on KJV-only and his book The Forgotten Trinity, but anymore I leave his site feeling drained.

A number of Christian blogs (I'm not even going to name because I'm tired of it) are leveling the boom on Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church based on quotes from a secular newspaper. Do I have to remind the owners of those blogs of the last three years of MSM implosions based on lousy reporting? There's a little thing called "context" that can turn quotes 180 degrees. My advice? Go to his church and see for yourself—then you can desecrate him all you want (as long as you follow this advice first.) I knew Rob from Wheaton College, and yes, he was "unique." But I can't tell you anything about him based on a sound bite. Before we publicly lambaste someone who claims to be a brother in Christ, we better have our facts straight. A couple quotes from a secular newspaper doth not a lynching make.

I feel sad writing this post. About four times I nearly threw the whole thing away because I don't want to be accused of perpetuating the same problem I'm complaining about.

I've long contended that the Internet is not real life. It's a lousy community when you get right down to it. And for that reason I want to tell a story from my own life that I hope you all will read and consider.

When I was at Carnegie Mellon University studying AI & Robotics in the early 1980s, CMU was on the cutting edge of the pre-Internet world. Every dorm had networked computers, IBM was opening up a networking research center on campus, and there was so much stinking CPU horsepower at the school that they ran their HVAC systems through the mainframe cooling systems in order to heat their academic buildings. In short, only MIT was even close in computing power.

One of the cool things about the school was that it was on ARPANET. I could e-mail a friend at MIT. Back then that was something. We also had a college online community that existed only in cyberspace. We talked about every subject imaginable. Everyone had cool handles, so it was easy to hide behind our anonymity and be "free."

I liked to hang out in an area discussing Christianity. Needless to say, it got contentious considering that the (self-identified) "heathen" to Christian ratio was about 500:1. One day a "heathen" posted something really sick and the worst flame war I've ever seen in my life erupted. I tried with all my might to keep it civil, but things got out of control. I've never seen such hateful things said in my life from people with handles like Blasphemer, Bot, Mr. Wizard, and Grue.

Yet behind each of those handles was a person—someone I could be sitting next to in class and not even know it. So I proposed something radical. I asked that the most vocal people—about forty altogether—meet up at a local Italian restaurant for dinner. We could talk face-to-face, drop the anonymity, and be real people. Maybe then we could come to a better understanding. Everyone in the flame war agreed, all forty.

I reserved a room at the Italian place, set up carpools with the forty, arranged a rendezous on campus so we could drive down in the carpools, and had the whole thing worked out. I was really looking forward to this.

Day comes, my watch shows 4:30 PM. I'm in the meeting spot for the carpools and no one shows. Around 4:40, my laid-back, barefoot Christian buddy, Tom (AKA "Captain Zodiac"), arrives and says, "Hey, where is everybody?" Tom and I sat there until 5:15 before we finally called the restaurant, canceled, and went upstairs to grab a burger in the lounge cafeteria.

Two days later, most everyone was at it again on the BBS system, flaming away. When I asked where everyone had been, there was a vast silence. I never got a response. As for me, I gradually bowed out of the "conversation" having learned a great lesson about human nature.

Folks, a name and a postage stamp-sized pic on the Web is not a person. You don't know me and I really don't know you, either. It's easy to tear out someone's heart on the Web through our pseudo-anonymity. It is far harder to tear out someone's heart in person. But when we get right down to it, the Lord would not have us savage each other on the Web anymore than He would condone us savaging each other in person.

Can we all just take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds? Can we count to ten before we post the latest flame bait or character assassination. I'm tired of the hunt for heretics. Cerulean Sanctum gets more combined hits from people looking for heretics than any other kind of Google search. That's really sad.

Is this all we are about? I've blogged many times about this, but it's getting stupid now and I'm questioning why we Christians even blog if this is all we can do.

If the picture that some of us are presenting to the world at large looks like a bunch of fussbudget, life-haters on a perpetual witch hunt, well let me tell you we're excelling at that.

Can we stop for a while? Please? I'm pleading now. Let's stop slaying each other remotely via words. Just last week I proposed that we spend a month in prayer for anyone we disagree with before we write them up on our blogs as "Enemies of Christ." Is that an impossible request?

August is a new month. Yes, it's a hot hazy one in much of the nation, but we can bring down the temperature if we try. Can we attempt this month to write something better on our blogs than one spiritual smackdown after another?

I have an idea. Why don't we try to reach out to some secular blogs and see if we can reciprocate some blogrolling. Better yet, why don't we try to reach out to some secular bloggers who may never have had a good relationship with anyone who takes the name of Christ and show them the love of Jesus any way we can? Can we try to turn the "dog days" of August into the "God Days" of August?

Isn't that ultimately the heart of the Lord for all of us God-bloggers?

On Consigning Enemies of Christ to Hell

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It's one of those blast furnace kind of days here today, 95 degrees with 95% humidity. To the amusement of little boys everywhere, the sun is so hot right now that ants burst into flame on the sidewalk without need for a magnifying glass. As I type, my son is sipping hot peppermint tea—of all things—somehow oblivious to the heat pump outside laboring to rid our house of thermal build-up. InfernoThe dryer is working with the weather to scorch our clothes dry, and just to add insult to injury, I need to take a flamethrower to some weeds outside tonight.

Why not talk about hell, then?

The Christian blogosphere talks about hell far more than you'll hear from any pulpit. I've read just about every take on hell you can imagine in just the last few weeks. But every one of those theological treatises has ignored one kind of hell, the hell that most people experience: hell on earth.

It doesn't take much for us Christians to castigate anyone we deem to be unworthy sinners. You don't have to look very far to find such horrid heathens. The Christian blogosphere is brimming over with posts that name names and point fingers. The names of the enemies change, but the general collection of them remains the same. You're likely to find homosexuals, evolutionists, atheists, and the ACLU in that category. Karl Rove seems to occupy that spot for Sojourners types, while the hardcore conservatives still get mileage out of Bill Clinton. And then there's whatever preacher or teacher we love to hate. Benny Hinn, Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Ken Copeland—maybe even your own pastor will show up on that list, who knows. The important thing here is that hell needs to be invoked whenever we think about them.

More and more I believe that we truly want to see some people burn in hell. It used to be the Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Stalins of the world, but increasingly it's the people we disagree with—you know, The Enemies of Christ. And from the dialog I see occurring on an increasing number of Christian Web sites, I believe that there are a few too many Christians who would get no more glee than to have a front row seat in Abraham's bosom so they can stare out over the chasm that separates heaven from hell and lob a few jeers at the prisoners of hell. Because we all know that nothing hurts worse than to be in hell and have to suffer the receiving end of cat-calls from The People Who Got It Right.

But waiting for the eventual demise of the Enemies of Christ is not enough for some of the most vocal critics out there. They'd love nothing more than to see people in hell right now, here on earth. Such an idea almost warms the cockles of their hearts (that is if stone can have cockles.)

Now it would seem a hard thing to make hell on earth for people, but I now know how it comes about easily.

You see, most people on earth are already in hell because they have no prayer covering. Most of those destined for fire have never once had anyone pray for them. At no time has a Christian stood up in public or stolen away to his or her prayer closet to pray for these souls just waiting for damnation. Not once. More often than not there hasn't been a real Christian within ten feet of those Enemies at any time in all their years on earth. No one to pick them up when they fall. No one to hear their hurts. No one to take their confession. At least no one who we would consider Spirit-filled.

It is a far easier thing to call someone an Enemy of Christ than it is to pray for them. It takes no effort on our part to just keep doing what we already do when confronted with people with whom we disagree. How simple it is to label someone "godless" or "heretical" or "deceived" than it is to get down on our knees and say to God Our Father, "And so I once was. May your truth be made known to them through me, Lord Jesus, by any means possible."

Because you see, someone may have been praying for you long before you surrendered up your Enemy of Christ label and became a Child of God. Someone loved you and me enough to have labored in prayer over our souls for years and yet we can't spare those we consider Enemies of Christ one second of our day to cover them in prayer for what may be the first time in their lives. No, it's easier to blog about their sin, to throw up our hands in disgust, and to leap to our feet in protest than it is to fold those hands and bow those knees.

So this is what I ask of anyone who comes to Cerulean Sanctum. Before you blog about this Enemy of Christ or that heretic, spend one month in prayer for them. Pray every single day. Pray that God would put Spirit-filled Christians into their lives who will speak life and truth into them, sharing the Gospel not only in words but also deeds. If you are close enough to actually be that supportive person, then consider taking the job because obviously no one else has. If after the end of that month of prayer (and service) your righteous indignation still burns hot, then do as you are lead of the Spirit.

Some people are already in hell, folks. Not having a prayer covering is the very definition of being in hell on earth. Not having the fellowship of committed Christians willing to draw up alongside you and help you through your hell on earth only makes it worse. Perhaps we need to remember how fortunate we are to have had that covering and that presence of devout believers in our own lives. And perhaps we need to stand in the gap for all we perceive to be Enemies of Christ before we get online and bitch and moan about them.