Contemplating Life

  Happy Saturday! Today I want to throw something out here that has been driving me crazy (and yes, I hear some of you like RJ saying “and we all know that’s a short drive”, so thanks.) But seriously, I am really struggling right now with the myriad of assumptions that people are always making about one another. “Assuming” almost seems like an epidemic, not only in the world, but also in the church. There is this terrible practice of thinking that you know what someone else is thinking, meaning, or intending WITHOUT EVER ACTUALLY HAVING AN IN-DEPTH  CONVERSATION WITH THAT PERSON TO FIND OUT. It is absolutely frustrating how much misinformation is out there because one person ( let's  call him Joe) decides that a word or a facial expression or even a silence from another guy (we’ll call him Bob) meant XYZ, so Joe takes offense. Joe now has a chip on his shoulder, (and sadly, gossiping and backbiting also seem to be rampant) so Joe tells Mark, Ignasius, and Sam, who tell their wiv

  Have you ever had someone tell you that the reason they won’t go to church is because in their experience “most Christians are hypocrites”? They go on to say that they get sick of listening to the preaching by people who don’t even do what they say? I have to admit that sometimes I see their point. And before you go all “but we are all just sinners who are saved by grace”, I would like to say…..”Then act like what you’ve been given!” Seriously, we love to talk about how great our God is and that He is in the business of “redeeming the broken” and “transforming hearts and lives”. We will invite in strangers to “share their testimony”, and we will clap heartily over the fact that this person was at point A but God brought him to point B. However, we then turn around and in the same breath we absolutely refuse to see the wonderful work that God is doing in the person sitting right next to us . In my experience (and that’s a lot of experience), the two places that hold you to your past