This is going to be fun…

I started this blog with the intent of using it as a platform to get a lot of things out of my head, and onto paper. I ran into a problem however. Almost daily I find myself thinking about things to write, and what to say, and how to word things. I couldn’t decide…

I find myself in a place where I just seem to have a constant, subtle frustration in life. Nothing is directly causing it, or even easing it, it just seems as if I have a little version of myself on my shoulder constantly screaming “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” But not loud, rather in a quiet, pestering sort of way. It is the opposite of fun. 

I don’t really have a title for this post, but I suppose if I absolutely had to have one, it would be something pertaining to entitlement. A societal entitlement, a religious entitlement, a personal entitlement, and a general sense of entitlement that seems to be far too common in America. 

Not that anyone ever wanting it, but a new Walmart Fresh Market is opening here in town. Facebook apparently tracks my activity, knows where I live, and plastered an ad for the grand opening on my news feed. (This is my punishment for not deleting my Facebook account). I clicked on the ad, for some reason, and the very first common was both saddening, and unsurprising. 

“Yall gonna have any free giveaways?”

Of course that would be the first comment..

“What can I get for free?” “What can people give ME?” “What can someone do for ME?” “How LITTLE do I have to do any sort of labor in order to just survive?”

I feel like more people every day wake up in the morning, ask themselves these questions, and unfortunately find a satisfactory answer to all of them.

It isn’t just people commenting on a Walmart ad though, its all over our society. People go through school and learn a rough summary of the articles our country was founded on. All they come away understanding is that we were born with rights that we are entitled to, and no one should be allowed to take them away. God forbid someone try to take away those rights, we are seemingly allowed to use any force necessary in order to re-obtain those rights. If we don’t have everything the way we like, we give ourselves the RIGHT to be offended. 

Everyone’s gettin’ offended up in here!

“Oh, you’re gay? Well that offends me and you need to change.”

“Oh, you’re not 100% in total agreement with me being gay? Well you’re hateful, uneducated, and not truly Christian because you don’t fully support everyone else’s choices.”

“You don’t think I should be able to easily obtain any kind of gun I want?! You ISIS loving, Obama worshipping hippie!”

“Wait, you want guns for protection, hunting, and simply because it is a right afforded to you in the Constitution?! You’re just another backwoods, uneducated, Obama hating redneck!”

Christians use the Bible to bash non-believers, and non-believers use the Bible to bash Christians. 

I feel like I’m living in a country where I’m not allowed to believe what I believe. I feel as if I have to be either totally on one side, or on the complete opposite side. I have to believe that having a beer will send me to hell, or that questioning my faith is a sign that I just do not truly believe in the Bible as I say I do. 

If you love God, you must also love guns, freedom, and non-muslims. 

If you do not believe in God, you must be pro-choice, voting for Hillary, and only watch CNN. 

I am stuck in the middle…

In a time when it seems like everyone seems to be entitled to everything, offended by everything them don’t agree with, and quick to slam anyone who thinks that their being offended is unjustified and slightly childish, here I am, wondering what the heck is going on.

I am lazy. I get offended. I feel entitled. I am messed up.

I am the last person to be pointing fingers at the faults of anyone, and that is not what I’m doing. I am just wondering when common sense and mutual respect for one another died off. 

Christians hate muslims, gays hate people who don’t agree with them, whites are hating blacks (again), pro-choice hates pro-life, Republicans hate Democrats, gun owners hate gun opposers, non-voters hate whoever is in office, most people hate cops, and everyone still hates the dentist who killed a lion that no once cared about before. 

It’s ridiculous. If you don’t choose a side, you’re cast aside as someone who overthinks (probably true), and doesn’t really know what they believe. 

I am a terrible Christian. I don’t set a good example, and I am what’s shown beside “hypocrite” in the dictionary. I am screwed up. 

But I’m trying. 

I read the story of Jesus (for myself, growing up in church doesn’t count as reading the Bible unless you’ve actually opened it up yourself), and all I see is someone beaming with love and grace. Jesus did not hate the government or its leaders. In fact, the only time He ever mentioned the government was when He told His followers to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” in Luke 20:25. Jesus did not say that the government is to blame for our discomforts. We equate America with God and God to America. They become the same thing to us after a while, which is a colossus insult to God, and a forgetting that although this country was loosely based on Christian principles (I say loosely because you should lookup ‘Thomas Jefferson Bible’, and then tell me how Biblical that is), it is a country of religious freedom for all. We seem to be completely fine with spending all our time telling everyone else how wrong they are, while we eventually forget what we’re arguing about. Most Christians just like to argue. As I said before, everyone likes being offended, and Christians are no exception. 

We forget that Jesus went out of His way to spend time with a tax collector (the IRS), a woman at a well (those who messed up and didn’t abstain from sex before marriage), a poor man (our present day poor), and many more people that are cast to the pits of societal respect. 

If we don’t like something that happened in our Christian gatherings (church, small groups, college groups, etc), then we just leave. We feel like its ok for us to just leave and find something we like instead of sticking out a storm in our life and seeing things turn out good in the end. Jesus walked into a temple meant for people to worship His Father God, and did he leave? No! He stayed, drove out the false prophets, and began proclaiming the truth every day after that! How crazy is that?!? Now don’t get me wrong, if unbiblical things are being taught, it needs to be addressed, and the if it cannot be fixed, leaving is acceptable. Honestly though, very seldom does that happen. 

Can we just respect each other? Christian or not, can we just live together with common sense? I am allowed to disagree with you, and you’re allowed to disagree with me. I’ll show you why I think this, and you show me why you think that. If neither of us changes the others’ mind, at least we’ll now have a better understanding of why we disagree, and won’t do so solely because everyone else does or because its the new thing to do. 

I’m not giving up hope. This isn’t me tossing my hands up saying “Forget it, I’m out”, and walking away. This is me stepping back and saying “wait a second… something doesn’t seem right. Surely there is a better way of going about this.”

Now I also do believe that Biblical truth will win in the end, but that’s BIBLICAL truth, not traditional truth, religious truth, societal truth, personal truth, or any kind of truth. Not everyone can be right about everything, but we also can’t say someone is wrong simply because we don’t agree.