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What? Me? Posting? Whoa…
I haven’t been posting, because I think I like looking at what my friends have to post more so than actually taking the time to post things myself.
So I must be posting for a very good reason.
I was contemplating today what I was going to give up for Lent. I thought that giving up social media (specifically Facebook and Tumblr) would be a good idea. It’s something that I do everyday, and it’s something that I spend countless hours on a day, during which I could be doing something else. I wasn’t sure about this decision, so I posted the idea as a status on Facebook to get some public opinion on the matter.
And then, the father of one of my high school friends chats me, saying that he wanted to talk to me about it for a little bit. He pandered to me a little bit, which prompted me to explain to him, in mild terms, why I wanted to do this:
The season of Lent is the Christian season of preparation for Easter, in which it is traditional to fast in order to turn the yearning for what you give up into yearning and an effort to bring yourself closer to God. I told him that I wanted to do something like this in order to do just that - bring myself closer to God, replacing the yearning and time I would have spent, in this case, on social media, and using that time reading the Bible, and other good little Christian things.
Following this, among other things, he said that I am “more devout than any 5 people he could think of” and that I should “live my life” because there was “plenty of time for God”.
wut.
I don’t claim to be devout. Nor do I claim to be the ‘perfect Christian’. Actually, there is a lot in my own personal private faith that I am quite ashamed of and want to be better with. But this…this is a problem.
If everyone who was ‘devout’ simply ‘lived there life’ because there was ‘plenty of time for God later,’ then doesn’t that run counter to the idea of turning away from our sins that Jesus died for? When we repent, we are saying “I made a mistake, I’m not going to do it again”. However, if we just ‘live our lives’ and save Christ for later, basically what we’re saying is “God, if you could just wait patiently over there, I’m going to come over here, live in my little box where I’m going to do what I want, when I want, and come back to you when I need forgiveness, that would be great.”
That’s concerning.
What’s even more concerning is that this man is a ‘devout Catholic’. Granted, I don’t know how faithful he is in his beliefs, I don’t know how ‘devout’ he actually is, but frankly, that shouldn’t matter. If you’re going to call yourself a Christian of any sort, shouldn’t your relationship with God and Jesus be first and foremost? Shouldn’t our lives reflect the passion that we hold for our Lord and Savior, and not our passion for our own self-satisfaction and glory?
I do appreciate what this man had to say, and I may have actually learned something from him…
But some of the other things he said were concerning and it’s things like that that make me want to be the best freaking minister ever and change the social perception of what it means to be a Christian.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
