venting

When something offends you, and does so on a regular basis or incredibly deeply, what do you do? If it's an organization or company that is supposed to be providing a service to you, complain. If it's the bumper sticker on the car in front of you, well you can't really get out of your car and walk up to the driver's window, knock and when they roll down their window begin to tell them their bumpersticker is offensive. And you can't rear-end them either. You just sorta hafta go on with your life. You can complain and talk about it with your friends, discuss how offensive it was and how you wonder why on earth anyone would think that. But in the good ol US of A, you can't tell them they're not allowed to have that bumper sticker just because it offends you. The ACLU might try and tell me I can't have a jesus fish on my car one day, but I'll fight that battle when I get there.
But for now, I am allowed to write whatever I want in my own online journal. Just like many of my friends can write and post some really absurd stuff in their journals that I don't agree with. But there was one 'friend' in particular whose posts often included semi-nude photos of her and/or her friends. And her entries often discussed in vague detail some sexual content from her life. She also complained a lot. One day, when I just couldn't deal with seeing those kinds of pictures anymore when I went to read my friend's page, I just removed her as a LJ friend. I could have reported her for posting pornography on that website, but it was infrequent and it didn't seem to offend anyone else who read her journal. But when it offended me regularly and sometimes quite strongly, I chose to ignore it. The benefits to me being huge, including I no longer have that in my face, trying to tempt me back into sexual sin.
So... when someone replies to my livejournal post (actually a comment in reply to someone else on my OWN entry) and tells me it's offensive and my beliefs are bullshit, it's really REALLY tempting to say "well, don't read it then." But knowing that she's grieving because her friend died very suddenly and unexpectedly, I struggle to extend grace and clarify. I have to draw a line between explaining where I stand and trying to explain the really tough, paradoxical aspects of Christianity, like having hope in God through grief. Because if the two sentances about my faith in the other note offended her, she's certainly not going to want to listen to me explain that i have hope in eternal life because of my salvation and that everyone else can have that too and death is much easier to deal with when we've got that hope. And I can't say to her "well, you blaming God is a bunch of hooey, he didn't do this, we did it to ourselves." she won't understand it, it wouldn't be loving her, not one bit. But I also can't deny the truth or apologize for my faith. So, she'll probably still be offended by my reply because I didn't renounce God because of a single tragedy, that I didn't agree with her. But I can live with that.

First Crash

Tonight was the first CRASH of the 2006/2007 school year. We had a VCU alum, Jodi, come and speak. The big draw for folks was that Jodi has actually been on a number of MTV reality shows like Road Rules. We had a ton of first-timers there and hopefully we'll see some of them again. Jodi was bold in her testimony and a lot of leadership people who weren't involved in planning crash said it went really well. My heart broke for the folks who were there and didn't have Jesus. Jodi played Jeremy Camp's "I'll Take You Back" at the end of her talk because it was a really meaningful song for her and her return to faith and relationship with Jesus and then we played 3 worship songs for folks to be able to like sit and listen to and think about or sing along.The last song was "everything" which I hadn't heard before. And the chorus (i think it was the chorus) was about "how can I not be moved by you when you're here" or something and I just prayed so hard that God would just draw these people to himself and really was just in tears (though, i'll admit, i was worried i looked like a big spaz crying in my seat so i tried to stop) remembering where I was three years ago. I am physically exhausted and may not be able to speak very loudly tomorrow, but this event was spiritually fufilling in so many ways. It's in God's hands if anyone else felt that way.