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Showing posts from March, 2013

My American Idol

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Do not make any idols. -God (from Exodus 34:17)     I have no silly statues or superstitious nonsense in my house.  I do not speak to the dead.  I don't play with Ouija boards or tarot cards or any type of divination.  I don't even read my horoscope.  But I have idols, as surely as you do.   I thought that I was doing well.  Church mostly every week, pray often, give what I can, stop drinking & smoking and cut down on the cussing (except in extreme emergencies), you know, the right behaviors.  Perhaps I was doing well.  Perhaps it is just that the tentacles of sin reach deeper than behaviors.  They reach into our hearts, tangling it.   Work has been challenging in the last year.  Sure, I know work is supposed to be tedious for the descendants of Adam.  (But do I have to get hit with multiple curses just because I work and am a woman???)  It got bad.  I was betrayed.  I was lied to.  I was devalued.  I was broken.  I was whiny.  I had discovered an idol.

Religious Snobbery?

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From a reader: whats with looking down, being derogatory about people with different hearts and minds re:god and religion? If we're all made in gods imagine nobody is special or 'better' whether you're a Christian, atheist, Muslim or wtfe. We're all the same-just a bundle of cells connected in the same way-so why the hierarchy? Before I identified myself as a Christian, I was a believer in a nebulous idea of god. That idea was loving and caring and vague. That idea was non judgemental not wanting me to beat myself up over the past, asked me to do my best, encouraged me to get back up when I fell, guided me through odd coincidences and other people, but never showed its face to me. Some will say that I didn't believe in God, or at least not the right one. But I didn't think that it was so black and white, right and wrong. Wasn't God's purpose to show us a peaceful way to live? If we were created in his image, all of us, what did it matter whic