11 November 2003 15:45
Post 2, Home Kitchen Restauranti'm sitting here waiting to order. it's one of the rare times when i'm ready to order before the waiter is ready to take my order :)
"exterior indicators of christianity"
what i mean by that is witness in a way, the things that people see that make us "christian" in their mind. say for instance you're taking a sunday morning drive and you see someone out mowing their lawn at 1030 on a sunday morning. your automatic assumption is that "oh, they're not a christian." for those of us who are mennonite, say you walk into the house of a casual friend, open their fridge and find beer on the bottom shelf. your automatic assumption is "oh, they must not be christian, or if they are, they're struggling in their faith." (for those of you who are not mennonite, ignore us, we all have our blind spots :) ). this subject has been on my blog list for a while. and there's a reason i haven't posted on it until now. {suspenseful waiting} the reason is that my blog list is very long. {groans}
so i was driving home from school one time (actually, the last time. i love this whole graduation thing). here i was mosying through southeast kentucky on a gorgeous morning, the sun shining, the birds chirping, the morning mist misting, the streams streaming. it was lovely. you'll have to bear with me, because i'd just spent four months in texas, and was going back to virginia, land of beauty and too many people. and i kept driving by houses with people out mowing their lawns at 1030 in the morning. it just so happened to be a sunday morning (bet you couldn't've guessed that eh?), and i kept thinking as i drove past these three or four houses in the course of the morning, "oh, too sad, they must not be christians.
Somewhere along in there, it finally filtered through to me, trickling up through my subconscious (as the cliche goes), that here i was (now proud possessor of a Bachelor of Science degree) thinking sadly that people not in church on sunday morning were pagans. the catch of course being that i as well was not attending church that morning.
okay, we'll ignore the whole sabbath day of rest issue, i can post on that tomorrow. back to exterior indicators of christianity.
there are things that i do that if i saw another do i would consider their actions to be characteristic of an unchristian nature. such actions are acceptable to me when i do them simply because i know my intentions. but when others do them, i, not knowing their intentions, have to base my assumptions only on what i can see. (this is assuming that i have to make assumptions). so i can for instance go bar hopping with some friends, perfectly secure in the knowledge that i'm just out to have a good time with my friends in a loud smoky dim throbbing environment. i know that i'm not out to pick up girls or get drunk, but when i tell somebody else that i spend my friday evenings bar hopping, what's their impression?
movies are an excellent case study. my granddad took mom to see Schindler's List, R-rating and all, when it was in theatres. i have a friend who's youth pastor recommended Devil's Advocate to my friend as an educational movie to watch. and of course we make movies based on the Bible as well. on the one hand movies, books, plays and other theatrical productions (including the bible) can be very violent, gory, risqué, and heretical (including the bible). on the other hand, we can learn from even the worst of those characteristics (obviously, or else the bible wouldn't contain them). a line has to be drawn somewhere. so i draw my personal line and sit down to watch 2fast 2furious. i'm busy learning about how to minister to guys who like racing (how could i ever relate to a street racer if i haven't learned about 10 second cars, NOS, and scantily clad women?). i watch it and take what i can get from it, then move on. but then i see my brother and sister sitting down to watch a movie. oh, so what you guys watching? well, we thought we'd watch 2fast 2furious, it looks to be a pretty cool movie. what would my reaction be? my reaction would be something to the effect of being pretty adamant that they not need to watch it. how can i know what they'll take away from it? i personally can filter out all the trash and take only the good from such a movie (at least, that's what everybody tells me). but the twins? or anybody but me? i can't be assured of how good their filters are, so the idea of them watching the movie makes me queasy.
(for the sake of those who are now wondering about me, i've never watched 2fast 2furious, and i'm not big on that filter bullarky. but the it is the truth that i've watched a lot of movies i wouldn't want my siblings to watch.)
so what i'm curious about, is where do we draw the line between living a life of freedom in Christ, and "acting" like common society expects a christian to act. if we don't live up to their expectations, then they'll think we're just a bunch of hypocrites [1]. hmm, it's romans 14 where paul talks about being legally able to do something (like eating food sacrificed to idols), but unable to physically do it due to weaker brothers. now there's a far difference between fellow christians (however weak), and the people of the world. at any rate, i'm trying to move away now from this whole line thing. mention "drawing a line" to any group of one or more christains and you'll get at least as many answers as there are members of the group plus one.
i'm in search of a definitive concrete tangible objective answer eh? i've probably come to the wrong place then. speaking of wrong places, never come to this restaurant... the service is terrible. and i mean it, there is but the bare minimum of service here. seeing as i'm 15' away from the kitchen, i even could have done the job faster than the waiter. but to be gracious, and because i was taught to never say something negative unless you have something positive to say, they do have a very nice pattern on their carpet.
first of all, we're not to live up to the world's expectations. it was misleading when i said that a couple paragraphs up. the world of course does have expectations of what a christian does. but the world, being ignorant in these matters doesn't really know what a christian does. for that matter, most of christiandom, being ignorant in these matters, doesn't really know what a christian does.
tangent: you know the nice thing about taking a laptop into a restaurant with you? it's a lot easier to calculate the tip (besides knowing that zero service equals zero tip). speaking of which, does the 15% come before or after sales tax?
so we as christians get to surprise the world with our characteristics. things like agape love, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, putting others above yourself, all these (although somewhat overlapping) are characteristics that any self-respecting pagan not expect in this dog eat dog world of ours. hmm. last thursday i went with d to a bible study on the USC campus. we walked around "evangelizing" people. he and i had an interesting conversation with a fellow who's spirituality (not religion) was of middle eastern influence (though he didn't ascribe to any particular one). he and d were going back and forth trying to figure each other out. i dropped in some questions too, and managed to stump him (the only time he didn't have an answer for one of us) by asking him why he lived a "good, moral" life, (which he claimed to do). he didn't exactly know why he lived good, except that perhaps it made him feel better (he himself recognizing that that was a selfish reason, just minutes after acusing christians in general of being christian for selfish reasons). he had a lot of misconceptions about christianity, and while claiming to be open minded towards all religions (religious tolerance, each believes what he wants to), he was rather closemindedly set in his openminded way, and seemed to discriminate quite freely against christians, apparently they didn't fall within the "to be openminded about" category. he therefore didn't accept a whole lot of correction from darren and i about what christianity is truly like, but it was interesting to note his discrimination against christianity as singled out from all the other religions (although he did part a shot at islam, and eventually discredited all religions in a vain last ditch attempt to sound impartial --i'm not sounding biased in my telling of this story, am i? :) ). but if either d or i were to develop a further relationship with this guy, he would find by firsthand experience what christians were really like (he thought we were all in a "do good works to get into heaven program."). thus by example in the long run he would learn, not by first impressions.
unfortunately, first impressions do have a drastic impact.
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