Tag: relationship

Sorry, Christian Trump Supporter, I Just Can’t Trust You Anymore

It used to be different.

I may not have always agreed with you, but I respected you and your views. It seemed as if being a person of truth and goodness was a value we mutually upheld.

Sure, we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I never thought it would come to this.

Everything has changed.

So much, that as difficult as it is to say and an even more difficult reality to swallow, if I’m honest, I just can’t trust you anymore. I wish things were different, but they’re not.

Somehow, someway, you still support Trump.

From where I sit, the person you once were is no longer the person you have become.

It baffles me to my core.

Even after he publicly mocks the disabled, brags about “grabbing pussy,” swindles people for cash, labels brown-skinned people as criminals, bullies his perceived enemies, embraces racism and white supremacy, pays off porn stars, lies incessantly, and pimps conspiracy theories, you still give him your “amen” and “hallelujah.”

How can this be?

Are you really that blind and callous?

For Christ’s sake, you won’t even wear a damn mask to protect the life of your neighbor. Your church won’t practice social distancing for the thwarting of a deadly pandemic. And, worse yet, you actually believe Trump was sent by God with anointing.

You actually teach your children to admire him.

You donate your money and your heart to his narcissism.

You give headspace to his lies and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

You give him a pass on everything you have fiercely denounced in others.

You twist the Bible like a breakdancer on crack and rape the person of Jesus in order to rationalize your addiction to power and preferential treatment within society.

Hell, you can’t even see your own white privilege staring you straight in the face.

Trust me, it’s a hard thing to say and even a harder thing to behold, but you’ve come off the rails of having a capacity for discernment and self-control. Your moral compass is calibrated to the black hole of your selfishness, and your soul worships a golden calf glittered with white, conservative Christian supremacy. In the end, there is nearly nothing evangelical, Christian, loving, or Jesus-esque about you. Like the Wizard behind the curtain, the sheep’s clothing that garments your veneer has been torn wide open to reveal the wolf that has long lurked inside you.

I still can’t believe it.

If you can’t see Trump for who he is, your faith for the evil it embraces, and yourself for the person you have become, how am I supposed to see you in my life?

If you lack the courage and clarity to stand for what is right and stand against what is wrong, where should you stand in my life?

I’m sorry, Christian Trump supporter, I just can’t trust you anymore.

The writing is on the wall.

 

I can’t trust you with educating my children.

I can’t trust you with speaking into my spiritual life.

I can’t trust what you say about God.

 

I can’t trust you with advising my values and choices.

I can’t trust you to discern good from bad.

I can’t trust you to steer away from fact-denying.

I can’t even trust you to have my best interests at heart.

 

I can’t trust you to tell the truth.

I can’t trust you to discern evil.

I can’t trust you to be fair.

I can’t even trust you to denounce murder and violence.

 

I can’t trust you with my friends.

I can’t trust you with my family.

I can’t trust you with my safety.

I can’t even trust you with the little things.

Little things like holding my mail, serving me food, and walking my dog.

 

Yes, it’s that serious, Yes, it’s that real. Yes, it’s that specific.

Your allegiance to his ridiculousness is the betrayal of our relationship.

So, until you can vehemently reject Trump’s brutal policies of family separations and kids in cages, you can stop lecturing me about being pro-life.

Until you can mandate the removal of police brutality, economic and racial injustice, and educational segregation, you can put down your microphone, “all lives matter.”

Until you are willing to tear down walls of discrimination, racism, and the unwelcoming of refugees, foreigners, and immigrants, you can keep your Old Testament quotations to yourself.

Until you turn the focus towards repenting of your own sins and the sins of your conservative Evangelical faith, you can forget about making me into your spiritual project and Chia Pet-for-Jesus as you hope to grow me into your hypocritical system of believing.

Until you cease to pursue the nationalism of your faith and a false religious freedom that is bent towards your benefit, can you stop trying to convince me that you worship Jesus and not Caesar.

Until you learn to lean not on your own understanding, put people first, and embrace the divinity and affirmation of all, you can stop insisting you occupy the inside scoop on God, the Bible, and how everyone else should be living.

Until you publicly reject the white, sexist, Republican, gun-wielding Jesus of conservative Evangelicalism, you can throw in the towel of your futile attempts to convince me that you worship the Jesus of Nazareth.

Until your faith becomes about the least-of-these instead of the privileged-of-these, the least-of-these instead of the whitest-of-these, the least-of-these instead of the sexist-of-these, and the least-of-these instead of the self-righteous-of-these, you can take everything about your faith, everything about your beliefs, and everything about who you have become and dance it all in front of me, but the scales have fallen from eyes and the truth has set me free.

Your loyalty to Trump has shown me everything I need to know about you, your faith, and the god you serve.

You can’t be trusted.

So, let me save you some time and disheartenment.

I will not believe the beliefs you believe.

I will not worship the idols to which you bow.

I will not become the evil you have become.

And most of all, I will not open my eyes, my heart, nor my life to any person or entity like you whose faith is so dedicated and committed to seeking its own way, that it is even willing to discriminate, demonize, and destroy all that is true, good, factual, and humane.

Sorry, Christian Trump Supporter, I just can’t trust you anymore.

And, to be honest, it scares me that I ever did.

 

Grace is brave. Be brave.

Check out Chris Kratzer’s new book getting rave reviews… Leatherbound Terrorism.

In Leatherbound Terrorism, Chris chases the evils of conservative Evangelicalism out of the shadows and gives powerful voice to the cries of the religiously oppressed. Confronting issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious greed, hypocrisy, nationalism, white supremacy, privilege, and the weaponizing of the Bible, Leatherbound Terrorism pulls no punches. Endorsed by best selling authors Steve McVey and Baxter Kruger, Leatherbound Terrorism will challenge you, inspire you, and most certainly cause you to rethink your faith and life.

Conservative Christian, If You Really Loved Me, Would You Please Just Listen?

I know you disagree with me and so many aspects of my life—that’s one thing that seems to be overflowing with clarity.

That’s o.k, it really is, you are welcome to your own perspective.

To you, my nonconservative choices, values, beliefs, and even the very essence of who I am as a person are deemed to be suspicious at best, certainly inferior, and likely in desperate need of repair and a strong dose of repentance. In step with the marching orders of your creed, you pace back and forth, waiting for opportunity to put my faith and life through your conservative curling iron in hopes of straightening me out. You say you love me and it’s all from a heart of genuine concern—I want nothing more than to believe you, I truly do. Yet, it feels like everywhere you touch upon the fabric of my life, you’re insisting on your own way while claiming it to be God’s—desperately trying to unravel and pull apart what I’ve actually come to believe and cherish as the divine tapestry of my life.

You want all the Scriptures you so confidently quote, the stern warnings about hell, and your passionate lectures on all the ways that I’m desperately misguided to feverishly call my soul to attention. You want your guilt trips, silent treatments, and glares of disapproval to magically solicit an urgency within me to wake up and change. You want all the articles, books, and sermon videos barking the bullet points of your faith to bring me to my knees, surrendering in agreement and tearful repentance. Yet, deep down inside I have this ancient, Jesus-embedded sense within me that I just can’t ignore—if you really loved me and were truly being used by the Spirit, you’d simply listen.

No, I’m not talking about the kind of listening that’s nothing more than the inconvenient duration of time you’ve silenced your lips while reluctantly waiting your turn to speak. I’m not talking about the kind of listening that’s merely the sum of the moments you’re rushing ahead in your mind to all the ways you’re going to correct me. I’m not talking about the kind of listening that’s nothing more than the pause you give in your rebuttals to humor me with a moment to interject my wayward thinking—licking your chops, poised and ready to shoot it all down. No, I’m not talking about the awkward silence that ensues while your arms are folded and your chin is lifted in obvious disgust. Maybe you call that listening or discerning, or whatever faith term that fits your brand of religious conservatism, but I call it—hate. For nothing is perhaps more antiJesus, demeaning, and drooling with shame and condemnation than a Christian who refuses to listen.

You want me to believe that you love me—I greatly appreciate that. You want me to consider that you were sent by God to guide me—I understand that. Yet, with all due respect, I’m finding it very hard to convince my conscience to open the door of trust when every alarm in my Spirit is sounding to the clear and ever present reality, you aren’t even listening.

You speak, you judge, you correct, you assume, you admonish, you lecture—perhaps all with the most wonderful of noble intentions. Yet, all the while, it feels so reckless, like a sheep being dragged to the slaughter, as you don’t even glimpse beyond the surface to the intricate fabric of my being and the complicated walk upon which I have been traveling. At best, you’re shooting in the dark because you don’t take the time, extend the grace, and embrace the humility required to remove the blinders and truly see me and my story. In fact, at times, it feels like I’m just another sitting duck, traveling across your spiritual arcade, bracing for the impact of your prepackaged conservative bullets. Cocked and loaded, you’ll never hear nor encounter the story behind my eyes—a story that if I told you, would break your heart, humble your faith, and perhaps even cause you to put down your weapons. Maybe, when it’s all said and done, that’s what you truly fear the most and the reason why you refuse to truly listen—it’s all too risky, your entire faith-construct might come crashing down.

The one thing that’s missing is that one thing you seem to be so adverse to giving. It’s all I’ve ever truly wanted—so I’m begging you, would you please just listen?

Listen—with the reverence that completely stops and deeply considers that chances are you have something to learn, change, or reconsider first before ever being granted the green light from God to speak to my Christ-imaged humanity.

Listen—with the humility that, though you are certainly entitled to your own opinion, you certainly aren’t entitled to your own facts, nor the claim that you hold the one-and-only divinely-sanctioned interpretation of Scripture.

Listen—with the self-control that renders the noise of your stubborn insistence to a prison of silence in order to create the openness and freedom required to hear a true revelation from God.

Listen—with the determination to never lean on your own understanding, project your bias, and pepper me with labels.

Listen—with the level of compassion that no matter what you had to say, all I would ultimately hear is that you love me.

For if we aren’t listening deep enough to where we understand with fullness, empathy, education, and humility the very journey, perspectives, beliefs, and values to which we disagree or disapprove in another human being, we aren’t truly listening. For when Jesus left the halls of heaven and became a human being, it wasn’t just an act of becoming human flesh, it was an act of ultimate, divine listening.

So now, when you wonder why I don’t call, why I don’t respond, and why I’ve resigned to love you from a distance. When you wonder why I’m deeply hesitant to visit your church, come to family gatherings, grant you influence, and see you and your conservative faith-understanding as credible. When you wonder why I ignore you on Facebook or de-friend you altogether. When you wonder why the world is increasingly concluding that yours is a brand of Christianity that is filled with self-righteousness, selfishness, and hate. Perhaps you would consider this perspective, it may just be because I, and many others, can’t ignore the screeching reality—you’re not listening.

Say what you want, debate all you like, curl up in the fetal position of your guilt trips, and trumpet your Scriptural proof-texts—my heart breaks at all that we are missing, the time that’s being wasted, the hurt that’s being experienced, and the relationships that never will be. Largely because, like Martha in the Scriptures, it seems you’re insistent on making religious sandwiches of debate, correction, and condemnation that Jesus never ordered, while Mary was learning the true heart of Jesus—to sit down, be quiet, and simply listen.

No, I’m not perfect, I certainly have my faults. But right now, I can’t trust you nor give your voice credibility, not because you aren’t speaking, but because I can’t hear you listening.

Conservative Christian, if you really loved me, would you please just listen?

“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak…” James 1:19

Grace is brave. Be brave.

True Friendships

Relationships are the marrow of life, and friendships being a very important aspect.

Seems to me though, maybe we throw the term “friendship” around a bit too freely. Just about anything qualifies for the term, “friendship” these days.  The person who knows a person who knows a person that you know… boom, that’s a friend.  The person on Facebook who you can’t even remember how you were “friended” in the first place… there you have it, another friend. The term “friend” could mean just about anything today and describe a wide variety of levels of intimacy between people. Nothing necessarily good or bad about that, just our cultural reality.  We all want to be “friend” heavy.

Yet, though we may know a lot of people, call a lot of people friends, and love to increase our “follower” and “friend” totals on our social networks, I would venture to say we are a culture lacking in “true friendships.”

The truth is, especially in our culture today, that over a life time you may have only 1-5 true friendships. And after reading further, you may realize you only have one or two, if that. The irony is deep as like never before we have so many ways to connect with people, but yet we lack true friendships in our life.

This is not anything necessarily new I guess, Jesus (while on earth) only really had three (Peter, James, and John).  Yet, I would say we are less prepared as a culture to develop and maintain true friendships, not because of a lack of ways to connect, but rather because of a kind of aversion or maybe even inability to connect at the level of true friendships.

What are the hallmarks of a “true friendship?”  Here are 5 ways to know if you have one…

1) You don’t have to inspire nor solicit them to be interested or engaged in your life-  If you have to be the primary one to keep a true friendship going, you don’t have one. In a true friendship, you don’t have to work to keep them interested and interacting with you. They have their own energy to be consistently interested and involved in your life. It’s never a one way street. You don’t have to drag them along into having a genuine care, concern, and consistent investment in your life. It’s not a “we only talk when I am the one to call” deal. Both of you are holding up the relationship, not just one of you. If you feel a consistent imbalance in the shared energy towards the friendship, you don’t have a true friendship.

2) They are with YOU- If a person is merely “with” something about you, you don’t have a true friendship.

The foundation of a true friendship is to be “with” that person, for life. Most people with whom we are friends, though they may be “with” something about us (our vision, cause, opportunity, shared interest, work, children, neighbors, project, etc.) that is shared in common, they are not “with” us.  Given the removal or diminishing of what they are “with” about us (vision, cause, job, opportunity, or benefit we bring, etc.) they would likely not be truly be “with” us.

In a true friendship, there is a deep loyalty to be with YOU above all else. By your side (where possible), on your side, with you. This is true whether you are right, wrong, up, down, or somewhere in between. Whether circumstances, settings, locations, etc. remain the same or change.  It is an unconditional devotion to be with YOU.  All relationships have ups and down and times where things are going well and when they are perhaps not, but a true friendship always lands “with you.” Any moments of tension are few, and that, quickly remedied. Oh, and by the way, you can be by somebody’s side and on somebody’s side without agreeing with them. This is a special dynamic, nuance, and skill of true friendship.

3) They have your best interest at heart- Because they are “with you” they want what is best for you. They rejoice when you rejoice, and mourn when you mourn, not the opposite.  They want to see God’s work in you come to completion to the point they highly invest themselves into you that you might be blessed. Theirs is an investment of themselves into yourself. And if ever push comes to shove or a crossroads is met, they put your best interests even above their own. They have your back, your best interests, and will protect what God is doing in and through you at all costs. They are givers in the relationship, above and beyond being a taker. This is a cornerstone of true friendships.

4) They speak the truth in love- These are not people who are playing you, saying what you want to hear, or flattering you because of what you bring to their table or can give them down the road. These are people who speak truth into your life. When they do, they wrap it in love.  You can trust that what they are saying, however hard to hear, is coming from a pure place and a pure agenda. They show up for the relationship with openness and honesty, always chasing any darkness in the relationship out of the shadows and into the light.  They are willing to confront you when you are wrong, and willing to confess to you when they are. They don’t let things fester or go underground, bur rather value having a clear and clean atmosphere in the relationship. They don’t just tolerate you, they love you.

5) They believe in you- They are your greatest fans and encouragers. They assume the best, not the worst. And when you fail, their hope remains. They do not give up on you.  No, they may not believe in everything you do or don’t do, but they still believe in you. There is a loyalty to you that is unbreakable. They want to lift you up, not bring you down, cheer you forward, not gloat when you fall backwards. They believe in you. They see God’s divine hand upon your life and the Master at work.  They see you as God sees you, like only a true friend can and would. They love you, like you, and believe in you. They bring out the best in you, and call you away from the worst. They aren’t perfect, the relationship isn’t perfect, but they are a true friend.

That being said, a couple questions…

Who are you true friends?

To whom are you a true friend?

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