Merry Christmas
This break has been pretty interesting. It feels like everything that God has been teaching me these past few months are actually coming together. I spent the past week at a resort with my family on vacation. I know we all love one another (a lot) but sometimes it’s just hard when you don’t agree.
Ever since I began going to church my parents have been wary of getting into certain conversations with me. We’ve had a couple of heated debates that always end with awkward silence and an increase in emotional distance between each other. And so it’s just been hard to just interact with my family and come home and kind of feel un-welcomed. Everything is fine until religion comes into the picture and then things just get weird.
But back tracking a little bit, these past months I’ve been listening and reading up on evangelism, marriage, and the historical context and evidence for the bible. All of these things aren’t really related in anyway except that I was just curious. These searches have lead to things like: this, this, this, this, this, this, this and a lot more stuff (just email me haha).
And somehow all these things came together this weekend—learning to show respect and love to the people around me (outside of a marriage context), learning to be patient in conversations and listen, and defend my faith with concrete facts.
Randy Newman talks about taking a long term perspective on conversations. While it’s nice to get your thoughts out there and to verbally defend your faith with a ton of facts, it’s really hard for anyone to hear you when it just looks like you’re standing on a pedestal pointing fingers. Even if it’s out of love, it’s just hard to see it as love.
A lot of marriage sermons, especially love and respect, talk about meeting people’s needs and seeing differences in perspectives as different but not inferior and really appreciate those differences. It’s amazing how applicable marriage sermons are to relationships in a general sense. I think by showing respect and love to the person you’re talking to, you’re already meeting them wherever they are.
Researching biblical history has been fun too and it’s definitely helped in reaffirming my own faith but it’s also helped in conversations. Too often things get abstract and sometimes you just need to be able to point to concrete things. I don’t know. It’s different for everyone and that just takes discernment.
And I think a lot of this break was really just an attitude adjustment. If I truly believe that all this is true, that God sent his son to die for my sins, that this was accomplished in full and that all the prophesies in the OT were fulfilled, that Jesus Christ was the perfect sacrifice and that He carried my sins onto that cross with him, died with them, but then rose again because God accepted His sacrifice, and that Jesus now sits at the right hand of God interceding for me, how can I sit here complaining? I have eternal life with God. If he was able to conquer sin and death, what else can he do?
I think a lot of my attitude has been on the defensive side just because I’ve been so tired of hearing the terms, “blind faith”, “brainwashed”, “naive”, and “idealistic”. I just wanted to prove myself and redeem my dignity and integrity. But that’s really not what it’s about. When you’re trying that hard to prove yourself right, you just end up talking a lot without listening to your audience. I don’t know how much more I have to tell myself this or listen to it in sermons, but so much of evangelism is listening. It’s being bold but it’s also about listening and discerning how to show love and respect.
But anyways, it’s not like my family is ready to hear even the word “bible” let alone read it, but this break I was actually able to learn a lot about my family and have some pretty open conversations about life and relationships. It was really nice to be included in conversations in general. We talked about politics, family, money, lifestyles, and I actually got to talk a little bit about religion without the conversation blowing up. It was really cool :).
I don’t really know what God is doing in my family but it’s pretty exciting to just be a part of it. All glory be to God. I am just glad to be his servant and messenger.
(Also, thank you so much for all your fellowship, support, and prayer! >.< There’s still so much of the break left. And I pray that I’d use it to glorify God and keep this perspective).
