This evening thousands of people are enjoying various activities: dressing up, getting candy and going to parties. But it’s nights like tonight that lead me down a rabbit hole of thoughts that I simply can’t keep to myself.
And it’s my #1 struggle I deal with regularly as a Christian…
Regardless of how you feel about Halloween and whether or not you personally celebrate it is another topic for another time, but it’s occasions like tonight that remind me of just how difficult it is to discern how outspoken I should be about my personal convictions with other people who don’t share my same faith or beliefs OR who do share my same faith and beliefs but their expression of it doesn’t look the same as mine.
If someone were to ask me about my personal thoughts and opinions about a hot-button cultural topic, I would do my best to express myself in a way that was both kind, respectful and hopefully helpful for the person asking to better understand my position. But for those who don’t ask, and for those who aren’t curious, where is the line between being respectfully outspoken versus downright pushy when it comes to sharing one’s own beliefs?
I know Jesus was in the business of flipping tables, I’m just not sure if the tables that I flip with strangers who aren’t intentionally seeking God are going to be helpful in causing that person to draw near to Christ. And that’s the goal. To draw people nearer to Christ. It’s not up to me to decide what convictions other people have. If their convictions don’t match mine that doesn’t mean that they’re inauthentic in their faith.
I don’t believe that people have been able to successfully cause others to think about their own position on a topic through arguments with strangers in the comment section on Facebook or YouTube. And yet, we still engage with it and emphasize the things that divide us rather than highlighting the things that give us common ground.
You can definitely determine the spiritual fruit in someone’s life but judging their relationship with God based on their alignment of my convictions just seems a bit… arrogant & prideful. And this can cause me to look more like a legalistic Pharisee rather than a Follower of Christ.
Earlier this year two of my colleagues from an old job I had both reached out to me in the same week. It wasn’t to shoot the breeze or catch up, at the time I’m not quite sure I’d say I was very close with either one them outside of the work we did together. And yet, they both reached out, asking if I could pray for them because one colleague’s brother had passed away suddenly and the other person’s mom lost her battle to cancer. These girls wouldn’t typically describe themselves as Christians per se, but they would probably say they’re on the spiritual side of agnostic— but when they needed comfort beyond what they could provide for themselves, they reached out to me to pray over them, and with them over the phone.
I don’t share that story to make myself seem “holier than thou” but to rather shed light on what Jesus’s love looks like in action. They knew my faith was an important facet of who I am because I had shared it with them before here and there— and since I was there for them in those situations, more organic conversations have come up as our friendships have grown. They’ve been curious about my beliefs and values & they ask me questions to back up why I feel the way I feel with certain things.
And I think that does a better job than being condemning with someone I barely know on a comment section on Facebook. Create curiosity by the way you live your life, maybe then people will start investigating their own roots of the belief systems they ascribe to.
I have convictions. Strong ones. But whether or not I should always be in a position of passionately disclosing my convictions regularly rather than just live my life and hope that the way I live my life fosters curiosity is always a choice I have to make.
So, I’ll keep praying for the discernment of knowing when the heck to shut up and when to be outspoken. And I know I’ll fail at doing it perfectly but all that matters is that I’m striving.
andrea statler 