Around this time last year I made the choice to stop commenting on Facebook. If it wasn’t a comment that exuded genuine love, I didn’t comment. I also made the choice to stop posting about political things until after my initial uprise in emotion had ceased. I had fallen into the trap of angry posting and the conviction I felt from that became too much. I had gotten to a point where I was angry all the time. I was angry at people I thought were my friends, or at the very least shared the commonality of being a child of God. I was angry at people for posting and commenting things I fundamentally disagreed with. But most of all, I was angry at how Christians were treating other people. Comment wars and long winded posts meant to discredit and mock the “other side” just didn’t feel right to me. It was confusing for me to see all the anger and insensitivity coming from people who were supposed to have the love of Christ in them. It begged the question: is this the point? Is this what God intended us to be doing right now? Are we living, speaking, or acting in the way Jesus called us to when He left this earth?

Christian, we were not called to be right.
We were not called to be politically correct.
We were not called to win debates and to get one over on the person on the other side of that screen.

God did not send His precious son to spill His blood in our place, be buried for three days, and be raised from the dead to ascend into heaven for us to spend our time ranting on Facebook.

I think we’re missing it. We are missing it. We are so caught up in our culture that we are missing out on the greatness we could be living in. We are missing out on the joy and love and community and peace we could be having if we laid down our verbal swords and realized our true purpose.

The Painter of sunset skies. The God who lights the moon to shine on the darkest night. The Creator of E Minor. The Maker of dandelions and mountains. The Master of the oceans and winds. The God who laid out the stars and beckoned the rain to fall from the sky to give life to the flowers below. He is our God. There is a life beyond all of this. There is a kingdom beyond all of this. There is a God beyond all of this. Beyond the pandemic, beyond your opinion on masks, beyond your thoughts on CRT, beyond what you think about your political opinion. There is so much beyond that. There is an eternity beyond that.

I would give anything to be home right now. To be at peace with my Savior and to not have to worry about the insane and chaotic world around me. But on this side of eternity, I have to stay focused on why I’m here.
Why are we here?
What is our purpose?
It cannot be to simply live. It cannot be to run about to our 9-5’s and try to live decent lives. It cannot be that. Because when our Jesus left this world to remain with the Father, He left us a mission. He left us with specific instructions.
You can rant all the live long day about constitutional rights, and the left, and the right, and up, and the down. You can be right in every political endeavor. You can be righteous in all your opinions. But without love, the life you’re living is useless. You can have a defense prepared to destroy anyone who dares to argue against your beliefs, but without love you are defending a paper-kingdom. A plastic fortress with foundations that will crumple unless precariously tiptoed around.

I don’t want to live like that. I can’t live like that. The thought of living like that makes me feel suffocated.

I want to be so filled with The Spirit that people can’t leave a conversation with me without thinking about Jesus.
I want to be so focused on loving people with the love of Jesus that I don’t have time for comment wars or heated debates. I want to be more worried about how I treat the people I disagree with than I am about how much I disagree with them. I want the first question to come to mind when met with someone I fundamentally disagree with to be, “How can I love this person like Jesus does?” When people bring me up in conversation, I hope to God they don’t immediately think of where I stand on a political issue. I pray to be the kind of person known for making Him known.

Above all else, love.
Above all else, treat people the way Jesus would treat them.
Above all else, spend your life doing what matters.
Spend it studying His word. Spend it worshipping. Spend it serving other people. Spend it learning and growing in your knowledge and love for Christ. Make your life so about Him that it can’t be about you. Be so concerned with speaking the way that God wants you to speak, that you can’t get caught up in being right and proving someone else wrong.
Because being a Christian is more important than being a Republican. It’s more important that being a Democrat. It’s more important than the Right and the Left. Because being a Christian isn’t about any of those things at all, not even a little. Being a Christian is about Jesus. It’s about love.
This is not to say don’t be informed or have opinions. This is not to say that the world isn’t frustrating and we won’t get annoyed and angry at the people we disagree with. This is to say that if any of that takes place before a life filled with the Spirit of God, there’s an issue. There’s an issue when Christians are considered to be the most judgmental, insensitive group of people.

We were made for more than this.

Don’t be so caught up in your own conspiracies that you miss the chance to be a witness to someone else.

And above all else, love one another.
It’s what He wanted.

-AC