rohlfing family update!!!
Well summer is here! The end of the school year was crazy as usual, and it’s nice to be in the full swing of summer. Here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to and are currently doing!
Did I mention that summer is here? This means less rain, more sun, leaves on trees, grilling, frisbee, and yes, T-Ball [ see the following]…
honest struggle…
had a very refreshing conversation 2 nights ago.
how to get into this… I had what was both a sad and encouraging discussion with a fella the other night. i’m not sure how it all developed or ended up where it ended up [my memory is just plain horrible], but it was both confirming as it relates to my fears as to the state of Christianity and at the same time hopeful for the struggle of people searching for truth and refusing to just buy the standard party line.
ask 100 people on the street, “What is your impression of Christians and Christianity?”
when you undertake this effort i’ve found that basically you get 2 schools of thought with only the rare outliers.
camp a - the not Christian folks, and the largest group (70%) - this camp here basically lays out the standard fare: Christians are critical, judgmental, proud, arrogant, closed minded, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-art, simple minded, boring, boring, boring people.
camp b - the Christians, smaller group (25%) - this group, doing an exercise in self evaluation do as most self-evaluating groups do and give themselves high marks across the board. Christians are loving, sacrificing, giving, humble, mission oriented people.
camp c - the self-critical Christians - (5%) - this group, also doing an exercise in self evaluation tend to have a much more critical evaluation on the state of affairs in the Christian world. Their evaluations work out to be a mirror of group a, but with a problem not lying in the basic tenets of what Christianity is, but rather what it has become in it’s formalized form and in its practice by its members.
so back to this conversation… it was really good… talking about the honest hard questions in this screwed up world. and those honest hard questions that genuinely intersect peoples lives, like why did my daughter, an innocent, good, caring person die of leukemia and Charles Manson and a plethora of others live on, many in luxury and at the very least enjoying LIFE. God how can this be?
this won’t be a foray into those questions, but rather an acknowledgment that yeah, that stuff STINKS!! that stuff hurts and confuses and embitters people. and what people don’t need in that circumstance is a bible verse patch to put on it. people need to express their hurt, be listened to, be empathized with, be genuinely cared for. of course there comes the moments where the truth needs to be interjected and wrestled through, but as Christians we’re all too well known for the “slap a Bible verse on it” way of counseling and not real well known for the “really listen to someone, cry with them, give them a hug and help care for them” kind of counseling.
it was good to listen to this guy. to be on his side, because I am on his side. there are real hurts there, things that shouldn’t be glanced over, or minimized, but that need to be really wrestled through and reconciled between this man and God. otherwise it’s just pretend religion. pretend faith.
and pretend faith catches up to us eventually and leaves us in even worse shape than when we started.
and yes, I probably am in that 5% group c. it’s sad to me to see what Christians are known for and not known for these days. how much of it relates back to our Lord. to his life and ministry, his words and actions and example. my hope is that we, that i, can get back to those things, root and ground ourselves in them.
and maybe even to begin to walk the walk…
