Religious nut won't stop misquoting scriptures, until this happened...

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The bait headline got you, didn't it? Yeah, I dislike such sensational stuff just as much as you do. Take that, upworthy.com!

Seriously, the titular nut is me. That's how off-putting I am, firing off smart-alecky replies when Christian friends approach me for a listening ear. I wonder how many people I've driven away from genuine and lasting friendship because of my behaviour.

This morning's Our Daily Bread reading is a timely reminder of how Christians can quote verses out of context, and sometimes this is disastrous on friendships, especially when a person is in anguish and the last thing he wants is someone throwing verses at him.

"God never gives us more than we can handle." Do you hear this often from Christian friends who are trying to comfort people in grief? Perhaps you were at the receiving end during a low point in your life? Well, this quote is not found in most English translations of the Bible. The foundation for this quote is 1 Corinthians 10:13, "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." Reading that verse in its context, Paul was addressing the issue of temptation, not suffering. God provides a way out of temptation, not necessarily suffering.

We may view temptations as ethical cross-roads, with moral choices to be made. Very often, suffering may not present such choices. An appropriate response when a friend in anguish draws near is perhaps that suggested by Paul in his letter to the Romans, "...weep with them that weep." When Lazarus died the first time, my Lord Jesus wept with the dead man's family. Surely He knew that He was to raise Lazarus back to life in a while, but He still wept with Mary and Martha. If you have a friend who is suffering now, I pray you will be there with him. We are called to love, not judgement.

On the road to Damascus

This weekend marks twenty years since my baptism as a follower of Christ, and if I look back even further to 1984, thirty years since that rain-soaked December night when I stepped forward to acknowledge my need for Him. If there's one thing I learned from these three decades, it's that years do not make a man wise. A cynical friend once quipped, after we had attended one too many talks at a pretentious conference, "So the speaker has twenty years of experience? Maybe twenty times of the same one-year experience." My friend could well have been talking about me, a person still very much lost after thirty years of following Jesus.

Perhaps the expression 'kicking against the pricks' is apt here. It seems such a difficult thing relying on Christ, and not my own understanding, especially when nothing has happened over the past eight months after leaving a cushy job, all the while resisting the Lord's attempt at steering this stubborn ox. Where am I going, following Jesus? If His yoke is easy and His burden light, surely then I am a long way off from following Him, and learning from Him.

Still blind and clueless on the road to Damascus.