• pigduck
• Oct 27,2006
• In: Rants

Restoration, is that the best word out there?

It’s 3am.

I had so much trouble connecting to the Internet today. I should not go into another Streamyx rant.

Tonight, I didn’t know we had bible study. God has a way with these things. I got a call tonight and I don’t usually get calls so it’s quite extraordinary the timing of these things. It’s God, I tell ya.

There was an interesting speaker tonight. He spoke of how he lives for Christ and in my opinion, it is questionable but downright honorable. Pretty amazing really. Very adventurous of him.

He mentioned we should reach out to the “unreachables” of our land. They are pretty “untouchable” too because if they were to accept Christ, they would be deemed an apostate. At the same time, due to the numerous warnings by our government over the years, we’ve learned that approaching these people could mean we vanishing without a trace if we were not careful.

We are living among the ‘harvest’ yet we are not integrating with them or gel-ing with them. I have been thinking of this recently. My circle of friends is not wide and it ain’t a multi-racial or multi-cultural either.

I am listening to Mariah’s “I Still Believe” Morales Remix and it is hard for me to concentrate on what I’m writing and considering the time, I apologise if I make no sense whatsoever. The remix is freakin’ fantastic!

Some people have the heart for these people. Most of us don’t want to ‘rock the boat’ in fear that we become like them or we lose more of our rights or endanger our lives. I fear the prospect of it.

Jesus Christ when He roamed the earth made an impact because He reached out to those that society did not accept. Prostitutes and tax collectors… People hated them with a vengeance and thought they were unclean. Even His disciples wondered what was wrong with Jesus when he approached such people.

It has become the case that Christianity has become exclusive. It doesn’t just happen here but in a lot of countries where we ‘become’ a Christian to hang out with the in-crowd, to be included, to be part of a cool ‘country club’ of sorts with benefits - support, love, kindness, generosity - not many country clubs boast such perks.

The Christians who are part of the club exclude certain people they don’t think are worthy to be Christian which goes against what Jesus did while He walked the earth. We don’t accept these people, we ‘help’ them, we ‘restore’ them - these people ‘need saving’.

The people I refer to here include drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, etc etc.

Some times, we go to the extent of forgetting that such people exist in order to live in a world that we think is liveable but such people do exist, like orphans, disable and dysfunctional people and the list goes on. We try to ignore what we think is ugly. We see it history, people cast into ‘homes’ or institution, forgotten and left to fester.

But Jesus’s love surpassed all the barriers. He ate with the tax collectors and prostitutes. He hung out with them. To me, that’s a sign of respect. He treated them equally.

I shall focus on a culture that gets sidelined often. The homosexuals. I should think of a better word or term for them here. I’m not a very politically correct person. I shall refer to them as the LBGT (Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Gay and Transvestite).

The other day I think I talked about how Christians thought of the LBGTs. Somehow, they roped in the church’s stance on such issues when I wasn’t looking at that aspect at all. It was more of a personal question. How would we react? We can’t pass it off to the church to deal with… I know God’s love is great and this means that such people are also accepted and forgiven by God. Isn’t God just amazing? I mean, our attempts to emulate Christ fall short of how He really lived. Maybe at the time, I didn’t convey it as a personal question but I want to now. How would we treat such people if we found out they were LBGT?

What irked me during the conversation was the word - “restore”. That word was brought up because they wanted to make a point that the church would restore such people or correct them or… there’s another word that they use for such things. It means brainwashing them in a sense… but I am sure they did not mean this. You know, if you take the wrong path, they send you away to get realigned to the ‘right way’.

I don’t like the word ‘restore’. It means these people have something missing or are wrong in some way. You don’t restore adulterers or people who’ve taken on second wives or who are divorced. Well, I guess we do restore adulterers so they don’t do it again but people who are divorced or who have two families, how do you ‘restore’ such cases? We kind of accept it. A man divorces his wife and remarries someone 20 years his junior… and starts a family with her. He attends church with his second family and somehow, it seems ok.

I read an article the other day that spoke of how the church needs to be relevant today. In the US, there are more divorced couples than married ones. This means that the church needs to start looking into broken families and highlighting their plights. Or single moms who struggle or dysfunctional family relationships. The church needs to stop painting a picture of the ‘average’ family - two smiling children, a pretty wife and a handsome husband. That’s way too 1950s. Sounds like the Mormons…:P

We are pretty ok when adulterers walk into chuch premises. Even divorced people. They look normal enough… even inconspicuous. But if LBGT people walk in, lo and behold, I can imagine people feeling vulnerable, afraid and fearful of them. The LBGTs are harmless yet our heart skips a beat just thinking about it or Lord forbid, that we become friends with them. We feel that they’re ’sin’ will rub off on us.

Why do the LBGTs need to be restored? Can’t we accept them and love them just as they are? All of us are flawed. Can’t they continue their lives, living in their ’sin’? There’s no such thing as acceptable sin. Sin is sin, isn’t it? There’s no ranks for sin. I am a sinner. I sin everyday. Impure thoughts, grouses, tempers, uncouth words and action, all is sin. Sure, I can clothe myself and pretend like I’m not that much of a sinner. Just because LBGTs flaunt it by being open doesn’t mean they’re sin is worse than mine.

But redemption is there for us yet we withold it from people who need it just as much as we do.

There was this one time, I expressed my heart for celebrities. They need prayer too. They need to hear what God has to say. I think people thought I was warped. It’s ok. But they chose their life and some times they lose the plot. They do things that reveal that they are direction-less and they seek ‘the way’ but maybe no one is reaching out to them.

Likewise for the LBGTs. Christians walk with their nose up in the air believing that they are better than a lot of people. We sneer at others who are not like us. We sin in the process and can point out other people’s faults so easily and not our look at ourselves before doing so. I’m guilty of this too.

When restoration was mentioned, they said that once these people see the light, they will do the right thing and God will correct them. What if they don’t want to be corrected? You don’t ask a leopard to change his spots. You don’t ask a man to dump his new wife and kids to go back to the old ones.

LBGTs go through a lot too. Besides struggling with acceptance and going through the transition and upheavals of ‘coming out’ they definitely question how they became like so in the first place. Were they born like that? Why were they born into it? Somehow, I don’t think they are. I believe it is the conditioning of their past and their upbringing that creates them.

I guess we have to find a way to accept them. I was going through my adsense and found a website that tries to reconciliate the idea of Christians and LBGTS. I haven’t read through any of their resources yet. I just clicked on the link tonight and flicked through the pages. Eyes are way too tired to read any of the text.

If I typed when I was more awake, I think I’d make more sense.

So maybe it’s time to reach out to such people. It’s time to accept those who are really seeking Jesus Christ and His love… God’ll touch them and it’s up to Him whether they want to change or not. We can’t force them to change. That’s God’s business. We’re meant to embrace them and bring them into our fold. A church is meant to be a safe haven for people with varying degrees of oddness…

Anyway, it’s late. Till tomorrow… such a challenge posed tonight. I wonder if I’ll live to what I’ve written. I might just become a hypocrite. Who knows.