A Fine Line

Greetings from late night motherhood! I have Friends Season 2 streaming in the background, my husband is snoring and has to wake up in 4 hours to go to work, and my wet hair is tied up in a slightly mildewy microfiber towel. Our house just went on the market and my kids are both potty training. My husband and I are alternating work hours and childcare, working about 75 hours a week between us these days!

So it's a perfect time to write a blog entry. Culturally, that is!

I don't know about you but my heart is stirred almost daily by sad or touching stories, or shows like Parenthood re-runs and This Is Us. News about war on other continents or heroic stories of people with disabilities overcoming amazing odds. Raising a child on the autism spectrum and being hormonal from having two babies definitely softens my heart. I can barely shop at certain stores because I know they take advantage of horribly underpaid factory workers across the ocean.

I'm amazed at how empathetic our culture has quickly become. It is definitely in my favor as an autism mom. But it is not always in my favor as one who loves Jesus. Because loving Jesus involves not loving what he says is bad.

There is a fine line between having empathy for the abuses that plague humanity, for championing the cause of the underdog, for creating awareness, and drowning in the emotional weight of the struggle so much that you can no longer see or believe in God's power, sovereignty, mercy and mystery. In fact, the only way I didn't drown was because God drew me back to his revelation of himself which he conveniently had written down in the Bible.

I mean it. Passages which tell me that those who reject God will face his wrath are very sobering and powerful. There are no two ways to read those verses and they are conveniently not read very often. But they are not obscure or rare in Scripture by any means.

Letters from the apostles of Jesus tell Christians that humanity has deliberately ignored God's law of loving neighbor and of following God's design for sex. They say that people who applaud immorality will face his wrath. They say that Christians should not partner with people who adore lust. They condemn deceitful teachers who tempt people away from the gospel in no uncertain terms. Peter uses words such as "condemnation", "destruction", and "judgment" to describe the future of those who lure Christians away from holiness and self-control.

These passages of Scripture are inescapable and very very very difficult to read in any other light.

Trust me, I've actually tried! While suffering my fair share of doubt and spiritual instability, I would read the internet's latest thoughts on how evangelicalism has failed the world (see my thoughts on that here). I could barely enjoy reading the Bible at all for a majority of my 20's. It seemed every week another Bible college grad had succumbed to the ever-increasing anti-evangelical rhetoric.

But in recent years God has grabbed ahold of my heart, strengthened my faith in his word, and allowed me to divorce myself from the power of emotionally-charged arguments that, at times, are theologically and biblically illiterate. He opened my eyes to the ways that my thoughts had crossed the line between empathy and rebellion against God himself. Practically, he helped me dissect the complex issues around words and people groups and culture and politics.

So it is from that renewed heart that I desire to write to my friends who call themselves Christians. It scares me to see that my brothers and sisters in Christ can, like myself, become intimidated by and feel trapped under the logic of our culture. But nothing and no one should claim our heart's authority more than God - no teacher or famous person or film.

There is a fine line between empathy for mankind and desperation for the applause of mankind. And Jesus, through the power of God's word, is truly the only one who can help us see that line. Because our current culture will never help a Christian with that.