Believe it or not, sometimes people irritate me. Maybe it’s the person who’s taking FOREVER in the line in front of me, or the people who always have to ask needless questions or feel the need to personally reaffirm everything a speaker has to say. The people who drive like idiots and those who go too slow; but no one can irritate me more than Christian people.

Let me spell this out first. I love God, and I love his people, but more often than not I want to smack them in the back of the head. We are so intolerant as a church of others with a differing view. I’m the first to stand up and say I used to be one of them, but man, I had no idea how annoying it was.

So Tom started promoting www.GLCCAlumni.com in an effort to get alumni to come, and as I told him, they have. Many from our very own blogging community have traveled over there for a more inter-active experience, and as is our nature, we have carried on as we normally would, we are still young after all (yes, I know I’m thirty now, but dang it, I’m still young, honest… no really, I am).

Tom or someone posted about the standard toilet seat positioning. Now, any person who’s willing to be honest knows that we have all had this discussion at one time or another with various different people. View points vary based on gender and up bringing, and that’s okay. So in the middle of it, this guy decides to post something along the lines of, “if all the discussing is going to be this unnecessary, then perhaps this board is unnecessary.” Give me a freakin’ break!

At what age do you forget that life is more than the essential? Where has all the enjoyment gone in their lives? If a man cannot discuss with others his frustration of having to put the seat down so that someone else doesn’t fall in, then what has the church come to? Do you think Jesus sat around and told fart jokes with Peter & John. Damn straight! These were fishermen, working men.

Who were the people most attracted to Jesus? Oh, lets see, drunks, tax collectors, whores, all these people flocked to Jesus. I have to imagine that part of it was he was enjoyable company, his first miracle was with wine, and we’re not talking the cheap stuff either.

When did we get it in our heads that books like The Cat and Hat should be tossed out because of the bad lessons that it teaches our children (true story), that sex is only having children (and that the bedroom is the only place to do it), that things that aren’t overtly good must therefore be overtly evil.

Where is the freedom in Christ? How can someone on www.andrew-peterson.com even post a topic like, “How can any Christian vote for John Kerry?”. If I want to let people know that I’m a Gemini, then dang it people, I’m a Gemini (and all that implies). I watch the Simpsons, South Park, and shows on MTV. I listen to both secular and Christian music. I’ll probably watch Ellen Degeneres as Oh God just as I watched George Burns and Alanis Morissette. I used to get free cable. I speed, but I will not stand for someone parking in handicap parking.

Perhaps I’m being a hypocrite by saying that I cannot tolerate intolerance, but I cannot. I only hate racists as well, I am the walking paradox. Some of you reading might be guilty of these things, some of you reading might be the very people I am mentioning indirectly, but no matter the case, knock it off.

How you view the world is your own. You may think that everything I do or someone else is totally wrong, and that we are of the devil. Just remember that thinking doesn’t make it so. So gang, open your eyes, open your mind, and shut your mouths. As I posted on www.GLCCAlumni.com – “In the essentials unity (understand too that just because you say it’s essential doesn’t make it so), in the non-essentials liberty (that means freedom, that means my view doesn’t have to be the same as yours), but in all things love.”

Let me leave you with another great song from Dividing the Plunder:

Perimeter of Me
Tasha Golden

Your wind is mighty – it bends the backs of trees
Moves among the fields along these Pennsylvania streets
We’ve come to know as highways – they can take us anywhere
But all we know is where we’re going
And how fast we’re getting there

Well, the world outside my window is shaming me again
With the things I haven’t seen cause I’ve been writing about them
The sky’s a waiting witness to the truth I would possess
But I’ve forgotten all its mystery in my quest for second best

CHORUS:
And I want to live with wider eyes,
There’s far too much to see
To think of nothing else
But where I’ve been and where I’ll be
I’ve been longing for the freedom
That is waiting silently
In the life that’s just beyond the small
Perimeter of me

Your rain is mighty, it weathers mountainsides
It raises the Ohio ’til it looks a mile wide
And I think that I have crossed it on this bridge a thousand times
And haven’t even seen Your river from the corner of my eyes

Well, I’m frightened by how easy it can be to live so long
Going from one thing to the next thing,
To the next ’til months have gone
And you realize you have really not done anything at all -
At night you fall asleep believing
You’ve just climbed so you could fall…

CHORUS

And I don’t believe that who I am
Is something I can find
It’s whatever I create
With what I do with all my time
It’s who I choose to love
With all my heart and strength and mind -
And whether I believe that what I have
Is really mine…

CHORUS