Unka Glen

Anonymous asked: What should I do when Christians seem to dislike me? It’s not anything so drastic, it’s more like a coldness in their manner towards me. It’s hard not to feel bitter when I’m clearly making an effort to know them better. And I just can’t ignore them even if I wanted to. I want us to be one big happy family of loving fellowship. Should I just pray for their hearts to soften? Is there a more active step I can take? Thank you!!

Unka Glen answered: Well, in order to fix the problem, we need to know where the problem is coming from. So let’s look at the possible causes.

Possible Cause #1 You’ve committed some kind of taboo sin. Christians really get wound up about certain sins, and it’s not the sins that get a special emphasis in scripture. In fact, they can take some sins that are only mentioned two are three times in scripture, and give them more emphasis than stuff that’s mentioned on nearly every page of the Bible. That is to say, you can be as greedy as you want, no problem, but mention a lack of judgmental attitude towards homosexuals, and you might just get the cold shoulder.

Solution: You’re in a church with mixed up priorities, and it’s time to move on.

Possible Cause #2 You’ve begun serving the Lord in some bold and outspoken way. For some weird reason I’ve never understood, a significant percentage of Christians feel threatened around someone who is doing something to serve the Lord in a way that might make them look bad by comparison. Some people develop their Christian identity around being the most committed Christian in the room, if you walk in the room and that stops being true, those people will react negatively.

Solution: You’re in a church full of insecure people, and it’s time to move on.

Possible Cause #3  You have a really cold church. I’ve been in churches where, for some reason, the people were colder than two day old penguin turds. I’ve got no idea why, but some churches are like that. And if you aren’t in leadership in those churches, then this isn’t your problem to fix.

Solution: You’re in a dead church, and it’s time to move on.

…It’s true enough that churches are filled with imperfect people like you and me who are bound to drift into all kinds of uncool behavior, but that’s a pastors responsibility to deal with. Your responsibility is to get yourself into some good fellowship. If you can’t get that going where you are, it’s time to be a blessing to others where it’ll do some good.

I’m amazed. I mean, give credit where credit is due. You can really influence us, getting us to answer to the way you turn around a single word. And it seems like your current word of choice is: purity. The clear Biblical concept of purity is that NOTHING in nature is pure, and we must subject ourselves to a purification process. We submit to the refiner’s fire that yields pure gold. 

But you’ve redefined purity as something we’re born with, like a new pair of shoes we have to keep from getting scuffed, as opposed to the fruit of something that we work through in our relationship with God. Only your little red butt could come up with something so puritanical, pseudo-religious, and just downright unrealistic. Worse still, you’ve turned all this into some kind of idol, one that has the power to create or destroy good relationships.

David said, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts”. Those of us bold enough to pray that prayer, find out soon enough that we aren’t pure. The heat of the refiner’s fire brings what is impure to the surface. We rid ourselves of those things and count ourselves happy to be free, searching for the next impure thing to remove. This process may be never-ending, but it is a joyful one, or at least, one that leads to joy and freedom.

I guess you wouldn’t know anything about freedom and joy, huh?

In Jesus name, 

Me

Psalm 66:10; Isaiah 48:10; Daniel 12:10; 1 Peter 1:7

this-soliloquy asked: My Muslim friend was showing me videos of a muslim lecturer and theologian trying to disprove Christianity because she wanted to hear my input. In one video, he was talking of a muslim tennis player who wore non-conservative clothing, and how this woman tennis player was giving a bad name to Islam, but then he turned to slander a Christian tennis player who also wore short skirts. He then quoted 1 timothy 2:9, and my friend who was showing me the video questioned why i don’t cover up my entire body from head to toe and why i wear jewelry. i wasnt sure how to answer her. How can I explain to her about what Paul really meant? [edited for length]

Unka Glen answered: I guess it’s no surprise to discover that you can’t count on a Muslim lecturer to give a proper breakdown of scripture, but your favorite Internet Uncle is all over it like ugly on a gorilla. Here are the two verses in question: “Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, 10 but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works.” (1 Timothy 2:9-10)

Okay, first, let’s get on the hair braiding issue. Back in Biblical times, if you were real rich, you might have all your gold melted down into gold rings. You could then braid those rings into your wife’s hair, and parade her around, to show everyone how rich you were. And since the gold was braided in, it made it hard to steal. True, that wouldn’t always work in the ‘hood, because some of those hairdos are, well, unbeweaveable, but never mind that, you get the idea.

Anyway, Paul goes on to use two Greek words to describe the clothing that Christian women should wear. The first is aidos, and it’s believed to be a derived from the word eido, meaning to have downcast eyes. The prefix “a” is a negative, so aidos is thought to refer to something you wouldn’t be embarrassed of. While aidos is often translated into the English word “modesty”, I think a more elaborate and accurate way of putting it might be: clothes that don’t make people ashamed to be seen with you.

The other word used to describe this clothing is “sophrosune”. That word is really cool. It comes from the word sphron, meaning sanity. It means to be sober, moderate, and fitting for the situation. It’s often translated in English as “decent” or “self controlled”, but again, if you were to expand it a bit, you might say: clothes that don’t look like you were out of your mind or drunk when you got dressed. Something like that.

The key element in the question is: why aren’t we obeying specific commands about not wearing certain types of clothes? The answer is, we aren’t being given specific commands about certain types of clothes. We’re being given a general guideline to avoid dressing like we’re on crack, and leave the bling at home. Moderation is the word used here, and that says to me: neither extreme, slutty, or covered head-to-toe, is fitting.

I’ll give you two additional reasons why we don’t cover our women, 1) anyone in the world with an internet connection can see naked women anytime they want, and 2) if I told my dearly departed Grandma that she had to wear a bedsheet to church, she would have immediately cut off my apple pie supply, and I don’t care if all the Muslims in the world don’t get it, I got nothing to say about Grandma’s floral print dress she sewed herself, the somewhat obvious faux pearls, and her up-do from the beauty parlor. If you don’t like it, YOU tell her.