Blood on our hand's

                                                Your eyes are closed when you're praying
                                                You sing right along with the band
                                                You shine up your shoes for services
                                                There's blood on your hands

                                                                              -Jon Forman


                                I can still feel the eyes of the Pharisees in the pews; Staring and watching my every waking movement. My appearance may be the reason for the stares. I am a bearded, tattooed and homeless looking man. I wasn't dressed in a suit or tie. I was wearing a comfortable combination of my usual jeans and t-shirt. My shirt at the time had the statement,"Jesus Loves Porn Stars" on the front. I had a small bible that happened to be a different translation than KJV, and it finally hit me. I was a different breed from this particular farm of people. I had tattoos down my arms and no sense of  proper "church" etiquette or manners. The encounters I experienced in this small congregation forever shaped the way I view people of my faith. 

                           Words that enter the world from our mouth carry an enormous amount of weight. The bible says that the words we say need to build up in grace, not destroy.(Ephesians 4:29) I was chatting with a woman I have only known shortly and the subject of what I believe came up. I told her my theological thoughts on ghosts, heaven, hell and more. She looked at me with a serious face and heavy heart and said,"A Christian in my life said that she saw the devil in me. Ever since then I have excepted that I am going to hell no matter what." This shook me to my core. How could this have happened?  As people made in the image of God we do a inadequate of showing his grace. We wreck and ruin the image of the blood soaked cross when we choose to damn people instead of love them. The bible says that we can do lots of work for God's glory but if we don't do this in the spirit of love we are as useful as a loud drum cymbal being hit until our eardrums refuse to function.(1 Corinthians 13) We can say that God died for the particular person that you are speaking to but if our actions are not purely out of love but of a religious practice; Then we are wasting our breath. The bible goes on to say that if we do not love, we do not know because God is love. Love should be in every word we say and every action we do.

                           Another occasion that comes to mind in my interaction with religious folk is another one that affected me personally. Me and a close relative were leaving a store and I saw someone I knew from my time at another church I had attended. I kindly uttered the word, "hi" and no response came back. I was completely ignored by a brother in Christ and I didn't know what to do. I told me relative what had happened and he said,"That's the reason I don't go to church."  What the religious people I mentioned in my opening thoughts don't realize is that they are the reason their church is dying. I genuinely think that a vast percentage of non-believers would come to know the God we trust in if we were the image bearers we are supposed to be. We can stand in the pulpit, sit in the pews, and drink of the communion grape juice every single week of our lives until we die and it wouldn't have an impact in the vast scheme of things. The place to truly experience God is in the trenches. God is in the slums and in the houses of the broken hearted. These people don't need religion, they need a real relationship with the God who loves them more than anything we can comprehend. Religion is a path to a certain death and its easy to fall into the comfortable. If it's comfortable, it's not worthy of the short time we have left on this planet.

                            In closing I want to say that we as sinners all have blood on our hands. What we can't do is put on a show and pretend that our lies are a little less evil than anything "other" people can do. Sins are equal in their ability to send us to the same place no matter the sin we have chosen to commit. We need to start living in love and making amends to people we may have hurt with our words of hate and religion.


P.S. Check out my sisters Blog currently on the same subject as this post. Her experiences are more in depth than mine so they are definitely worthy of you're time. (www.mire2lotus.wordpress.com)
P.S.S.http://youtu.be/6uE1l75aiZc
P.S.S.S.@learninhowtodie on twitter. God Bless!