I find myself in a weird place. I’m not supposed to offend people with my faith. Okay. I’d like to not offend people at all. However, that does leave a person in an odd place. If, by my faith, something is a sin, and I truly believed my faith, I should call a spade, a spade. Right? Unless it is a sin. Then I’m just supposed to love them? I don’t want them to change?
The new mantra (with which I don’t disagree) is we need to love people into the faith. What if they don’t want to be loved into the faith? There’s the rub. If I believe that by not believing they are destined for anything other than the Heaven (i.e., afterlife), why would I leave it (or them) alone?
These are, frankly, all unanswerable questions. Plenty of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus have their answers to those questions. It still leaves me cold and sad. I love these people. I want them to be with me.
I’m not even sure why I’m writing this post, to be honest. I just feel the need to say something. I love you. I want you to spend eternity with God, me, and who knows who else? If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t want you to be there. Yet, in the spirit of not offending, I’m now relegated to the dustbins of friendship.
Of course, someone will say, well, they weren’t much of a friend, were they? It isn’t about them being a friend. It is about me being a friend.