Cactus People

In a comment to what Roger said in a post on “Giving up belief in God, in order to find God.” My reaction was that I have rather lost faith in people (a current face of God) than having to lose faith in God Himself. Over the Easter weekend I was confronted, time and time again, on how Christ could have died for our sins – and sorry to show a bit of my bad side – especially how he could have died for people that doesn’t want anything to do with Him, or people who say that they are Christians but not living that way (to me it is like the most frequent form of blasphemy)!

And without telling any of the locals about these thoughts – I mostly aired them on the web in the past week, the reverend – who is my mentor at this church – said (while talking to adults in the confirmation class) that a lot of people call churchgoers hypocrites (holding myself back from shouting “AMEN!”), but that we should realise that all of us are saved by grace and in different stages in our walk with God. We aren’t all exactly on the same page, but we attend the same sermons and belong to the same congregation.

I remembered the earlier words in a post on being church, that being church is a messy business. I realised that, like the others, I am also saved by grace, that I am too in a process of trying to be more like the face of Christ – sometimes with success and sometimes without. Loving your neighbour isn’t easy, loving him like you love yourself is even less! But we need to do this, we have to because on the same grounds that I deserve to be saved, so does he (and don’t worry I’m not suicidal – but with the stupid stuff that I do sometimes, I need to realise that it was only by grace that I’m saved). It is only by grace that the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and that we can’t live without God.

 

On seeing this picture I realised how empty our lives would be if we won’t even give the time of day to some people – at least the cactus has some colour! Hugging a cactus will be painful (and it’s so true that we get hurt most by fellow Christians), but we need to embrace the cacti in our lives – that is what Jesus did (speaking to the Pharisees and Sadducees), they were the church people! They were the people who caused His death, but Jesus even embraced them (John 3) even though He knew that He will be killed by them. He laid down His life for cactus people (people like you and me), are we willing to do the same?