It's a mad, mad, mad world

I've discovered that I have the real possibility of becoming an AWM soon. Understand, I don't want to be angry. I don't want to be conservative even. I want to be able to take risks, bring people into a loving relationship with Jesus. But all that is happening today across this country is a bit much to understand in one big gulp.

I'm sorry, but I might not be able to take this much longer. 

So, I'm becoming an AWM. Not a Trump AWM. That one still is bouncing around my brain. No, I'm an AWM who is having to deal with change that he never imagined. It's happening so quickly, at least as it seems to me, that it is threatening whole fragments of our culture. It really is. 

I'm angry that if I mention someone going to the bathroom they were born to go to this is a discriminatory action on my part. I'm so dang old that the thought never occurred to me that going to the bathroom would become such a thing. ISIS is killing Christians for being Christians and we are hung up in a bathroom squabble. In what world is it okay for elementary school bathrooms to let boys go to girls and girls go to boys facilities? I mean really. I don't get that. Sorry.

I'm angry that despite trying my best efforts, I can't understand what's happening in my denomination. We're stuck. We can't go forward, or backward even. Just stuck in the middle with you.

I'm angry that I, we, can't all get together on, well, anything. I ain't much into protesting, and I sure don't like to be protested against. I'm fallible, I'm full of sin, I fall. I allow others to sin, fall, fail. I'd love for the whole world to be Christian, but right now I'm not even sure how to tell anyone I meet about what Christian is and what it's not because the line someone drew in the sand for me keeps getting rubbed out.

I'm angry that I am feeling more like Clint Eastwood talking to a chair every day, or telling someone to get off his lawn, and I never wanted to be that.

I'm angry that anyone looking at the United Methodist policy-making conference would simply keep walking by even if they could help or they needed help. Why? We're a dumpster fire, and which side of an argument you come up on is only part of the picture.

I'm angered that trying to be in the middle, trying to be helpful and true to the Gospel is about as easy and putting the Titanic in a bathtub.

Oh, but there's hope. There really is. The writer of Hebrews tells us, "For God is not unjust; he will not overlook your work and the love that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do."

Oh, those are comforting words. 
Love
show
his sake
serve.

Nothing in that statement tends to make me think of me and my wants. Nothing in that statement makes me think that the future is hopeless. Nah. Instead I feel a kindred feeling with those who disagree with me. I feel a re-start coming. I pray. I keep washing myself in the waters of baptism and keep putting the bread of life in me.

It all comes down to one man dying on one cross to save the world. All this other stuff is just flotsam in the river.

My late pal Rich Mullins said it this way: "People want to know God's will for them. In one of his most explicit statements on the subject, Christ said, 'I come that you might have life and have it abundantly.' One day it won't make any difference how many albums I sold, but I will give account of my life to God. What I think He'll be most pleased with is to see that we truly lived, that we were the person He created us to be."

Perhaps my anger just needs a good dunking. I'll always be a WM, but something tells me that my anger will go away soon.