Note from “A Friend”

“A friend” — someone claiming to be a former associate of my older brother — left a comment on my post, “The Healing Heart,” which requires a response from me. In part, the comment says:

I just wanted you to know that although I don’t agree with your lifestyle I still believe you are a wonderful person. I do not believe God changes his laws to suit lifestyles. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever … I’m not leaving my name or anything because this is not intended to be turned into an argument or anything. I just wanted to write what God laid on my heart.

Dear “Friend,”

First, a word about tone. I don’t think you intended your comment to be judgmental or mean-spirited. I’m not angry. I do not intend to be ugly to you, and I do not want to pick a fight. Instead, I want to be calm, straightforward, and frank.

That said: I’m someone who choses to share his life, his convictions, his conclusions, and his faith in a very public forum. I hope someday you’ll feel strongly enough about your own beliefs to “own” them by attaching your name to them. A comment like yours from someone with a name is one thing; a comment like yours from a shadowy figure who refuses to name himself comes across as more than a little creepy.

I’ve addressed the whole issue of “my lifestyle” many times before. If you haven’t read those posts, I hope you will. Here, I will only say this: you might spend some time considering what kind of spirit makes a person feel that announcing of his or her agreement with lives of others is acceptable, justified, or necessary?

I assure you I have no problem accepting the laws of God. I do believe, however, that imperfect human beings with a necessarily limited understanding of God’s will are able — and are even very likely — to misread, misinterpret, misunderstand or misapply the Word of God.

As a result, I’ve little patience with people who run around proclaiming what God thinks, telling others what God says, or quoting carefully selected passage from God’s book, or sharing what God has laid on their hearts. I don’t need other people to tell me what God is, or what God is like, or what God says, or what God has on God’s mind. You’ll pardon me if I prefer to get God’s insights and instructions for myself, direct from the Source, without you or anyone else as an intermediary.

In your comment, you position yourself as someone who talks to God, and who gets answers. Perhaps it is time to trust that others, too, are having these conversations … and that, if you want your own claim of conversations with God to be taken seriously, you must also accept that others are having their own conversations with God, as well.

in short: perhaps it’s time for everyone to stop expressing their approval or disapproval of the lives of others, stop speaking for God, stop judging the quality and correctness of other people’s relationships with God, start focusing on their own relationship with the Lord … and start allowing others to do the same.