Summer@Home: I'm a Bad Christian

Confession: I make Christians blush.

I find this terribly amusing since I am one.

But sometimes I don't act like it. And that's a good thing. At least in my over-rationalizing mind it is.

I have many dear, amazing, wonderful, godly, funny, sweet Christian friends who have been Christians all their lives. Who have never known a life of debauchery and deep personal sin and been heartbroken over it. That is not to say they haven't had struggles. I know they have ... struggles I'm not sure I could handle. Struggles they could only handle because of their faith. But our life stories, while they ended up at the same place, had very different paths.

So sometimes, frankly, I identify with non-Christians more readily than Christians.  

Didn't Jesus dine with tax collectors and prostitutes?

Kind of like when I was under 30 and a single mom. I identified more with the "mid-singles" group at church than I did the "young singles" group. While my age classified me as one, my life didn't.

I like friends that I can laugh with, til wine squirts out our noses.

Oh, crud. I just admitted that I drink wine. (And beer. And sangria. Oh, golly, do I like a good sangria. Read all about it here.)

Does that make me a bad Christian?




I sure hope not.

And does it make me a bad Christian that I tend to gravitate to other shady ladies like myself? If we were in Catholic school, we'd be the ones rolling up the waistbands of our skirts to shorten them once we left the house. Or putting on makeup in the bathroom. Or hiding Cosmo inside our Church History textbook.

Instead, in our adult world, we're just the ones joking that we should be able to bring alcohol to our kids' Saturday baseball games. (You know, I've been told that beer in a water bottle really does look like lemon-lime Gatorade.) And we joke about the noises men make and the messes our  kids make and laugh at people who take everything too seriously.

But some of these black sheep of the Christian faith are also some of the most godly women I know. They will drop to their knees in a heartbeat to pray for someone who needs it. They will bring a casserole or a bottle of chardonnay, whichever is needed more at the moment. They have held me while I cried and peeled me off the ceiling when I was so mad I could spit.

Many of us became Christians as adults, so we have a past. A real, live, ugly, dirty, messed-up, sinful past. But you know what? It makes it easier to sympathize with other people who live ugly, dirty, messed-up, sinful lives now.

A man fell in a deep hole and could not get out. He called out to someone passing by to help. The man heard him, and jumped down into the hole with him. "Why did you do that? Now we're both in here!" "Because I've been in this hole before, and I know the way out."

When my kids make big mistakes, I hope it will make them feel a little better when I can look at them and say, "Wow. That sucks. But it will get better. I know, because I did the same thing, and it got better."

It pray it will give them hope.

Not just hope that they can make mistakes — that they can sin — and be forgiven. But hope that the adult Christian life isn't a plain vanilla life in which you will never watch another rated R movie or tell an off-color joke or even just laugh at one. You can be a Christian adult and still be fun. And funny. And sexy. And just a little bit dangerous.

Because my girlfriends are a hoot. ALL of them. Even the sinners. But now I'm being redundant.

Finish Well.