Recently Facebook was alive with the frenzy created by a pastor, apparently in full use of his brain while the rest of us had left ours on the curb, asking others in a YouTube video, “Do you realize that Starbucks wanted to take Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups, that’s why they’re just plain red?”  Perhaps this same pastor’s understanding of the world is vastly different from my own. Perhaps he’d had coffee from some off shoot brand of Christian Starbucks, whatever the case, when I employed the full capacity of my brain to discern if Starbucks had indeed become so bold as to actually make a statement that they wanted to take the Christ of Christmas off of their holiday cup, I discovered the guy was…well, not fully informed (and I’m only saying that because I’m trying to be kind…trying) .

In the end there was nothing to his accusations and Starbucks was given ample free advertising.  I guess he also got a lot of attention so I’m sure his narcissist cup is a bit fuller but seriously? When there are so many other places one could put their energy if they want to speak out against Christian persecution. Voice of the Martyrs would be a really good place to start. If you genuinely want to find those Christians dealing with  persecution in the world, the odds are very good that you won’t find them at Starbucks. Try Syria. Yemen. North Korea…Now there you WILL find some badass Christians standing up for their faith and subsequently being persecuted beyond what you can ever imagine here in the good old US of A.  Red cups? Really?

Next we have mass shootings by radicals within weeks of one another. A radical religious extremist Christian heads to Colorado Springs and kills people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic and we do not call him a terrorist? I wonder what the victims and their families think about that.  He took a gun into a public place and shot people!

A radical religious extremist Muslim and his equally extremist wife kill people at a workplace. They are terrorists but this time we have no problem saying so.

What bothers me most of all with this is that each time a horrible event like this takes place, we take no time off to mourn the loss before the gun control folks are posting photos of their guns, memes about the 2nd amendment and the list goes on…Christians were up in arms all over the place.  One person on my Facebook page said, “We’ll let you keep your Starbucks if we can keep our guns”…I nearly fell of the chair. My reply was that if those two issues are even remotely related to each other, we have way bigger problems to deal with.  And it is clear that we do.

What has happened to the heart of being Christian? If you are one, did you come to the faith over a Christmas greeting on a coffee cup? If you lost a loved one in anyway, did you ever need time to grieve? Do you know the Jesus who looked into the eyes of sinners and said, “I have come to give you an abundant life?” Did you never want to go and take that love to those most in need?

17 people lost their lives in these tragedies. that is this many….count them one at a time I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I  people.  They were…

boyfriends

girlfriends

husbands

wifes

mothers

fathers

grandparents

neighbors

friends

co-workers

American citizens

PEOPLE who died. PEOPLE who will not go home for Christmas. PEOPLE who will not open a single present very  likely sitting under a Christmas tree for them. PEOPLE  who will not even get to do something as simple as brush their teeth. THEY ARE GONE.

They are gone and all you care about  in the immediate space after their deaths is keeping your damn guns?

I find myself in the tremendous conundrum of what to do about Facebook.  I can’t figure out how to participate in the daily conversations without living in a state of perpetual grief over what the brand of Christian faith represented there  has become…we seem to have lost the essence of zoe – the life force that oozed out of Jesus wherever HE went. He was living water and we are constantly trying to contain that water in some kind of political package that cannot begin to hold it. Water is always seeking a way out…but I guess if there isn’t any coming out, it might be a good idea to check and see if anything is really in there in the first place. LIVING WATER…it brings life and THIS nastiness, my friends, is not it.  I’m not sure why anyone would want to drink it either.

What has happened to the heart of us?