let's all calm down

the original post found here has now been removed from my site.

let me just say how grateful i am for the support and encouragement i received when sharing this post. it was an honest expression of my thoughts on how often we as christians freak out about things and forget to show the world who jesus is through our actions, but there were parts of the post that were reckless and could easily have been misconstrued, so i have chosen to remove the piece from my site. thank you for understanding.

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here's an excerpt from the original piece that sums up what i want to share:

we are not showing the world who jesus is if we are always pointing fingers and ruffling feathers. we are not showing the world love if we are always arguing. we are not showing the world grace if we are blaming, judging, condemning, attacking. we are not showing the world mercy if we are on pedestals of righteous anger. we are not showing the world peace if we are waging our own wars. we are not showing the world unity if we are drawing lines and building walls and categorizing humans. we are not showing the world jesus when we act like this. do you hear me?

we are not showing the world jesus.

but we can.

we can choose to love when it is hard. we can choose to move toward the mess. we can open our hearts and our homes and our lives even to the people who aren't like us. we can share with the less fortunate. we can have civil conversations with people on the other end of the political spectrum. we can serve our communities instead of closing ourselves off to them. we can show the world who jesus us by how we live, and it can be so much better. we can change how people think of christians if we stop being the awful christians they think we are.

we can show the world jesus.

let's just stop freaking out first.