I’mma start this with TW: Christianity, Bible verses; because I know that many people have been hurt by people who claim to be Christians; it’s that very reason that I don’t know what to call myself anymore. 🤷🏻♀️
Actual Christlike love has no qualifier. That’s going to make “Christians” mad, but it doesn’t have a qualifier. 1 John (the whole book) says it in multiple ways, if you love others, you help them; if you love God, you show that by loving others. 3:17 “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” Even that verse has been twisted to say that “brother” means only other Christians, but Jesus didn’t withhold love, healing, and forgiveness when he walked among people from anywhere in the world.
All of this is to say simply: My personal beliefs are rooted in something that has since been twisted beyond recognition from the original. I love people because Christ loved me first.
I am repenting of the old, twisted, hateful teachings that I had let settle into my head and heart. In my beliefs from reading the gospels in the Bible, Jesus loved and cared for anyone and everyone.
What that makes me personally anymore, I honestly don’t know, because frankly, I feel as though I’ve learned more from witches in the past few months than I’ve learned from those who claim to follow Christ. And even “Jesus follower” has been co-opted to mean something that I don’t agree or align with, so I don’t want to call myself that either.
And now I’ll explain what I mean when I say I’ve learned a bunch from witches: in some circles, they work with their deities to accomplish their own and their deities wills.
Jesus’ will is noted to 1. Believe in Him. 2. Love people because of that belief. If I’m claiming to believe in Him, those are my only requirements. Everything else centers on those two things. And again, there’s no qualifier on that love. It’s “show love and help people no matter who they are, where they come from, what they believe in, what they look like”, etc.
If I believe that Jesus is God (and I do) then my actions need to reflect that. I need to help those less fortunate than me when I can; I need to care and pray for anyone who is hurting (and praying means also showing up, not just sending an ethereal thought out about the problem/hurt, but as much as able, communicating with those that I’m praying for as well); I need to act in a way that’s consistent with who I claim is my God.
There’s a lot more that is going on with this as well, but to sum up, I believe in Jesus and I am untangling that from the twisted beliefs it’s been tangled with. I love people because He loved me first.
With that, I am going to be spending a lot of time over the next few months and a lot of next year intentionally trying to learn about other peoples and cultures outside of my own drenched in the ideologies of the southern United States.
If you have resources that you know of, please share with me in the comments below; I want to learn of anything that I can. I’m doing my own research too, but I appreciate all additional resources.
Thank you for reading these Sunday thoughts.
