Bumper Stickers Make You Stop and Think
Every now and then I come across a bumper sticker that pulls me up short. Well, saw a car the other day with two of them that really stopped me shorter than usual:

The first:

Religions are just cults with more members

The second:

Churches eat souls.

It always makes me wonder what the background of such bumper stickers is. What experiences or issues has the person had with "religion" and "church?" Did they come out of an abusive religious family and now they respond with such malice and only slightly contained anger? Are they from a family that has a long history of anti-religious opinion or did they come to it on their own? I guess the counselor/psychologist in me wants to answer those questions because I want to find it hard to believe that anyone could hate the church that much.

I know there are, though. Some for "good" reasons some for less than good and some for downright evil reasons. What I have to remember as I see something like that is that God has the work to do to break into such a person's life, not me. I am not powerful enough to convince my own soul to do what's right some days let alone the person filled with such history and feeling.

It made me think about an incident I blogged on a couple years ago. I had been doing Servant Evangelism handing out Handi-Wipes by a port-potty during an event in the downtown square. One person asked me why I was doing it and I gave a standard answer about serving others for God. Wow! What a reaction I got. Here's how I wrote it back then:

“No way! God doesn’t have anything to do with this. Don’t try to push your sh*t on me. God doesn’t care about sanitation. You trying to show how much better you are than the rest of us? Nobody is anyone else’s servant.”

I remained calm and restated the simple fact that God wants His people to be there to help and serve others and this was a simple action of that. It didn’t appease the person. They kept commenting as they waited in line, pacing from one side of the area to the other.

It was a humbling and educational moment. We in the church aren’t used to reactions from people. Most of the time they ignore us. We’re not in their life, they aren’t in ours. Like this person, there are lots of different reactions to God and to us as His people. That was an education in patience and calm. And, like Jesus says to the church at Laodicea, I would rather you be anything but lukewarm. This person was passionate!

So perhaps the person with the bumper stickers is another passionate person, certainly not lukewarm! I wonder what God will do for them and how they can begin to see, hear, and feel the awesome grace of a God who loves them more perhaps because they are so passionate.