A Lump of Clay

Trey Smith

Unlike me, my wife is on Facebook. She says that she's on Facebook to keep up with her family back in Arkansas and many friends throughout the country and world. As it turns out, a great number of these people are (what I call) bible thumpers. Whenever something is amiss in our dear world, these folks come out of the woodwork to declare that all of our problems are caused by our insistence of turning away from [their version] of the Christian God.

In the wake of the mass shooting in Connecticut last week, many of these folks have declared that the prime reason tragedies such as this keep happening over and over again is because the evil government has outlawed prayer in schools!!

As my wife commented to one such poster, it is impossible to outlaw prayer! No one can control our thoughts. If you want to pray -- wherever you are -- all you have to do is to think your thoughts in your heart and God will hear them. What has been outlawed to some extent is forcing people who don't believe as you do or who don't believe in a god at all (like yours truly) to have to listen to your prayers. If you feel the need to pray, fine. Just don't subject me to it!

And this leads into a bone I have to pick with predominantly fundamentalist Christians. A good majority of them want to talk about living a good Christian life WITHOUT actually living it themselves! They want to witness and proselytize until the cows come home, but too often they don't model the words they mouth.

Each of us enters this world as a lump of clay. As we grow and mature, the lump begins to take form. If fundamentalist Christians genuinely want to bring others to their Lord, the most effective way is to model the words in the way they comport themselves in everyday life.

Imagine if we had a bunch of saints running around this world. Others would notice that these individuals had peace of mind. They would see the happiness and contentment that defined their lives. Nonbelievers would take note that these saints weathered adversity far better than the rest of us.

In time, some nonbelievers would approach these sainted individuals to ask, What is your secret? It is at this point that the saints could then witness to people eager to learn how they too could find this sense of peace and love in their own lives. Words could flow out of them in torrents and the people asking for the assistance would lap it up. You'd hear nary a complaint.

But that's NOT the way it tends to go. These fundamentalists appear beset by all the foibles and frailties as the rest of us. Few seem happy, content or enlightened. They rarely model the beliefs that they say are so central to their lives. In place of living their beliefs, they talk about them. They don't merely talk about them -- they scream about them. They demand that others give their lives over to beliefs that they themselves refuse to abide by.

In essence, they talk the talk while refusing to walk the walk. If they would commit to doing the latter, not the former, I bet they could win a lot more converts (and they wouldn't be so damn annoying either).