Shaking my head

Continuing the theme of Christians who are making my job 10 times harder...

While driving through a town that I pass through many times, I took notice of a certain church's sign. A couple month ago, this church purchased one of those light up signs that can display a bunch of messages. Unfortunately, this place has chosen to put up some of the most spiteful, hurtful, almost hateful messages I have ever seen a church place in public.

A few weeks ago, the message board was doing nothing but listing all of the different types of sinners who would not be able to enter Heaven. Today, "Hell is a lonely place... You will have no friends in Hell." I actually thought about stopping and watching the sign for a while just to see what else they could come up with.

Although it is biblically true that Hell is a real place and people really do go there, the preocuppation that the sign writer has with it is most likely driving more people away from Christ than bringing to Him.

In college, we had Mad Max. Honestly, that's what we all called him because he would never stop shouting long enough to tell his real name. This was one of those guys who would come to the center of the university, stand up on a small wall around the fountain, and spend two hours sending everyone that passed by him to Hell. I personaly was condemned nine times during the second semester of my junior year.

It saddens me to this day to think of not only how much joy that man was missing, but how many people he led away from Christ.

Of course, the last thing I want to do is point fingers, because, I wonder how many times I've done that myself. How many times have I kept someone from seeing the fullness of God's love because I was too busy, or in a bad mood? Hypocrisy is too dangerous of a topic to deal with without looking at myself in the process.