"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding." Proverbs 4:7

I have couple of friends that have been instrumental in helping me to understand the love of God. I am certain that they did not do this intentionally, but their influence has been life changing. If you asked them about their faith they would tell you without hesitation that they were not Christians. Still, they are reasonable and caring people. With what I know about them, and with all that I have learned from them, I have often wondered why they wouldn’t follow Jesus Christ.

In an effort to discover their angst I asked them what (if anything) Jesus had done to piss them off. Due to the length of their individual responses, I am posting this as a two-part entry. As you read through their words please do not judge them. You do not have agree or disagree. Just take some time to hear their hearts and understand their points of view.

I have learned that in order to live like Jesus, we have to be genuinely empathetic. I pray that God would use these entries to solidify this value in your hearts.

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Part 1
I am not pissed off anymore Eric, but I used to be.

I was a very skinny kid, I am large now and nobody would even dream of picking on me now, I actually go to some really rough bars and nobody picks a fight with me due to my bulkiness. They always seem to pick on skinny guys. But either way, when I was the thinnest and weakest kid in grade school, and covered in acne earlier than anyone else, and had unkempt hair and clothes that only the poorer kids wore like "tough skins" I was one of the most made fun of and picked on kids in my school. There were kids who didn't pick on me, but were afraid of being picked on if they associated with me. I was alone most of the time, I think that in some ways that being ostracized by nicer kids was more painful to me than the bullying. In school I had no one. Really public humiliations in places like the lunchroom or the hallways were almost weekly, minor humiliations were daily.

But I belonged to an evangelical church in the next town, Assemblies of God. In the youth group I found kids my age who treated me kindly, wanted to spend time with me. They liked me. For the seventh and eighth grade when school was at it's worst and loneliest for me the kids from the next town that went to my parents church were the only friends I had.

But my school district had a regional high school where in my freshman year my friends in the youth group would be in classes with the kids from my school district that humiliated and bullied me every day. On the first days I sat with them in lunch, hung out with them during the period of recess. The bullies that knew me, the people who ridiculed me, they went up to me in those groups and humiliated me and these friends did nothing to stop it. Later I saw them making friends with some of the kids that gave me a hard time, and they just laughed along when I got picked on and pretended it was okay. I was not welcome hanging around with them, or at their lunch table. It's not like some of them didn't have the popularity or the strength to do anything to help me out, one of them was a first string football player and the other was on the cheerleading team. None of them did or said anything, they wanted nothing to do with me in school, they didn't want to be seen with me. They pretended to be friends with me like nothing happened in the youth group, but then they started bringing some of the people who picked on me to the youth group that were their new friends. The same crap I had to endure in school was imported there and I found myself being the object of ridicule.

My parents went to the pastor about it. He felt that I was bringing the ridicule on myself because I wasn't really conforming well to my peers, felt there was something to artsy and weird about me, that I couldn't relate with my peers and that this was my problem and not the youth groups problem. Because of this I left and my parents didn't force me to go to church, outside of that cluster of towns on Sunday was a regular game of dungeons and dragons during church hours where my parents would drop me off. I was around other "nerds" even though playing the game was thought to be a sin I didn't care. Metal heads who were accused of being "satanic" in high school were more morally outraged and stopped the people who bullied me, they were braver than my christian friends who wanted nothing to do with me, the metal heads didn't mind me sitting with them at their table. It was at that point that I lost all religious faith for a while and had nothing but hostility toward chrisians for a very long time.

Time heals all wounds however, and I can't stay pissed off over my childhood and teen years forever, I don't need anyone to defend me now. But I will always remember that when I was at my weakest, insecure, and most outnumbered the people who claimed to be so holy and Christian didn't do anything for me, joined in the ridicule, and the pastor blamed everything on me for being a nerd. I know better than to paint all Christians with that brush, and I am sure that with maturity some of the people who I felt totally betrayed their friendship to me aren't really bad people today, but the point is that it hurt a great deal and left a very sour taste in my mouth towards Christians. In response to that hurt I attacked their faith for many years with a certain amount of vindictive relish.

I don't know if I could ever be a Christian, but that is an intellectual decision now rather than an emotion driven one, I don't hate all Christians or Christianity and I am not out to stamp out all Christianity. I do feel that some Christian sects teach that some kinds of bigotry are okay and that it's okay to dehumanize certain people, my church dehumanized everyone that was a non-believer and maybe that is why it was so easy ultimately for the kids in my youth group so easily go from being friends to dehumanizing me. I do know that if they had been a community of friends who had stood with me I probably would have never lost my faith at that early time in Christianity, perhaps later I would have made an intellectual decision to be an agnostic... I don't know, maybe not if it had been associated with something in my life that had been more positive rather than negative.