I’ve just been reading a Facebook thread where yet another miserable, grey-personality, dour Christian has been pushing the Bad News instead of the Good. And that in response to a bright, joyful, faith-and-light-filled post by a friend of mine who understands the nature of Grace.

This grey Christian writes like someone who, given two apparently contradictory Scripture passages, would always want to swing towards the passage expressing the idea that God is a total git, rather than the truth that He is our loving Heavenly Father. I really don’t know why these people remain Christians…

In fact, despite having once been similar to that tragic soul myself, once upon a time – although never as grey and dull! – I actually wonder how I, and others like me, can ever get through to these people. Where do we begin expressing the huge, vast, freeing, life-changing revolution in our faith that we have undergone? How do we even begin to describe the vastness of our freedom in Christ that we have discovered, to those still trapped between the (probably leather) covers of their Book?

Or maybe we can’t get through to them. For me, it took fifteen years, and then a subsequent powerful move of the Spirit, to break me free from the clinging mud of my legalism and Biblical infallibility, inerrancy and literalism. Maybe only God can shift their shipwrecks from the muddy, silted sea bed and lift them to the surface and into the sunlight.

Certainly, as far as the Stages of Faith go, each person whom God leads through the Stages (and it’s not everyone by any means), has to go through it in their own time and at their own pace. This is because each person had their own spiritual baggage that needs to be sorted out on an individual basis.

So, maybe we can’t get through to these hidebound characters. I’m sure God can, but the other thing is that I personally am not convinced about the ‘power’ of prayer, at least prayer ‘for others’. So, again, does He do these things in His own time? I suppose He does.

This is all pretty deep, but I had to get this off my chest today. I don’t engage with these grey people any more; all they do is to try to drag others back down into the ooze in which they sit.

And I’m not going there ever again.