Life As Performance Art 143

We are all hypocrites. Only those who are not making a real and concerted effort to improve their life situations are immune to this charge. By not making the effort you get off scot-free, but we are hypocrites. Your life might be a sordid and tangled and filthy mess. But at least you are not a hypocrite. If you are an alcoholic, you can go on drinking yourself to death while hiding behind the bottle from your inner fears, demons and shadows, while lashing out at anyone who challenges you to get better and recover (because we don't want to see you destroy or kill yourself), because to you we are all hypocrites. Unlike you we do not always faithfully live up to our ideals, values and aspirations, because unlike us, you don't have any ideals, values or aspirations. You are content to remain in your sewer of choice from where you can pontificate and judge the rest of us who bust our asses trying to befriend and help ungrateful losers like you. Because we are hypocrites. And you are not. Uh-huh. And what are you doing to help make this world a better place? At least there are a lot of us hypocrites out there working side by side to support the poor, the vulnerable and the sick, but you are too busy getting drunk. Oh, you're getting drunk again. Case closed. I have wasted so many valuable hours as a friend with people who are not Christians, who do not share my values, in the hope that they can see in me at least something authentic. Big mistake. First of all, I am not always going to get it right. I am not always going to live up to the high demands of my Christian faith, not because I don't want to, and not for not making some huge efforts, but for my own very human weakness and imperfection. This is how we grow. By making the effort, by getting up after we have fallen and by moving forward some more, till we fall again, and then we get up again and keep moving forward, because we know that we have to and to stay lying in our gutter is going to be death to us. But people who do not have faith, and would really prefer to despise the Christian faith and its adherents from behind the safety of the bottle or whatever their vice de jour are not even remotely interested in changing their lives to begin with. They do not want the challenge of the Cross. They do not want to be challenged to give up their self-destructive ways and actually embrace real life and hope. They are content to wallow in their filth and then judge as impostors anyone who befriends them or helps them, because those same people really hate God. And they hate themselves. Which is why they drink, which is why they have addictions in the first place. They have somehow, often after years of being treated like garbage, themselves, come to believe that they are garbage, and so they go on living as though they are disposable. But they are not garbage. They are not disposable. But no one is going to convince or persuade them. They have to do that for themselves. I still refuse to reject them, because I do not end friendships unless they become actually dangerous to me. I will call for a time out. Sometimes a lengthy time out, even if it has to last a few years, because there is no point in damaging ourselves while trying to help and support damaged people who do not want to heal. As a Christian, I know better than anyone watching me that I often don't get it right. I try, yes. We all try. Yes. And even in our failures God can make himself present, but only to those who already have the eyes to see, and who already have the ears to hear. This has nothing to do with making ourselves better or worse than others. It has everything to do with whether or not we want to make the effort. It is always going to be much easier to judge than to practice.