Why non-Christians often do not like Christians
This was certainly the case with me. When I was 15 years old my dad became a Christian, at a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles. And it was then that I hung out with Marica, Dale, and Jim, who all went to a church in La Crescenta. They tried to get me to come to church with them, but I would not and after some time I stopped being friends with them.
It was just that I did not feel comfortable with these folk, who later on, following my conversion, I took up with again. But back then, I felt I did not fit in nor did I want to.
Over the decades now I have experienced what I felt like being around Marcia, Dale, and Jim, which I am going to try to express here in this brief essay.
Guilt comes to mind first. When I was a mid-teen, I did some really dumb stuff, smoking, looking at porn, trying hard to have sex with a girl or two, and stealing. Yes, during that year fifteen I racked up two felony arrests. When I started the process of joining the Air Force, my recruiter called me and reminded me of the arrests. I told him I had forgotten about that, which was true, and fortunately he had my criminal record expunged.
Guilt can rob a person of so much, and this I learned over five decades of pastoral ministry and spending 34 years of this as a volunteer at San Quentin State Prison, 13 of these years doing cell to cell ministry and the rest as the baseball coach. (You can go to Amazon.com and see my book on the 2010 season at the prison.)
If I had not known that all my sin, ugly stuff, is washed away, and forever, by the shedding of Jesus’ blood on the cross, a strange kind of darkness would remain with me and no attempt on my part to move away from it would do the trick. Oh, I remember my sin, but knowing that I am completely safe in Christ, makes life far more pleasant.
Fear, this emotion may lay silently in the back of our minds, a sense that we have taken the wrong turn in life, that something, somehow, somewhere, is out whack.
Embracing the idea of reincarnation helps some people, the idea that the only thing bad doings will bring about is some unpleasant reincarnations, perhaps as a slug, a mosquito, a snake, or even as a drop of rain, according to a song done by the Highwayman, and so on, but these would be passing and eventually, well wow, earn getting reincarnated into a person again, or maybe into something better.
Is it so that somewhere I heard that the upward way would take 30,000 reincarnations?
Being judged comes to mind now. I have experienced this often as something vague and being unable to express it to myself or others. But it rolls around though in the back of our brains.
I did have a sense of it prior to my coming to faith in Jesus. To make matters worse, I had heard Christians talking about a final judgement and it made me angry. It hit me hard a couple of times and made me afraid of a God I was unsure that even existed.
I tried for a while to be an atheist, I would not settle for agnostic, and this while attending the University of California at Davis, while I was stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, CA. I was a medic with 2nd Casualty Staging Flight, and my shift was from 5pm to 8am, so I was free during the day.
Dr. Child’s class was The Philosophy of Religion, and to pass the class we had to write a paper on a religion. For some reason I picked Christianity thinking, well, I know about that one. Well, I didn’t, and I had to fake the paper by copying stuff out of encyclopedias. (No internet then, that was 1963)
The result was a sense of being judged, I mean I knew I had broken the rules and it all had to do with Christianity. As I look back on those days, I think this disobedience helped make me realize I was not a good person, that there was something about me that I did not like, but I blamed it on Christians.
The guilt, the fear, and the judging feelings lead me to a life changing event. Let me summarize this here.
My wife was a Christian, became one when she was fifteen. She wanted to attend a church, so we began to do so. We tried a couple, but neither of these suited her. Then she tried the First Baptist Church in Fairfield, and talked me into going with her. I was only able to attend every third Sunday. But Pastor Bob Lewis gave an invitation to accept Jesus at the conclusion of each service, and one day I walked up front, and an Air Force Staff Sargent Al Becker lead 3
me in a prayer to accept Jesus. I actually did all of this to satisfy my wife. I did not become a Christian, in fact, the whole event drove me further away from Christianity.
Of course, a Baptist church, and it was expected that I would be baptized. However, a new church building was planned, and baptisms were put off until the building was completed.
The day came, some six months after my prayer with Al, and there I was knowing I was faking it all the way, and I just went along with it. Just minutes, waiting in line with about twenty other guys from Travis AFB, all of a sudden, bam, everything changed. I knew suddenly and concretely that I was born again right there and then. It was plain as day, and as I was laid backward into the water, I knew my life would never be the same again.
In the months that followed I was on fire, wish I could have that fire again, but that was my new birth. I have never turned back, though I have gone through some bad times.
The reason for this essay is that the fear, or disgust, or whatever it was, of Christians, suddenly disappeared. I now had bunches of brothers and sisters in Christ, and it continues to this day.