The Talking Heads

Last weekend I was downtown and there were a bunch of sandwich board sign wearing people claiming to be Christians. They were wearing signs that said things along the lines of "Turn or Burn," and "The wages of homosexuality is death and AIDS," which not only bothered me because it singled out one sin specifically as worse than others but also because it was grammatically incorrect.

I passed by them before going down to the park and they were just standing around looking all judgmentalish but when I came back by it looked like a riot was about to break out. On one side were all of the "christians," and on the other side were the people that they were pissing off. It was just a huge yellfest. Nothing was getting accomplished because no one was willing to give way enough to hear anybody out. The cops ended up breaking the whole thing up. So these people went home feeling like they'd done a good job of representing Jesus because they were "persecuted" in His name.

The thing that gets me about people like this is that there is no way to talk to them. Their goal is simply to yell their position with absolutely no chance of listening to someone else's. I find that I have to stop myself from being like this often. I don't want to be a guy who has an opinion and my goal is to share that opinion with others, not caring about their reaction or what they could add to or take away from it. I don't want to just be a walking mouth. I want to be the type of guy that isn't afraid to voice his opinion but not be so cocky that I think that I can't learn anything from what others has to say.

Steven Furtick said in a blog post last week, "You're a big boy. You can eat the fish and leave the bones." You don't have to agree with everything that someone says for a conversation to be profitable. Not every conversation has to be an argument where your goal is to convince the other person to have the exact same opinion as yours.

I want to be a guy who isn't afraid to hear what others have to say and to understand the stance that others have, especially non-christians. Because, why on earth should they listen to what I have to say if they know that I could care less why they believe what they believe?