The World I Want To Live In

Saturday, June 02, 2007

I was cleaning out some old MySpace messages and found this one, which I'd sent to myself...because I'd written down some thoughts I wanted to post as a blog, and it got lost in the shuffle I guess.

For the record, the word "recently" in the first sentence refers to June of 2006, so it's been about a year since I wrote this. Wow, time flies.

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I recently made a MySpace friend of a young girl through the radio show I work on. She was impressed by my page and how focused it is on my faith. I checked out her page and thought it was cute...she had this neat html thing that makes "Jesus Loves You" notices fall all over her page. BUT in contrast...she also had some of those online surveys posted; and in one, on the topic of gay marriage, she wrote "THEY SHOULD ALL BURN IN HEDDIES!* I HATE GAYS! IF I WAS BRAVE ENUF I'D BE A GAY BASHER!"

*[That's Hades, just in case you were confused.]

I wrote her and reminded her that Jesus taught people to "love one another." I actually thought she would shut me out. But she simply wrote back that she meant to take that (and other stuff) down. I guess she wrote it back when she first signed on to MySpace...yet she still hasn't removed it. I'm not sure that it's my place to continue to bug her about it...and I bet if I did, she'd shut me out. I'm a stranger, after all.

When discrimination means discernment, when judgement means consideration and decision, when tolerance means disagreement without excluding love...that's the world I want to live in. If I can disagree with a friend's choices or lifestyle, if I can express that, and never for a moment stop loving them and have them know I love them...I think (I hope) that's the intention of the Commandment.