raising godzillas

A Maundy Thursday Reflection On "Deeply Held Beliefs"

I've been thinking a lot about Indiana's religious "freedom" bill, and why I oppose it. I'm a Christian, and all my part time jobs take place in the context of church childcare and teaching. I'm a private preschool teacher, work in my church nursery and two others, and provide MOPS care for two churches.

I meet a lot of parents in this context and to be frank, there are times their practices and beliefs are in opposition to my own deeply held beliefs. In contrast to Indiana's situation, discriminating against or treating LGBTQ people as second class citizens is against my beliefs about how Christ would treat these people, yet I serve people who WOULD discriminate. I serve parents who are against public assistance and socialized medicine, and we KNOW how Christ treated the hungry, poor and sick. Don't get me started on parenting. I have my own deeply held beliefs there, too, but I know to just keep them so myself. To use an example that's probably less personal to most others, anyone who knows me knows how I feel about disposable anything. Yet I don't turn parents away and tell them to come back with cloth diapers.

Because that's the thing about service-about being a SERVANT- which those of us in the Christian tradition celebrate on Maundy Thursday. Being a servant means being a servant to all- in love, without condition. Have Indiana's fundamentalist Christians forgotten that?

I'll leave you with a quote from Steve Inskeep on today's "Morning Edition" :

 I wonder if there are people who are uncomfortable as a matter of conscience with gay marriage who might, with reason, take that position - that their job is simply to sell flowers, that their job is to take photographs, that their job is not to judge either way, that none of us are put on Earth to judge, actually, that their job is not to judge the people in front of them necessarily.

(Full article here. )

Amen

posted by gojirama @ 12:50 PM