“What the hell did you expect me to do?
You told me to love my neighbors, to model the life of Jesus. To be kind and considerate, and to stand up for the bullied.
You told me to love people, consider others as more important than myself. “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.” We sang it together, pressing the volume pedal and leaning our hearts into the chorus.
You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never “hate” anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.
You told me it’s better to give than receive, to be last instead of first.
You told me that Jesus looks at what I do for the least-of-these as the true depth of my faith. You told me to focus on my own sin and not to judge. You told me to be accepting and forgiving.
I payed attention.
I took every lesson.
And I did what you told me.
But now, you call me a libtard. A queer-lover.
You call me “woke.” A backslider.
You call me a heretic. A child of the devil.
You call me soft. A snowflake. A socialist.
What the hell did you expect me to do?
I thought you were serious, apparently not.
We were once friends. But now, the lines have been drawn. You hate nearly all the people I love. You stand against nearly all the things I stand for. I’m trying to see a way forward, but it’s hard when I survey all the hurt, harm, and darkness that comes in the wake of your beliefs and presence.
What the hell did you expect me to do?
I believed it all the way.
I’m still believing it all the way.
Which leaves me wondering, what happened to you?”
Chris Kratzer is a man overflowing with compassion, a man who, as far as I can tell, practices what he preaches. He writes with intensity and poetry, and he seems to have captured the soul of the exact people I most want to reach with my own writing.
“The lines have been drawn,” he says. And that is the biggest tragedy of all. Because that line, the line that Kratzer and people I love and value are helping to draw, is a line that cuts right through the heart of real, genuine love.
Love is forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance. But it is not ONLY forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance.
We are called to love our enemies. But that does not mean we are called to stand aside while they victimize the innocent. When the Bible calls us to forgive those who have wronged us, the idea is to make ourselves so strong and resilient that, as we stand between our enemies and the innocent, we can withstand the hurt they may choose to inflict upon us.
And if we cannot withstand that hurt, the second best thing to do is stop them.
There is a needle to be threaded when it comes to criminal justice reform. We have built an amazing society, one that is strong and resilient enough to forgive a lot. But the answer cannot be to give people permission to steal and destroy.
We are called to love our children. But if your child becomes a drug addict, it is not love to celebrate the drugs. We love our children by hating the thing that is hurting them, by judging the bad decisions our children make, by encouraging them to change for their own sake.
It is undeniably true that many on the evangelical right make the mistake of hating the sinner. That is terrible, and we must stand up to that error. But it is equally dangerous, even though it might not seem like it, for the liberal left to insist that loving the sinner means loving the sin.
We on the religious center right do not hate the L, the G, the B, the T, or the Q. We hate the fact that, the more you focus on and identify yourself with your base urges, the less happy and fulfilled your life will be. The more you pursue hedonism and reject commitment, the more pain and loneliness you unleash on yourself and those around you.
Pride month doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I don’t hate it for my sake. I hate it because the sugar rush of pleasure and the superficial belonging it offers is drawing people I love away from the lasting joy and deep community I want for them.
We love the sinner. We hate the sin. That is what true love is.
But, like a pandemic, we do everything we can to protect the individuals who have been infected with sin. But we also have to do everything we can to protect the innocent from becoming infected by them. Everyone is worth fighting for, but that doesn’t mean that each of us must fight for everyone.
In his own words, Kratzer is a man struggling not to lose his faith. And I can see why. His vision of heaven is so pure that he will pour his entire being into reshaping the world into it. But heaven is heaven and earth is earth, in the same way that man is man and stone is stone. As talented and passionate as Michelangelo was, there was no way for him to imbue David with blood and breath.
The most important step in transforming a cold stone into something that can warm the human heart is to understand and accept that it is, in fact, a cold stone. As beautiful as a world without hate, aggression, and selfishness would theoretically be, there is no way to wish those things out of the world we all live in. But, by acknowledging the reality of those things, we’ve already proven that we can make the world a surprisingly beautiful place.
