Sacrifice

Now, let me first say that I'm not exempt from the things I'm about to talk about. A lot of the self loathing that I have stems from that fact that I think I am an exceptionally shitty Christian. I have done many things that I am not proud of, but thankfully that is past tense instead of present. I fall into the pitfalls that most, if not all of the people in the church have fallen into as a result of living in Irvine. And I probably am a large contributor towards the problems that we as a church have.

One of the biggest problems I currently have with my church is that I feel like we don't even follow one of what I consider to be the most basic tenets of Christianity.  And of course, I'm talking about loving your neighbor. The worst part of this is that "neighbor" in this context is referring to anyone inside the church, not the other various people in their lives. I will first say that there are multiple exceptions to this, and I have a lot of respect for these people. But it seems like outside of groups of close-knit friends (I really have no way of knowing what goes inside these groups so I cant really say much about them) no one is really willing to go the distance for someone else unless its easy. Even when its super easy/simple people sometimes STILL are unwilling to take a step.

Every time there is an open mic or something similar, there is almost always this one person who will talk about how loving our church is and how much they feel at home in a relatively short period of time. And honestly this is something our church should pride itself on, seeing as these declarations of how loving our church is is usually followed by something along the lines of "no other church I've been to has made me feel like this". But, it's not really something that I think we really should be proud of because most if not all of the people who have said this typically are already outgoing, social and generally a cool and chill person. And while we are good at being accepting and integrating new people into our church it always seems to be someone who is already seemingly built to be accommodated.  Seriously, the combination of them being outgoing + social + cool/chill actually makes it hard for them to not feel welcomed in our church.

This is easy. But when push comes to shove people often do nothing. The big thing is that most people are not willing to really sacrifice anything for the sake of another person in our church, barring someone that they are particularly close to.

Its interesting when someone mentions all the faults that Irvine has in relation to the Christian lifestyle that being comfortable is more often than not almost completely overlooked. Maybe a couple things are said about it but it really doesn't end up being a big deal. Being comfortable and complacent are exactly why people are unwilling to sacrifice. Living in Irvine breeds a culture of comfort and Irvine itself allows people to constantly stay inside their nice little bubble where they don't have to do anything. And when they do have to sacrifice its practically nothing. Maybe a dropping someone off on your way home, going to lunch with someone when you're free etc etc, those are both things that really require little sacrifice but are unfortunately seen as these big and great things. Again, I'm not trying to downplay the significance of these gestures or the fact that people do these things, but this is really mostly the extent that people are willing to go to. Maybe occasionally we'll send a care package to someone we're particularly close to or... well, no that's pretty much it.

 When I think of sacrificing for one another, there is one event that immediately comes to my mind. A member of our church had to move out of their place very early in the morning. If I recall correctly, we had to meet up at 5AM and we finished moving everything at about 12PM. This kind of sacrifice is admittedly pretty difficult and I honestly don't expect many people to do this sort of thing. This requires a lot of sacrifice and very hard to commit to. However, something similar happened a couple weeks ago that is exactly what I'm talking about. A mother of someone that comes to our church needed (and, unfortunately still needs help but I have not gotten a set date yet) help moving some things out of their garage. When this was presented to our college group I was the only person to volunteer. I took two classes this summer, both of which required a lot of work and also required me to be at school quite often. And, to my knowledge, most of the people in our college group aren't really doing much this summer besides chillin. 

That really just speaks for itself. It's not like it took imagination or someone had to come up with a way to sacrifice for this person. It was figuratively handed to them on a silver platter. If we can't even do this I can't imagine other people sacrificing anything for people inside the church. Ultimately, this is all to say that as a church I think we need to break free from this culture that perpetuates comfort and start forcing ourselves to be uncomfortable. At the very least I think it is a step in the right direction towards being able to love and sacrifice.