Cursing the Church or Helping it? by Anna M. Aquino

Author:Anna M. Aquino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Destiny Image, Inc.

Face the Problem

When I was in the seventh grade, I was at a wedding and I mentioned to my mother that I wanted a particular boy—who happened to be her friend’s son—to ask me to dance. I was mortified when I found out she told her friend who in turn told her son that I wanted to dance with him. She told her son to go ask me to dance. I was so mad at my mother for saying anything. Now I didn’t know if the boy really wanted to dance with me or if he was being made to by his mom. I was so embarrassed that I ran into the bathroom crying when he came and asked me to dance. I refused to leave the bathroom until it was time to go.

We all often act like this in the church when it comes to dealing with conflict. We realize the conflict is there, but our perceptions of what others are thinking run wild, so instead of dealing with it, we avoid it. This is why many people just leave a church or end friendships—it’s a result of what we think someone might think.

I got an e-mail from a dear friend of mine not long ago. Someone in her church read something I wrote in a blog and left her church and ended what was supposed to be a friendship over it. This story made me so sad. When it was brought to my attention, the issue that this happened over was misunderstood. I never meant what I had said in the way she perceived it, yet she did perceive it that way and went so far as to leave a church and a friendship because of it. That’s not God’s will. That’s running into a bathroom because you don’t want to deal with the situation that caused the hurt in the first place. It was obvious from the situation that I wasn’t the one who caused all the offense. But she was looking at the scenario with offense-colored glasses on, and I hit a sore button in her life.

These stories happen way too often. I’ve heard of people leaving churches over the slightest things—the pastor didn’t say hello to them enough or the leadership seemed distant, for example.

When my husband and I went through that situation with Nick, I remember briefly considering leaving the church. This guy was in leadership there, and I didn’t want to have to deal with him. I wanted to run in the bathroom and cry. However, the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that God moved my husband and I down from the North to Florida and made it very clear that this was where we needed to be. I wasn’t about to let this guy bulldoze me out of the church. If he didn’t like me then it was his problem. If I had to sit in the front of the church and everyone didn’t like me, I would still stay.

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