The Mistake of Denying Others the Name of Christ

It's a disappointingly popular pastime among a subset of Christianity to take an actively accusatory stance toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  So many times I have heard, "Mormons aren't Christian."  They essentially always neglect to use the correct name of the Church, because it starts to sound absurd to say that members of the Church of Jesus Christ aren't Christian.  While it's possibly useful to go point by point and provide explanations to potentially alleviate people's concerns (e.g., reliance exclusively on the Bible can't be a defining aspect of Christianity because the followers of Christ in His time were definitely Christian but the New Testament hadn't even been written yet and the Bible wouldn't exist as a collected volume until several hundred years later), it's also unlikely to be effective because people are already taking a stance of opposing the Church; even the most basic truths are not convincing to someone who doesn't want to hear them.

When I converse with people who are confrontational or antagonistic, I try to change the tone of the conversation.  I try to ask about their beliefs--independent of mine or of the teachings of the Church they have objected to--so that they can start participating in mutual understanding.  I try to have hope of establishing a conversation free from contention.  It still always depends on the other person, too, but sometimes the tone does improve and very good things come of it.

Recently, another thought occurred to me.  Antagonists often cite Christianity while condemning us in a very un-Christian sort of way.  Here's what I expressed to one such person:

"As to whether or not we should judge others, I think there will be a lot of surprise and embarrassment when, standing before Jesus Christ at the day of judgment, some people will hear Him say, 'You treated some of my disciples very poorly.  You tried to deny my name to them.'  Perhaps they might sheepishly respond, 'Well, we thought they weren't good enough.'  He might, in turn, say, 'I was pretty clear that you weren't supposed to judge others.'  Christ's own words ought to give some people great pause.  Yes, as we read in Matthew 7:21-23, there will be those who thought they had done great things in His name only to find out later that He tells them He doesn't know them, and that they must 'depart' from Him.  But consider this: how horrible will it be for those who have judged others to be unworthy of Christ's name, given His words just earlier in that same chapter?  'Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.'  How horrible it would be for our Redeemer to say to a person, 'You would have denied my name to others, and now I must deny it to you.'  How horrible it will be when He does have to tell people who professed His name to depart.  I really feel like that's something that should make people reconsider their words about other people's beliefs.

Last thoughts for now:
My faith and my knowledge of God aren't deterred or undone by any critical words from others, but I hope that they're always grounded in Christlike love so that I might be able to serve people who would otherwise call themselves my enemies.  Perhaps I will be able to express my concern about the fate of those who judge in a loving way to those who are being overtly judgmental.  Perhaps it will help.

A Day When All Wounds Will Heal

We are all wounded in life.  Many times.  Some of these wounds linger with us, and never really heal.  I move on with life despite my unhealed wounds.  Sometimes they do heal, and they're supposed to.  Jesus Christ, "the Son of Righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings" to those who "fear [the Lord's] name".  (Malachi 4:2 and 3 Nephi 25:2; also 2 Nephi 25:13)  But realistically, while I can look back at some wounds today and call them healed, some are still open.  I have memories of making some mistake or another in front of someone else, and I know that I misrepresented myself to them in a way that hurts.  I want to give myself credit, because I know that I've given great efforts in life to love others and be the man I ought to be, but I know or have good reason to strongly suspect that those people don't see the good in me that they should.

Sometimes I just have a fairly simple memory of a merely embarrassing moment that likely wasn't memorable for anyone else.  Those sting a bit but really don't matter.  At other times, they were too personal with others to have gone unnoticed.  What I'll relate here is personal, but almost no one sees this blog, so the risk is minimal, I imagine.

One of these things I've carried around for years is a time when I was with my second brother, his wife, and my own wife while at my mother's house.  It was merely a matter of me being naive.  Previously, Jeri Lynn and I had watched a slightly old movie with some unfortunately lewd humor in it.  One of the characters used a word that, at the time, just sounded like a funny word, and in the film the way it was used had a funny ring to it.  I didn't know what it meant, but the humor appealed to me.  So back to the situation, in front of my brother and his wife, I turned to my wife and, just to be silly and share the humor, I said (to my shame), "I think I'll call you ____," using the word from the movie.  My brother responded with, "I think that means something bad," and I immediately realized that I'd made quite an error by using the word without knowing its meaning, especially when the context in the film should have made me suspicious.  I may have looked up the word online later.  Either way, in the years that followed I never found occasion to bring up the mistake and explain it.  I don't know if they even remember it, but I always felt that when understood, the mistake ought to have been forgivable.

Sometimes my mistakes were brought on by stress and hardship.  After my deployment to Afghanistan, I wasn't emotionally healthy and was sometimes highly stressed out for no reason related to events surrounding me.  I was on an all night duty (battalion "Staff Duty") with responsibility for overseeing physical grounds when I heard a report that someone had broken into the area and stolen a few things.  I called one of the company commanders and meant to say something to the effect of it being a battalion-level event in his company area but was not recovered from the stresses I'd encountered while deployed and additionally tired from being up all night, and I used the term "company-level".  The man I was speaking to reacted with a "What???"  He knew me very little, but people who knew me from that unit knew me at my lowest, when I'd succeeded far less than I'd wanted because of the stresses.  I'm sure the reaction in his mind must have been, "This guy is a total moron."  I'm sure many people from that unit esteemed me rather poorly, having seen me only during a time of my life when I was struggling greatly.

I think I may have finally forgotten some of my life's stinging moments, but some go back even farther in time than those others.  I was engaged once before marrying my wife.  After that other woman called off the engagement and then broke up with me, things went poorly, to say the least, and I found myself unable to concentrate as I needed to.  I couldn't think well enough to write, and failed my English 1010 class.  (There's a whole dumb story about me and English classes, but that's for another time.)  I wrote a couple of letters to the woman following the breakup; the first was right after the breakup and before the relationship really changed, and it was well-received.  The second was later.  I hoped to express some important things to her.  Sadly, as I mentioned, by this time I wasn't thinking as clearly as I wanted, and sometimes people just make mistakes.  Early in the letter I'd intended to write about how I had been happy to learn "to be interdependent", but I somehow fell upon the word "codependent" instead.  To give myself some credit, for people who are not well initiated with the two words, they can sound similar, but the meanings are really vastly different.  I never got a chance to ask her about that letter and that word, but I cannot imagine that it left a positive idea in her mind.  I don't know if it really bothered her a lot or was just another brick in the wall for her.  Either way, it's something that I still remember after fifteen years.

What I've described could perhaps be termed "self-inflicted wounds", in that they came from my own mistakes.  There are also wounds we receive very much from others.  Though both arise from misunderstanding--and I think that if we really had proper understanding we would never find reason to wound one another--even the deepest wounds inflicted by others end up being forgivable for me.  I've never wanted to hold a grudge against anyone, and it's really not my nature to do so, even if the difficulties of my deployment changed me and some of the wounds I received during that time cut pretty deeply.  All the same, given time, even the worst feelings I have toward others fade.

So it's my own mistakes that mean the most, and it's those wounds that can sometimes still linger.

Will those wounds heal someday also?  Yes.

I say "Yes" because I know that someday we'll have understanding.  Someday we'll know the trials others have gone through, and we'll have much greater sympathy for them and their reasons for doing what they've done.  We'll see that we're often not so different from the people who have caused us pain, especially because we'll see very clearly how we've caused pain in other people's lives--sometimes without even knowing it at the time.  And others will understand us, and the reasons why we made mistakes, and the seeming mountains of those mistakes will become so much smaller than molehills as we look out toward eternity.

We'll still be judged.  We'll still end up with different degrees of glory than some people we've known in this life.  But, aside from those who end up denying themselves of all of God's glory, no matter where we end up I'm sure we'll understand why things happened the way they did and we won't be angry about it.  We won't be hurt any more.  With a lesser or a greater degree, we'll be happy.

That will be a good day.

Last thoughts for now:
From a mortal perspective, there's a lot of time left when I'll have to continue on with hidden wounds.  I hope that I'll always have the strength required for any situation despite those wounds.  I don't hope for us to all have perfect understanding in this life, but I do know that one day "every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess before him. Yea, even at the last day, when all men shall stand to be judged of him, then shall they confess that he is God". (Mosiah 27:31)  As the prophet Abinadi said, "The time shall come when all shall see the salvation of the Lord; when every nation, kindred, tongue, and people shall see eye to eye and shall confess before God that his judgments are just." (Mosiah 16:1)  When we finally come to fully understand the love of our God and of our Savior, and when we all finally "see eye to eye", when we've struggled and struggled to be good people and find that the struggle is finally over, that will be a great day--a day when all wounds will be healed.