Faith: You’re Doing It Wrong

To the man who just refused to give my son fifty cents so he could buy a stick of deodorant,

You know, I could appreciate you doing this if you didn’t have change, or just didn’t trust it. I understand that. What I don’t understand is that you said. “No, not for you.” And watched him walk out of the grocery store after telling the clerk he didn’t have fifty cents. The clerk just shrugged at him and pointed at the door. All of that is fine. It’s that you actually followed him out to his car after you allowed him to be humiliated to tell him exactly WHY you didn’t help him out. You said that his language was foul and that he had a poor attitude and that Christian people would never help him if he continued to behave that way. You said this, to a young man who said, “Crap. I’m short fifty cents. Do you happen to have fifty cents, please?” If you had given him the money, which you clearly had in your pocket, he would have paid it forward by donating fifty cents in the charity bucket the next time he was at the grocery store. That’s the kind of kid I raised, but you didn’t know that. You judged him based on how he was dressed and the two sentences that he’d ever spoken in front of you.

This young man is probably the only twenty year old left on the planet that holds doors open for the elderly. Every time I go out in public with him, I am stunned at the compliments I receive for raising a “polite, well-spoken and well-mannered young man.” Yeah, that’s my kid. He holds doors open for the elderly. I taught him that. I’m proud of him for not being the twenty year old that dresses like a gang banger that practically knocks a 70 year old woman with her walker down on his way into the shopping mall. My kid doesn’t do that.

This young man volunteers at a restaurant that provides free meals to domestic abuse victims and their families when they need him. He knows that his mother was a victim of domestic abuse in the past and he feels strongly about this cause. I love him for sticking up for me the only way he knows how because what happened to me is in the past. I am NOT that girl anymore, but it still outrages my son that I lived through it.

This young man comes home from hanging out with his friends on the weekends, to help his mother lift their elderly large breed dog up a flight of stairs because he knows that she can’t do it alone. Then he sits in the floor with their dog for ten minutes, whispering to her about how pretty she is and how much he’s missed her while he was gone. He makes sure to give her a hug and a kiss before he leaves, because he knows she has cancer and his time with her is short, so he makes the most of every minute that he has. How many twenty year olds do that?

This young man is, some day, going to hold a door open for you when you are walking into the grocery store with a cane and when you are fifty cents short on a stick of deodorant, do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to give it to you, because he has the sort of generous and caring spirit that your faith has clearly failed to teach you.

People like you give Christians a bad name. Yes, I know exactly who you are. You hide behind your faith as though it gives you some kind of right to act however you please because you show up to church every Sunday and then you forget what it means when God gives you an opportunity to show him what you’re made of on a Monday.

I’m positive that this is NOT how God wants you to roll, but you go on with your bad self and do it anyway. I’m sure that we’ll see who’s right on judgment day.

Signed,
A Mom.