I wonder sometimes (more often than not) at the lack of thought many of our comments have. I mean – we can’t think all the time, we have to trust instinct and experience to guide us through busy times…still…I was reading an article about Rosanne Cash’s new album Black Cadillac and the following excerpt got me thinking:

Told she had a month to write something else after her mother died, Cash responded with "Like Fugitives," which lashes out most directly at religion.

Cash remains bitter at how her mother, a Catholic, was shunned by her church for many years after her divorce. And many supposedly religious people sent Cash angry mail after she spoke out against the Iraq war. Your God-fearing daddy would be ashamed, they wrote, "not realizing that he was as opposed to it as I was," she said.

"I didn’t want to believe in their God — that punitive, vengeful, angry guy," she said. "That’s not the God that I believe in and I resent people trying to project their God into my life."

I don’t agree with Cash’s remarks about God, comments like "that’s not the God I believe in…" betray our culture’s return to an age of household gods made in our image and controllable by us rather than transcendant and all-powerful. Still her comments point to what I think is a struggle we as followers of Christ have – our desire to cast judgement. We have been so VERY CLEARLY warned that we cast judgement to our own peril, that it can boomerang right back at us. There is one judge and that is God. God will judge. We need to ask ourselves if our use of God in our comments about other people are not rather like our use of a baseball bat being swung into the head of an unwary person. Are we sometimes guilty of the same thing as Cash is – defining God to suit our own personal feelings; turning God into something less than God – our own household idol that we can pull out and shake at people who we distrust or fear. This is not God. When we do this we attempt the most greivous of sins – to put ourselves on God’s throne and humiliate Him in favor of our own opinion.

It is so odd how easy it is for us to fall into this trap because the Bible is incredibly clear on what God’s position is and what ours is and how we navigate the two. It is no wonder so many people who are not followers of Christ distrust the Bible…they base their opinion of God’s Word on how we, as His followers, choose to use it.

My hope is that some will turn to the Bible to see if it is as we sometimes present it – and find that it is the living, loving word of the just and loving God, not a petty God.

BTW – I think I will buy Rosanne Cash’s album (or if it came as a gift that would be fine as well HINT HINT). The review sounds like it is a rare album that plumbs the depths of foundational human emotions like grief and loss. Check the review I read out at:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Music/02/02/music.rosanne.cash.ap/index.html

P.S. Condolences and prayers to CNN movie critic Paul Clinton’s family on the event of his death. He was a reviewer who I appreciated greatly and am saddened I will read no more of his columns.