"Sometimes Christians make me grouchy"

Someone posted this online. They weren't asking me.

I'll tell you what they said, and read the parts that matter in their own words.

The post is about being worn down by other Christians. Mostly online.

They ask why we aren't kind to each other. Why, when someone is mean and you answer in kindness and ask them to reflect on it, you're the one who gets downvoted and the mean person gets upvoted.

"What's with the snark and sarcasm and talking to people like they are stupid?"

Acting superior to people with mental illness. Loud about the sin of the world and quiet about their own.

"How can we get angry for people having pride month, when we are prideful everyday?"

They say some of us have been in church all our lives and still haven't grasped the basics. That the lack of self control ends up pushing people away from God, and away from church.

And then a question they actually seem to want an answer to.

"It's not that we can't give you grace or forgiveness, but when is it a bad day or year versus it just being character or a hardened heart?"

They recommend reading James. Matthew five through seven. The letters to the churches in Revelation. They say so much would be solved if we worked on controlling the tongue.

And in the middle of all of it, one line shorter than the rest.

"It sucks because a lot of the time we don't have each other as a safe space."

And then, at the very end:

"Sometimes the world doesn't hate us simply because we follow Jesus but because we are cruel."

We're not going to answer the question. Not because there's no answer—there probably is one, and it's likely already been said to this person, maybe more than once. An answer isn't what's needed here.

Jesus was told about eighteen people crushed under a tower, and he had an answer available. He didn't give it. He moved past the question. The disciples asked whose sin caused a man's blindness—an answer with a clean cause—and he told them nobody's, then healed the man in front of them. Information was never the missing piece.

So instead of an answer, we're going to ask a different question: what does a person do with God tonight, while none of this has changed?

The surface question is the one argued at length: why are Christians cruel to each other, and how do we get people to stop?

That question has answers. Scripture gives plenty of them, and the post already names three of the best places to find them—James, the Sermon on the Mount, the letters to the seven churches. Nothing is missing there. Someone who has read James on the tongue and still bends it into a weapon does not have an information problem.

There's a second question, put as a real question rather than an argument: when is it a bad day or year, and when is it character, a hardened heart? That one Scripture mostly refuses. It doesn't hand out the instrument for reading which is which in another person. Samuel was told plainly that man looks at the outward appearance, and the LORD looks at the heart—and that was said to the prophet, to stop him from concluding anything.

But there's a third thing in the post, and it isn't a question at all. It's the line in the middle, shorter than the rest, with no argument attached:

It sucks, because a lot of the time we don't have each other as a safe space.

That's the injury.

The wound isn't that the internet is harsh.

The internet has always been harsh.

The wound is that it's coming from inside the house—from the people who were meant to be the one place it didn't come from.

And then the last line, which turns the whole thing around and points it inward: sometimes the world doesn't hate us because we follow Jesus, but because we are cruel.

That's someone who is hurt by their own people and cannot fully separate themselves from what they're describing. Scripture has a lot of company for that. It has prayers for it.

Jeremiah spent his working life inside the religious establishment of Judah, speaking to people who had the Scriptures, kept the festivals, and ran the temple.

What the text records him saying about them is in Jeremiah chapter 9.

Oh, that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people and go from them! For they are all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men. They bend their tongue as their bow for falsehood.

He wanted out. Not out of the country—out of the people. He asked for a shelter in the desert, the kind travelers use, so he wouldn't have to be among them.

And the thing he names, twice, is the tongue.

They have taught their tongue to speak lies. They weary themselves committing iniquity.

Taught. It isn't a slip or a bad day in that description. It's practised.

Chapter 9 goes on: everyone deceives his neighbour and doesn't speak the truth; one speaks peaceably to his neighbour with his mouth, but in his heart he lies in wait. That's the same complaint as the post, made about the same kind of people—not pagans, not the empire. The congregation.

Two things sit in the text alongside that, and they're both worth having.

The first is that Jeremiah was weeping over them at the same time. The verse immediately before the wilderness line:

Oh, that my head were waters, and my eyes a spring of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. He wanted to leave them, and he was crying for them. Both, at once, in the same breath. Scripture doesn't ask him to resolve that into a consistent posture.

The second is that God had already told him, in chapter 17, that the heart is deceitful above all things, and exceedingly corrupt—

who can know it?—and then answered his own question:

I, the LORD, search the mind. The reading of hearts is not given to Jeremiah. He gets to say what he sees people do. The verdict on whether it's a bad year or a hardened heart is kept somewhere else.

And Jeremiah never saw it fixed. He preached for around forty years, and the reform did not come.

At the end of his story, he's dragged into Egypt by the very people he'd been sent to, against his own word to them.

Hebrews 11 says of the whole company of them that they were commended for their faith, and did not receive what was promised. That's the part to sit next to. Not the vindication. The forty years in the middle of it, with the same people, unchanged.

Psalm 55. Some of it.

Listen to my prayer, God. Don't hide yourself from my supplication. Attend to me, and answer me. I am restless in my complaint, and moan because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked. For they bring suffering on me. In anger, they hold a grudge against me.

My heart is severely pained within me. The terrors of death have fallen on me. Fearfulness and trembling have come on me. Horror has overwhelmed me. I said, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! Then I would fly away, and be at rest. Behold, then I would wander far off. I would lodge in the wilderness."

The same wish as Jeremiah. A lodging in the wilderness. Away from these people.

And then the reason:

For it was not an enemy who insulted me; then I could have endured it. Neither was it he who hated me who raised himself up against me; then I would have hidden myself from him. But it was you—a man like me, my companion, and my familiar friend! We took sweet fellowship together. We walked in God's house with company.

We walked in God's house with company. That's it, exactly. Not strangers. The people you sat beside.

Now put the two sets of words next to each other.

The post says: we don't have each other as a safe space.

The psalm says: it was you, my companion, my familiar friend—we walked in God's house together.

Almost the same sentence. One difference, and it's the whole thing.

The post is said about us. The psalm is said to God, about them, out loud, with the specifics left in. The psalm doesn't soften who did it. It doesn't reach for a charitable interpretation of their behavior. It doesn't say, "maybe they were having a bad year." It names the friend and hands the whole thing over.

That's a permitted way to speak. It's in the book.

One thing.

If you're in this—worn down by your own people, and honest enough to know you're also somewhere in the description—take the sentence you'd write about them and say it to him instead, with you in it. Not tidied. Not made fair. The psalm isn't fair, either.

God, it wasn't an enemy. It was my own. We walked in your house together.

If your own words won't come, use the psalm's. Read verses 12 to 14 out loud, addressed to him, and stop there.

I'm not going to tell you what that will do. It may not lift anything.

Jeremiah prayed for forty years among the same people and buried nobody's hardness but his own hopes. But there is a difference between a complaint that circulates among us and a complaint that has been spoken to God, and the difference is not that one of them feels better.

The post ends: sometimes the world doesn't hate us simply because we follow Jesus, but because we are cruel.

Psalm 55 ends: Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you. He will never allow the righteous to be moved. And then, two lines later, the last thing the psalm says: But I will trust in you.

Not they will change. Not it will be made safe. Only that.

This has been Small Voice. Small Voice is an app for bringing your life and your questions to God. Find out more on smallvoice.app.