Ex-Smokers

In my experience, there are few people who are as militant anti-smokers as ex-smokers. The trials they've gone through after deciding to renounce their habit, combined with their reason to take that hard journey, often leave them feeling quite strongly about the importance of the decision they made and their reasoning behind it.

In my experience, many converts to Protestant Christianity are that way too. One might even also call them "ex-smokers" given the destiny they've escaped.

It always makes me happy to see a new Christian who is full of joy at what they've received, regardless of their denomination.

Sadly, however, some of these "ex-smokers" have grown up in homes that may have had certain cultural practices associated with one or more denominations of Christianity, but didn't actually live the faith. Of course, since the largest denomination of Christianity is Roman Catholic, the odds are good that any given person of this ilk will have grown up in an ostensibly Catholic home.

What is saddest about this is that, when these newborn-again Christians discover what they'd been missing all along, they often condemn the denomination(s) their families had ostensibly been associated with when young.

Add to that a certain flavour of "Protestant superceded Catholic" that is common in Protestant Christianity, and Catholic Christians can often get quite a rough ride from their Protestant brothers and sisters, and particularly those who grew up in nominally Catholic homes and then converted.

This is especially a shame because we all need each other's prayers and support - particularly in a world that so readily rejects many of Christianity's core beliefs.

In my own life, one of many examples is a Bible Study I attended at noon once a week, which was held in a conference room of a former employer of mine. Some people who knew me personally welcomed me as a fellow Christian, but there was one very active lady there who had grown up in a nominally Catholic home, and recently converted to Christianity as a Protestant. She was convinced that Catholicism was anti-Christian, and did everything she could to make my attendance uncomfortable, including bringing a ghetto blaster and playing tunes before each meeting began which had messages intended to help me see the error of my ways.

I finally concluded that my presence at that Bible study was not going to contribute to anyone's well-being, least of all my own, and gave up on it with regret.

Today, one of the things I continue to take from this is the importance of accepting our fellow Christians, imperfections and all, and journeying with them in our forgiven relationship with our redeemer, rather than looking for ways to exclude them based on some area of mutual non-understanding.

Hopefully, we can all avoid that ex-smoker attitude in dealing with other Christians.

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)