The Grey Area

Ugh. You guys. 

I didn’t want to write this post, to be honest. 

Frankly, there are other things I would rather be doing.

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m about to go out to dinner with my husband. Our family is traveling because his band, Simple Tenants, is recording their first album this weekend. 

I was trying to stay silent, fly under the radar, and not weigh in on the Fifty Shades debates that are all over the media. I really was. 

But in my little world that revolves around the internet (because I am a professional blogger who hosts a national blog conference, after all) something started happening. 

Many, many, many Christian bloggers began to come forward with posts about why they are boycotting this movie and these books. They spoke about how they are bad for marriages, about how they are pornography, about how they didn’t want to read them because they thought they promoted violence. And they didn’t want anyone else to read them either. I understood that. And I thought, “Good for them.” 

Then something else started happening. I started seeing more and more comments in my feed like this one (paraphrased): 

Do these Christian mommy bloggers truly not understand that they are doing more in terms of free advertising for this movie than its PR team? Every five minutes I see the stupid movie poster in my Facebook feed attached to one of their blog posts. I swear I had no desire to see it in the first place, but now I’m going to, just to spite their judgmental censorship.

Then I thought, “Uh oh.” 

That wasn’t the only post I saw that had that message, but it was the most articulate. Actually, I understood exactly the place that it came from because it is the same reason that led me to buy the books in 2012. 

Yes, I admit I bought them. I’m not proud to own them, but I do. I bought them because they were being banned from public libraries and my reasoning at the time was very similar to the comments above. 

While in our minds we are trying to help educate and share our beliefs and spread the Gospel message, what people are hearing is that we think we are better than they are. Because when we write posts about why we would never do things because we think God hates them and we don’t think anyone else should ever do them either, that is exactly what we are telling them. 

We think we are helping. We’re not. 

Friends, we are hardening hearts. Whether we mean to be or not is irrelevant. 

No one was ever trying to argue that God did like pornography. No one needed a list of reasons not to see Fifty Shades any more than they needed a list of reasons not spit on their next door neighbor. Everyone already knew that it was naughty. That’s kind of its deal.  That’s what got it banned from libraries in the first place. Sin is pleasurable. It feels good. If it didn’t, no one would do it. The fact that those sentences make us uncomfortable does not make them untrue. Our friends and neighbors are not stupid and they are not blind. They know we have our vices too, whatever they may be. 

It has been my experience that scolding from afar has changed approximately zero hearts.

We may get a nice boost in pageviews and a few virtual fist-bumps from like-minded individuals, but that is not the way to accomplish our goal.

I’ve found that the best way to spread the Gospel message is to stop trying to change other people, turn the mirror around, point it towards myself, and expose my flaws.

God uses imperfect people who do imperfect things to accomplish His perfect plan.

We need to let people see our imperfections so that God can shine through them.

Instead of lecturing our friends, we need to reach out to them and say, “Hey. You’re broken? Me too. Come over here and sit next to me. I’ll show you who can fix it.”

So that’s what I’m going to try to do now.  

I wrote more about my own imperfections and my admission that I read the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for a guest post on In The Powder Room today.  Before you read it, I need you to know that In The Powder Room is a humor website and this post is a bit snarkier than you may be used to seeing from me. I am honored to be over there talking about God and having a new conversation with a new audience. As always, please remain respectful in the comments.