The name of the personal interest/counseling group I wanted to join was “Walking by Faith, Dating by Faith”.. at least that was the name until the higher administration thought it fit that the group sessions should be postponed and the name should be changed to “Faith, Friends, and Dating” because the proposed name suggested a certain faith.
When I met with the councilor, she asked me to spell out the frustration I had faced when my religious views conflict with my social life. There were to be four or five in the group who went through the same questions and who would be put in the same room together with the councilor to get down to the root of things in a civilized conversation.
At least, that’s what was supposed to happen..
The first meeting, we were informed that the whole semesters’ sessions were canceled. Despite this, we had a chance to introduce ourselves and our religious backgrounds and I found there was a buddhist, muslim, jew, and a bahai sitting around me, a christian. These people all felt the conflict between their religious values and their social lives, but they were stopped from socially relating to one another in an effort to be politically correct, and the irony continues…
I think I witnessed firsthand what the prince of darkness is trying to do with our society… separate us for the sake of “unity”. But just like the hunting leopard that aims to separate the weak or young from the group, killing is his goal, not unity. I believe inch by inch, he tries to “seal the deal” by exploiting the hurt we feel with conflicts, and providing a way to seclude ourselves from hurt behind walls of words the courts have deemed politically correct.
The irony lies in the word unity, because the only faith that offers it, is the only faith that is exclusive in its claim that Jesus is the way. Exclusiveness itself is a stumbling block for this era, and it causes us to separate and build our own worlds, and it takes an objective exclusiveness with mercy to remove the veil to our eyes to see our own hurt, and those hurts around us so that we can show grace to them.
I hope that we can pray for our leaders, because if they don’t see the need for the revealing of our souls, they won’t know how to diagnose the problems, and will keep fostering our separation for “unity’s” sake.
