Hang-ups.

I’ve shared this story before. I’m choosing to share it again. First, because it’s such an interesting story.  Mainly because the older I get the more I realize this story is the perfect illustration to help us recognize the danger of our hang-ups. 

Most of us become obsessively concerned about a topic that causes a great deal of personal pain. I’m not talking about finding a spiritual calling based on individual tragedy. I’m talking about taking it upon ourselves to set the entire world straight when we feel we were harmed by misinformation or have been misled. 

The story I’ve shared before, that I’m going to share again, is about a former pastor‘s wife. She was in a denomination that required people walk an aisle to accept Christ as Savior before they could be baptized into the church. She walked the aisle as an elementary-aged child and was baptized within the same year. 

As she aged and matured, physically, spiritually, and emotionally, she felt her church and family had lied to her. She felt like the plan of spiritual salvation had not been fully explained to her. She grew bitter feeling like her parents pushed her before she was ready. 

I’m not sure why she couldn’t just walk another aisle or make an appointment with a pastor in her adult years to discuss her insecurities. I’m not sure why her taking an entire church hostage with her bad experience was necessary. I’m not sure why she just didn’t reject her first baptism stating she didn’t know what she was doing. Why didn’t she simply request to be baptized as an adult during a time that she felt like she did know what she was doing?

Instead, she became a pastor’s wife and made a deal with her husband. He would not baptize children if they walk the aisle to accept Christ as Savior. Children’s decisions would not be announced to the church until her husband, the church pastor, was able to meet with each family and discuss his apprehension to childhood baptisms.

Recently, I’ve witnessed another tragic hang-up. A young college dropout decided it was his calling to set the world of higher education straight. Apparently, he didn’t get very far in college as a student. He took it upon himself to visit colleges and universities all across our country in an effort to tell them what they were doing wrong. 

Most evangelicals will say in regard to the former pastor’s wife, “Well, she just wanted to prevent other children from making the mistake she made as a young child.” Really? It was her sole responsibility to prevent every child at every church her husband ever pastored from making the mistake she felt she had made as a young child?

And for the young college dropout, church folks might say that God tasked him with telling colleges and universities how to teach soon-to-be adults in courses, such as science, mathematics, and sexuality.

I believe there is a definitive way to determine a hang-up from a spiritual calling. When we think we are the only person that can do a job instead of understanding that even Jesus Christ picked 12 people to work with Him, our ego is in the way. Our egotistical hang-up then becomes someone else’s spiritual stumbling block. (Been there. Done that.)

Children and young adults need instruction and mentoring. They don’t need to be incensed and manipulated. 

“But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.”