I hate having to write this blog post, but I have to get something off my chest…

 

I saw a meme the other day from a restaurant server who said he has been serving for three years and in all that time he has never served a more abusive, arrogant, self-satisfied and “privileged” population than the church folks who come in for brunch or lunch following their so-called worship services on Sunday.

 

I shared it because I know it to be true.

 

But yesterday I saw it in action in my own sister, and it made me livid. Really, really livid. I was absolutely disgusted. (Have been frequently displeased by the way she treats servers, cashiers, janitors, and others who are less privileged than she is.)

 

Every time I ride in her car (which is infrequently), she is playing SPIRIT 105.3, a Christian station in Seattle.  I mention this for the sake of ambiance and in stark juxtaposition to what happened next.

 

Yesterday she was driving me across town to pick up my van from Dodd’s Automotive (which I highly recommend if you live in or  near Tacoma as they take great care of your vehicle and your wallet!) during the time schools were letting out, so there was a huge (for Midland) one-block backup on the street we were taking to get there.  She complained about it, saying she would have gone another way had she remembered the time. I suggested a way around the backup from where we were, but she said no, she’d deal with it.

 

As we inched along, I could see a string of cars waiting to come out of Harvard Elementary School — probably 20 of them — so I said to Jackie, “Why don’t you let one or two of them out?” (because obviously no one else had let any of them out in long minutes). She said, “No” and then explained that she is an impatient person, as if that justified her callous disregard for others.  (An additional two seconds, tops, is what it would have cost us in time.)

 

I wanted to say, “If that was your son, or his wife, or your niece or me in that car up front, or even three cars back, you’d make sure to let us out, wouldn’t you?” but I kept my mouth shut and just fumed silently, “It’s no longer any wonder why she’s such a fan of Trump — she’s a narcissistic, privileged bully just like he is — but how in hell can she call herself a Christian with a clear conscience?”

 

And as the Christian music played on…

 

It just drove me nuts that she wouldn’t allow access for the folks in a car or two to get out of the school lot ahead of her!  It wasn’t like anyone in our car was bleeding to death or Dodd’s was about to close. It was simply a conscious decision to be a real-time jerk!  “So there, you inconvenient suckers with elementary school kids!”

 

I am so done with self-identified Christians.  I recognize real Christians by the way they regard and treat others, those Jesus considered “the least of these”– anyone not sharing their bloodlines.

 

I’m a far better Christian than she is, and I’m a lapsed churchgoer (partly for the reasons expressed above re fellow parishioners!). I am a fan of Jesus, the Jewish rabbi I was introduced to as a small child, who taught me about love and self-sacrifice and doing to others what I’d want done to/for me.

 

Anything less is sacriligious blasphemy, in my opinion.

 

Too damned few churchgoers are modeling Christ’s behavior these days

 

It makes me sick to my stomach.

 

There. I’ve said it. Had to get it out of my soul so it isn’t polluting me anymore.

 

I had a dream last night, where my sister did other shitty things while driving. In the dream I called her on it in public and then left on foot, way out in nowhere, ready to walk back home without her assistance. She came after me, insisting I get back in her car (because it was raining, cold, and I wasn’t dressed for it), and I refused and continued to castigate her for being a plastic, pontificating counterfeit Christian.

 

And then the dream turned into her being close to commmitting suicide because she realized what a shitty representative of Jesus she was being. And then I saw the pain and fear she was bearing, and I felt a little guilty for speaking my mind and I didn’t want her to do that. But I also wasn’t about to get back in the car with her. I was intent on walking home alone, no matter whether I survived the trek or not.

 

This is something she will have to save herself from

 

Not my circus, not my monkeys, but Jesus Jumped Up Christ!!!  It’s so exhausting and abhorrent to see this behavior in my own sister…

 

How did we grow up to be so very different?   Why is she so impatient, fearful, arrogant, and self-absorbed in her druthers, while I’m usually so patient and always so unafraid, compliant/acquiescent and absorbed in the lives, experiences, and treatment of marginalized/maligned others?

 

Probably because I’m a reader (I’ve lived a thousand lives to her one),  because I was a grateful, eager student in school, and because I don’t listen to far-right scare mongers, many of whom are evangelical Christians blinded by their Armageddon-oriented End of Days mindset.  That’s probably the genesis of most of our differences.

 

Unless the rest of us are very careful and strategic as voters, the End of Days folks will get their way and we will perish as a species.

 

(Not an unhappy ending for the planet and the rest of the species whose home Earth is unless we blow it all to hell when we take ourselves out, but entirely damning for so-called, self-proclaimed “God-fearing/thinking animals.”)

 

I AM SOOOOOO SICK OF TODAY’S JESUS-ESCHEWING CHRISTIANS