Blue Like Jazz

Those of you who are my Facebook friend have probably noticed that lately I've been posting a lot of stuff from the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.  I have only recently started reading it and I am not even finished with it yet, but I highly recommend it.  I wanted to share an excerpt from the book that was too long to post in a Facebook status.  So here it is:

     "When Penny and Nadine first met, Penny wasn't a Christian.  They had both spent their freshman years at Reed but never knew each other.  Individually they decided to study at the same school in France during their sophomore year.

     
     Penny wanted nothing to do with religion.  Her perception of Christians was that they were narrow-minded people, politically conservative and hypocritical.  Penny dislike Christians because it seemed on every humanitarian issue, she found herself directly opposing the opinions held by many evangelicals.  She also felt that is Christianity were a person, that is all Christians lumped into one human being, that human being probably wouldn't like her.

     
     ...During those first three weeks in France, it was comforting for Penny that Nadine cared so much about her past and her story.  This helped Penny listen to Nadine's story, and one night while walking on a beach in the south of France, Nadine explained to Penny why she was a Christian.  She said that she believed Christ was a revolutionary, a humanitarian of sorts, sent from God to a world that had broken itself.  Penny was frustrated that Nadine was a Christian.  She couldn't believe that a girl this kind and accepting could subscribe to the same religion that generated the Crusades, funded the Republicans, or fathered religious television.  But over the year at Sarah Lawrence, Nadine's flavor of Christianity became increasingly intriguing to Penny.  Penny began to wonder if Christianity, were it a person, might in fact like her.  She began to wonder if she and Christianity might get along, if they might have things in common.

     
     ..."Nadine and I would sit for hours in her room," [Penny] began.  "Mostly we would talk about boys or school, but always, by the end of it, we talked about God.  The thing I loved about Nadine was that I never felt like she was selling anything.  She would talk about God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day.  She was never ashamed, which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered.  They felt like they had to sell God, as if He were soap or a vacuum cleaner, and it's like they really weren't listening to me; they didn't care, they just wanted me to buy their product.  I came to realize that I had judged all Christians on the personality of a few.  That was frightening for me, too, because it had been so easy just to dismiss Christianity as nuts, but here was Nadine.  I didn't have a category for her.  To Nadine, God was a being with which she interacted, and even more, Nadine believed that God liked her.  I thought that was beautiful...So she asked me if I wanted to read through the book of Matthew with her, and in fact I did.  I wanted to see if this whole Jesus thing was real.  I still had serious issues with Jesus, though, only because I associated Him with Christianity, and there was no way I would ever call myself a Christian.  But I figured i should see for myself.  So I told her yes." 

     "So then you started reading the Bible?" I asked.

     "Yes. We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me...We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know.  And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward.  He wasn't diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me.  Don, I can't explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me.  I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio.  I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me.  But it wasn't like that with Jesus.  There were people He loved and people He got really mat at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcast or pagans.  There were others, regular people, but He didn't play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself.  That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn't show partiality, which every human does."(Parts of Chapter 4)

Penny's story really got me thinking.  How sad is it that Penny felt that Christians wouldn't like her.  I think that Christians get so caught up in the fact that we are supposed to hate sin that we come across as hating the sinner as well.  We need to be careful of this.  There is a fine line between being accepting and loving of people, while at the same time not loving or endorsing their sin.  This can be a hard line to walk, but Jesus shows us how to do it.