I came across this on Facebook a while back…
The line “people just aren’t hungry enough” rings true, but I think the issue goes deeper than that. McDonalds doesn’t ask a lot out of you, so even when they get it wrong, you’ll go back because it’s cheap and meaningless. Christianity, on the other hand, is demanding. The commands are not burdensome (1 John 5:3), but the demand of discipleship encompasses your whole life. So if you get upset, the demand of Christianity, combined with the offense done to you, often adds up, and people may just throw up their hands and walk away from it all. Christianity is asking everything of them, but Christians don’t always live up to that. And when someone gets hurt by a Christian, it can make that injured person think “if they don’t care enough, why should I? If it obviously isn’t a life-long commitment to them, why should I stay here and being hurt by them?”
Now let’s take that idea and turn it around in the other direction…
A McDonalds worker doesn’t care that the ice cream machine is down. It’s no big deal to them, and you can get mad at being told the machine is down, but they don’t care: They know you’ll come back later and ask again. Why? Because it’s cheap and meaningless. On the other hand, if you are a child of God and you push someone away… the Master says it would be better to be thrown from a bridge with cement shoes on (Matthew 18:6).
So, yes, there is an impetus on you to care about Christianity, to think of it, not as cheap slop to be discarded on a whim or walked away from at the slightest offense, but also there’s an impetus on us not to push someone away from something that is as important as eternal life. We both have a part to play.
I pray that we both play it with an appreciation for the severity of eternity.
~Matthew