During my time at Spring Harvest in April we met (one evening) a group of girls (between 12 and 14) not in the main session, we asked them why, their reply was detailed and had obviously been discussed by them in detail, they discussed all the reasons for the leaders being ‘hypocrital’, saying one thing yet doing others. One example being throwing a flan in someone’s face and then talking about how we just waste food in this country when we shouldn’t.

Now the thing is that on the surface these girls have a point, although perhaps taking what was being said a little too seriously, however the thing that got me was how cynical they were and how they were going into these sessions just to pick holes.

This challenged me, I am naturally very cynical and the challenge I faced in challenging them was that by doing that I was challenging myself and actually in the end I just said to them ‘before you go into the next session ask God to show you one thing in that session and look out for that one thing not all the negatives’.

The fact is I (like many others) find it very easy to find faults with things, if you read through this blog you’ll find my faults with the church, with Christians and even if you go far enough back some specific churches…and the problem is that it’s all too easy to moan about it.

For instance one thing that gets me about Christians is that they moan a lot about things in church if it’s not to their taste, however by moaning about this I think I’m wearing their shoes (so to speak) and the trick is how to turn the negativity into something positive.

If we continue to take the negative things we see and discuss their negativity we will just become a cynical, bitter bunch of hypocrites.

The difficulty is finding a way to take the thing we see as negative and make something positive and I don’t know that I entirely know how but I guess every situation is different….it’s so easy when someone mentions someone you don’t like to mutter something negative, we all have things or people that rattle our feathers but we need to work out how to make this positive.

The church is full of negativity…and I am probably part of that to an extent. My big thing in the last few months has been about judgmental Christians and yes, I’ve ranted about it, however I’ve also tried to do the opposite, one of the things a young person at church wrote for my portfolio said that ‘you can tell him things and he won’t judge’…although for them that might have been a throw-away comment to me it was reassurance that I had actually managed something positive from something negative.

The challenge to all of us however is to bite our tongues and rather than moan or rant find a positive angle…or at least move on from that rant.

I’ve been reading a book on Lamenting in church and the author talks about the pattern for a psalm of lament is roughly: have a rant, tell God what he should do, praise Him, so if we take that approach to our negativity let’s have a rant if we have to, think about how we can make a positive difference and then praise God by doing that.

That is my challenge…why don’t you join me…