leave no doubt, i want the whole world to know just what i'm all about...

Why would you ever be a Christian, because people inevitably lump you into the same category with people like Pat Robertson and Bush?"

This is some paraphrase of an essentially rhetorical question that a kid at TIP scholars weekend threw out there during the class I was TA-ing on the 2006 midterm elections. The students were involved in group discussions on different House races, and the question probably wasn't meant to be heard... at least not to anyone outside of the group.

I hate the fact that those are the only greatly publicized pictures of Christians that a 15 year old kid can come up with when explaining why he's a Deist.

People have a great desire to be loved, to feel love, and to love one another. That can sometimes be hard to see with all of the brokenness and anger around us... While I understand that it's that conviction that makes someone pro-life, it can be that same conviction, interpreted in a different way, that makes calls someone to support stem cell research.

Christianity, and how people interpret it, is extremely complex. Some people do in fact assume certain things to be true when you call yourself a Christian. Unfortunately, one of those things isn't necessarily that you are trying to imitate a the life of Christ, or at least understand his teachings and his call to a greater purpose to love and care for all people.

For all people. For people who aren't so different from yourself. For people whose sins are not unlike my sins and whose struggles are not unlike my struggles. And none of us are deserving of the grace that God extends to us through Christ, but God extends it to all of us, just the same, no matter what we've done. We all need the love and grace of God because we are all of this secular world, not above it in a position to judge the people in it.

Barack Obama discusses the historically black church's impact on his life by describing that it, "rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation... It understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world."

The emotions of love and personal responsibility to all people can be incredibly powerful, and I don't think that as Christians we've really known how to fully tap into that. I need to be more convicted of that... so that people who have not known God can still feel the effects of God's love.

And perhaps to challenge the perceptions that being a Christian is likened to Pat Robertson