I’m a Christian. I make no bones about that and hide that from no one. I went to the world’s largest Christian university and have two different degrees from there. I worked on staff at a church for 4.5 years. Now that I own my own business, almost 70% of my work is with churches.

I love me some Jesus.

But there are some parts of following him that I don’t particularly like.

I don’t like adhering to an absolute truth.

I get why non-Christian thinkers love the idea of a “personal truth”. I would love nothing more than to determine my own right and wrong or set my own scale of morality.

I don’t like that marriage is between one man and one woman.

I know what God’s design for marriage is. I understand why it’s like that. But I also understand that love is love and some people end up falling in love with someone of the same gender.

I don’t like that Hell is a real place.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that Heaven is a real place. I can’t wait to experience that. But I wish that Hell wasn’t real. I’d much rather unsaved friends’ lives just end when they die than for them to go to Hell. Give me Heaven, but I’d prefer they not endure Hell.

I don’t like that sin is a real thing.

I’d much rather chalk up bad decisions to simply being mistakes and not the result of a curse. Correcting mistakes is much easier than dealing with the grips of sin. I can beat mistakes on my own.

I don’t like that I’m supposed to value life.

Things would be much easier if I didn’t view others as made in the image of God. Things like war, the death penalty, and even abortion would be much easier to deal with and comprehend if we were simply molecules and cells and not representatives of our Creator.

I don’t like extending grace.

I much prefer justice. It’s so much easier to give someone what they deserve than to extend grace to them. When someone pisses me off, I want to be a jerk back to them. When they do something to hurt me, I want to hurt them just as much. Or more.

I don’t like that I can’t trust my feelings.

There are so many times that what I feel seems to make sense. It’s motivated by what feels like love and good intentions. And yet it’s so often in contrast to what God says is true.

These are all things I don’t like about following Jesus. Here’s the catch though: I know that it doesn’t matter that I don’t like them. Ultimately, the reasons for these things are good and pure. Part of following Jesus is putting down my own desires for something and someone bigger and more holy than I’ll ever be.

Following Jesus is much more about the fact that a sinless, holy god laid down his life for me so that I could go to Heaven than it is about the feeling that something may not be fair. I get that for some, that’s a disconnection that they can’t or won’t be able to look past. For me though, I understand that my feelings can’t be trusted. My motivations are so often for selfish reasons.

So even though I may not like these things about Christianity, I will gladly go about following them because I trust in the one who put them before more. I trust he knows better than I ever will; that he sees the entire picture when all I see is what’s in front of me.

Say your prayers and take your vitamins.

Have a nice day.

-Jonathan