I didn't stop...

I don’t know if you can tell from my Facebook posts or if you have even seen them, but I am very BAAH HUMBUG when it comes to The Melbourne Cup. For weeks anything to do with the spring racing carnival has been plastered on our TV’s and within the past week it has really ramped up in readiness for today’s race. The catch cry for the event is ‘the race that stops a nation’. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a ‘good news ‘ story as much as the next person, and with all the wrong that goes on in our world today its nice to see people out and about in the sun being happy and enjoying a day off if they are lucky enough to get one. But if you take a minute to look through all the fancy dresses the horses and the alcohol, it is not a good news story. What we are not shown on the TV is the dark side to this race, the fallout from the pretty girl all dressed up who got way to drunk and embarrassed herself, the guy that got into a fight and taken away in a divvy van, the gambling addict that lost all his money and potentially his family because he had promised that he would never do it again. Imagine if Tom Waterhouse didn’t care about what the ‘punters’ wanted, but instead what the families of the punters want. They want to be able to eat, they want to be able to go to school, and they want to be able to have a life. What a difference this nation would make if we invested the time and money this event uses every year into our schools, hospitals and aid organisations. What a different nation Australia would be, and what about the real good news stories we would have!

Was going to be a Facebook status... but it got too big.

Know what I don’t like?? Christians that say or write OMG.. in the letters just like this. Why? Well to them it just might mean oh my gosh or oh my goodness. I know that that is what they mean by it but, too much of the rest of the world it means ‘oh my god’, it means taking the Lords name in vain. It means using my Gods name as a swear word. Taking Him down to nothing as it falls off their tongue without them even thinking.  I have been thinking about this for some time. Sometimes I cringe, sometimes I sigh but mostly I do nothing. Nothing until I had a small discussion with someone that I used to work with. This person was from an Indian background and would ‘Oh my god’ at the drop of a hat. When something was good, when something was bad, when something wasn’t even something. Now I work in a very confined space and am with the same people in the same room for 8 hours of the day, so by about the 10^th time they ‘oh my godded’ this one particular day I had had enough. Firstly I realised that they probably had no idea how much it was it was getting to me, yes they knew that I was a Christian, but they were pretty new to work so we never really shared what our beliefs were. But then I started thinking that if I started using their gods name in vain. How would they react. They would probably not hold back in any way in telling me that they didn’t appreciate it. So why couldn’t I do they same?? Why did I feel like I had to hold back as to not upset them, when what they were doing themselves was upsetting me. So I did, I asked them if they could stop saying ‘oh my god’. They didn’t really get it, I even used the example of their god (although I wasn’t really sure which one to use J). Even if they didn’t understand, and yes they pretty much said it in the next sentence they used- I had done something. It’s a hard gig to turn people to see your view on things- especially a big to me but little to them thing like OMG – but as Christians, if we continue to let other Christians use OMG and oh my god, then what do we expect the rest of the world to think. We need to start with ourselves before others will even start to take us seriously.

Exodus 20:7 “you shall not misuse the name of your God, for the lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”