Pick Your Battles

Do you ever feel like Christians are picking the wrong battles?

A piece of parenting advice commonly heard in parenting books and classes and workshops is, "Pick your battles." Fighting over every single thing is exhausting and damaging to the parent-child relationship. Therefore, parents are advised to pick which things are important enough that they are worth fighting over or enforcing, and which things parents are willing to let go of - at least temporarily - in order to maintain the attachment bond.

For example, a child who wants to wear mis-matched clothes and their shirt on backwards might be something the parent could let go of, whereas if the child wanted to go all-out naked to school we would have to set some boundaries.

I wonder if the same principle might work in the Christian life. Christians are known for, unfortunately, the things we stand against. But, goodness, why are there so many?? 

I remember when Mattel came out with a meditation Barbie. She talks and gives a few different cues to help children breathe and calm down. I thought it was amazing (hint hint to anyone who is wondering what to get me this year for Christmas). One, because she was part of the yoga series and I personally enjoy yoga exercises and have found it one of the few things that helps with my restless leg syndrome. Two, because multiple studies now are showing that meditation, mindfulness, and deep breathing exercises are one of the best regulation tools for children dealing with trauma. 

However, it wasn't long before a Christian influencer started a campaign against meditation Barbie. She claimed that meditation Barbie and her yoga sisters will "possess" kids and that "Satan was out for our children." She had several followers take up her call, even to the point of protesting and boycotting Target, where the Barbies were sold.

I couldn't help but think, isn't this a waste of time??

First of all, the grand majority of Yoga that is taught and appreciated in the United States has very little to do with religion and much more to do with exercise and relaxation.

Second of all, there are real evils in the world that are much more deserving of protests and boycotts. What if instead of protesting a harmless toy, we focused that energy on child pornography, sex trafficking, systemic racism, or gender inequality?

Are we picking the right battles?

If you don't like a Barbie, don't buy it for your kids.

Just like, if you don't like a book, don't read it.

If you don't like yoga or meditation, don't do it.

Simple.

Pick the battles that matter. 

Fighting over everything is exhausting.

Fighting over everything hurts our relationship with the world around us. It breaks the witness we are meant to be. 

There's a brilliant book by Barbara Kingsolver called, "The Poisonwood Bible", originally published in 1998. It tells the story of a family from Georgia who moves to the Congo in order to share the Gospel with an unreached people group. The head of the family, Nathan Price, goes in so entirely certain that they are right, that their ways are better, and that they will "save" these people. 

Yet nothing goes right for him. He tries to plant a vegetable garden, but it bears no fruit. He tries to convince the people to be baptized, but they refuse to get in the water because of the crocodiles. He declines to learn their language, and they have no interest in learning English.

Even when the local teacher tries to give him advice on how to make his message more culturally applicable or understandable, Nathan Price rejects him. He will not bend.

He was stuck - fighting the wrong fight.

Rather than relaying the message of Christianity through the Gospel of love, he was fighting a battle of culture. 

How often do we do the same?

Christians are so busy fighting "culture wars" that we have lost sight of the mission Jesus entrusted to us. Culture wars are worthless. There is no need for the culture around us to look Christian. This is not (nor, would I argue, has it ever been) a Christian country. We should be much more concerned about looking Christian ourselves than making those who don't believe into some sort of impossible standard that we don't even live up to. 

People do not change through laws and restrictions. They change through the heart. And the heart doesn't listen to mere words - especially if those words are hateful. It listens to love in action. 

If Christians were out there in the trenches, loving on people through concrete action, now that would be a force to be reckoned with.

If we were known for our love, rather than for our hate, the Church in America would be growing, not shrinking.

If we were caring for the poor, taking in the orphans, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbors... can you only imagine what kind of a difference that would make?

Instead, we're busy fighting with each other and with the culture around us as if that matters.

We've confused what fight we are in. We're picking fights over things of unimportance, costing us the fights which actually do matter.

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (Ephesians 6:12)

It's time we refocused our priorities.