I wrote the original novel many years after I first noticed someone chipping away at Christianity.
It was the 1960’s, and a faction proclaimed God dead. Stunned and angered, I told myself the
notion wouldn’t last. It didn’t. However, the mantra was only the beginning.In the 1980’s, we watched prayer disappear from our schools. Christian people in my neighborhood who counted on the institution for their livelihoods prevented Christian children from referring to their beliefs with drawn faces. Many tried in small ways to be available for Christian youngsters without speaking about Jesus or his Gospel of love.
One day my daughter was required to take off her cross because according to the teacher, school wasn’t a place for God. Some may choose to only acknowledge God in certain places, but He’s in our schools, our churches, our homes, our closets, our very being. No one can put Him in or take Him out of a place, and He knows our hearts wherever we are.
By the time my daughter started sixth grade, political correctness had replaced God’s commandment that we love one another. The schools had changed from a safe, nurturing atmosphere to an environment with students armed with knives and guns.
In the late 1980’s some states and counties prohibited Christians from displaying nativity scenes on public property. Since then Christmas has become a winter holiday, and most clerks in department stores will not say “Merry Christmas.” Occasionally, one will say it back if the customer says it first.
It’s only July. Is it too soon to talk about Christmas? It’s 2016, and we’re still allowed to worship God in our churches. Is it too soon to wonder if the freedom to do so is slipping away from us one tiny chip at a time?
The phrase, “Love Is Not Easily Angered,” for Breaking Barriers, book eight in the Love Is...Series comes from I Corinthians 13: 5: “It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrong.”
