"Far From Perfect..."

One of my favorite blog reads is written by a lady who goes by the moniker of Norman. (It makes perfectly good sense if one reads the history of the how and the why she came to adopt that name.) She lives in the San Antonio area and works as a customer service representative for what sounds like a prominently recognized insurance company that includes the underwriting of motor vehicle insurance policies. She's less than enamored with her job, and based on the types of telephone conversations she has had to field of late in this worsening economy from irate policy holders, I can't say that I fault her (pardon the intended pun.)

In a most recent post Norman goes into lengthy detail describing a phone conversation she attempted to have with a policy holder in order to determine the client's side of a vehicular accident in which it appears the teenage policy holder was clearly at fault. In synopsis the teenager was operating his personal vehicle at night without his headlights being switched on. An on-coming police officer observed the lightless vehicle and in an attempt to signal the car's operator of that fact, the officer flashed on and off several times his headlights, but to no avail. The car continued past him and made a turn at the next intersection...right into the path of another on-coming car that did not see the turning vehicle in time to avoid the resulting crash. Sounds pretty cut and dry to me.

The police officer filed his official report as operator error, failing to operate the vehicle with the headlights illuminated. Norman becomes involved as she attempts to contact the teenager by phone to obtain his side of the story. The teen male, for reasons only known to him, has been repeatedly avoiding talking with any of the insurance company's representative. Finally Norman succeeds in getting in touch with the teen's mother and the "fun" begins. Apparently the Mom believes her son can do no wrong, thus did no wrong, that her son stated to her that he had the car's headlights on, that the police officer and the other on scene witnesses who contradict her son's contention are all lyin. And here's the kicker...the Mother proclaims that she is a Christan and, therefore, is beyond reproach. The Mother even threatened Norman with eternal hellfire and brimstone if she dared deny her son's claim for recompense.

Pardon my French, but Hell, I'm a Christian and that pisses me off!! And no I'm not taking the Mother's side nor the son's. That "Christian" family is totally and completely out of touch with the basic essence of what being a "Christian" means. At base it should first and foremost embrace the basic principles of what is right and wrong. If anything that Mother should have forced her son to immediately and forthrightly face the consequences of his error and begged the insurance company to take compassion on her son's youthful stupidity and not cancel instantaneously their automobile insurance policy. But no, she deliberately played the "holier than thou card" in an attempt to perhaps shame the insurance company from even daring to consider that they don't consistently "walk on water." It is the likes of this variety of self-righteous religious snobs that lend unfortunate and unwarranted credence to the assumption by so many that all professing Christians are at base hypocrites. If this were indeed the types of individuals who populate our country's houses of worship, I'd stay home myself on Sunday mornings. For what it's worth, I know that not to be the case. As a rule there dwells in the hearts of the faithful and devoted Christian a ready compassion and an accompanying sense of duty to serve others, who seek first to do good and never to intentionally do harm.

For me, personally, Christianity should be a filter through which I am to be an observer and a consumer of what life challenges me day to day and not wielded as an impenetrable shield by which to unfairly judge the motivations and actions of others. I have no more right to play the "religious" card than a man of color has the right to play deliberately the "race" card if the underlying motivation is for no other purpose than self aggrandizement.

Bottom line...there are any variety of malcontents, miscreants and your basic kooks that occupy rungs on the many ladders of organizations and institutions. Christianity has a recorded history of not being immune from such self absorption, nor will it escape future embarrassments. Norman unfortunately ran up on a family unit that serves to prove the point that there are bad apples bobbing in the barrel among those of my fellow Christians who would have otherwise expressed embarrassed regrets and would have been respectful of the job she is tasked to perform. When one tastes a bad apple, one needs little encouragement to spit it out, move on, and not prejudge the rest of the barrel's contents. Norman was personally and professionally courteous in that regard. I, perhaps, would have been less so. The "bad apple" family could learn a lot from her and reciprocate in kind. One can hope...and in my case, pray that that shall prove to be the case in her future encounters with professing Christians. We don't need any more bad press.