The LGBT Pride celebration was last weekend. We live right in the middle of the central neighborhood - it gets so busy around here that we avoid moving our car for the whole weekend to avoid the endless search for parking.

I watched the parade with my students and it was generally a fun time, but has brought up a lot of stuff for me.

The other impetus for all this "stuff" that's been stirring around is a conversation with my pastor. I posted on facebook that I was disappointed that North Carolina had passed the amendment to their constitution banning gay marriage. Within 10 minutes, my pastor had an email in his inbox letting him know that one of his council members had been supporting gay marriage in public. What would that say about our church?!

(Sidenote: to my pastor's credit, he did not ask me to take it down or jump on any sort of alarmist band wagon. He knows my heart is love and acts accordingly.)

I've spent the last week or so just being disgruntled. What would it say about our church? Firstly, this is my opinion and I do not speak on behalf of my church on my personal facebook page. But what does it say? I don't know, maybe that we believe that loving other people is the most important thing? That we've read our Bibles and see that Jesus loved people - even the ones the rest of his contemporaries deemed unworthy of love or were repulsed by - and that he never once gave his opinion on homosexual relationships. But you know what he did give his opinion about? Divorce. Consumerism. Bigotry. Discord. Selfishness. Grace. Redemption. The absolutely life changing power of His love.

Here's my conclusion thus far: we should be so busy loving other people (modeling our lives after our Savior) that we don't have time to condemn others. If we have time to criticize others, maybe we should really look at our priorities and make sure they mirror the one who gives us the title CHRISTian.