We’ve all occasionally run across the stereotypical angry atheist, all spittle and phlegm as they hurl their progressively weaker arguments at you while never genuinely responding to your refutations of their tortured pseudo-logic. After a while, the root cause for their hatred of Christ and Christians is revealed: something or someone along the line let them down in the category of God serving as Santa. Didn’t get that pony you asked for one Christmas? Didn’t get shielded from anything bad happening to you as a result of someone exercising their free will even as you demanded full reign for yours? Obviously there is no God. Why? He didn’t do things the way you instructed Him.

This nursed grudge isn’t exclusive to atheists. It also permeates more than a few believers. I’m noticing more than a few popping up that for lack of a better terms are the angry ex-evangelicals. While they generally lay claim to some form of belief, more often than not professing allegiance to the “real” Jesus, they also come out with both barrels blazing against the church, both leaders and parishoners. They’re hypocrites. They’re idiots. They don’t get it.

Translation: they don’t do it my way.

As with the angry atheists, when you pare down to the core of their contempt you run across something or someone having let them down in the area of God as cosmic bellhop. For many in their middle ages, much of their angst centers on one of the main tenants of the Jesus Movement in the late ’60s and early to mid ’70s, that being the emphasis on eschatology and a belief that the second coming of Christ was imminent not by God’s standard of measuring such events but by man’s. As it turned out, those who thought this way were wrong. Their zeal led them to gloss over Christ’s warning about playing guessing games. They did not disprove God’s Word. They proved errors of enthusiasm are still errors.

More than a few who followed this teaching have found themselves in the unenviable position of being woefully unprepared for life. They assumed we wouldn’t be here long enough to require forethought about what was ahead because they wouldn’t be here. Well, they have been here all along. And they’re quite upset about it. When in doubt, blame the bad advice and those who gave it rather than admit they heard more than once “in case Jesus doesn’t come back tomorrow…”

Given a choice between our daily dread and waking up to a million dollars, a pony and no responsibilities most of us would choose the latter. The latter is not going to happen. We can beclown ourselves by blaming the God we don’t believe in or those who do believe in Him for our miseries. But when we’re the ones doing the cutting of our own skin while claiming it’s all the fault of who made or who handed you the knife, or we’re the ones who partied our brains out believing there’d never be a need to clean up the mess then go earn a living so we could pay for it all, no amount of playing the blame game is going to change the truth about who’s responsible for our wounds, empty pockets and empty lives.