Chick-fil-A Day

Any excuse to eat at Chick-fil-A works for me. We love it. They forced the acceptance of Sweet Tea in Southern California and if you aren't eternally grateful to them for that....I might boycott you. :P

The Teenager got Babycakes to eat a second piece of potato, but not a third, which is what he's trying to convince him to do here.

Obviously, we ate there for more than just the food. It was a statement. I would like to think, even if I wasn't a Christian, I would have eaten there just because I'm an American. While I thought boycotting was the thing to do in my youth, I think calling for a boycott now is decidedly un-American and, to be frank, un-Christian. Let me explain.

Boycotting gives us an excuse to make up signs like the one above. Normally I enjoy Conservative jokes, but this one annoys me because none of my liberal friends fit this description.  Being in ballet, I have quite a few liberal friends. I find friends who have differing opinions a benefit for reasons I've mentioned before. One thing I've noticed though is that we are more alike than we are different. Yes, we have our things we disagree on, but if we are honest we will admit there are a lot of things we disagree with Conservatives about as well.

When we, as Christians, call for a boycott, the world sees us as they see themselves when they do the same...hateful. If you don't like the rhetoric being thrown around the airwaves and in the blogosphere this week, change the words just a little bit and you will see it's not a whole lot different than some of the things Christians say during boycotts. And sometimes to other Christians who don't feel they need to participate in the boycott.

I admit I did decide to boycott Starbucks, but honestly, I hate Starbucks already. Their coffee is dreadfully bitter and only became popular because most Americans were just happy to finally drink something that tasted better than Folgers. But I digress...;) So it's not like it really put me out to boycott them so I probably wasn't really serious. If a boycott were called for CBTL, it would have to be something huge to convince me to participate in it.

Now, there is a business we have not shopped at in probably four years or so. This is a business that gives money to an organization we disagree with. Don't ask me which business it is coz I won't tell you. I'm not going to call for a boycott, though I think their practices are far more heinous than simply trying to maintain the biblical defnintion of marriage, or even making really terrible coffee. But out of our own convictions we have chosen not to shop there based on this one fact.

Interstingly enough, when I posted something on Facebook about today's CFA incident, it was one of my liberal friends who said about her decision not to eat at CFA:  But those are my decisions. You should be able to make your decisions the way you want to live.

And that's how it ought to be. I guess I would challenge people who are boycotting in a called boycott or in their personal boycott...do you look down on people not participating? Do you think less of them because they had a Frapuccino or ate at Chick-fil-A. Then you are accomplishing nothing by your boycott except feeding your, um, dislike (yeah, I want to use the other word) for others based on your own personal grading scale.

In the end we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. Period. The people around us will respond to love far more quickly than to our diatribes and our rhetoric.