When I think of Christians I think people like Chambers Swiggart and Michael Vaughan. People who don’t cuss, people who aren’t selfish, and people want to be pure until marriage. These are the people I would want to hang out with. It’s the people that say they are Christians but don’t live it. They are the people who really make me angry, even more than the ones who are straight up bad and don’t care. When people want to take the title of being a “Christian” and don’t live that title out and would rather live for themselves and having fun over making the right decisions and living a pure life it just angers me.

When Timothy and I were young we were best friends! You could not keep us apart. We used to tell each other that we would never be bad kids or do any of that bad stuff that we saw older people doing. As we got older we started to like different things and started to hang out with different groups of people, but of course we were still best friends and would hang out with each other every now and then. We were playing basketball one time at his house and I remember he jumped up to try and dunk it and he hit his finger really hard on the rim. He yelled a cuss word very loud and it just shocked me. At that moment I realized that he and I grew to be very different people. I didn’t say anything, but in my head I was just thinking “What an awesome person he is! Now he cusses and I really want to be even better friends with him now! He is so much cooler now that he cusses!” I didn’t say anything to him about it though.

As Tim and I kept hanging out more often I began to notice all the ways he had changed. When we would talk at night he would tell me all the things he was looking forward to about high school. He brought up girls and at first I agreed with him, but I didn’t know where he was going with this. I was looking forward to girls too, but not in the way he was talking about. The conversation of purity came up and it got intense. I reminded him about what we used to talk about as kids and that we said we would never do that kind of stuff if we didn’t have to. He just kind of looked at me and said, “So are you telling me you are going to stay pure all throughout high school? You aren’t going to have sex even once?” I gave him a long hard stare back with a look on my face like, are you serious? I thought to myself, “Dang! Having sex before you are married must make you a cool kid, so I guess I have to now.” I think the look made him catch my drift, but this didn’t change the way he thought at all. All Tim was worried about was being part of that cool kid group and being popular.

Tim wasn’t good at baseball, so I’m not real sure why but he became really cocky and full of himself. I just guessed that this came with being cool. Always having to show off to the other kids, mainly girls though. I had always disliked kids who were selfish and thought that they were better than everyone else so this didn’t please me too much. I finally confronted Tim about the decisions he was making recently. Well, that didn’t work. If my best friend was telling me I was messing up I think I’d listen to him and try and work on it. That’s not what he did. He just blew me off and kept on living that “cool” life that he was trying to live.


It really through me off because of the fact that we were best friends our whole life and now he has totally forgotten about anything we talked about our whole childhood. That we would stay pure and not cuss and good sports about everything that came across us. He gave it all up to be “cool” and popular. I was so disappointed that I almost gave up on him. Even though he gave up on me I decided to stick by his side and keep encouraging him to be the better person that I knew he could be. It was definitely difficult, but I tried and eventually had to stop completely because I didn’t want to hang around him anymore. Tim was a good kid, gone bad.