Do you know what autoimmune diseases are?

Autoimmune diseases are a mind-boggling set of diseases where your body’s immune system becomes confused and starts to attack normal, healthy cells in your body.

Rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Sjogren’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and many diseases function this way.

It doesn’t seem right, does it, that your very own immune system could become so “angry” with your own body that it would start to attack and destroy the cells that should be their “friends.”

Perhaps one of these posts I will explore some of the theory behind why these diseases develop and the strategies for treating them, but for this post, I want to go a different direction.

Recently, I saw a Facebook post from someone declaring that they could “no longer be friends” with anyone who thought differently than they did about an issue.

They believed that if you thought differently than they did, then you must literally be evil and there was no possible redemption for the relationship.

I was taken aback because I do, in fact, think differently about the issue.

Yet I still believe that we can be friends, despite this difference.

I was pretty shocked that this person could confidently assume to know my intentions and motives simply by my position on a single, broad issue (that they had never bothered to talk with me about).

I suppose I can understand this to some extent, but it strikes me as akin to having a sort of cultural autoimmune disease.

We are so quick to believe caricatures of each other that we are misidentifying who our friends and enemies are.

Somehow, we are missing the fact that we are all of the same ‘body’ – we all belong to this country. And even more fundamentally, we are all humans, created in the same image of God.

I am not so naive as to not realize that there are some very serious differences of opinion and ideology out there. And some of them are truly incompatible with each other.

My point, though, is that it seems like we have become so quick to judge people’s hearts and motives without taking the time to hear them out, to try to understand, and to remember that we are both members of the same body.

I believe many of the people who have staunchly declared “I cannot associate with …” might truly be casting aside some of their best potential friends.

I pray that this ‘autoimmune’ disease in our culture can be healed. So much of the division seems misguided and unnecessary.

Even with my friend, I think that if they hadn’t been so quick to assume that my heart and motives were actually evil, maybe we could even have a deeper friendship than we presently do.

I hope that can still happen.