"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."

"The Godfather" is one of my all-time favorite flicks -- and books.

(Funny that a good Christian girl would say it, right? I just had a thing for a young Al Pacino, I think. No surprise I married a man who closely resembles him!)

There are a lot of great quotes peppered throughout (and if you're a Godfather maniac as I am, you'll immediately conjure the scene from the blog title today).

But a sage piece of "advice" comes from Michael Corleone (my beloved Al Pacino) to his brother Fredo:

"Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever."

This morning, as you can see from the comments listed in the entry below, I got into a little tiff with a regular blog visitor who is highly critical of my church, Quest Community Church, in Lexington, Kentucky. Nothing really burns me up more than when someone lobs fiery arrows from dark corners, and that they use the anonymity of the Internet to do it.

So, I lost my temper, as you'll see from my responses to his posts, which by the way I didn't print because they were libelous.

I thought about removing the entry entirely, because quite frankly, I know a lot of non-Christian people read this blog all over the world. I was concerned that they would think, "Look at those Christians. All they know to do is fight amongst each other. No wonder they're a dying religion."

And then I decided ... this actually is a perfect example of a pearl of wisdom from "The Godfather."

"You're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again."

Why is this important? Precisely for the reason I mentioned above ... as Christians, we have enough going on with the world -- enough persecution, enough twisting of our words, enough maligning of our character, enough sabotaging of the advancement of the Truth.

Why do we fight each other?

What causes such division, such strife?

If we can't agree, if we can't love, if we can't unify -- how is the world to take us seriously? Because if we fight each other, we might as well be "taking sides outside the family."

So.

I apologize to all of you for losing my temper and posting the angry comments to the critic.

And I want you to know that ... divisive comments will not be printed here. The blog is meant for exchanging encouragement.

As I told my critic, if you want to fight within the family for the world to see, take your argument to the world.

But I'm done fighting. Doing so just means that I'm giving ammunition to those that would want to tear the family apart.