Because we don’t understand God or his mercy, we can miss them both if we are not careful. Lacking understanding about something isn’t a bad thing. It leaves room for wonder, surprise, and mystery - all critical elements to a vibrant faith and life with God. If I’m going to see God’s mercy each day, I’m going to have to look for it. I’m going to have to make space in my life to stop, slow down, and take account of what’s going on around me. I cannot autopilot my way through my days, if I don’t want to miss them entirely.

The church is robbed of her beauty, mystery, and goodness when your voice is the loudest. She cannot hear the voice of her God when you’re casting doubt on every utterance that comes from his mouth. She cannot care for the least of these when you question their worthiness to receive help. She cannot meet the confused and outcast where they are when you insist that they get their act together and agree with your ideological and theological premises to be welcome amongst you. 

She cannot shout the rallying cry of freedom when you shackle her with chains of oppression and gag half her members for the audacity of being female.

In my life, I’ve faced many challenges and I expect that I’ll face a few more before my time is through. I was recently reading a book where the author reminded us that there is no pain “quota”. As in, you don’t suddenly reach your max-out-of-pocket with pain and suffering. It’s not like, just because things have been difficult for me, that it’s smooth sailing from here on out. My worst days could be ahead. I cannot control this, but I can control how I respond.

The trauma and abuse that I endured as part of a conservative, white, evangelical church and ministry organization left me with more than just a scrape or bruise on my upper arm. I’m not even sure that I could compare what I’m dealing with to a specific disease, but I do know that things hurt that shouldn’t. There are, otherwise, perfectly healthy parts of my mind and my soul that ache for no apparent reason when someone says something or looks at me in a slightly sideways fashion. Someone asked me recently where I thought I was on the road to healing from all of this and I said, “Not very far at all. I think that I may walk with a limp for the rest of my life”.

I’m fumbling a little as I grapple for words to communicate something deeply healing for me. Deconstructing the faith community that I found myself in throughout my twenties was the best thing I ever did for myself and my faith in Jesus.

I’d encourage you, if you find yourself in a similar place, to not be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to deconstruct your faith before God and see what’s still left standing. It doesn’t mean that everything you took off the walls is bad. It just means that it’s not necessary and anyone who claims that it is selling something.

Along with quitting their dream was quitting their ideas about women and what God intended when he made us. I had to go back to my roots, do my own studying, and spend years wrestling before the Lord. I had to quit listening to voices that did not want to listen to me. They were so convinced that they were right that they couldn’t entertain other views, much less respect them. The sad thing is that I had to do this mostly alone. My only companion was my husband because literally everyone else in that community thought that God’s highest and best for women was to be second-class. It was awful.

 I was never listened to. At best, I was dismissed as bitter and lacking understanding. At worst, I was silenced for daring to question someone in authority or daring to speak against someone who was part of the inner ring. At the very worst, I was completely disregarded and treated as a second class citizen for having the audacity to possess both two X chromosomes and a penchant for anything but staying at home with my 5 children. “God doesn’t make women like that.” “God made you a mother and you need to delight in it.”

I wonder if Jesus’ disciple, Matthew, was burnt out in his first century tax booth and was glad for a shot at literally any other lifestyle? Who knows how he got there- all but a traitor to his native people and completely outcast by the religious system. I wonder if the women who funded Jesus’ ministry and followed him were there because they were tired of being treated like second-class citizens? I wonder if children were so excited to be near Jesus because he had the audacity to treat them like full people, not just half ones?

Not only am I warning against religion and formulaic brands of Christianity in your personal practice, I’m warning you against even listening to them. Because they’re threatened by you. Religious Christians are threatened by the simplicity, versatility, and deliciousness of authentic followers of Jesus. Your freedom is intimidating to them because they can’t control it. And what they can’t control, they try to destroy. What they can’t destroy, they cast out.

When we make exceptions to engaging in the rest that God gives us, and deep down that we know we need, we reveal the idols of our hearts. When we refuse to listen to our bodies and take some down time, we reveal what we worship: human praise and adoration, control over our circumstances, and performance or production, to name a few. God has to command us to rest and take a Sabbath because he knows how prone we are to wander. He knows how deceitful the enemy of our souls is.

Some of us have been around long enough to ignore the “s’ppostoos”. Some of us, like my husband, literally don’t care what you think he’s “s’ppostoo” do. Some of us have been maimed and injured by the “s’ppostoos”. And some of us are blind to them. Mostly because they serve us well and we don’t realize that everyone around us is just like us and everyone who isn’t has left our particular circle. Because they couldn’t live up to the “s’ppostoos”.

I’d like to think that there’s not that much, but we all know that that isn’t true. Despite my best intentions and areas of growth, there’s still blood on my hands. I’d wager that it’s true for you, too. Even with the best plans and the best spiritual advisors, the King of Israel ran out of patience. He had an idea about how things would go and he expected God to show up for him in that way. When he didn’t, Saul, like Moses and so many others before and after him, tried to fit God into his own plans and forced himself. He got blood on his hands.

If I’m right, and I think that I am, then we don’t have to change anything at all. The world was made good, beautiful, and abundant. What we have to do is figure out all the ways that the lies about scarcity and God’s character have seeped into our collective understanding and undo their damage. We need to rewire our collective brain. If you’ve ever had to unlearn anything or try to untangle the webs of your family of origin, it’s like that, but on a cosmic scale. We don’t have to change the world, we have to start believing the truth about it and that means acknowledging who it really belongs to in the first place. Spoiler: not us.

So, I was scared of desire and I learned not to trust myself. I was paralyzed by getting things wrong and anything that I did try was like throwing spaghetti at the wall because, not only did I lack proper support and training, but I was also not taught how to get insight from the Holy Spirit. And I never cast any vision. I couldn’t handle the potential failure and shame that would come with getting it wrong. I couldn’t handle the rejection. The sad part was that the rejection was coming my way regardless because I’m “not a good fit” for the evangelical world.

I fought through the tension of the clear call and example of Jesus to live life with people that the religious establishment calls “sinners” or “bad people” and the pressure of that religious establishment to tow a certain ideological line with our actions. That establishment would affirm my desire to follow in the footsteps of Jesus to befriend “sinners”, but not too far. It was critical, to the establishment, that everyone knew that I didn’t agree with these people. It was imperative that I treat them like friends, but not too much like friends because, otherwise, people might get the wrong ideas about me, my theology, and my friends. And, if we’re really going for it, people might get the wrong idea about my church. God forbid.

What Jesus is saying is that you can look all fine on the outside. You can memorize all the Scriptures, know all the songs, go to all the events, give money to the poor, have a quiet time, serve at your church, do street evangelism, whatever, but it doesn’t matter. When the storm comes, when your life gets hard, then we’ll see what you’re really basing it on - the words and person of Jesus, or something else. When you get bad medical news, when you lose your job, when the people of God are mean to you and cast you out, when you’re abused by those who should know better, when your grandmother dies, when your friend is shot, when you get old, when your kid won’t listen to you, when your spouse doesn’t care, and when anything unexpected or shocking comes your way, will the house of your faith stand or will it fall?

It’s no secret that the ancient Israelites failed to shoulder the burden. But what you might not know is that God didn’t give up on them. Jeremiah was not the first or the last prophet that God sent to speak to his people. Jeremiah was not the first or the last prophet to re extend the invitation to the people of God to shoulder the burden of his words to humanity. And Jeremiah was not the first or the last prophet to be completely disregarded by the people of God. They didn’t want to listen to him. In fact, another prophet, Isaiah, was told by God himself that the people that he was going to talk to would not listen to him (Isaiah 6:9-13).

Now, these circumstances on their own might not be so bad. I mean, the headphones and intentional ignoring of me still happens, but at least I know who I’ve talked to before and what they look like. But the combination of minimized recognizable facial features and complete sonic isolation made it nearly impossible to interact with or get to know anyone. Not to mention the general social phobia that ran rampant during the pandemic and is still somewhat at play three years on from it.

I’m going to do my best not to get distracted here. I have so many thoughts about things that happened during the pandemic that nobody talked about and we all just kind of accepted. A lot of nuance is needed and I don’t know that I fully understand it all, but one thing I’m really confident about is this: people were not made to live alone.

And, if you’ve lived in the world for longer than five minutes, you’re going to realize that bad things just happen. It doesn’t matter how good you are or how many rules you follow. Sometimes bad things happen to you when you don’t do anything to earn them. Sometimes bad things happen to you when you actively work against them. This world is not as it should be and bad things just happen, even without cosmic interference.

Some days I wake up and think I’ve wandered into someone else’s daydream: simple home, working with your spouse, healthy child, and no responsibilities outside of work and home life. The normalcy of it is my nightmare.