the letter i'd write to my twenty-year-old self

Dear Twenty-year-old Self,

The ache you feel right now, that ache of not belonging in the church?  That ache won’t ever go away.  You’re going to get through this period of intense doubt.  One day you’ll be able to believe in God again with most of your heart.  But the believing will never be the same.  I know how much you wish right now to return to your childhood faith.  You will always wish that, but it won’t ever happen.  And that’s okay.  The faith you will stumble into and the faith you will stumble through will be different, yes, but it’ll also be good in ways that will make you stronger.

Don’t be afraid, my twenty-year-old self.  God seems so distant now, but this distance will only make you more empathetic, wiser, and better able to deal with the reality of a life in which many times God is – for all intents and purposes, at least – distant.  It’s life, self.  God seems distant, if only because we refuse to acknowledge him, because we put up barriers between heaven and earth.  But, really, if you will only pause long enough to listen, He is never very far off.

I want you to know that you will slowly become that which you now fear and despise.  You’ll become more liberal, more uncertain about all of those nuts and bolts of faith, and you’ll lose your desire for easy answers.  You’ll stop straining so hard for the answers at all; instead, you’ll learn to love questions.  It’ll be scary and uncomfortable.  It’ll put you at odds with nearly everyone sitting next to you in church and nearly everyone on your Facebook friends list, but it’ll bring you into a wide place of hope and peace.

There’s peace, self, in refusing easy answers.  There’s hope in not knowing.  There’s joy in admitting without reservation that your view of God is hopelessly skewed and so is your pastor’s.  There’s freedom in knowing that the God you worship is the same God that your pastor worships, even if the two of you don’t agree on predestination or baptism or evangelism. 

Go forward, twenty-year-old self.  Don’t let the questions stop you from loving.  Don’t allow yourself to become embittered or angry or lonely.  Christians are not your enemy, even if they believe and do crazy things.  They are your family, no matter what.  Love them as such.  Make the things that you say and the things that you think and the links that make it onto your Facebook profile things that will lift up rather than tear down.  Build a new society with the people that surround you rather than focusing all your energy on tearing down the existing one.

Above all, my dear twenty-year-old self, love with abandon.  Love God, love others, and love yourself.

The rest will take care of itself.

Love,

Marilee

Your Kingdom Come, Your Will be Done

Last night a Facebook friend posted a link to a current event on his timeline.  The story instantly made me depressed, and I said so.  800,000 bikers gathering in Washington D.C. to let Muslim Americans know just how much they're hated?  I was heart broken that this is what we do.  This is, for so many, what it means to be "American," and even more sadly, "Christian."  If I'm not careful, politics (read "extreme American conservativism") can send me over the edge, to a place where I don't want to go.  A place where I am critical and hateful, where I become depressed and self righteous.  

I realized tonight that in lashing out at people who hate, I am no better than them.  In succumbing to anger, I condemn people as militant Americans because they identify as Republican.  God, forgive me for this.

I have a dream, though.  I dream of a world - a Kingdom, really - where people wake up and begin to think logically.  A Kingdom where fear no longer drives us, where we are motivated by nothing other than love.  I dream of a day when Christ comes and sets up His Kingdom here on earth, and hatred ceases.  

I mourn for American Christianity, politicized to the point where Jesus' call to radical love has vanished from our hearts.  I mourn for my relatives and my church friends who refuse to see that the call of Christ is far beyond any political affiliation.  I mourn for those for whom Christianity and being American are synonymous.  I mourn for those who rally around the flag of hatred, who fear those who are no enemy at all, who persecute the defenseless, who cast blame and throw stones.  

I mourn for all of us, though.  I mourn for the "liberal" Christians (which, if we're speaking about a dichotomous world, I am) who fall into the same trap of fear and hatred, of name-calling.  

Tonight I made an attempt in that Facebook thread to reach out to one young man who believes all Muslims to be the enemy.  I was not successful.  My biggest regret is not my failure to reach him (although that does depress me more than I'd like to admit).  My biggest regret is that my first reaction was anger toward him.

Never anger.  

Always love.

Christ is coming back.  To that hope I cling.  A better world is on the way.  One where Christ's kingdom is established and sure, where hatred and wars cease.  Where there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female, where all are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28)

Maranatha.  Come, Lord Jesus.

My Confession

My heart is fickle; how well I know this.
I want different things, irreconcilably opposed to one another.
I betray my conscience with nearly every breath and with most of my actions.
Day after day I choose the status quo over honesty and truth.
I cast blame rather than acknowledging my guilt.
I see simplistically rather than in full complexity, preferring the simple narrative to the truth.
I am apathetic, embittered, hard-hearted, unforgiving, lazy.
I serve myself first before looking to the needs of others.
I am the center of my world.

God, forgive me.

what was and what is

I didn't drink until I was almost twenty-four years old.  For me it was a religious thing.

And then things changed, and I began drinking.  I had somewhat of a life epiphany, and realized just how much I had been judging something that I didn't really understand.  Alcohol, in and of itself, was not bad.  It was a cultural thing, a social thing, and I liked it.

I drank for about a year and a half.  Not a whole lot, just a drink here and there, sometimes several a week sometimes several a month; it all depended.

And then, about three months ago, I stopped drinking.  At first it was mostly just a "I'm-not-going-to-buy-alcohol-anymore" thing.  And then I realized I was done.  No more drinking for me.  I am not going to go so far as to say I'll never drink again, because I don't operate on those terms.  But at this point, it serves no positive purpose.  Among my friends here, it serves only as a stumbling block.  In Bellingham it was different, but culture is a funny thing and I must be willing to change with the culture.  When I drink here I promote alcohol as a solution to life's problems.  I promote, perhaps without meaning to, alcohol as the primary means of entertainment in a slow town with nothing else to do.  I promote drunkenness without having more than one or two drinks myself.

Do I regret the year and a half or so that I drank?  Not at all.

I refuse to see life in black and white terms.

~~~

As you're probably all-too-well aware, I attended graduate school a few years ago and obtained a master's degree in history, which came right on the heels of three and a half years of undergraduate work in the same subject area.  At this point I have little desire to return to the world of academia, at least not to obtain any more degrees.  I'm ready to earn my keep in this world.

And I'm changing, too.  Being out of the gates of the university means that I'm surrounded by different types of people than I was as a student.  My influences are more Christian (both religiously and culturally speaking) in nature due to my geographical location.  I'm becoming less concerned with things that plagued me a year ago.

Above all, God is moving in my heart.  He's changing me and making me more like Him.  He's taking my heart of stone and making it a heart of flesh.  He is the one transforming me, He is the one guiding me.

But today someone said something to me that cut much more deeply than they probably know or intended.  The specifics of what was said is not important, but she implied that my time in graduate school taught me to think in the wrong sorts of ways and that with time I'll relearn how to be a good Christian.

I refuse to see life in black and white terms.

God gave me my mind, and He gave it to me to use it.  When I have a gut level instinct about gender roles in the Church, the struggle is mental and spiritual and emotional all at the same time.  I cannot divorce my mind from my will, my soul from my heart, my thoughts from my emotions.  It's all interconnected.  God did not leave me during my time in graduate school, and He was no less with me then than he is now.  I may be more aware of Him now, but I treasure the things God taught me about life and Him during my time there.

I want to be transformed more every day into the likeness of God's Son, and I'm trying to not be afraid of the questions.  I'm trying to learn to ask them with gentleness and humility, with meekness and with boldness, knowing that the questions I ask are not the most important thing, but neither are they unimportant.

I'm wrong about most things, I know.

But that will not stop me from asking the questions.