for the wildflowers blooming in abundance, hope, and freedom

I am not sure when I began to struggle with my place as a woman in the church.  I think it was in Bellingham, probably, when I first came awake to the disparity between my church-at-the-time's stated position on women and the practical reality.  I remember being taken aside when I agreed to serve as a worship leader and it being explained to me that I could lead the congregation in song, but I couldn't preach.

Oh.  Cool.

At the time, I wasn't too concerned, I don't think.  I was more amused that they felt the need to clarify.  It was a bit unsettling (in the best of ways) that it wasn't just, I dunno, taken for granted.  I had (and have) no plans to enter the pastoral ministry, and so there was no barrier put up for me personally.  But I'd found the glass ceiling.  I told most of my close friends about that experience.  I won't ever forget it.  One little statement that opened my eyes and, long term at least, played a small but significant part in changing my life.

I don't want a fight.  I really feel little desire to discuss this or argue about this with the people I know will disagree with me or be angry with me.  I want them to see things the way I do, because I'm finding such crazy freedom and joy on the other side of fear.  But I know how long it took me to walk this road.  I know the roadblocks on the way to freedom.  Allow me to elaborate for a moment:
1) But the Bible says...
2) But all these really smart and important people say...
3) It's weird to hear women preaching, so it must be because it's not natural.
4) What if I choose to embrace women in leadership and it's wrong?  What does this mean for my salvation?  Is this a "slippery slope" type thing?
I know about each of these.  I've worked through these questions (and let's be real, I'm still working through them) for years.  I've found that it's a losing battle to argue with someone who already knows what they believe.  They have their reasons, just as I had mine.  I was not converted in a day, and it wasn't one person's clever argument.  It was a process of discovering a deep emotion inside me that embraced my identity as a beloved daughter of God.  I began feeling elation and hope any time I read blog articles about equality in marriage or in the church.  I began cheering for the "other" team.  I began to deeply believe that God desires to bring redemption from the Fall - not to perpetuate its effects - and that this redemption is, although not yet fully realized, something we, as Christ's body, should work to bring to earth.  Your kingdom come, Lord Jesus, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

With the fall came weeds and pain in childbirth.  We work every day to lessen those burdens.  What are we doing to restore the equality of Adam and Eve before God?  I firmly believe hierarchy is descriptive, not prescriptive.

I believe in submission.  I believe in silence.  I believe in servant-hood.  I believe in these things because Jesus modeled them.  Have there been times and places where Paul's instructions to women made sense?  Why yes, in that culture.  Do the principles behind his instructions still make sense?  Yes, in so far as we understand them in their proper historical and literary context.  Do I believe that Paul meant for us to copy his instructions to first century Jewish/Roman culture in the present day to the letter?  Nope.  In fact, we don't.*  So let's not even begin to pretend that we do or that we should.

And where does this all leave me practically speaking?

I find myself standing in a wide open grassy place with wild flowers blooming like crazy all around me.  I raise my hands toward the sky and spin in joyous abandon.

I'm free.  I will do my best to follow God where He leads me.  I don't know where that'll be or what it'll involve.  That's the crazy thing about following that same crazy call that uprooted Abram from all he'd known and transplanted him squarely in the unknown.  Maybe I'll have kids and stay at home with them.  That sounds nice.  Maybe I'll go to seminary and write books and teach college kids.  That sounds nice.  Maybe I'll do nothing "important" with my life.  That sounds nice, God doesn't really need me anyway.  His promises will prevail in spite of my best attempts to stand in the way.  But I want to be faithful to Him in each small choice I make, and I want to have the boldness to speak up when He calls me, in whatever forms that takes.

Here I go.

~~~~

*head coverings, women speaking in church and leading ministries, to name a few things that come to mind.

for hope

Militant opinion often betrays more about the doubts of the militant than the illegitimacy of the target.  We rail against things about which we ourselves face crippling doubt and uncertainty.  We shout about the things that scare us.  

I'm walking into a wide place of hope, and as I walk into the brilliant sun, I lay down my arms.  I don't want to fight anymore.  I just want to live in this place of hope.  

You can't kill my hope.  You can say what you will, believe what you will, do what you will.  And I may disagree entirely, but my hope cannot be killed.

This world goes to hell in a hand basket.  Mistake not my hope for optimism.  In this moment, I am not optimistic.

But my Jesus' kingdom is coming here.  It's coming soon.  Redemption is on the way.  I possess a hope with radical promise.

I look toward the day when the wrongs will be made right.  I will live today for the right, because I believe that His kingdom is on the way.  It's just around the corner.  It's just behind the clouds, peaking through even now as we speak.  

I see the rainbows every day.

for the wildness

There's a wildness to my God.  This wildness defies characterizations or organization or categorization.  This wildness blindsides me again and again the moment I think I have finally managed to tame my God.

I walked out into the inky blackness, desperate for answers.  I begged God for the key to unlocking the big questions I had.  Hell, salvation, women in the Church, the nature of grace... I wanted to know on which side of the line to land.  The inky blackness enveloped me.  I studied and prayed and discussed and emerged with no more peace than when I first embarked on this quest.

There's a wildness to my God.  He doesn't fit in my boxes, he breaks through all the fences - he's way too big for them in the first place.  He shatters my preconceptions, His Word constantly realigns my thoughts, gives me new questions.

There was a time when the Bible held all of the answers for me, when it brought peace and clarity.  I've changed; now the Bible jars me with its begged questions, with its insistence on shattering my equilibrium.  Who is God, anyway?

There is a wildness to my God.  I believe in His consistency as I do nothing but change.  It is his consistency that makes him wild.  Wholly other.  Essentially and entirely and utterly wild.

There was a time when I knew God.  I don't anymore.  Not really.  There are things I believe about God, yes.  Truths to which I cling.  I don't claim any special corner on knowledge of God, though.  He's too wild.  In spite of this, I love Him.  This Being, wholly Other, holds me.  That is wild, ridiculously wild.

for the rain that brings me home

The sky is obscured by a thick layer of clouds leaking moisture in varying doses, unrelenting in its delightful gloom.  I love the rain.  It brings me home.

I sit by the window of the coffee shop, sipping an americano and reading, listening to pandora and thanking God for this needed escape.  In this coffee shop, swallowed in the comfort of muted conversations buzzing around me and an over-stuffed armchair, I can forget that I live in rural Georgia surrounded by people with whom I sometimes feel I could not have less in common.  I love this coffee shop.  It brings me home.

~~~

Life is characteristically lonely.  I remember coming to this realization in my dorm room freshman year of college.  Things haven't changed.  I have acquired amazingly close friends with whom I would share anything, I have found a man who has my heart forever.  And in the midst of these people who have supported me through thick and thin, I am alone.

If I am thankful for anything today beyond the love and friendship of the God of the universe, I am thankful for the internet.  The internet connects me to a wide world where I am not alone.  In the world wide web, there are doubters and cynics, there are poets and intellectuals, there are wandering artists and lonely souls.

What is wrong with the "real community" in which I am immersed in my "real life" that I would stand in a circle around a bonfire with people I love so desperately and yet feel so desperately alone?  More accurately, what's wrong with me?  How many of us are there, living here on the fringes or in the heart of this community, not willing to admit that none of this is as certain as we pretend it is?  Why must fear characterize our questions?  Why must we despise the very community we so desperately require?

Today I despise my mind, my emotions, my liberal arts education (both undergraduate and graduate), and my inability to turn it all off.  Today I despise the questions, the necessity (in my mind, at least) for historical context.  I despise my cynicism and inability to trust any one philosophical framework.  I despise where reading blogs and NT Wright and Dietrich Bonhoeffer has brought me.  I despise the friends who have encouraged me to use my mind.

Where has it all brought me?  Here, where my questions are met with cloaked hostility.  Here, where I have two people in my physical location who know what is *really* going on in my brain.  Here, where I edit myself and compromise, where I mourn and fear what I am becoming, where I hide.

~~~

At the end of the day, though, it is only here, in this very place, where I would be.  Here, where any opinion I form is hard-won, where my perspective stands in sharp relief with those around me.  It's lonely, but I remain fearlessly optimistic that it is here that God is sanctifying me.  Here, I am not a lemming.  Here, my  perspective forms under the least amount of coercion possible.

Here, in the conservative capital of 'Murica, I have carved out a hard-won freedom to follow Jesus as he calls me.  As nice as it would be to live in community with Christian hipsters and cynics and intellectuals, I would be a lemming.  A chameleon.  My opinions would require a refining possible only in a community like the one in which I find myself.

~~~

And so I will embrace this place.  I'll sit in this coffee shop another rainy day and let the rain transport me home.  And for just a few more days it'll be okay that I live in this far away land.

And then I'll need the rain to come back.

for the crazy days of engagement, 125 days left edition

A few short days ago, I sat down to write the following:

for the crazy days of engagement, ??? days left edition 

"God's timing is always perfect," it is said.  

I stand here today not having a clue when I'll be getting married.  Thank the Navy - it appears there's a distinct possibility Justin will be deployed soon, and, with no specifics as to duration, the Navy just blew our wedding date out of the water (pun intended).  

There aren't really words for the range of emotions I have experienced over the past 48 hours: shock, anger, sorrow, fear, hope, hopelessness, each in their turn.  In recent years and months, I have struggled much with God's will.  Does God control life's events?  I was landing frequently on "no."  God walks with us, I thought, but certainly isn't ordaining or orchestrating pain.

The funny thing is, though; when this crisis hit, I realized how deeply I believe at my core that God not only holds and walks with Justin and me through this time, He is also in control.

"Thy will be done," is my prayer.

~~~ 

Justin just called from the boat.  I missed the call.  There was no voice mail.  In that moment of crazy fear, coming just as I was sitting down to write this blog post on the peace that passes all understanding, I was reminded how much my flesh and spirit fail, how dependent I am on God every moment of every day.  My peace, hope, and joy find their source in Him, not in my "good temperament," coping skills, or spirituality.

My stomach is tied in knots, my sleep is restless, and my heart hurts.  But God is my portion and my strength.  There is a peace that passes all understanding, and it is mine in Christ Jesus.

Right after I wrote the above, Justin got off work and let me know that the deployment is probably not going to happen.  For now, at least, we continue to plan and hope for a July 5 wedding.  But I hold it all with an open hand now.  God holds Justin and me and our future marriage in His hand.  There's no need for me to hold my future with a clenched fist, for God is above me, above the Navy.  He ordains each of our days and directs our footsteps.  He will not let us fall.

I'd like to think I'm getting married in 125 days.  But at the end of the day, I will leave it in God's hands.  He knows best.