Andrea Lucado's Blog, page 4

“At the Well”

It’s Friday night. I’ve been working and what I really want to do is lie down and binge watch West Wing.

But instead I am here, typing.

I just listened straight through Bethany Barnard’s new album three times in a row. The fifth song is called “At the Well.” It has a sort of haunting sound to it (in a good way), so haunting that it compelled me to forgo my binge watching for the evening and write this instead.

Have you ever been continuously drawn to a certain passage in scripture but you weren’t sure why? That’s how John 4 has been for me. I wrote a devo on it for She Reads Truth a while back and ever since, I keep coming back to it. Thinking about it. Wondering about it.

That Samaritan woman at the well.

And tonight as I listened to that song (three times), I remembered it again. Go back to the passage, I heard my soul urge. Ask me why you’ve been drawn to it. And it hit me. Just like that.

To recap, the story of the woman at the well (John 4:1-30) occurs when Jesus is on his way from Judea to Galilee. He stops at a well in a city in Samaria and asks a woman to give him a drink. They proceed to have a pretty amazing conversation. Go read it and then come back.

When I was studying this story for She Reads Truth, I learned that Jesus breaks three cultural barriers of his time in order to speak to this woman:

He is speaking to a woman, and traditionally, Jewish men were not to be seen conversing with women.


He is speaking to a Samaritan, and as the scripture says, Jews had no dealings with Samaritans at the time (v. 9).


He is speaking to a woman he knows is an “adulteress.” A woman who has had more than one husband and was now with a man she wasn’t married to.

Jesus didn’t have to be in Samaria that day. Because the Jews and the Samaritans didn’t get along, most Jews would go around Samaria if they were traveling somewhere, avoiding it if at all possible. The HCSB commentary says, “…rabbis considered Samaritans to be in a continual state of uncleanliness.”

It’s also particularly strange that Jesus is talking to a woman. As the same commentary says about verse 27, “The disciples’ amazement that Jesus was talking with a woman stemmed from the common Jewish teaching that talking too much to a woman, even one’s wife, was a waste of time, diverting one’s attention from the study of scripture and reflection of God.”

It’s worth noting here that Jesus pursues the conversation with the woman, not the other way around, and he keeps pursuing it until he reveals who he is:

“I know that the Messiah is coming…”

“I who speak to you am He.” (vv. 25-26)

Remember, at that time Jesus wasn’t going around telling everybody who he was. This is very significant.

I have been needing something from God lately. I’ve been needing him to explain to me why the faith I believe in appears to have been turned upside-down and twisted into something I don’t recognize by people touting the identity of “evangelical,” and, in the name of Jesus, trying their hardest to further marginalize the already marginalized.

I have felt so put off by my own religious affiliation I threatened to my mom on the phone the other day that I was going to quit. Just evangelicalism leave. Possibly forever.

I knew, of course I knew, that a president making executive orders and a handful of big evangelical names supporting those were not the actual true voice of my religion. But it felt that way. It felt like they were hijacking what I believe and know to be true about Jesus and molding it into this unrecognizable thing. This weird, sad, patriotic thing disguised as “safety and security.”

And now I know why John 4 has been rumbling. I told God I needed something. I needed to know what He thought about this, what He was going to do about this and here, I see it.

Jesus took who no one else wanted—a woman a Samaritan—looked her in the eye and offered her his very self, the living water. He turned it upside-down. And he let his disciples see it—that cultural norms and discriminatory attitudes will not hold him back. That the gospel does not push away, it moves toward. It doesn’t build barriers, it crashes through them. At all costs. At the cost.

I don’t like this tendency of mine to let others’ voices get loud and tell me who I am and who everybody else is. As if the loudest one on TV wins, and I just have to deal with it. But the reality for us right now is that we are going to have to fight for this. As Christians, we are going to have to consistently come back to the well, to the one who knows us, to the truth that lies underneath. Because not much of it is at the surface right now. We will have to be diligent at reminding ourselves and each other, as the voices roar, that the Jesus some claim to serve is not the Jesus we serve.

The Jesus we serve is holding the faces of the unclean.

It was not a practical answer. God did not tell me how I was going to solve all of this. Instead, He told me He is with me in it. He is with us. And that is what I needed. Because the disbelief and the despair had silenced me, and I needed to know that the same one who drew near her, draws near me, and all of us. And he isn’t going to stop.

P.S. If you are looking for a practical way to help refugees during all of this, check out Preemptive Love Coalition. They are the rock stars of my life right now.

And, I was really inspired by this last week, written by Sharon Hodde Miller: Evangelicals and the Loss of Prophetic Imagination.

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English Lessons: The Book Cover and How Writing Makes You Crazy

Around this exact moment on this day last year, I hit SEND on my manuscript. I had spent the previous nine days in a bit of a frenzied state. I did not speak to other people. I holed up in a garage apartment in the country for a couple of days. My physical appearance got scary. All I did was write, and read out loud and go on runs. For nine days.

In that time I rethought my entire book. I questioned everything I had been writing for the last two and a half years. I decided to change my entire first chapter, and then later, decided to change it back.

Book deadlines make a person crazy.

For me, it wasn’t a matter of getting the book done. The words were all there. It was more a matter of overthinking every single word and sentence and phrase. I was second-guessing myself and feeling upside-down, and at one point I hit my knees and asked God if he had actually called me to do this or if I was supposed to surrender the idea of writing a book altogether. (Raise your hand if you are such an intense overthinker that you actually come to point of considering throwing away a couple of years of work in case you had “misheard” God. Ugh. Sometimes I kind of hate myself.)

After these nine days of crazy, on February 1, 2016, I turned in the first draft of English Lessons. And now, there is a cover and everything. There is a publication date: May 2, 2017. And there is talk of marketing and publicity.

In short, the book has just suddenly become real.

It is no longer a Word Doc. on my computer, an idea in my head, a dream in my heart. It is, as we speak, on its way to my house in advance-reader-copy form and some time in April it will be a real-life, bound, hardcover beauty of a thing. Can you believe it? Nor can I.

In case it isn’t clear by now, that beautiful image above is the final cover for the book. I describe it as lovely with a bit whim. I love me some whim, and I am so glad the artist captured that in the cover. Did you notice how it goes from black and white to color? Pretty cool, huh?

I would now like to draw your attention to the subtitle and in doing so, tell you what this book is actually about. Because I don’t think I’ve really done that yet…The Crooked Path of Growing Toward Faith.

If you’ve even been on said path, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

From 2008-09 I lived in Oxford, England. Some of you who’ve been following this blog for while know allll about that. I was there for grad school, studying to get my master’s in English (hence, English Lessons), and over the course of that year, I finally had to face some questions about my faith I had always been able to avoid while living in Texas, located in the Bible Belt. England is not located in the Bible Belt.

I began to question, well, everything. God’s existence. The legitimacy of my faith apart from my parents’. The very real possibility that all faith and religion is is something to comfort us and make us feel better as this earth spins and spins and spins.

The reason this subtitle isn’t The Crooked Path to Faith, is because I realized after that year that we never quite arrive at faith, to some sort of absolute certainty in all things unseen. Faith, at least genuine faith, asks questions, takes detours, gets lost, gets found, gets lost again. And the way doesn’t dump you out at a destination. Rather, the way continues and is long and dark at times and light and beautiful at times. All the while though, you are moving toward something, toward someone.

There’s so much more I could say, but really, you should just read it. Because I didn’t spend two and half years writing this blog post. The book is much better.

Which brings me to some announcements:

I already told you the book is coming out May 2 this year. Mark it on your calendar! The book will be for sale that day in bookstores and online.

Pre-orders: You will be able to pre-order the book too, for all you people who just cannot wait till May 2. I’ll be letting you know more about that soon.

LAUNCH TEAM: All caps because this one is what I am most excited about. This is where you get to be a part of this process. I’ll be gathering a few (or 50 or 100) people together to rally around English Lessons and tell everyone you know about it. (I meant it. EVERYONE. More caps.) You’ll get stuff, like a copy of the book and maybe some other freebies to be announced. Stay tuned for how you can be on the team!

Speaking: I never officially announced this new page on my blog. But, I do have a speaking page. And I do speak sometimes.  If you’re interested in the content of English Lessons and would like to have me come talk about it at your Bible study or event or school (or over coffee) or wherever, fill out the form on my speaking page. I’d love to chat with you more.

Ok, I think that’s it? So much to say! So much!

Thank you. Thank you for reading this, thank you for reading any other stuff of mine that you’ve ever read. I know some of you have been here a long time, and for that, well, you just don’t even know how grateful I am. Because when it comes to writing, there’s no point in doing it if you’re not connecting with people through it. Connecting with people is really everything. It’s the whole point.

So again, thank you.

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2017.

2017.

I know three things about it so far:

It will be the year my first book releases.

It will be the year I move home.

And, I hope, it will be the year that I rest.

I think above all else, 2016 made me aware of how tired I feel. I’m not sure I’m supposed to confess that sort of the thing in a New Year’s blog post, but that’s the truth. I am tired.

In September this year, my dad and I attended the Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, led by writer Leslie Leyland Fields. The workshop took place on her family’s island, off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska. There is no cell reception there and occasionally there is internet service, but only occasionally. It is amazing how God can speak when I turn my phone off for eight days.

I remember talking to my roommate, Devi, one night. She asked what I would do if I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. One of the things I said was I would move home. I’ve lived at least several states if not an ocean away from my family for the past eight years, I explained, and I am tired of being so far. I want to be able to see them on the weekends. I want to be able to go to birthday parties and Memorial Day bar-b-ques. I want to be able to hop in the car on a Saturday and have lunch with my mom and get pedicures with my sisters.

As the week in Alaska went on and in the weeks that followed, it became increasingly clear that God had spoken during that conversation.

So for the next few months I prayed and planned and finally, I set a date. Next week on January 12, I will leave Nashville and move to Austin. I will settle back into the Texas Hill Country where I am from. I’m going to live with one of my best friends from college, just a few minutes away from two of our other friends from college. Austin is an hour and half north of my parents, my older sister, brother-in-law and niece. And an hour and half south of my little sister and brother-in-law.

I will be smack dab in the middle of my family and near some of my oldest friends.

I moved to Nashville in fall 2009. I had recently turned 23 and knew absolutely nothing about the real world, though I thought I did. Nashville is the place of many things for me: Where I had my first, second and third jobs. Where I wrote my first book. Where I learned what grace really was. Where I met a group of friends I didn’t know I would so desperately need as I navigated my twenties. Where I fell more deeply in love with red wine and learned I like some types of beer too. Where I had hard conversations and realized I have a lot of work to do on myself.

If my late teens and early twenties were spent grappling with belief in God and where I stood in my faith, Nashville is the place where I grappled with who God really is and if that’s different from how I’d always pictured him to be.

For some reason, when I imagine moving back to Texas, I don’t see it as an adventure as much as I see it as a much-needed nap. I imagine moving into my new room in Austin, lying down on my bed and falling asleep.

The past couple of years have worn me out. Writing a memoir and starting a freelance business are two of the reasons for this, and hope is the other.

Though I didn’t feel it on a day-to-day basis, I think writing such a personal story and knowing that I would be sharing it with the world has taken a lot from me physically and even more from me emotionally. Venturing into freelance writing, pitching myself and my work, spending time in excel sheets and Googling questions about taxes has been educational and necessary but also exhausting at times.

And hope.

Have you ever looked up and realized you have been hoping for something for so long that you are actually physically tired of it? Hoping has just plain worn you out? And instead of one more prayer or one more push toward the thing, all you want to do is lie down?

That’s how I feel. And giving myself permission—because I do feel like I had to give myself permission—to move home has felt like the largest step toward rest and reprieve that I could possibly take. And I am grateful for it.

I want to do two things in Texas in 2017. I want to write and I want to rest. I want to write as much as I can, and I want to lie low and spend time with the people I love and the God I love. I don’t have many more dreams than that. I don’t feel the need to make a lot of new friends or build up a new community. I don’t care all that much about “getting plugged in” at a church. I would like to attend a church, but I want to sit on the back row, and I want to leave when the sermon is over.

I know this won’t last forever. This desire to hunker down and close the door. But this is where I find myself in 2017, at the beginning of a new road that will begin with rest.

So if you are out there feeling more weary than dreamy about this new year, I am with you on that. Perhaps this can be a year of rest for you too. And perhaps the rest will lead to restoration and perhaps the restoration will lead to hope.

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