Lindsey Kay's Blog: *! (on Goodreads), page 9

It’s been a while.

We’ve grown enmeshed like two trees rooted in the same earth

inseparable unless we leave some part of ourselves in each other

I keep telling myself that I need to write something about the past two years.  I have, in a way.  I wrote becoming.  It was about parts of my passage, some of it so heavily coded that you would only decipher the details if you knew me very well.  But becoming was also about far more than just the past two years, it was really about the past eleven years and my fears for the next twenty.  Am I a good mother?  Do I love my mom?  Do I love my husband?  Am I becoming something better or worse than who I used to be?  Becoming is a rite of passage, a collection of battle scars.  I feel like I need to tell the truth directly because while I am repentant about some things and conflicted about others I don’t want to feel ashamed about any of it, and there are people in my life that know a lot about what exactly happened but have very little to hold on to about why.

Here’s the thing:  my husband and I spent almost a year separated.  It was a very dark time in my life.  I felt completely wrecked.  I knew we couldn’t go on living in the same house together.  I was suffering from what I later found out may have been a mild kind of post-traumatic-stress disorder.  I was constantly hyper-aware of everything, couldn’t sleep, and felt panicked every time I was in the same room with my husband.  It felt like every time we talked about what was wrong it made things worse.  I was starting to question my sanity and I was starting to get darkly suspicious of him.  I worried that he might really, truly, physically hurt me.  I worried that I might completely break down even if he didn’t.  I felt so completely lost.  So I left.  I didn’t know what else to do.

Then, the internal questions.  Does this mean I’m a failure as a wife?  Am I a bad Christian?  What do I say to the kids?  What will become of me?  How will I make it through the next few years?  The years after that?  Will there ever be a time that I feel whole and happy?  It was the best and worst year of my life.  It was the worst in that I was working 36 hour work weeks and going to school full time.  I had to schedule my time with my own children so that I didn’t forget to interact with them.  And my home got to be the kind of home I wanted it to be.  The TV wasn’t on all the time, we ate dinner at the table, we felt happy and safe together.  (Aside from the big gaping wound just beneath the surface inside of me, that always seemed to split the stitches at the least opportune times.)  It wasn’t fun to have to struggle for a GPA I could be proud of; like the time I forgot to print my homework because I’d worked two twelve hour night shifts over the weekend and only got about four hours of sleep before coming in to school, massive migraine in tow, and had to go beg my teacher for full credit.  Thankfully the instructor understood, but I’ll never forget the look on her face when I confessed to being a single mom with an infant and two kids in school, that I was so unsure of my own capability to get through school.  She just said, “you’re getting through,” and left it at that.

My husband and I ended up reconciling, and that in and of itself has led to a lot of difficult questions.  He continues to do the work that is needed for our relationship to get better, but as in all things it waxes and wains and I have to stomach my doubts.  I have to wonder if I’ve made the right choices.  I have to wonder if our relationship will ever be what we both dream and believe it could be.  I have to wonder how we’ll put that year behind us, how we’ll ever fit back together now that we’ve lived and grown separately.

Is this cold flesh moving once again until rot corrupts and the stitches no longer hold the form together?

Or is it soft and sacred as a newborn baby’s face with the scent of fresh birth still lingering in it’s hair?

What do we call ourselves?

And then I look at all of the growing and changing that has happened, and even with all of the scars I realize that I would not give up this experience.  When I was first considering the reconciliation a friend of mine asked me what I would say to the 19 year me if I could find her and talk to her.  Would I say run?  Would I say go for it?  Whatever I would say to myself then should be what I say to myself now, that friend said.  But I realized that if I could find the 19 year old me and talk to her I would tell her to never stop believing that love can change everything, and I don’t want to stop believing that now.  It’s completely foolish to believe that the changes are always what we want, that the love is always perfect, that the end result is always purely good.  We’re human, and sometimes humans hurt each other.  We’re made of flesh and that flesh can scar.  We have our own motives and sometimes we’re blinded by them.

But even in the moments where we kill each other, kill ourselves, in our selfishness there is still beauty that can be born there.  The stories of the Bible are stories of corruption and renewal, death and rebirth, slavery and exodus, captivity and freedom.  It comes in a cycle as people live and forget, lose and remember.  And those stories in the end are what all humanity shares.  We’re all on the same journey.  And I look at my husband and realize that he can love me despite never fully understanding what went wrong, and I can love him without knowing what changed, and we can both live with our past without believing it has cursed our future, and then I trust God.

I barely remember parts of the past two years, especially the almost-year I spent alone.  Huge parts of it are already lost to me, probably because the immense amount of stress I was under.  My brain would go on autopilot.  I’d drive home and put the car in park and not remember driving there.  I’d look at the clock at work and realize four hours had passed that I could barely remember, but when I panicked and double checked I’d been doing my job.  I’d wake up in the morning and not remember having gone to bed, but there I was.  And throughout that whole process I learned to relax because I just knew that someone out there must really love me, and want me safe.

I can remember the moment I realized it would be okay.  And it was, it has been.  It will continue to be.  And my biggest question, the one I’ve struggled with the most?  You know the one, I’m sure.  ”What am I becoming?  It is better, or worse?”  It makes me smile, because the one thing I’ve learned more than anything else is that if you move towards God you could never become worse.  Little things happen to remind me of how I used to react, what I used to think and feel.  I realize that I am not who I used to be, and as I trust myself more I can learn better how to trust others.

I think I died, somewhere in that year alone.  Not my physical body, obviously, but somewhere deep inside of myself some version of who I was died.  Sometime in one of those moments where my conscious brain just shut itself off and hid, some part of me died.  And I’m okay with that, because it’s part of the journey.  I think it was the part of me that doubted the most, that wanted to hold on to its hate, that wanted revenge, that thought that I shouldn’t have to share the blame in what went wrong.

But when I snapped out of it, late at night, and wondered how I’d ended up in bed safe and warm with my daughter in my arms, I heard a voice tell me it would be okay now.

And it has been.

Every tree knows it was once a seed covered by earth,

Dead and then not dead, not undying.

*Pieces of poetry from a larger work called “you wouldn’t call a tree a zombie”, written a month after the reconciliation.

Honest Conversations: Revised, Expanded, and being GIVEN AWAY!

“There is a love that is so deep it surpasses understanding. It is so enormous and boundless it could utterly destroy you with its force. It is a love like the ocean. In the shallows it looks harmless, but caught in the undertow it will drag you away from everything you know and enjoy and bury you in a world you’d never imagined.”

“This is God.”

Honest Conversation.  As I wrote yesterday, revising it has been a strange journey for me.  I came across the above passage this morning and it was one of those moments where I forgot having written something that still grips at my chest now.  Passages like that remind me of the importance of this book just as much as the passages about being a gay Christian do.  Why?  Because there’s a side of God that many people in the Church too easily overlook, the violently affectionate God who longs for all of his children, even the ones we’d rather not have be a part of the family.  This is why I wrote that book, and it’s why I still believe in it and want it to be successful.  I want to share a taste of the God who changed my heart and my life and brought me back alive when I was dead in my life, the God who dragged me out to sea like the undertow and brought me back to shore a wholly new person.  The God whose love in me has allowed me to see and experience things I would have never been able to in my own power.

So I’m going to be doing a giveaway of Honest Conversation.  The giveaway will be twofold:  first, I’ll randomly give away copies to two people who review becoming. on Amazon or Goodreads before January 10th (the prospective release date for Honest Conversation).  People who review it on both sites (copy and paste, y’all) will get entered twice.  People who also paste a link of it being reviewed on their blog to my author fan page on Facebook will get entered THREE times.  I’ll also be giving free copies of Honest Conversation to trustworthy reviewers.  So if you know someone who book-blogs and would be interested in reading Honest Conversation, please send them the link to this post.

One of the additional blessings of my Kickstarter campaign having gone so well is that I’ve got enough money to be able to afford this giveaway- so a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed.

Plus as an additional happy part of the giveaway, I’ll be adding in some as of now unnamed goodies, so stay tuned!

***(Anyone who already has Honest Conversation coming to them as a part of the Kickstarter campaign can request another book of their choice.)

Bloggy Potpourri

So today is my birthday.  Today is also the start of my first full week sans classes until January, which means my brain is actually functional in terms of personal thoughts instead of just school, kids, dinner, school like it seems to be during classes.  I have so many things I want to write about and can’t seem to keep a thought straight, so I’m just going to put it all out there, potpourri style.

* * *

I’ve changed my major.  I’m going to be entering into a teaching certification program next fall, where I’ll be studying English, Literature, and Language Arts with a focus on High School/Secondary education.  I’m going to… teach.  It’s a long way away from social work in some ways and only a short hop in others.  I had this realization that without language we really have nothing.  Without language people can’t grow, can’t succeed, can’t understand.  So I want to give people language.  That’s all I want to do.

* * *

On TV shows people always seem to see turning 30 as some sort of tragic event that has to be denied.  I’m turning 30.  My first reaction?  Thank God.  I’ve learned a lot.  I earned another year under my belt.

* * *

Newtown.  It’s this immense tragedy that I don’t have words for.  People react in anger, they react in demands, they react in grief.  People also react in love, and I think that gets overlooked.  So many people shared words and prayers, tried to find ways to send support.  I saw far more of that then I saw people talking about guns or prayer in school or God’s judgment on an unholy nation.  The love is so strong, the grief so sincere, the prayers so honest.  If you remember anything from this tragedy, remember that.  Please.

* * *

I want to write a poem.

* * *

I’m going to get back on the horse with regards to Ravens.  Really.  I’ve already started writing it again, and I made a promise to myself not to just abandon it.  One of my personal goals for the next year of my life is to be more intentional with the goals I set for myself and plan ahead for how I’m going to meet them.  I’ve always been good at that in SOME areas of my life, but other areas have really suffered, and blogging always seems like the first to go.  That’s a real tragedy because blogging has given me some really incredible gifts, and I don’t want to take that for granted.

* * *

Wreck It Ralph was a great movie.  I want to see it again.

* * *

Not so sure about the Hobbit.  I haven’t seen it yet.  I’ve seen mixed reviews though, and that book was my first love.  You know how sometimes you see a crush all grown up and you hate it, and want to forget that they got chubby and their hair was different and they’d suddenly become an obscene jerk?  I don’t want that to happen to the Hobbit.  No, no, no…

* * *

I could compare you to a winter’s night/

you are colder and far more treacherous.

(No, not YOU.)

If you want the whole poem, buy this book.

* * *

Oh, I, uh, wrote a book.

* * *

I’m currently editing and expanding Honest Conversations and plan to re-release it later this month, a sort of Christmas Present to myself.  It’s like moving back home, or like…  I don’t know, eating apple pie.  Comforting, but also a little strange.  Like chatting with an old friend but knowing that there are all of these years in between you, even if their voice still sounds the same.  I would say like falling back in love, except it’s not that sentimental.  It just is.

* * *

How is it that EVERY TIME I make cookies I’m wearing a black t-shirt and flour myself?  Every.  Single.  Time.

* * *

Sex and bacon.  (God wants us to be happy, folks.  He really, really does.)

* * *

God also wants us to learn self-control.  Those two things always seem to go hand and hand.

* * *

We’ll call it a day.  I miss you all.  I promise to write at least once a month.

Becoming

(written for a class.  Liked it, wanted to share it.)

The ultrasound photo didn’t look like a baby to me. It either looked like a mutated kidney bean or a tiny alien, depending on the angle I held it at. When people said “wow the baby looks just like Mommy!” I had to wonder how absolutely unattractive I was. Did I have bug eyes and a tiny mouth and a caveman forehead? I knew I was supposed to blush and say, “oh thank you” or “nope this one looks like daddy!” or “I’ll take that as a compliment!” so that is what I did. When I was alone I’d put my hand on my growing belly and feel the baby moving, and I’d wonder. What was this creature? Who was this creature? Over countless hours in waiting rooms I’d hear other soon-to-be-mothers talk about imagining what their child was going to be like. What color of hair would he have, what disposition, how irrepressibly cute might she be? I didn’t wonder that. I wondered, “will I like this child? Will I want to take care of it? Will it resent me?” The times when my husband and I stopped fighting long enough to sit together in silence I’d stare at him and think, “my God, what have we done?” I’d fantasize about a world in which I’d been brave enough to break off the marriage before we’d gotten so far. A world in which I was still skinny and attractive and being wooed by someone successful and independently wealthy. It was an imaginary life in which having children was still far away somewhere in the future, and I was certain that when I got around to it I’d be a perfect mother. Then the baby would stir inside me and anchor me hard to reality. Regardless of if I wanted it, if I was ready, or even if I was able, I was this child’s mother.

The closer the due date loomed the more excitement and fear I felt. I wanted my child desperately, but partially just because I was sick and tired of being pregnant. My stomach ached, which I expected. My joints hurt, which I heard was normal. I retained water like the Hoover Dam every time I ate anything salty, which was apparently dangerous but also perfectly normal. My breasts felt like they were on fire and my head was constantly pounding out a twangy riff like the bass in a bad jazz trio. I felt like my body was completely out of my control and I wanted it back. I never talked about my feelings with anyone, even my midwife, because I felt so completely ashamed. Where was my glow? My joy? The heart rending poetry of longing for my child to be in my arms? I would write epic journal entries about my fears and then trash them, mortified at the things that were running through my head. I still remember the words I wrote, despite their having long ago turned into compost. I remember writing that I would have no idea how to raise a bubblegum and pompoms princess. I wrote, “I’ve heard the stories about what my husband was like as a child, and I’m fairly sure that raising anyone even remotely like him would kill me. I can’t do this. Please, God.”

The due date passed, and then another date, and then another; with every hour and minute that ticked away I felt the inevitable gathering nearer like thunderclouds. I had contractions every twenty minutes for a week. I was sleep deprived, sore, cranky, and completely emotionally wrecked. My midwife sent me to the hospital and I was buoyed in an ocean of relief and panic. My husband held my hands, he said something really romantic about finally having our baby. I honestly can’t remember what it was. What I do remember is the feeling I clung to, of wanting to be happy, pretending to be happy, hoping it overwhelmed my mortification. I prayed, and prayed, and prayed that once I had my baby in my arms I would be magically transformed into a mother worthy of her child.

It would be 38 hours before I finally saw my baby. I went into the hospital late on a Friday evening and they induced labor overnight. My body fought it the whole way. I was left staring at a room that looked a little like my grandmother’s parlor. The walls were a tan color, the kind of color that is somehow even more colorless than white. There were stenciled vines with grape clusters on the wall, and the nurses and midwife and my mother took turns sitting in a rocking chair by the bed and working on needlepoint and knitting. I can remember at one point thinking, “am I giving birth in a sewing circle?” But the delivery room didn’t exactly feel like a comfortable room. Not with the braid of plastic tubing sticking out of my wrist and the crisscross of elastics holding monitoring devices on my belly. The IV regulator beeped regularly, telling me information I couldn’t really understand. The readout from the monitors showed my heartbeat and the baby’s. A nurse pointed to a needle scratching on a paper roll that reminded me of lie detector tests on spy shows and said, “see that little hill? That’s a contraction. We want it to look more like a mountain.” Later, my husband would incredulously ask if it was normal for the needle to not go down in between peaks. I’d look at the paper printout and see that my contractions looked like the Rockies. The nurse would sympathetically say that in a natural labor there were breaks for the mom to rest, but every time they dialed back the meds to give me a break my labor stalled.

I should have felt comforted by the nurses in their cardigans with prayer shawls pinned to their buns. The nurses who, in my memory, all look like distant relatives of mine. But comfort was unreachable. Everything about that day felt so surreal. My eyes tracing the stenciled vines like a labyrinth, the gnawing hunger that ice chips couldn’t sate, the beeping and whirring and scratching machines, my husband’s voice so distant and muffled like he was holding a pillow to his face, the pinch of two black combs I held in my hands and squeezed until they drew blood, the sterile smell of the room which looked to me like it should have smelled of cinnamon, the pounding pressure of wave after wave of contractions that crashed into my body without ever drawing back to sea, the inescapable tide of the thing, all of it worked together to carry me to a place that I remember only in scraps and flashes like a drug induced nightmare. Other women recall the day of their child’s birth with bright smiles on their face. I start to tell the story, and the back of my neck clenches so tight there’s an instantaneous headache.

There were two insane hours of pushing to bring my first child into the light of late morning. There were tears and blood and sweat and things that are what a good friend called “too unladylike to discuss”. No matter now, because I got through it. I didn’t give up, and eventually managed to bear my baby kicking and screaming into this world. When the midwife held her up my first thought was, “ew.” She was covered in ooze and had just pooped all over herself. The nurses laid her on my stomach to towel her off and one miniscule hand clutched at my finger. Her grip was so disproportionally strong. I wondered at those tiny fingers, the feet that curled like a ballerina en pointe when she cried, the greasy wrinkles in her neck and the feathery blonde hair sticking up in bloody clumps. I thought, “she came from me.”

Then I was lost, in an ocean of panic. I didn’t know this baby, she came from me but she was a complete stranger. Was she like me? Was she like my husband? Who would she grow up to be? Would we have anything in common? Was I even capable of being the kind of mother she needed? The past nine months I’d feared and resented her, and now here she was, screaming, and I had no idea what to do. “You need to nurse her,” my mother whispered, and I blushed. I should’ve known that. I struggled with how to hold her, what to do, what went where. Wasn’t this sort of thing supposed to be instinctual? Easy? One of the nurses corrected me, telling me the baby wasn’t latching on. I cursed under my breath and tried again, and again. My husband’s calloused hand was on my shoulder. Despite all of our differences, he was the one who said that he was proud of me. “She’s perfect,” he said, “she’s just like you.” Over the next few days I’d end up chafed and sore and constantly worried that I still wasn’t doing it right. My daughter would cry and it would take me just a split second to recognize her voice, to respond. Guilt, guilt, and more guilt. I’d see other mothers for whom nurturing was second nature and I would secretly hate them.

It wasn’t until months later, after seemingly countless setbacks and struggles and nights spent awake with the baby clutched to my chest and me crying through my pain and frustration and wishing I knew what I was doing wrong, that reality would start to creep in. I remember one dim twilight, another three o’clock feeding, after I’d given in and my daughter was curled close in bed beside me. She started fussing, not really crying but the sort of sad whimpering that leads to cries if you don’t react in time. I half woke up and took her to my breast without even completely opening my eyes. She reached one hand up and laced her fingers through my hair, holding the tangled lock to her cheek. I woke up just enough to see that she was smiling. That was when I finally knew it. I knew that she belonged to me, and I belonged to her. Whoever she became, whoever I became, whatever we ended up meaning to each other as she grew didn’t matter. We were designed to fit together, by nature or by God or by love or whatever force our lives are led by. I’d like to say that I basked in the glow of that moment, that I was awash with emotion, and it changed my life forever. However, I couldn’t say that and tell the truth. It was three in the morning, the baby had been fussing half the night, and I was tired. I fell asleep. That moment was lost in the ups and downs of many moments to come, and it’s only in looking back that I realize now what it meant.

When I was a child I took for granted that my parents had no choice in whether or not they loved me, and it took me a long time to grow out of that belief. I once thought naively that love is something that happens to people. I imagined that if men and women are meant to make babies together they would be drowned in an ocean of love and pulled together by an unstoppable tide. I believed that mothers loved their babies from the moment life is first sparked inside of them. I believed in love as only a child could, and believed in its transforming power as if it were magic. It isn’t. It’s hard work. Here’s the truth: Pregnancy sucks. The women who do glow don’t glow because of the fact that they are pregnant, they glow in spite of it. The love that a mother and father feel for each other isn’t an unstoppable magical force, either. It’s built off of a million decisions made over time, in which the old identity is bricked over like a foundation and they are re-created, as a person whose innermost being is inseparable from the new role that they’ve taken. It isn’t pushing a child into this world that makes a woman a mother. The sight of that crying baby doesn’t change you forever. What changes you is a myriad of moments in which you make a choice; those moments are mostly lost to memory. Yet somewhere inside of you, your soul reaches out like an infant’s hand and grasps on to each one, with disproportionate strength, holding them to your heart like a tangled lock of hair to a milk stained cheek.

GUEST POST: Lee Goff reviews Honest Conversation

(A review of my novella Honest Conversation by Lee Goff, author of the Thunder Trilogy books)

Honest Conversation’ is a novella that wastes no time getting directly to one of the most controversial issues of our day, homosexuality in the church. The story opens with Zoe, an associate pastor in a local church, agonizing over the congregation’s reaction towards a recent addition to their church, two gay men, Kyle and Evan. Kyle is a long time believer, Evan is not. Enter John, the lead pastor for the church, bearing the burden of leading a church in the way he feels Christ would, which at the moment seems to be in opposition to the feelings of the membership.

Zoe, for her own personal reasons that are revealed in the book, champions both kyle and Evan, to the point of threatening resignation if they are not treated as she feels they should be. John, the one called to shepherd the church, tries to find the path that pleases everyone, especially the influential members that strongly oppose the gay couple.

Kay has chosen her characters nicely and writes in a style comfortable and easy flowing. She gratefully skips the ’feel what I feel’ format and leaves the reaction up to the reader. There is not a deep development of the characters, but that is typical in a novella. I confess some disappointment here, but it is a compliment rather than a criticism, as she has given us enough of John and Zoe to want more. In John, we are shown a pastor, the shepherd, as opposed to a preacher. He is more interested in the spiritual health of his flock than he is the potential loss of members, and make no mistake about it, this threat is a real one in our churches today. This is refreshing, and likely contradictory to the reality of many churches. Just my opinion, but his character could serve as an example of how a challenged pastor might handle this situation in their own church.

Zoe, on the other hand, irritated me beyond description. I give kudos to the author in being able to achieve this, since I rarely get this personally involved with characters. Zoe is non-compromising, bull-headed, and seems to ignore the pain her pastor and friend is going through during this time. It is in this view I have of the characters that might just be the most accurate mirror of our church society today. Sides are chosen; an ‘all or nothing’ attitude developed, and because of that, the ability to compromise is gone. Here is where the author makes a difference, and by doing so, sets this book apart from those with a singular agenda owned by the author, and the intent of pushing that agenda on the reader.

I’m not going to spoil the ending, but it shocked me. I expected a neatly wrapped up story with a bow designed by the author and her self-imposed agenda of accepting gays into the church without any thought to the sin that the others feel accompanies the lifestyle. The author, through the wisdom of john, the pastor, gives us what just might be the best way for a church to address this issue. It is not a compromise, it is not a victory for one side only. It is possibly just the way a man that walked 2000 years ago would have handled it.

I do not recommend this book to someone with a closed mind; unwilling to learn. I do, however, recommend it to anyone open to learning something about this issue, and willing to look at it as Christ Himself might have.

One more thing…that criticism. It’s too short. The characters and their personalities leave us wanting more of them. They are who they are due to their past, and I wanted more of that. And in the world of authors, this criticism is perhaps the best thing one could hear.

–Lee Goff

Fear our Love.

Christians are not the parents of this world.  I say that because at times we act as if we are.  We want to dole out punishment and appropriate discipline to all those whom we see as disobeying.  ”Hey. single mom, your current struggles are the natural consequence of your actions!  If you’d followed God’s plan your life wouldn’t be so hard!”  Or, “hey, gay person, you’ve got to get straight to get to God or you’ll burn in hell, m’kay?”  Or, “Hey, society, just going to change a few laws over here to keep your Judeo-Christian values right or God is gonna judge us all, don’t want that happening!”

Missing the point, missing the point, missing the point.

We aren’t society’s parents.  There’s a difference between being God’s ministering hands and feet to express the Gospel to this world and being God’s spank paddle.  One, we are called to be.  The other?  We aren’t.  See, the thing is, all of humanity is called to be God’s sons and daughters.  We’re all siblings.  When I tell my son if he throws his toys his toys are going in my closet and he’s getting a time out, his sister is right there to let me know that her brother is stressed and angry and he can’t help it and he needs a hug and if I give him a time out I’m Mean Mommy.  When I tell her that if she doesn’t respond to me because she’s watching a video I’m going to turn off the TV, her brother is right there to defend her.  They’ve got each other’s backs.  And when I dole out the discipline and go into the other room, guess who is sneaking in to hug and kiss and talk their sibling through it?  That’s the way of things.  I, as my gay Christian friends sister in Christ, see my first and foremost job as being their advocate, not being their jury.  I also don’t need to be their voice of conviction because that is why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit.  What they do need is me as their sister, the one who will stay up late to whisper to them.  The one who will argue for them in the face of judgment.  The one who will conspire with them to wreak havoc when necessary.  Their partner in humanity.

Sometimes, when I read Christian magazines and articles online, I start to picture the Bride of Christ as a nagging wife, saying “didn’t I tell you last week if you didn’t stop that you’d burn in Hell?  How many times must I remind you?”  It saddens me deeply.  Our example is supposed to be Christ, the one who came to Earth to advocate for our healing.  The one who gave us freedom from beneath the law.  The one who acted as the supreme advocate, standing between us and our judgment at the expense of his body, his dignity, and his life.  Yet in his name we enforce the law at the expense of faith, bullying, belittling, and threatening our fellow humans, our fellow brothers and sisters, until they turn from the Church with a resigned sigh, throw up their hands, and disavow God.

And why shouldn’t they?  When I punish my children unfairly, without any sympathy, grace or mercy, because I myself am scared and frustrated, they turn from me.  Our words must be selfless.  They must be motivated by love.  They must be tempered with knowledge of God’s grace and mercy and kindness.  They must be modeled after Christ.  They must never be motivated by our own fears.  Let’s be honest with ourselves- a lot of the condemnation the church heaps out is fear-centered.  No gay marriage?  We’re afraid of the consequences to society.  Discipline the single mother?  We’re afraid of the reputation that embracing her would give our church, and afraid she’s going to keep sleeping around, and afraid that she’s going to expect us to help her out and take her responsibilities on ourselves.  Rebuke the tattooed punk?  Let’s be honest, we don’t understand him.  We find his attitude offensive.  We’re afraid of what he’ll act like if he sticks around.  And that gay sixteen year old boy?  If we don’t rebuke him, he might be gay forever.  And we’re terrified of what that might mean.

It’s not God, it’s fear.  And when we reprimand our fellow man in God’s name, claiming that it is love, all we ultimately do is teach them to fear and reject God.  Are we supposed to hold each other accountable in love?  Absolutely.  Just like how my son will whisper to his sister that Mommy said something and she’d better say “yes mom”.  Just like my daughter will tell my son, “If mom sees you doing that she will be SO MAD.”  But that is something done out of charity, something done out of love, something done out of sympathy and a common goal.  It’s done to improve a life, not to condemn actions.  When we intercede with each other we have to do it out of God’s spirit and heart, and with knowledge of the consequences of our actions.

When I see the multitude of people who love God but are ashamed of Christianity, all I can think is that if we truly were doing things God’s way the result of our actions wouldn’t be fruits of bitterness, doubt, and loss of faith.

Somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong.

Book Review: A Name Like Thunder

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being given the book , written by my friend Lee Goff.  It’s the first book of the Thunder Trilogy, a series about God’s relationship with his modern followers.  I have to admit, I didn’t know what to expect.  Because Lee is someone I’ve known for some time and have a lot of respect for, I was terrified that I wasn’t going to like the book and unsure of what I’d do should that happen.  People who know me know that I have very demanding tastes when it comes to fiction and can be a real snob about reading.  I don’t have much time on my hands to devote to reading, so if I’m going to read something I want to feel like it really adds something to my life.   I have friends that read over a hundred books a year and I used to be able to read like that.  These days, aside from schoolwork, I only have time to read about as many books as I can count on my fingers and I want each and every one of them to be memorable.

That’s why I was mortified when just thumbing through the book I saw grammar and punctuation errors.  Those things are my kryptonite.  I reminded myself that I really owed it to my friend to try to look past it and enjoy the read anyway, and I am oh so glad that I did.

As snobby as I am about fiction in general, I am even worse when it comes to things written by Christians.  I don’t want to be preached at by anyone but my preacher, I don’t want to have someone else’s doctrine “snuck in” under the radar, and I really hate it when I can feel writers pulling punches and dipping what could be powerful moments into dopishly saccharine dialogue.  There have been some books (especially the romances) where I found myself screaming “PEOPLE DON’T TALK LIKE THAT!  YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!  WHAT IF AN ANTHROPOLOGIST FOUND THIS BOOK AND THOUGHT THIS IS WHO WE REALLY WERE?”  So when my dear Christian friend writes a novel, my first impulse is to never read it so I can keep on respecting him.

A Name Like Thunder is a different kind of Christian novel.  The fact that it is written from a Christian perspective is undeniable from the first sentence- the story is introduced by an angel and each chapter is headed off by one of the angel’s dialogues.  Yet the author focuses on telling a story instead of preaching to the reader.  The story he tells is about a normal couple who have their faith tested by a string of circumstances.  They make the kinds of decisions normal people make, doubt their faith, and doubt each other just like any other couple.  I found myself very quickly getting attached to Len and Liz, the main couple.  The fact that the story bounces around over the course of several years helped with that, as well as the fact that hanging in the background was the knowledge that a very physical and imminent danger was coming nearer.  The truth is, the author is a masterful storyteller.  He writes compelling and believable dialogue with characters that act as if they were culled from real life.  The messages in the story- that couples were made to compliment each other, that life is precious, that God is waiting in the wings with your salvation if only you would ask for it, that your calling is not dictated by your righteousness in the moment but your ability to respond to God’s call- are all very apparent, but you aren’t beat up by them.  The God that the author writes about is a God that is sadly overlooked in much of Christian dialogue.  It’s a God that longs for the holiness of his servants and loves every life unconditionally and passionately, and longs to use even the most broken for His glory.

A lot of the writing reminded me of shades of Stephen King, if Stephen King were writing for a Christian audience.  The characters love a good barbecue and they love to make love.  Friendship is fierce and binding, and evil is most definitely evil.  Even though not too much happens right off the bat you find yourself getting drawn in deeply, and once the story winds up for the end the book is almost impossible to put down.  (As evidenced by my kids trashing the campsite while I obliviously held my breath and tried to read as fast as possible.)

I would even suggest this book for a non-Christian to read, as it might illuminate some things about faith and belief in God that you might not get anywhere else.  Perhaps the most beautiful thing about A Name Like Thunder is the way it quietly defends the idea of a Christian who isn’t close-minded, bigoted, or insular.  I would strongly suggest reading Lee’s books, or at the very least say hi to him on Facebook.

A Name Like Thunder gets 4.5 thunderous hurrahs!

***This review is not paid for, sponsored, or coerced in any way.

heard hearts, oppression, violence, love…

I linked to an old post of mine on Facebook a few days ago (this one) and ended up getting into a fight so bad I deleted my own link.  I had, until then, never done such a thing.  I’ve also never found myself so incapable of expressing and communicating my own point of view.

What is it about the past few week’s issues that have made honest conversation so impossible?  I’ve been contemplating this, and praying about it, and meditating on it, and generally beating my head against it, and I think I’ve finally realized what is going on here.

Everyone is backed into their own corner licking their wounds, and they don’t care two figs about what the other side is thinking or feeling.  We’re on 24/7 attack and defend mode.  The Christians don’t care why the gay community is upset.  It feels safe, right, and supported to assume that any reason the gay community would be upset is an invalid one since it’s gays doing the complaining.  And does the gay community care about the church’s defensiveness?  Why should they?  Why would the oppressed care why the oppressor oppresses?  It has to be wrong, so why bother listening?  Why have a conversation?

We’re nearing a full on war, where buglers on both sides are signalling out an attack and the language and rhetoric has grown so expansive even the innocent are caught in the crossfire, with the end goal being battering the other side into submission with no regard for righteousness.  I find this far easier to forgive in my gay friends than I do in my fellow Christians.

But, for the sake of both sides, let me explain some things:

Christians, I don’t care what Tony Perkins said last week.  The Family Research Council has a track record going back almost thirty years in which they have routinely blocked moves to overturn legislation that bans sodomy and homosexual acts.  Tony Perkins can grandstand and say, “we don’t try to make new laws”, but actions speak louder than words.  If two hundred years ago a man spent millions lobbying to keep wife beating legal, could he really turn around and say “I’m not trying to make new laws to beat my wife” and have anyone defend him as someone who doesn’t want to impugn women’s rights?  The Family Research Council does think that homosexual “behaviors” should be illegal.  Period.  This is not something that can be argued, it is true, and their own website makes that very clear.  They believe being gay is dangerous, and threatening to society, and they say so.  Routinely.  They fought against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  They lobbied to change a resolution that would challenge a Ugandan law that made the death penalty for homosexuality legal.  They state that it was a matter of semantics and they don’t support killing gays, but guess what?  They held up a resolution that condemned killing gays.  What matters is how that looks to gay people, and it certainly doesn’t look good.

Now, my dear gay friends, I love you.  But you need to understand some things.  All of the hateful, painful, offensive things that Tony Perkins and the FRC say?  They believe them.  I know that this is not comfortable for you to hear, but you need to hear it.  They do believe that being gay is dangerous.  They believe that it weakens society.  They sincerely believe that gay people are more likely to be diseased, mentally ill, and harm children.  They believe that homosexuals have a dangerous agenda.  It may seem completely incredible to you to accept that people may think those things.  It may seem even more incredible to believe, for even a second, that someone could think those things and be a genuinely good person.  Here is the thing:  They don’t hate you.  They are worried about you, and they are worried for your sake.  They don’t want you to be gay because they think it’s bad for you, and they think that if they curb your rights you might give up and go straight, and they think that the loving thing to do is protect you from your fleshly desires.  They are, to put it simply, trying to save your soul.  They just aren’t going about it the way that Christ would.

I know, because I’ve been there.  This is the mindset I grew up with.  I know that when I believed those horrid things, I was becoming the person that I am now.  I believe that other people could make the same journey.

So for the love of God and all that is holy, try to understand the other side.  Try to listen to what they are saying and argue rationally.  Stop pointing fingers and throwing stones and trying to gag each other, it helps no one.  Hatred begets violence.  Oppression begets violence.  Hard hearts unwilling to listen to the other side breed violence faster than bunnies on speed.  It needs to stop, and the only solution is to love the other side to little itty bitty bits and try to rebuild this whole mess in a better image.

I think we can do it.  I think we have to.

Government waste/Societal need

When I worked at the homeless shelter, the knowledge that our budget depended on the government’s generosity never could truly leave our minds.  Most of our donations were won through tax incentives that we needed to continue to be passed, and others came from community development grants and other charitable contributions that all seemed to lead a trail back to capitol hill.  While the churches that housed our guests and the people that fed them every night did so out of charity, my paycheck and the paycheck of those I worked for, the money that kept the lights on and put gas in the van, all traced back to the government.

This is even more true at the residential treatment facility I worked for, where huge portions of the funding were directly tied to social security and medicaid.  Without those programs, we would have had no one to treat and our patients would have been homeless, fully symptomatic, and dangerous to society.

In both places I can say with absolute certainly that the work we did improved our communities, kept them safer, and filled vital needs.

In both places I can say that I am worried what the future holds.

When people talk about the Government’s “wasteful spending” I am horrified that the things most people point at are tax incentive community development programs, medicaid, and welfare.  The argument usually goes like this, “these benefit programs create a dependency that deepens the problem they are meant to address.”  Let’s look at that for a moment.  The first assumption of that argument is that if people didn’t have government incentive programs to develop their communities, they’d be equally able to do it on their own.  It also assumes that people who receive welfare and medicaid are capable of providing for their own needs if they didn’t receive help from the government.  To further that logic, the assumption deepens into a belief that we are wasting our money by giving to people who are capable of, and should be, caring for their own problems.  I will concede that such programs are self-feeding.  (That is, that by giving the benefit they often weaken resolve to move beyond the need for it, or in worst case scenarios the program actively works to keep people in it.)  What I don’t understand is the logic behind the assumptions being made.

Why were these programs created in the first place?  If we believe that people are both capable of providing for these needs on their own and would do so if the government didn’t have them a check, then why would the government have ever handed them the check in the first place?  These programs address real, persistent problems that people can’t fix on their own.  Poverty has always been endemic to our society.  Sociologists will say things like that it fills a societal need by creating the impetus for people to work jobs that are necessarily low paying, or by saying that since there is a conflict over necessarily limited resources it is inevitable that there are people who end up without insufficient resources for survival.  The debate as to the reason extreme poverty exists is ongoing, but what I can say with absolute certainty is that even God himself is quoted as having said “the poor will always be among you.”

It’s a fact of life- the need exists, whether or not a program is created to address it.

The reason the government took on the burden is because it is demonstrated that by raising the basement and making even the poorest in society capable of achieving more,  everyone benefits.  It is beneficial to all of us that the children of the very poor have healthcare.  It is beneficial to all of us that children do not starve or have the meal they eat at school as their only meal of the day.  It is beneficial to all of us that community development programs offer tax incentives that drive community members to donate more to food banks, homeless shelters, and beautification programs that remodel the homes and apartment complexes that the very poor live in and cannot care for by themselves.

Do these programs create a self-feeding cycle?  Perhaps they do.  But even so the money is not wasted, the more the programs are cut the more people end up starving, or homeless, or literally insane and on the streets.

It isn’t safe to cut them without a backup plan, and I’ve yet to hear any backup plan other than social darwinism.

And do you know what social darwinism leads to?  Dead babies.

Culture and Faith.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the affect that culture has on faith.  It seems impossible to divide the two with any cleanness.  Why?  We are human.  While we may conceptually believe that there is one fundamental, immutable, unchangeable truth and that God is the embodiment of that absolute, how can we ever fully understand it?  We do not have divine minds.  We have human minds, and inevitably any taste of the absoluteness of God’s nature we have, we interpret through fallible brains.  We judge and mold our faith based off of what we feel is right, a feeling that is the culmination of what we’ve experienced.  Our experiences, those things that mold our understanding, are basely human and only remotely touched by holiness.

If you doubt for a moment that is true, just consider the Bible.  In Biblical times if a woman was raped but didn’t scream, she should be stoned.  It’s what the Bible demands.  Do you feel like that is right?  If a man punched a pregnant woman in the stomach and she miscarried as a result, she should be paid a pittance.  Yet today people will cry out that fetuses are human life as valuable as the born- if God feels that abortion is murder, should abortion by violence really be something that one can pay off with shekels?  Why would God say that it is?

It goes beyond that.  There’s also the fact that so many of the fathers of the faith, so to speak, had multiple wives and concubines.  Jacob’s marriage to both Leah and Rachel is often preached as a sermon on the value of faith and persistence, with the fact that he favored Rachel’s bed to the detriment of Leah and her just inheritance is glossed over.  There’s David, the man after God’s heart, who had how many wives and concubines?  Of course he took Bathsheba wrongly but the Bible is clear that his sin wasn’t marrying one woman too many- it was coveting what rightly belongs to someone else and murdering to get it.  Solomon, the wisest of all kings, had so many wives and concubines he couldn’t have slept with each more than two times in a year.  Yet how do we interpret all of that in light of this current day’s conviction that God intended for marriage to be between one man and one woman?

The truth is, we simply ignore the history that is there and rewrite it.  The idea that marriage should only be between one man and one woman is one that evolved as a response to cultural pressures.  If you married your daughter off to a wealthy man to ensure your family’s inheritance, you wouldn’t want that being fudged up by his later picking a superior mate and bequeathing that inheritance to her spawn instead of yours.  Polygamy died out not because God gave a new word, but because people rationally decided it isn’t a sustainable social system.  Nowhere in the Bible does God say, “one man, one woman.”    He says for this reason a man leaves the home of his parents and becomes one flesh with his wife, but that isn’t a statement of doctrine, it’s a euphemism for sex.  Clearly the people that wrote that part of the Bible didn’t interpret it as “one man, one woman” or they wouldn’t have praised Solomon for marrying more women than he could bed.  Besides the fact that if bucking that law leads to the deterioration of society and God revoking his blessing, why would God have so blessed Jacob?  Solomon?  The myriad of men who kept harems of wives and lovers?  It simply does not stand up under sustained thought, and that isn’t the only place where people start to mold faith to culture.  It’s just one that really stands out in my mind.

I think about these things a lot, because when I start to question why God gave the directives he did I start to question how I dress, feed, and raise my family.  I start to feel like prepackaged foods aren’t “clean” or worthy of my consumption, I start to feel like if God laid out the Levitical code today he’d condemn clothes made out of cheap materials in sweat shops.  I start to wonder about a lot of other things, too.

My point is that we can’t just blurt out what we “sense” is true about our faith without applying history, knowledge of culture, and the caveats of our own fallibility.  After all, we don’t know what God said, we know what people interpreted Him as having said.  Yes, we have the Bible.  That doesn’t mean that we understand it.

We interpret it.

And we, as humans, often only interpret what we want to hear.