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February 26 - February 28, 2025
“Having it out with God is your spiritual heritage. The wrestling is not the problem, it is the point.” You’re part of a vast company of folks out here who are learning—sometimes the hard way—that God is more welcoming, more loving, more inclusive, and more generous than we ever imagined.
Most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiographical. Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
The only things that end up dying are the things that really didn’t deserve to flourish in the first place.
you vacillate between constant crying and utter panic and unchecked rage.
If you’re watching someone you love walk through this lament portion of deconstruction, I know you want to fix it. You want to give them all the right answers and platitudinal Band-Aids because you love them, and you want good things for them. It hurts you to see them not at peace. I get it. I know at some point, my kids will need to go to therapy for the way they were parented, and I understand I will have to swallow this paragraph whole, but the best thing you can do for your person who has set everything on fire with the hope of seeing what’s true is to stay with them. Show up. Do not be
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placing arbitrary timelines and guidelines around your grieving process for the sake of propriety or efficiency is cheating yourself out of experiencing God on a level untethered to human parameters. Or as Amanda Held Opelt puts it, “Sometimes we have to allow grief to have its way with us for a while.
Fred Rogers, “What’s mentionable is manageable.”3
Phyllis Tickle, who shares the idea by saying how every five hundred years or so, the church undergoes a great rummage sale. And how it’s been about five-hundred-ish years since the Reformation, so if the math is mathing, perhaps we’re in the middle of one now.
When we believe maybe God loves us but doesn’t like us all that much unless we behave ourselves, we start believing that God hates the things we do, God hates when we mess up, God is disappointed by every step out of line. We become a child constantly berated for every mistake, certain we are a burden, constantly reabsorbing our own forsakenness, and assuming what we do is who we are. We look around every corner for punishment, bracing ourselves for the next blow.
Wow- that hit really close to home….
we know Jesus isn’t asking us to love ourselves in a way that the world sees love, but with his love. With a love that stands firm in our identity as beloved.
Maybe I’ve been pickled in evangelical brine for too long. But I operate under the potentially delusional thinking that something divine worked in Paul’s pen when he scrawled that he was “absolutely convinced” nothing, not one thing he could possibly imagine, not politics, not the past, not the future, not our successes, not our failures, not the things we question, not the things we let slide, not our half-baked theologies, not our problematic interpretations, not our poor attempts at love, not our hidden hatreds, not our wounds, not our bravery could separate us from God. If God is who God
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