Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

But it’s within the life of our Jesus that we see it most clearly: Jesus was the full embodiment of what it means to be human in the way God intended. He uplifts instead of tearing down, He heals instead of wounds, He lays down His life instead of fighting to survive, He chooses compassion instead of numb acceptance, He is water to a thirsty soul, bread to the hungry, oil of joy for mourning. And instead of death, He is life. Life!

I know that the idea of wilderness is sometimes romanticized in literature or sermons by the now-clean and tidy prosperous ones who wax philosophic about rediscovery. But there’s nothing romantic about the arduous task of sorting through a lifetime of questions and wonderings. We sort on the threshold of grief and change, it’s a liminal space, and I hope you know I’m just as dirty and disheveled as everyone else. Because we never stop.

No, the wilderness isn’t romantic, but it’s beautiful and terrifying and intimate. Eventually, there won’t be anything between you and God anymore. There is freedom and deliverance waiting on the other side; sometimes it won’t look the way the travel brochure sold it, though. You’ll look back from your new home in the west, and you’ll love the wind and the wild, you’ll love your freckles and the sun’s slow weathering of your bare face. You’ll love the song of the stars in your hair more than you loved the contents of your life, more than you loved tidy sealed boxes and certainty.

I pray you would come to know Jesus, deeply and intimately. I pray you would fall in step with the man from Nazareth and that His way of life would become life for you—life more abundant. I pray you would have your ideas of Jesus, your preconceptions, your thought-I-knew-Him disrupted. I pray you would find yourself apprenticed to Him in all ways. I pray for you to love Him, yes, to love Jesus and the Father and Spirit to whom He introduced us, with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. I pray that He would be your first and your last.

May we be the ones who don’t give up on radical inclusion. May we remember to whisper to one another, every now and then, on purpose, at the right time: You belong here. There’s room for you. There’s room for all of us. We are part of the temple in which God is quite at home.