Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

My husband and I were both burned out and broken, but we somehow went in different directions. These were the years of disunity between us, particularly around church. I railed against institutions and organizations, wouldn’t darken the door of a “real” church, became fluent in faultfinding and cynicism, and the word orthodoxy made my left eye twitch. But he tacked hard the other way, steering toward seminary, conservative denominations, structures, authorities, a longing for accountability after the Wild West, Lone Ranger atmosphere of our lawless charismatic church past. I couldn’t go to church without anxiety, and he couldn’t fathom walking away from the work he had prepared his entire life to do. Many of our friends and acquaintances saw my wonderings and wanderings as a liability to my husband’s calling. They felt bad for him; I was holding him back. Why couldn’t I fall in line? I knew this and I felt bad for him too. And those on “my side” couldn’t understand why he was going back into the old ways of titles and traditions when God was moving as a fresh wind, beyond boundaries and walls and institutions. But we were moving toward each other, as if in an ellipse. We started at the same point and then swung wide out and apart from each other before skating toward each other again. It took a while. He moved, and I moved, and God was moving. Today, we stand together, all these years later, in harmony and in step, in agreement, oneness, even in the places where we disagre...