A Scandalous Tale - Sex, Social Media, and Ministry

What happens when you put over 600 women in closed Facebook Group and ask them to talk about their most intimate issues? You learn:

1. The Church and Christian communities have been far too silent on issues of sex, women’s health, and relationships.

2. We all struggle in these areas. The specifics may change from woman to woman, but we are all trying to figure out how to balance our faith and our flesh, trying to be good stewards of each.

3. Shame has been the leading contributor to the lack of education, self-destructive behaviors, abuse, and the inability to celebrate this great gift of sex.

4. How laughter heals and eases us through the hard lessons.

5. The power of having others invest in your well-being through a kind word, prayer, and tangible support.

6. The joy of discovering your story can help another on their journey.

7. That when you give people a tool they already know how to use, they will create something amazing with it.

When the Scandalous Ladies Facebook Group took off on May 29, 2016, we had no idea what we were in for. The group exploded from three members to over one hundred and fifty in less than three hours. In eleven days, we broke three hundred and fifty, and we are still growing. The pace has slowed a bit, but growth isn’t measured in numbers alone.

During that time, we have had over a dozen women make connections with counselors, eight couples have gone into marriage counseling, and hundreds (that’s right, HUNDREDS!) of women have reported that the overall quality of their marriages have improved. The tales of new found freedom and joy in being a woman are told daily, and the friendships being formed have transformed lives.
Our network and combined resources have helped one woman get out of an abusive relationship and into a safe home, another family is being helped through a hard financial time, and the women of Scandalous gave sacrificially in a successful effort to remove girls from a life threatening situation overseas. Even the men are voicing their praise, as their wives have opened new dialogues about sex and proposed they explore some new adventures between the sheets – or other places!

And we do not show any signs of slowing down anytime soon! Since May we have started a Scandalous Moms group, and this month we launched a public page where men can join in the conversation. Soon we hope to launch a series of international (yes, that’s right! International!) conferences and retreats.

I am sharing all of this with you for two reasons:

1. Yes, would love your involvement and support! Ladies, consider this your personal invitation to join the Scandalous Ladies Facebook Group, and to take part in the discussions on “A Scandalous Faith”, our public page.  Men, we need to hear your voices so join us on the public page too, and please, don’t be shy. We want your insights and opinions that is why we started “A Scandalous Faith.

2. I want everyone to know what a powerful tool social media can be, and I want my Christian and Church friends to pay attention.

Within the Christian community there has traditionally been a huge push for outreach and ministry within our communities. These are admirable and needed aspect of fulfilling the mandates of our faith, but let’s face it, we tend to over complicate things. We focus on big events, massive (and often top heavy) programs, or other ways that we can address the masses with some sort of impersonal ministry machine. We stop looking at people as individuals and meeting them where they are. Instead, we get lost in the program and the structure, defending the machine instead of stopping to value the person the machine is supposed to serve.

This is why I think Scandalous works. You can’t talk about sex, sexuality, and relationships without addressing the person. Our machine is secondary, it is the tool we use to meet people where they are. It doesn’t need to be protected, it does not eat up all our resources, and it serves only one function – it connects us with the people that we are here to serve. For us that machine is social media. It is free, we all have it, we don’t have to teach our people how to use it, and we didn’t reinvent the wheel. We used the tool at hand, and made it serve our purposes.

We took all the things that church people like to complain about when it comes to the internet and flipped it on its head so we could use it to our advantage. Impersonal? Yes, but reinterpret that into anonymous and nonthreatening. Too much sex? Oh, yeah, but maybe that is just one way people are saying they need to talk about these things. Crude humor? Sure, but maybe that is how people express their discomfort as they try to establish a dialogue. Eats up all your time? You bet, but maybe it is because people are looking for something to invest their time in that really matters. Hate filled speech and drama? Absolutely, but maybe that is because there is no place else they can express their need for passion.

We didn’t invent this formula for how to have vital and thriving Facebook community. We stumbled into it by asking people to do one little thing – tell their stories. That is it. Tell your story, let us know that we are not alone wrestling with these major life issues, help us understand how you cope, how you survive, and show us how we can be important in your life. Maybe that is just a place to vent, maybe it is providing a safe space to ask the questions you can’t ask anywhere else, maybe you need someone to laugh with you, or maybe you need someone who is willing to cry with you too.

People will tell you what they need, but you have to be listening. They are saying need community. They need to know that they matter, that they are more important than the cogs of some ministry machine. They need some place to invest, to know that they have the ability to make a difference, and that their experiences matter. And that is all we have provided. The women and men who have joined us on this journey are the ones who have made it work. The amazing team of men and women who have so selflessly devoted their time and energy to fanning this spark of an idea into flames have done little more than provide a place where others mattered – really mattered, not for the numbers that can be tallied on a spreadsheet, but rather for the strength each brings to the table for the rest of us.

We in the Christian community need to stop lamenting over a lack of resources or our inability to get people through the doors of our buildings. We need to go to where the people are, and right now that is social media. But beware, you can’t treat people like projects or offer help in the same manner that you would pitch peanuts to a monkey at a zoo. You have to be willing to give, not a program, not an event, and not some pretty little prepackaged Christian band aid, you have to give yourself. And you do that by giving them your story – your successes, your failures, your humiliations, and your victories because that is the only way they are going to see not just you but the God we serve, the God redeems all things.

It is time we stop being afraid, that we stop hiding behind all the glam and glitz of programs, and using them as an excuse for not being present in our communities or blaming the internet for keeping people away from the good we are trying to do. It is time we showed up. The online community is a community, a very real and thriving community that has extended an invitation to us, so now it’s time to remember your manners and show up. We did and were welcomed with open arms.

Reader's Question: How Do Single People Not Give Into Lust?

Reader’s Question:

How do single people not give into lust? At least married people get to have sex. If a (single) person is trying to stay Godly, it sure isn’t easy.

Let me begin with a confession, I was single for over a decade between my marriages, and I wasn’t always successful in combatting the temptation to lust myself. It was a constant, ongoing battle to keep my thoughts and desires in line. The good news is that God redeems all things even the battles we lose, if we are willing to take them to him with honesty and sincerity. And one of the ways he is redeeming my failures is through being able to share the lessons I learned during that time.

One of the first things we need to acknowledge is that we were designed to have sex, to crave it even. There is a level of intimacy that only occurs within a sexual relationship, all sorts of healthy benefits are experienced both participants, and let’s just face the facts, nothing feels as good as sex does when it is done right. Now, I know that we aren’t supposed to admit this, particularly not to single people, who are all virgins in our perfectly sanitized view of the world, but this brings up two other facts that we need to acknowledge:

1. The majority of single people, including Christian Singles, are not virgins. With most people becoming sexually active at an average age of 17 and the high divorce rates, the majority of the single population has been sexually active as some point in their past even if they are abstaining now.

2. We do not live in a perfectly sanitized Christian world, and to create such a view of it for ourselves is called lying. To paraphrase Jesus, cut it out and really look at the world around you. Luke 4.

So now that we know that sex is a part of our lives and was meant to be so, we need to figure out what to do with this God given desire that leads so many of us astray? I don’t claim to have definitive answers, but I can share what worked for me after plenty of trial and error on my part.

We have to stop fighting it. I mean really, we have to stop actively resisting the urge to lust. I know this is counter to everything you have ever been taught, but follow me on this. What am I thinking about when I am trying to convince myself not to lust after a hot piece of man meat? If you answered the hot piece of man meat, then you are correct.

As a friend so aptly put it last night, “We are a tapestry of many things. We are all of them. If we struggle too hard against part of oneself, it gets stronger.” Lust is one of those things that makes up who we are, we are not going to eradicate, but we can direct it. In fighting it, we are declaring its power to define and control us. And as I sit here today, looking back at some of the men I lusted after, I am so glad that my lust does not get to define me.

Now, obviously, I am not saying that we should just give into lust. What I am saying is that we need to use some different tactics – tactics that do not always look like they have anything to do with the problem.

First step: Figure out what feeds your lust. We want to starve it into submission, so we cut off the food source. Pornography, erotica, romance novels, romantic movies, and that piece of eye candy that keeps drawing you back to the coffee shop that you really don’t like otherwise? Yeah, he’s got to go too. Obviously, we can’t cut all the beautiful people out of lives, but we can and should distance ourselves from the ones we aren’t required to be around. It’s like the purging the kitchen before starting a diet, get all the junk food out of the cupboards and pitch it. Yes, they still serve an amazing coconut pie at the diner down the street, but it takes a lot more work to indulge those appetites if you are having to get dressed, start the car, and fight traffic to shovel some in your face.

Second step: Find your vision.  I know, what does this have to do with lust or sex? Everything.

Have you ever taken the ice cubes out of a glass of sweet ice tea? Did you notice the holes in the tea where the ice cubes once were? No, me neither. Our minds operate in much the same way, take out one thought and another thought is going to rush in to fill the empty space.

However, have you got in a hurry poured the tea just a bit too fast, and had it splash all over the table? What floats right out the top and out of the glass? The ice! And this is what you must do with that vision. You have flood you heart, mind, and soul with it to the point that all the icy lust (or would it be lusty ice?) ends up on the table.

This is why it can’t be just any old vision. It has to be the type of vision that consumes you to the point there isn’t any room for anything else in your life. It has fill you up and run out all over the table and the floor, so that everyone who comes in contact with you knows this is your passion – and that is why this is so important.

Passion that needs to a target. Some thing or someplace where it can be unleashed without fear of damaging ourselves or someone else, and ideally where all the strength and power of it can do some good. The problem is that our flesh craves passion. I do not even have to explain to you the truth of that statement. Anyone who has ever felt hungry hands on their skin knows this is true, and it is so easy to dump the passion into the nearest gaping maw. It’s a simple, it’s natural, and we do not have to put one ounce of effort into it, but when you feed all that passion to your flesh it becomes lust.
And you have to keep all that passion somewhere, because even if you determine not to feed your flesh with it and just bottle it up and hold it in, it becomes something else. We call that bitterness, and that is not something you want laying around your heart. All it takes is one hot day and those bottles explode, all over you and everything you love.

Third step: Select what I call some “Go To Thoughts.” These are some prepackaged thoughts that you can pull up on the fly when you feel those lustful urges begin to well up, and this one way you are going to use your vision as way to combat lust. When you build your vision, don’t just have some grand but vague idea, get specific.

For instance, it was not enough for me to say that I wanted to help other women avoid the mistakes I had made or to help them heal from similar experiences. I had decide how I wanted to do that. I envisioned conferences, retreats, and meetings in my home. I planned out the venues, the session topics, how I would present the information, and who I wanted involved. I began designing a house that would be a warm and inviting respite for my guests. Then I began to research how to make this happen, I talked to others pursing or living a similar vision, I went back to school, got the necessary degrees, and I began looking for the best ways to use the tools I already had on hand.
Most importantly, I knew that everything I wanted to accomplish would be endangered if I lived a life that was counter to the very ideas I would one day be sharing with others. And with that knowledge, I was able to flip my thinking. No longer was I saying no to my desires which only left me feeling deprived and sorry for myself. I was actually saying yes to something that was so much more important to me than a few minutes of pleasure – and I like saying yes to me!

Now this is where those “Go To Thoughts” come in, if a lustful thought pops up, you have something to replace and displace it with. Instead of telling yourself no, you say yes to the vision. Instead of telling yourself, don’t think about that (which inevitably leads to thinking about that), you tell yourself to think about that future you have envisioned. Stroll through that house in your mind, tweak the placement of those windows, move the sink to the other side of the kitchen, decide you want a red couch and not a blue one. Practice saying those words you want others to hear, plan an event, research conference centers in Houston, and call a friend to get their advice. If you are pursuing your vision with passion, there isn’t going to be a lot of time or energy left to entertain lust. In other words, you aren’t going to have anything to feed it.

Step four: I am not putting this here because it is the least important. I am putting it here because if you only remember one of these steps, it need to be this. Get honest - raw, brutally, and nasty honest with yourself and God.

I believe anything in excess is sin, and that is all lust is – an excess of desire to please and serve one’s self by using someone else as an object to exploit. It is saying that the pursuit of my pleasure is greater than God’s desires for me. Lust does not ask for another’s consent or bother itself with their object’s desires or what might please them. Lust demands that its object’s pleasure be fulfilled in our desire for them, that the object gives itself as a sacrifice to our wants, and that all we know to be good, true, and right be pushed aside so that we might have a moment of bliss.

What an affront to the God of Love! The God who demonstrated how love puts aside its own comfort and pleasure by leaving his place in heaven, to walk among us as one of us, and to die a brutal death upon a cross so that we in turn might walk in love with him. A God who became the sacrifice because he loved you so much that he would extend an invitation to a relationship where each could experience the joys of knowing and being known – where love is given and received, not simply taken to satisfy his desires.

God placed boundaries on our sexual expressions for a reason. He knew that if we allowed lust to rule us we would be destroyed by passions. He knew the emotional, mental, and physical scars that unfettered lust leaves upon us, and he asks to respect the boundaries so that we can avoid the pain that makes his heart ache on our behalf. Because that is what love does, it places the needs of another above our own. God’s ego and heart is not so fragile or hungry that he must appease us to that he might bask in the shallow affirmations of those who can only love when it feels good. And he does not need our obedience so that he can feel like the great and powerful Oz. Instead, he loves us with a love that is selfless enough to put our needs ahead of any wants he might have, and in doing so exemplifies the splendor of true and holy love.

So we get honest, we repent, and we honor God’s love for us by placing his desires and good pleasure above our own. We acknowledge that anything God loves as much as he loves us is worthy of highest form of love from another, and we honor the God of Love who lives within us by offering the highest form of love we may give another. And when we love like that, lust loses its grip on our hearts. It becomes a momentary distraction whose power to define us has been lost, because we have surrendered that right to the only one truly capable of defining his creation.

A Challenge For My Detractors - Until Then I Will Remain Scandalous

Y’all might want to buckle in for this one. I am little steamed and I am afraid I might forget how to be proper – but it turns out it probably won’t be the first or last time I hear that allegation.

Twelve days ago, something magical happened. I had no idea at the time what a few clicks of a mouse would mean to my life, and even now, I am pretty sure that I am just barely starting to understand the magnitude of that act. You see, a few friends and I decided to start a discussion group inspired by a book I wrote a few years back. (You can purchase it here: Scandalous on Amazon) Within three hours it went from six people to over one hundred and fifty. In three days we had over three hundred and fifty women – all sharing their stories, all asking their questions, and all experiencing a freedom that is all too rare in Christian circles.

You would think that this would be a good thing, but it has gotten back to me that there are some folks out there who think that what we are doing is evil, wicked, and – gasp – improper. There are even a few women who have been chastised for daring to associate with us.

Good Christian girls don’t talk about things like molestation, rape, marital problems, porn addictions for him or her, feminine hygiene, spousal abuse, traumatic births, difficulties have sex with our spouses, sex toys, lubricants, oral sex, anal sex, or period sex. We are supposed sit back and act as if these things either never happened to us, the women we love, or voice a desire to know what the Bible really has to say beyond we should sit down, shut up, and accept what we have been given with proper blushing timidity.

Here is my problem with people who say stuff like that – not that they would actually say these words, they just want to act all appalled and self-righteous – none of them have offered up one scrap of a Bible verse to support their opinion. Let me repeat that: NONE of them have given any BIBLICAL REASON to support their OPINION that we should be silent on issues that make THEM uncomfortable. Criticism flies high and thick, laced with a lot of pious outrage and sanctimonious shock, but that is ALL they have ever offered me or anyone that they have confronted. Oh, sure there are lot of holy SOUNDING words, even a few random phrases from the Bible tossed about as if anyone with half a brain and the ability to read couldn’t tell they have been ripped from their proper context and application in a desperate attempt to vilify women who dared to be honest.

Allow to clarify a few things for you folks. The Bible isn’t proper. In fact, the Bible is rather scandalous itself. Don’t believe me? Try these on for size.

Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.” Ezekiel 23:19-21 ESV

(In case you missed it, “member” means penises and “issues” means ejaculations.)

I myself will lift up your skirts over your face, and your shame will be seen. Jeremiah 13:26

(Oh, and “shame” there – well, it’s referring to genitals again!)

In that day the Lord will shave with a razor that is hired beyond the River—with the king of Assyria—the head and the hair of the feet, and it will sweep away the beard also. Isaiah 7:20 ESV

(Why in the world would anyone shave their enemy’s feet and cut off their beards? Unless, this means…gasp…genitals again!)

This is just a sampling of what the Bible offers in the way of scandalous verses, and I could go on. However, let’s just stop right here for a second and notice one tiny detail. In all three of these passages, the prophets were writing on the behalf of God himself. So it wasn’t really the prophets talking this way, it was God talking this way. Some of you need to stop and let that sink in for a moment.

And what about Song of Solomon? I don’t care you slice that puppy or try to dress it up as an allegory for Christ’s love for the Church. The book is sexual and sensual. To deny that shows that you are more concerned with defending your own delicate sensibilities than getting real about God, His Word, or our faith.

Finally, we should look to Titus 2. This verse is a favorite for women’s ministries, but y’all like to over spiritualize every cotton picking thing.

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. Titus 2:3-5 ESV

We are to teach what is good. We could spend hours, years even discussing what is good – things like freedom from bondage, how to be good stewards of our bodies and sexuality, how to heal from sexual trauma and abuse, what healthy marriage that celebrates sex can look like. We can spend years talking about how to be good wives and mothers, but you are fool if you think that means we can be silent about sex, the scars we carry from past relationships, dealing with sexual issues within a marriage, or how to train our children to live in a world where porn is one click away from us all. We can discuss what it means to be self-controlled but we aren’t talking about how to control our biology we are missing a major element of the conversation.

And when we get to that last point – “that the word of God may not be reviled” – every argument ever offered to me, claiming that I must be silent is shredded. Because do you know what happens to women who told to bury their past, to ignore the pain caused by the misuse and abuse of their sexuality, or to deny that they have questions? I do. They end up in marriages where their lives are endangered. They become invisible victims of abuse. They become disillusioned with the Church and think they are disillusioned with a God who is not great enough to deal with the complexities of female sexuality. They rebel against the restraints that the overly pious would place upon us, and they act in anger against God and his Word. I know this. I know because I lived it and because so many women tell me the same story – a story that begins with, “No one ever talked about this.”

So here is my challenge to all of my detractors – show me one verse in context that says I am wrong. Give me one place within the pages of God’s word that would convict me of leading women astray, and I will pull Scandalous from the sales, close down the discussion group, and never speak of these things again. That is how right I KNOW this is.

Where Was God?

 “Prayer doesn’t do anything. Where was God when you were getting the shit beat out of you?” she sneered.

My heart broke a little bit more. It is the one question I really don’t have a good answer for. I can’t point to some supernatural intervention. I can’t claim divine deliverance. I can’t even say that I saw a glimmer of light in the dark. I just took it hoping that it would all be over soon, and at her words I felt stripped naked as if my whole life had been a sham.

For days, that question haunted me. I knew he was there. I knew that I had not endured that for nothing, and that he had not missed my suffering, but I didn’t how to convey that truth. I didn’t even want to look for a way. That chapter of my life is closed and opening it up to sift through the pieces in hopes of finding anything concrete meant opening up a lot of old wounds. I didn’t think I had the stomach for all the gore.

Over the years, I have talked a lot about my previous marriage. I have shared my story in churches, schools, and in my book. I have been commended for being “brave in my transparency” and praised for “daring to be so open about such a painful topic.” I can give you a rundown of the abuse without batting an eye. I can recount the feel of his fingers around my neck without fighting down the need to flinch. I can even tell you why the physical violence was far less traumatic than the emotional and mental abuse he doled out as he worked up his nerve to finally strike with his fist.

God and I were good. We had worked through all the heartache of those years. I had yelled and screamed at him for abandoning me, for leaving me alone, and ignoring all my cries for help. I had even taken the radical, and some claim blasphemous, step of forgiving God for all that – not that he needed it, but rather I needed to let go of my bitterness. I had to be ok with his way of doing things, and I had to take responsibility for my foolish pride and rebellion that landed me in that marriage to begin with. I don’t resent those years anymore. There is a huge part of me that still grieves and always will grieve the effect it had on my children who witnessed those events, but for myself, it is a time that has been redeemed as I have witnessed my story help so many others.

Maybe the question stung because I had gotten used to be lauded for my ability to rise above the circumstances of being an abused woman and then a single mom. And I was stunned that this scar that I had wielded like weapon for so long had now been turned against me.

So I have been thinking about the answer demanded of me, and I have been trying to find the words to express the truth that has been hidden in my heart, to quantify it in some way that would make sense to someone who is not inside my skin.

The only time my ex would lay a hand on me was if I was holding one of our children. He never attacked unless my daughters were in my arms. The first time, I was holding my oldest daughter as he grabbed me from behind putting me in a choke hold and shaking me like a rag doll. She was only two weeks old. All I could think in that moment was, “Don’t drop the baby.” So I didn’t. I held her tighter against me with one arm and with the other I gripped his arm taking the pressure off my neck. The last time he lunged at me as I was putting nightgowns on the girls, and he sat on my chest screaming as he tried to strangle the life out of me.

He might have succeeded. I wasn’t scared, and I didn’t fight. As the waves of blackness washed over me, I was tempted to let them sweep me away, but then one of the girls made a sound that caused me to look over at them. They were small and scared of what was happening, and all I could think was how if he killed me, he was the only parent they had left. So I fought back. I got free, and I got him out of my home and my life.

Where was God in those moments? He was holding my arms around my baby so I didn’t drop her. He was showing me why I had to fight to get free. He gave the courage to do the scariest thing I ever did. He gave me the strength to endure the years of being alone and trying to keep it together for the ones who counted on me. I screwed up so many times, and I made more mistakes than I can even remember. There were days when I was certain that they would be better without me, but every time that those dark waves of oblivion seemed more enticing than returning to the battle, he was there reminding me that love does not give up, that love does not get to indulge in that depth of selfishness.

Were there any burning bushes? No. Clouds parting, voices from the sky? No. Just my kids. Just the ones who had been entrusted to me, and the ones who relied on me to keep fighting. This is probably not the answer that anyone is hoping for. We all want the presence of God to be some over the top display and then are angered when he doesn’t reveal himself that way. We think we deserve a fairy tale, for him to make everything perfect and easy when he is near, but that’s not how he works, that’s not how faith is built.

And what good is prayer? It changed me. It is still changing me. I am learning to be okay with how he doesn’t split the skies open because I think I deserve that type of affirmation. He is showing me how to see him small moments, and to how to feel is presence in the chaos. He is teaching me how to become more like him – love more like him both in the times I rage before him in my frustration and in those moments I quiet my heart to listen and to know him. Prayer is where I learn, where I see the connections, and find the answers to the hard questions of life, as I allow him to change me. For never in a million years would I have understood his the depths of his love if he had not connected the dots for me, and showed me that if I as a mere human can rise from edges of death motivated by nothing more than the love of my children, then how much more does the one who rose from the depths of the grave love me? Does he love you?

Facing My Hypocrisy

There is nothing like getting slapped upside the head with your own hypocrisy. In the rankings of unpleasant things it is somewhere above having your leg rotting away with methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and just slightly below being eaten alive by rats. However, while I strongly advise avoiding those two scenarios, honesty requires that I acknowledge not only the benefits but the necessity of having our hypocrisy exposed even when it hurts.

It is the temptation and joy of every believer to indulge in complacency about our faith. We like thinking that we have figured out. The rules are simple, the requirement light, and our lives fall into a pattern of convenient obedience. If you are like me, you build a world where blatant sin is hard to come by. Things like killing, stealing, adultery, even gossip, if you are good enough at the game, become more troublesome than being good. Outward obedience becomes easy, and in fact, outward obedience becomes so important that you recoil at the thought of doing anything that would threaten your image of being the good Christian.

But it’s a trap.

Over the past five years, I have spent a lot of time building a social network designed to give me a platform from which to speak. I have been careful with what I post, with what I say, and with what I reveal. People see my work and they say, “Oh, you are edgy!”, “You are so brave to say that!”, and “Wow, I cannot believe how honest you are about these issues!” I have got to be honest with you, I love hearing all that. I love being able to shake people up by talking about things that intimidate so many others. The affirmation is wildly addictive.

But I haven’t been completely honest in my work, at least not as honest as I should be. For a long time now, I have been resisting the prompting to go deeper. If anything resisting is too mild of a word, more like kicking and screaming my protests as I am trying to claw my way free of God’s grasp on my life, and I have been pretty good at justifying it to myself. So many of you know so much about my life already, about things I have experienced that most women keep covered up, and yet, I am the one who will stand in the middle of room full of strangers and tell you the story of how my life was destroyed by violence and deceit. I will tell you have the hard years of being the divorced woman in church, and I will admit to the times of destitution while trying to raise my daughters. I will recount those moments when I defied God, daring him to show himself to be real in the wreckage of my life, and how he met there.

I could do that because I locked down all the emotions. I cut them off and buried them deep so I could tell my tale without flinching. I “set my face as flint” because I did not want to feel the humiliating sting of pity. I would do lip service to my part in the story.  I could admit the pride – the sheer hubris that led me into those places. I could be so stinking spiritual about it all that I would even say that I was thankful for that time, and laugh about how it took something that severe to get through to someone as hard headed as I am. I could confess how I had been a fool and share with you what I had learned, but I never let the enormity impact me, not really, not deep down where counted. It was an intellectual assent to what I knew to be right and good, but there was no heart behind it.

You see, I knew all the answers. I knew which verses to quote and how to phrase things to that you would hear how dazzling my intellect was and never notice what was behind the curtain. After a while, I forgot that there even was a curtain, let alone that there was something behind it. I convinced myself that this was me, all there was to me, and no one needed to know that there was more, not even myself.

The thing is when you lock down your heart that tight, it can’t beat. There is no room left for it to function, and you slowly begin to die. I kept the pain at bay, and if you don’t feel any pain you don’t react. Emergencies and crises become your forte, because you they don’t rattle you at all. How could they? At that point you are nothing more than a robot who is carrying out the programming, a program I did and still do believe is right, but one I could never implement completely because the primary code is love. And acts of love can be performed, but if the emotion is not there then you are offering nothing but pretty lie.

The other problem is if you never feel the pain of a wound inflicted, you will never be able to forgive. You may be able to respond with the appropriate gesture or kind word, but the hurt is still there just lurking behind the curtain. The apathy that was once a shield will harden into bitterness, and the sense of satisfaction for your self-control becomes wall of pride and disdain for those who allow emotion to rule their hearts.

Love for God and reliance upon him erodes, as your ability to cope becomes the new god to whom you have erected your altars. Relationship becomes ritual, not because you derive any enjoyment from his presence, but simply because it is the proper thing to do and your delight is in your ability to do the ritual well. Prayers become perfunctory and empty repetition, as you are left to wonder if he hears you at all, but since when was God ever servant to the decrees of the mind? And how is he to respond to the cries of a heart you have strangled in a futile attempt at self-preservation?

Then comes the day when he places the choice before you, the one you have worked so hard to avoid, do you love him or do you love the life you have created? Do you trust him to heal the wounds you have denied? Do you want him or the walls of protection you have built around yourself?

The answer should be easy. For my mind knows the correct response, but my heart is still clutching at the curtain afraid to step into the light. I was hurt the last time I let down my guard. I still have the scars to prove it. The select few I allowed to peek in used their privilege as the means to hurt me further. I still bleed from those cuts, but I caught breath of fresh air and felt the surge of blood coursing through my veins once more. I remembered what it felt like to be alive once again, and something within me is crying out that this is what I desire more than the false security I have relied upon. The next step is not safe, but even as I accept that peace floods over me because I know that only when my heart is revealed that he becomes its true defender and king.  

A Request

Lately, I have been finding it hard to write. I have no way to describe the craziness that was released into my world since the first of the year, or the massive amounts of craziness that still loom on the horizon. As the events that have rocked my world involve so many others, out of respect for them I am not comfortable sharing the specifics at this time. However, always the writer, I do find solace in the knowledge that I have gained enough material for no less than eight new books if life will ever permit me the time and mental space to work.

As most of my writings are based on what is happening in my world, issues brought to my attention by things I am experiencing, or studies prompted by my needs in that moment, you can see where all of this causes me to be wary of the keyboard lest I needlessly expose another to shame. I am left with a bit of a quandary, wondering how to maintain the transparency that I strive for in all my works while still being faithful in the obligations to the covenant of love that I have with each of these people.

Nor do I wish to forego the support and love that so many of you have expressed to me since starting this blog. Because now more than ever, I do need your support. I do need your love and encouragement in my life. I am faced with many difficult, almost impossible decisions, and I covet your prayers for wisdom and guidance I move forward. Perhaps that is selfish of me, but rarely in my life have faced such a difficult and demanding situation.

I am also asking for your prayers for time and energy. I have a book that is currently being edited, lacking just a bit of polish and the cover art before it is ready to meet the world. I have been working on it for almost ten years, and I believe that it is a significant work. While such a thought never crossed my mind in the initial writing phase, that has been the opinion of several who have been kind enough to read it in its roughest form, and as I have been met with resistance with every step of its competition, I am beginning to think that they might be right.

To record the number of straight up catastrophes that have occurred each time I believe the end is in sight would require the writing of entirely different book. The short version includes: illness, my own and of loved ones; financial straits, prohibiting me from covering the various cost associated with self-publication; various scenarios with Ty’s job that have stolen time and energy from the project; malfunctioning technology; the loss of friends and allies in ways that have broken my heart; and now I have been blindsided by another event completely out of my control that has left me without the myriad of resources required to finish this work. And I strongly believe that this recent event is just one more attempt to keep this book from finding its way into your hands.

If this sounds like whining, please extend a little grace, for whining is not my intent. I am simply in a situation where the only resolution I can see is divine intervention, and all I know to do is to ask that my brothers and sisters pray that God provide ways and means that I even my over-active imagination has yet to conjure up. I am profoundly grateful for the friendships that have been extended to me since the release of Scandalous and the starting of this blog. You have all been an encouragement and strength to me as I try to share the little that I know, and it is among my deepest desires to continue exploring this thing called faith together.

So I am imposing our friendship now to ask that you keep me in your prayers, that resolution will come to this circumstance and that I will have the resources necessary to continue with my writing – peace, clarity of thought, time, energy, creative solutions to tangible obstacles before me, and of course, abundant inspiration. I will be praying the same for you no matter what your endeavors may be, for who among us could not use more of these precious gifts from our King?

Love In An Imperfect World

In a perfect world, we would all love each other with a fullness and grace that would make sacrifice and compassion as natural as breathing. In perfect world, anger would be defused with understanding, bitterness erased with tenderness, and the scars we inflict upon each other would fade into nothingness so that we would never again be reminded of those moments when we failed to love or be loved completely.

But we do not live in a perfect world, and we ourselves are not perfect. Love costs us greatly, grace is never cheap or free when you are the one extending it, and forgiveness never comes with forgetfulness.

We live in a world where people fail us, where we fail others, and usually it the ones we hold most dear that hurt us the most and who we fail most often. In those times love demonstrates its strength by turning to embrace the hurt and the hurting so that relationship can be preserved and healing, as imperfect as we now know it to be in this realm, can commence.

But what of those moments when healing is denied, when forgiveness is not offered and mercy is withheld?  How then do we love?

Does compassion become weakness? Grace permission for abuse?

For so long we have been told that love is without bounds and limits. It is to be given freely and only its unwavering expression of approval and acceptance is it determined to be authentic. All else is but a fraud, a manipulation, and self-serving artifice designed to bind another to you through the shackles of control and demands of proof for their worthiness of such affection. So we give, and we give without thought to self or survival. We pour out so that another might know that they are worthy of our gift and sacrifice, and we pray that we will be found worthy in turn.

The stories told us that if we loved enough, if we held on tight enough, and worked hard enough we would indeed be found worthy and rewarded with the strength of love that we have bestowed upon another. But this is not truth. It never has been.

Love is the most easily rejected gift we have to offer another.

Perfect love was the first gift offered to humanity. Love not merely expressed in the feeble tools of words and deed, but love personified, walking with Adam and Eve there in the garden, guiding and teaching them with his tangible presence. Their experience of love was beyond any that you and I will know this side of the grave, and they still betrayed it for the hope of something better. Greed and pride deafened their ears, blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts to the truth – love wants to give all, but only to those willing to reject everything else for the chance to experience this great gift.

Millennia would pass before love once again walked the earth, and this time the gift of his presence was rewarded with a gruesome death upon the cross for demands of fidelity are the one thing the human heart cannot abide. Sacrificing control of our lives and destiny is not something easily accomplished by the human heart, and yet, that was what he required of us so we demanded his blood for daring to be so bold. Unable to appreciate the great gift before us, we rebel. We fight and scream at the cruelty of perceived oppression, and declare that this cannot be love for the love we wish leaves us unchanged and unburdened by expectations.

We have never embraced love without struggle or objection.

This is true not just of God’s love for us, but even the love of another human being. We will lash out at any who feel they have the right by merit of their love for us to dictate the terms of our lives. We will deny that what they offer is love, and call it evil so that we can justify our rejection of this gift.

And what of those times when we are the ones who love? When our great gift of self is rejected? What are we to do then? As in all things, we should look to the example of our Lord and Savior, we continue to love, but we enact limits. We set boundaries, not upon our love but upon the expressions of love that we offer. We do not permit ourselves to be used up and abused by those who would use our emotion as a means to demand all and give nothing in return. We recognize that what we have offered is of great value to ourselves and our Creator, and it is not a gift to be scorned.

Therein lies the conflict. For if we as human beings cannot give love without expectations of honor nor can we receive without submission, how then are we to love?

The answer is a revelation of why we need the love of God before any other love. For without his guidance, the continual experience of his love for us forever renewing our minds and conforming us to his image, we will lack the wisdom and knowledge of where boundaries should be set and how they should be enacted – first in our lives and then in the lives of others. We learn to love by being loved. We learn how to love by experiencing how he loves us, and we are taught to accept love when we receive the gift of his love to us. Without his love illuminating our hearts and minds we stumble and fall into abuse and selfishness, we are lured into believing that our happiness relies on something beyond what has been given, and we flinch from the burden of expectation.

As we experience the love of God we learn to discern love from lust, true sacrifice from manipulation, respect from flattery, and conviction from unfounded guilt. We will never get it right, not completely, but that is why we need the one we love to love our Father as well. For in our humanness, we will need the grace and mercy that can only be inspired in the hearts of one who knows the source of true love intimately. And sometimes, as you fight through the learning together, you get a piece of it right and in those moments you learn the beauty of what it is to truly love another and to be loved in return with all the glory and beauty that is a gift from the God of love alone and can never be conjured from the mere depths of our humanity.

The Importance of Shame

Yesterday, I shared an interview that Charisma Magazine did with my friend Dennis Jernigan. Not that I was too fond of the way Charisma decided to twist his words into a click bait headline, or that they did a pretty hard cut and paste of what Dennis said within the article itself, but rather because I know Dennis and I believe that there are people who need to hear his story.

As I expected, there was an immediate reaction, and most of it was negative. There were several comments, but most of them revolved around the concept of shame. The idea being that even in telling his story he was and is, and if I know Dennis, will continue to heap shame upon others by declaring his victory over homosexuality.

All of this got me to thinking, which is always dangerous, when did shame become a bad thing?

Seriously, why do we automatically reject anything to do with shame? I know that there are times when shame is unhealthy and damaging. I know that it is always painful and that it can drive people to do some really awful things in their lives, but does that mean that shame should be avoided at all costs?

There is a part of me that would love to think that shame is a horrible emotion that we should just outright rejected in our lives. I never liked being ashamed and shame was what kept me from seeking help when I was in the middle of an abusive marriage. The weight of it all left me self-destructive and suicidal, and I only learned how to speak up when I managed to free myself from those feelings. Part of what I do now is help other women to free themselves of the shame that has kept them quiet so that they can walk towards healing and with confidence of God’s love for them. There really would have never been any need for my book Scandalous if so many women had not been bullied into silence by the destructive power of shame. So, yeah, I am not a big fan of that particular emotion.

But there is another story, one that I haven’t told all that often – probably because I have been, well, ashamed.

Sometime after my divorce, I found someone who made me happy. There are no words to describe how complete I felt with this person or how they eased all the wounds I carried since leaving the warzone of my marriage, but there was one problem. This person was unwilling to commit to loving only me. I knew I could never be happy hanging out on the fringes of their life. I wanted to be the center of their world, just like they had become the center of mine. So I did everything in my power to facilitate that. I began bending and twisting the rules, reinterpreting the decrees of my faith to make allowances for my lust, and justifying my actions under the guise of love.

God is the God of love, I told myself, and so he must want this for me. God would never allow me to feel such passion for something he did not bless. He would have never created me this way if he knew it would cause me to sin in his eyes, so I must not be sinning to do what was so incredibly natural for me. This was his design, everyone knows this, and only a fool would say that it is evil to experience the bliss I felt only with this person.

Looking back, I can see the flaws in my logic. I know now that what comes natural to humanity is very often the very things that God does call sin. He has no use for my happiness when it comes at the expense of who he declared me to be, and his greatest desire is that I would love him above all others. If that means putting aside my own desires as a demonstration of that love, I need to do it, and if I am allowing my happiness to be pervert his word to serve me then I am declaring that my happiness, not God, is the one I am worshipping.

I won’t lie to you. It wasn’t easy turning loose. I can’t tell you how devastated I was when I finally walked away, and what was worse, I had no clue as to who or what I was walking towards. Sure, I knew I was chasing Father, but what that looked like this side of eternity, I didn’t know. And the idea of living my life alone terrified me as few other things ever had. I had become so enmeshed in my dream of being with this person and finding my fulfillment in a life with them that I did not even know how to define who I was or who I could be without them because every image of the future I possessed had them at my side.

How did I do it? How did I find the courage to finally make that cut? Well, it didn’t start out as courage. It started out as shame. Big, ugly, nauseating shame. The type of shame that makes you doubt if you are worthy of life. The type of shame that rubs salt into the wounds of loss by demanding that you admit how stupid you had been, how you had let yourself be played, and how you had sold out everything you believe to be true so that you could have a few moments of fun that left you utterly unfulfilled and tormented.

But shame becomes something amazing when presented to Father. Shame stops being that ugly worm that gnaws at your guts and finds wings as it transformed into repentance, and finds its true form in faith. I think this is the step so many of us are unwilling to take, and why shame paralyzes us or propels us to do horrible things to ourselves, we don’t trust the process of repentance. We buy into the lie that if our walk to Father begins in pain that it will continue in pain. So we recoil before he can lead us through the process. All we can focus on is what we are losing, and when we shift our gaze to him we see our sins laid bare before a God who loved us so much he withstood the shame of the cross on our behalf. Knowing that so much ugliness was heaped upon one so perfect makes your soul bleed. Everywhere we turn is nothing but pain! Giving up seems to be the only option where we don’t have to hurt.

Having faith means that we learn how to trust the process, and sometimes the process means embracing the pain. I think there is reason for this, and I don’t think it is because is some celestial sadist. I think he wants us to know the depth of the wounds we carry within us. I think he wants us to feel our sickness has invaded every part of our being and how it has warped us into something that he never desired us to be. I think he wants us to learn how to hate our sin, but more importantly, I think he wants us to know our sin does not define us. For how will we ever celebrate the grandeur of his love and forgiveness if we are unable to acknowledge the depths of the healing?

No, shame is not a bad thing. It is a necessary thing, but something should only last for season – a tool to be picked up and then cast aside as we celebrate God’s redeeming love that was given when we were still lost in our sin.  

The God of I

“I love ______, and God is love so this can’t be wrong.”

“I need ______ in my life to be happy, and God wants us to be happy.”

“I want to be true to who God made me to be.”

“I was born this way, who are you to say that God made a mistake?”

“I feel like God wants me to do this.”

“I know in my heart this is God’s plan for my life.”

“I made the right decision, and only God can judge me.”

“I have prayed it through, and this is the right thing for me.”

“I believe that this is what God wants for me. Why else would I feel this way?”

And so goes the theology of our day. I want, I need, I think, I feel - all of these phrases, an introduction to the carefully crafted theology of “I”. Oh sure, we toss God’s name in there so it sounds as if we might actually be speaking of him, but let’s be real shall we?

Look, I am not throwing stones here. I have said these things myself, and did so quite convincingly. I was in love. I could not be happy without this person in my life, and surely a God of love would understand if I bent, or broke, the rules so that I could have love in my life.

After all, those rules were written so long ago and to different culture. The people back then weren’t as enlightened as we are now. They didn’t understand the things we now know are true about relationships and human sexuality. If they knew what we know now, God certainly would have written something different, something more lenient, and more loving than the self-denial that being true to his word would require of me.

And I could believe everything I told myself, as long as I never stopped to think about what I was really saying because if I did, I undermined every reason to believe in God in the first place. The truth is I was telling myself that I was smarter than God, I was wiser than him, and I was more loving than he ever professed to be. My thoughts were higher and more rational than any thought he had deigned to share with humanity, and his words were cruel when compared to grace I offered myself. I had the power to stop my pain, and I could heal my heart more effectively than he ever would, all I had to do was have enough faith.

But that faith was never in him, it was strictly in myself.

I had become my own god. I had elevated my will above his, and I had called him a liar with my thoughts and deeds. Not that I would voice such a thing, for who could condone such arrogance, such hubris? Not I or any other rational human being, but when I dressed it up as a service – a debt I owed to my heart, to my sense of self, then I could celebrate my accomplishments and bask in the approval of my peers.

Sin never creeps into our lives because we label it a sin. It comes wrapped in all things beautiful and delicious. It appeals to our pride, our vanity, but even more it appeals to the needs of our hearts and seems soothing against ragged places of loneliness and pain. For a moment there is the sweet seduction of knowing what it is to have our appetites satisfied, but it is only for a moment. Then we are confronted with how powerless we, or anyone else, really are to satisfy the demands of our hearts. Pride would seek to lash us onward, to try again, to love someone new, and to immerse ourselves in pools of self-help and self-healing, when the truth is we need to acknowledge that nothing we create of ourselves will ever be any lasting value.

Facing the truth is violent and painful task. It is bloody act to cut out the part of your heart that would betray you for a seconds worth of peace and self-aggrandizement. Pride writhes with wretched anguish when displaced by humility, and mercy stings when you realize how undeserving you are of such a gift. Nor does the love you worshipped above the God of love die swift and painless death, instead lingers in the recesses of you heart waiting for a moment of weakness to rise up displace this new God you have enthroned upon what was once its domain.

No one said it would be easy or without cost to worship this God of the Bible and the God of truth. Even he said there pain, but he promised it would be worth it and either he is a God of his word worthy of our worship or he isn’t. There is no in between and there is no compromise or justification in him. He will not share our hearts with another god, not even the god of I or the god of love for ourselves. For the love he offers is greater than any we can conjure of own will. The question is who do we really worship more, the true God of Love or the love we have that it only sustained by I?

My Bipolar Faith - No that's not a joke

One of the million and one fun facts about being Emily is I wrestle with being bipolar. When I tell people this I often get that “Ah, I see you are telling a self-deprecating joke and I am going to play along” giggle, followed closely by the “Oh, crap! She’s serious and I have no idea how to respond” fumbling attempts at politeness. Now, just to be clear, this in no way offends me. After all, that’s exactly the type of joke I would crack about myself and expect you to laugh along. I can’t blame anyone for being confused, but the fact is I have an official diagnosis of “highly functional bipolar complicated by PTSD.” Doesn’t that make me sound like a fun fill bag of unpredictability and chaos?

I decided to write about this because I have recently learned that many of my friends had no clue. I have never considered it to be a secret or an overly sensitive issue that I have tried to keep hidden. It is just part of my life and a part that I have to deal with on a daily basis so I rarely feel the need to bring it up in casual conversation. Besides, it rarely works out well.

“I just repainted my bathroom a lovely green, not too sherberty and not too sagey. What have you been up to?”

"Me? Oh, I haven’t done much. Just got through a hypo-manic episode so I have been on lock down in my house and trying not make obscene posts to Facebook.”

I don’t think that I will ever get to the place where I will celebrate the fact that I have to constantly examine each and every thought, emotion, and impulse because my brain has decided that it didn’t like all the chemicals to be properly balanced. Dealing with that is draining at a level I cannot begin to articulate. However, I can say with conviction that it has forced me to be intentional about many of my life choices that I may have otherwise cruised past without a thought.

I had to accept that my emotions lie to me, and if that wasn’t special enough, so do my thoughts. I have to actively work to silence the voices that tell me to get in my car and drive until I hit an ocean, that I can always get more credit cards if I max out the ones I have, or that taking off my clothes in public is great idea. At times like these, when I too big and too great to be contained by anything and every fiber of my being is fighting against the restraints, be it geographical or financial restraints or even just my socks, I have to remember the truth. This is nothing more than the chemicals in my brain lying to me. These are not good options and I would be destroying the good things in my life, things I may not think I love today, but will remember I do love tomorrow, or in a few days at least.

But that is just the beginning, because human beings don’t like confinement and especially not those of us with a major malfunction in our heads. I react to this type of self-imposed discipline with anger - unrealistic, irrational anger that can spew out on those closest to me with the least bit of perceived provocation. (Please note the use of the word perceived in the previous sentence.) In my state of hyper-vigilance, I notice everything and I have to fight the feeling that everything is directed at me on the most personal level ever conceived. Music too loud? You did that to make me mad. Dirty dishes in the sink? Really, you want to set me off. Didn’t call? Did call? You are ignoring me or trying to disrupt my day. Got sick, can’t make our lunch date? Sure, you really just could stand to be near me.

You name it. I can find a reason why you meant it as an attack. So I swing the other way, and deliberately attempt to depersonalize everything. I shut down. I don’t respond, and I keep you at arm’s length. It is easier that way, and I am far less likely to say or do something that is unforgivably cruel. The problem is that safe guard is also cruel to those who genuinely love me and feel as if I don’t care about them when I can shut it down so effectively.

There is no winning this game, but it is one I will play for the rest of my life. It isn’t easy and I there are some days I would give my left leg to be normal. (Whatever that is.) And yes, I am serious. Did you notice the specificity of the limb I would relinquish? You don't get that specific if you didn't put some thought into it, but that is pipe dream, and I have to accept that.

I also have to accept that I have hurt people in the wake of my fury and despondency. I have to own that, because no matter how great the chemical imbalance tempted me towards irrational thoughts or behaviors, I made the choice to do as they dictated or to deny them the right to define me. I get to choose if the sum total of my life would be a disorder or something of my own making. Some days, I choose better than others, and I am learning to be more consistent in those choices. I had to learn to accept help, to be open with my family about those days when I felt the world beginning to spiral and stop acting as if I had it all together all the time, and I had to learn when to say “enough, I need a break” without just running away leaving everyone to feel like I had abandoned them.

It is hard on my pride. I want to be in control, and I want to have it all together. Above all, I want to be there for those who are important to me, and I am still trying to figure out how to do that in better ways than I have in the past. I am also learning how to remain open even in those moments when shutting down is safer and easier than running the risks of annihilating the world around me, and that has got to be the scariest thing I have ever attempted because I know how thin that line between open and out of control really is.

In all the years of fighting this, there has been one saving grace. I had a standard of truth to cling to. I did not have to rely on the thoughts inside my head or the feeling that washed over me to tell me what was good or right. The answers do not come from the inside, they are found in the revelation of God in his Word. I had to decide to hone my ability to empathize so that I could offer what I believe my faith requires of me.  After all, even if I feel like I am huge black hole of impenetrable darkness that does not mean I can act as if everyone else is. So while careening my car into oncoming traffic might solve some of my problems, I have to remember it might put a huge damper on someone else’s big day. And those days when I am too great to be bothered by the pettiness of your life, I am really working on trying to remember that your pain is valid and real and should be honored as such, instead of cavalierly declaring that death of your dog is just part of life and you should get over it.

I had to decide what I believed. By that I don’t mean that I could just make an intellectual assent to my faith or the dictates of it. I had to get honest about how sincere I was about the Christian ethic of love, kindness, and grace. I had to make a cognitive choice to live these things despite what I may or may not be feeling in a moment, and the most beautiful thing of all is I am not expected to give you a feeling that I have to manufacture on my own. I just have to give you the love that I have been given, the love a Savior that is supposed to flow through me – a love that is far superior to any created within my heart or mind. In that there is freedom, from the condemnation of my inadequacies and the shame of not always feeling as Christian as I think should. The command to me, to us all really, isn’t too feel a certain way, but to act in accordance to His word. So that is the part I am working on. You know, the stuff I can control, most days.

Steps, Leaping, and Surrender - The Ways of Love

Originally posted April 2010

Still Together

In my adult life I have had three significant love relationships. The first one was to the man I married, a man I dated, and the man to whom I will be married in forty days. I haven’t always been wise when it comes to matters of the heart. It would be easy to blame society, television, Walt Disney, or a million other factors. The truth is I was pretty mixed up when it came to the who to the whole love thing, but I didn’t know it and as I talk to other girls who hope to one day find love I see that it isn’t just me that had a problem sorting all this out.

We get a lot of mixed signals when it comes to romance. Most of us come from broken homes, so we believe that love is something that goes away and can’t be trusted. Many of us see the dysfunctional relationships portrayed in popular media and we think that love can be had in rapid succession with a number of partners. We are told that love is a commitment by so many people in the church. Walt Disney says love is forever and once we find it we are guaranteed a happily ever after.

We don’t know if love is something we pursue or finds us. We can’t figure out if it is something that we feel or decide. We just don’t know if we are destined to be the lucky ones or if love is a matter of intense effort. It is not easy to sift through all the information out there about this phenomenon.

As the date draws closer to my wedding, I am finding myself reflecting on the past. The events that shaped my perceptions, recognizing some of my mistakes, and things that I have endured in order to understand what makes this relationship so different from the last ones. Yes, definitely the man is different, but I am different too.

I was twenty years old when I was married the first time. I knew I wanted a husband and a family so I got married to the first man who seemed to fit my check list. I took all the proper steps in choosing this man. He looked good on paper, and I believed that as long as I kept following the formulas, did things by the book, we would be able to build a marriage that would be okay. There was no passion for him, and as it turned out, he had none for me. We were both looking of partners who fit certain criteria and we thought we had found them. It was not long before it was obvious that our marriage was based on misinformation and more than a few lies, but I still believed that if I took all the proper steps I could make it better. I told myself that I loved him, and if I just kept trying everything would work out.

I had every relationship book in print, worked the formula, and went through counseling all in hopes that I would find the right set of steps to our save us from destruction. The thing is love is a bit of a dance, but if it is really love, your partner doesn’t hate you if you step on their toes from time to time. In the end, I was unable to keep up, do the right things, or be the right person to keep him happy and all I was doing was killing myself trying to make it work. It wasn’t easy to admit that the marriage failed, but looking back, I realize that my biggest mistake happened when I believed that love could be a formula to be mastered.

The next relationship was comedy or tragedy of mistakes, depending on your point of view. I leapt into love, blindly, stupidly. For the first time I knew what it was to want someone in my life, not just try to have someone because it is expected. There was fire and passion, but it was fanned by the flames of uncertainty and doubt. The constant strain of whether he was going to be there for me or not, rearranging my life so that I would be acceptable and appealing to him, all in the hopes that he would one day wake up and realize he loved me as much as I did him. I held on through so much chaos and confusion thinking my leap of faith would be enough to sustain us. In the end, it takes two to believe for great things and both have to leap together. The last time I leapt, he stood firmly on the edge of that abyss and watched me fall, and I realized that I could never do that again.

I was a little lost for awhile after that. I didn’t know what to do. Love wasn’t working for me or I couldn’t make it work for me. I had tried taking the steps. I had made the leaps, what else could I do? It seemed so out of my hands, so far beyond anything I could possibly do that I felt hopeless. I didn’t like being out of control. I didn’t like feeling like I could do nothing to bring about the one thing that I have wanted since the first time I saw Cinderella, but I was helpless.

Dirty feet in the garden while we were dating

Then I met Ty, and I was too weary to take the steps. I was too scared to make another leap, but he never asked me to. Instead, he sat there one night and told me about the things in his heart, his hopes, his fears, and why I belonged in his life. He told me about how who I was, not what I did, fascinated and captivated him. There was no formula to master or ability to prove, and I found myself confronted by something so completely new, it scared me to death. He loved me, and all I had to do was surrender to it. I had to be okay with just being. I had to trust him, and it is hard not do with those beseeching blue eyes promising so much if you do. I had to turn loose of all my attempts to control the situation, and surrender to this man.

For the first time, I understood why so many people can’t figure Christianity out, why a God who offers grace is so difficult to understand and accept. When you spend your whole life thinking that love is something you have to perform to receive, being confronted by a love that demands only your presence is overwhelming. I almost walked away from Ty. He seemed too good to be true, but I decided I could be okay with this new type of love, the kind where I am beautiful even when my hairs a mess and my feet are covered in dirt from the garden.

I have to believe that God is like that. That he sees our dirty feet and smiles every time we turn our faces towards him, because its not about the steps we take or the leaps we attempt. It is about realizing he loves us and trusting his love enough to surrender to him.

An Eternity With Morons

Recently, I was asked if I was sure I was even saved. And not in the “I am deeply concerned for your spiritual well being and eternal residence” kind of way. It was more in the “You disrupted my theology, I don’t like the way that feels, so I will attack you personally in a manner that makes me feel superior to you” kind of way.

At the time I laughed it off. I was rather amused, because the only thing in this life that I am certain of is that I have a real relationship with my God. It is everything else that can be kind of shaky.

But later, the question began to bug me. And not the “Oh my God, could she possibly be right?” convicted kind of way. It was more of the “How dare she even insinuate such a thing” kind of way. Conviction followed shortly after some rather uncharitable thoughts about the person, me questioning her salvation, planning on how I was going to be a great tool - first, in her enlightenment and secondly, her repentance for doubting my dazzling theological intellect.

It is amazing how un-Christians can be when we talk about our Christianity. We get all self righteous, and convinced that we are the only ones who truly know who God is and how He does things. We begin to believe that only those who agree with us can possible be saved and everyone else is going to hell. And I am not so sure that that feeling isn’t accompanied by some sense of relief – as in the “Oh good, I didn’t want to spend eternity with that moron anyway” kind of way.

The essence of the conversation that led to this anger provoking question was God had to conform to certain ideology that provided this person with absolute confidence that God would never do something they did not approve of. I countered with God is absolutely capable of doing whatever He pleases and should He choose to upset your paradigm than He will – and it would not be out of his character or not in keeping with His nature. It is one of the perks of being God, you get to have it your way all the time, except when you chose not to – and then it’s called grace.

Somewhere in the midst of the conversation, I got the “shut up” message from God. He sends them more than I receive them, but sometimes, when He shouts, I get a clue. So I tried to extricate myself from the situation with a little grace, end on a note we could all agree on. It went like this (if you know me then you have heard me say it, so no it probably isn’t you I am writing about.)

“Maybe we should leave it at agreeing to disagree. After all there is so much that we do agree on, right?” I say nodding my head until she began to parrot me.

“God loves us and created us to have relationship.” Agreement was given.

“Jesus fully God, fully man, lived, died and rose again for our sins.” Again we had agreement.

“And we can only experience salvation through him.” Once again, agreement.

We parted warily, liked two armed gun men both aware that the other could turn and shoot us in the back while we retreated. There was no sense of community that arose from the conversation, nor do I think that we fostered any type of relationship, but that could just be me and my wounded feelings.

Theological debate and arguments can be good things. They help us clarify what we believe, and make us articulate ideas and concepts that float around in our heads like fog. They help us weed out heresy, and force us keep some sort of coherence in our thoughts about God, but too often our thoughts about God become our image of God.

There was a reason that the second commandment says we should not create a graven image of God, and most of us don’t break this one – at least not literally. But maybe it is time that we extracted the principle for use in our day, because everyone I know, including me, has an image of God. It is my favorite idea of who and what he is. He is the God I like, and his parameters are well defined.

I have come to believe that our walk of faith is less about knowing God, and more about realizing what we don’t know about him. It is about tearing down the image of him I carry around in my mind and can defend so well.

Maybe this is why we get so crazed when we talk about the God we believe in, and someone disagrees. We know they aren’t tearing down God, we know they have walked up to our idol and smacked it with a baseball bat. It tends to set us off, but I have discovered something – only an idol needs our defense, only an image we have made needs us to use dirty tactics to preserve their dignity. God, the real God, is pretty good at taking care of himself. Defense is not our job, loving each other is. And when we get too busy protecting our image of him, it’s the one thing we just can’t do.

And by the way, we should all prepare for an eternity with morons, I am pretty sure I will make it, and I hope you do too.

"Stay Together" - Or Stupid Things Moms Say

Since my children were tiny there has been one event that defined their day – if they could go down to Grandma’s house. My mom and dad live next door and the houses are within shouting distance, but just barely. A wide open pasture stands between us and the greatest risk to my children’s safety are the handful of cows who share more in common with lap dogs than their other bovine relatives, but there is always that chance a something else could be lurking in the grass. When they were smaller I would watch them out the door and call Mom to be expecting them, both of us would stay on the line commenting on their progress from our respective windows. We would only hang up once the gate into Grandma’s yard had been hurdled.

When I was small I did the same thing, my grandma lived next door too. Every day as the door swung closed behind me my mother would call out, “Be careful.” Now if you know me very well at all, you know being careful in no way appeals to me. If I have to be careful, I would just as soon not waste my time. I have raised my children who share this mentality and they are fabulous risk takers, but since a mother has to yell something as her children go out the door, I had to come up with mine.

Now, there was no cognitive thought put in my selection of words, but this morning as I yelled after them I found myself wondering why I hear myself saying, “Stay together.” There is an inherent risk in my children staying together and it can involve bloodshed and bruises on a good day. The truth is they fight. Not your usual “Did not, Did too” fights, it’s more of the apocalyptic nature which I am convinced is simply preparation for Armageddon. So all wisdom would dictate that I encouraged them to stay as far from each other as the forty acres allows. God knows they are safer facing the cows than each other sometimes.

Even they see this and complain about having to tolerate the other. Lydia could make case that would convince a Supreme Court justice, and Lauren has a way of putting her head down so she can figure out a way to circumvent my command (in a completely defendable manner, of course). What they don’t see is that I have a reason for them sticking together and it is more than one of them might need a kidney one day.

I want them to learn to walk together in the midst of conflict. I want them to face challenges and difficulties without turning to attack the other, and sometimes I catch glimmers of hope. Too often we face a hard situation and our answer is to blame someone else, let our tempers flare, and demand to be vindicated or martyred for our stand. Separation is easier than relationship. Peace at all costs demands we sacrifice friends and loved ones because often they seem to be the source of our problems.

Sometimes they are. Lauren would not have anyone to yell at if Lydia picked up her dirty clothes, and Lydia would not have a reason to be inflamed if Lauren did not try to boss her. In their child minds the answer is simple, remove the offending party.

As adults we know this truth far too well, and so often we simply stop inviting people into our lives. We keep them at arm’s length where they have not opportunity to do anything that might hurt or anger us, and therefore, we never have to deal with conflict. The problem with this approach is we never learn how to truly love someone who remains at this distance. Sure we can have nice thoughts, wish them well, or even share pleasant Sunday afternoon meal, but we will never know them well enough to love.

Paul warns us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Many people think that this means go to church on Sundays, but I think there is a bit more to it. Church is a great place to start, but how many times is that where it ends? I love to go to concerts, and sit next people at every one I go to, but I am not there with these people. I know nothing about them, their life and habits in no impacts mine, nor does mine theirs. To say our relationship is shallow would be an understatement, nonexistent comes much closer.

In some respects the relationship among concert goers is far superior to other relationships we may have, if we use peace as the criteria. I believe peace is a good thing, but it can’t be everything. Jesus even fought with his disciples, correcting their misconceptions, going to toe to toe with them when they dared disagree, but he never cut them out of his life. He never washed his hands of them and said he was done trying to get along with quarrelsome men. He understood that when you walk with someone there are going to be difficulties, problems, possibly a shouting match or two, and maybe even some punch thrown somewhere along the way.

The quality of the relationship was not defined by the absence of conflict. It was defined by the ability to resolve conflict and build stronger relationship through confronting conflict honestly. Coming to gather as believers should entails conflict, fights even. It means we are really walking together, and if we can stop seeing conflict as the death knell of friendship, we could begin to appreciate the diversity of thought and method that God has equipped his body to use to reveal his desire for relationship to the world.

The girls are growing up, and after over a decade of duking it out, hours of hysteria, they are learning to appreciate the strengths of the other. Strengths they have tested and found to be worthy of their trust through conflict. I don’t worry about them leaving the safety of our house when they are together, because I know that even as they scream at the other, no outside threat better come near.
My hope is that we all have someone yell at and to yell back at us as we work our way through this thing called faith.

Reminiscing About The Harley Days - Being Swayed

Originally posted on Exploring The Pagus

There are a few things that make a girl go “That’s MY man!” And Ty does something that never fails to cause that response in me. Now I know for all of you who do ride motorcycles, that it is something that comes second nature, but for us newbies it can be rather impressive.

Ty rides a 1995 Harley Road King. It is a big bike, 900 pounds of steel and chrome, over half a ton when you add our two bodies, and he usually maneuvers it all with the subtlest shift of his hips. A movement that cannot be detected with the naked eye, but has guided us through traffic, curves, and rain without fail.

The other night as we rode, we hit a rough patch of road and I could feel as he efficiently and elegantly responded to the demands of the situation. I could feel how his muscles worked with and against the bike, keeping us upright seemingly without strain or duress. I, on the other hand, fought the overwhelming urge to grip those love handles in white knuckled terror. As I choked back a shriek, he laughed and said “That was fun.” (I hope to God that was sarcasm, because from my seat, it did not remotely resemble anything called fun.)

It was all over in a matter of seconds, and my dear husband never broke a sweat. The only clue I had that he was even aware of the situation was the way his body swayed to the interplay of the road and the bike. A part of me wanted to chastise him for being so calm, so cavalier about his wife’s safety, but the sheer truth of the matter was he got us through it unscathed.

My walk with God is like that. He is up in front and seems completely unruffled by circumstance. He doesn’t make a big commotion about getting things done. Everything is handled in subtleties, efficiently and elegantly. Subtleties I miss if I am not close enough to feel the slight sway of his spirit as he maneuvers me through this life.

And just like with Ty, I find myself wanting to scream out in panic, demand to know why he is so calm when everything is so threatening. I want to see more action. I want to see him be a little more proactive and really show that he is dealing with the problem, but rarely does he do things my way. He calmly sways with and against circumstance, and occasionally laughs over his shoulder, “That was fun.”

It is easy to forget, that he will get me through unscathed if I am able to keep myself in check. If I can resist the urge to reach past him and try to steer myself. I have to trust that even when it doesn’t look like he is doing anything, he really is, and he never fails to respond to the needs of a situation. Riding with Ty has reminded me that I need to stop trying to control and learn to be responsive to how God is leading. And just like my husband, God probably isn’t going to draw much attention to what he is doing, so if I don’t want to miss it I need to be alert to the subtle shifts.

And sometimes, I just need to stop and think about what he is really doing. How all those little motions mean that the world has moved, not just a bike, the world. Lives are changed and destinies determined with a slight sway, and I need to sit back and experience the awe again. The awe that makes a girl go, “That’s MY God.”