The Church and Me

So yesterday I found the evaluation sheets from a job I took for sixteen weeks during the summer of 2005.

The word I get to use now that I'm just a business woman who happens to be a Christian is pissed.

I wish I could have seen everything clearly when it was all happening. My innocence and naivete astounds me. Just clueless.

Why? Well, for some odd reason that I will only know in the afterlife I suppose, I always see things from an eternal perspective. I see health in people who are really unhealthy. Meaning I see the possibility of them as whole and functioning. I see the possibility of growth in stagnant situations. I see what 'healed' looks like in the wounded.

To every person, I speak into their best life. If Haley whatshisface saw dead people, I see life. To the detriment of my own protection.

Sometimes I think God has kept me where I am, without opening any escape hatches, so that I could lose the rose coloured glasses.

The interconnected enmeshment of the denominations in which I have moved and had my being is beyond belief. It's incestuous. They are men who are faking it and not quite making it. Company men they used to call them in the denomination of my childhood. The business of religion.

So here's me, on this Donna Quixote like quest for spiritual maturity and life abundant saying, 'Hey gang! This new life we are offered is so cool. Don't you just want to get to the core of your pain and fear and turn it all over to God and let it be washed clean and given new meaning?" And their like, well, really we're in this for the applause and affirmation and leader worship we can receive because it feels really safe and comfortable.

You would think it would lead me to hate wouldn't you? But it doesn't. It can't. Because in November of 1993, I took vows to hold God's people in my heart. I'm supposed to love them even when they hurt me. So, my default is always , after I've set some limits, to go into teaching mode.

I spent all day on a book I've been working on since the mid nineties which if written with excellence and read properly, has the possibility of leading people to a deeper relationship with themselves and a closer relationship with God. That could be revolutionary. It will not have any patriarchal aroma to it. That might be different, freeing for some hopefully.

Then tonight, I spent my hours working on my spiritual memoir.

In both instances, I have had an opportunity to see with hindsight, what my spiritual journey has been. It's enough to make you believe in God.

Now, I'm not going to keep my experience from the summer of 2005 a secret. It was the singularly most defining time period in my life outside of the Spring of 1969 in Cambridge England when I surrendered my life to God. And no doubt, as always happens, when I speak my truth, people who are embarrassed about their behavior might see it as an attack or criticism.

But I am, at this point in my life, fully confident that God is working in their lives as well, whether they want God to or not. Good will come of me telling my story.

And this day, this most incredible day when I am reaping the blessing of a  thousand moments of small obediences to the nudge, the whiff that has been my pillar of smoke and fire, I wish that for them. I wish healing and awareness and increased closeness to the eternal love that shapes and molds us for the best we can receive.