Fifteen years ago, I'd get in the car and drive Corley Mill Road from one end to the other for the fun of it. Corley Mill was a two lane road with rolling hills through a forest made up of mostly hardwoods, a novelty in the pine belt. It was also reminiscent of the woods in my New England hometown, and made me nostalgic for the leaves that canopied the narrow road and the hills I missed from Massachusetts.  It was my happy place after leaving my other hometown in the deep south, where my happy place was a swing at the waterfront on the Back Bay.


Corley Mill is now the gateway to multiple subdivisions and a new high school, not even a shadow of its former self. A new swing hangs in homage to the one of my childhood on Paw Paw's property, which now belonging to my uncle.

Time does its relentless work of change.

And here I am a year from my declaration that I was boldly embracing gray. I don't know when or why I chose this arbitrary amount of time of one year to figure out my broader worldview, one that traded in black and white for all the hues of gray in between.

I have done much to explore this expansive territory and it is changing me.

• I've worshipped in Anglican, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches.
• I've read academic works from both camps on what the Bible teaches about women and have become somewhat of a feminist.
• I've discovered new-to-me approaches to scripture beyond systematic theology that have breathed new life into my relationship with the Bible I so love.
• I've had wine with family and friends.
• I've allowed myself to be seen and heard and have weight, even though it still feels like clunking around in my mother's red loafers when I was five. But I know its a good gift to give myself, so I keep trying and hoping I will grow into it.
• I've left the confines of legalistic, small boundaries for complex freedom in my walk with Christ.
• I bought a copy of The Book of Common Prayer to read and pray through beautiful words that Christians worldwide are reading/pondering/praying. It feels like another aspect of community,  added to my personal relationship with Jesus.
• We'll be opening the door this Halloween and hurrah for the candy, the costumes, and the giddy children with tired moms and dads. What was I thinking all these years?
• I've added stillness, contemplation, and listening to my corporate worship repertoire of loud singing, clapping, and hand raising (the more demonstrative the better). 

I thought this would be an "after" post. But this isn't a bucket list as much as it is a way of living, another beautiful discovery this past year. It didn't turn out to be a process or project with deadlines.  Even this is a shade of gray and not black and white.

So instead of an "after" post, let this serve as a progress report.  And long live the progress, I say. May we never stop folding gently into all the ways to live into the freedom of Christ.

My faith is no longer flat and linear. It's nuanced and multidimensional. I've pressed on hollow platitudes and formulaic approaches with small, stingy boundaries. I didn't know they would crumple to reveal a wider world full of wonder and peril, and in need of God's love, generosity and freedom.

My faith now incorporates doubt, questions, pain, fear and things I will never understand, all without taking away anything from God's worthiness of everything perfect. Because he's also deserving of my everything, including the sad, earthly-fallen parts that persist. He is the only one who knows what to do with these things, and ignoring them didn't make them go away.

I don't think I realized how hard I tried to wear blinders to those unsettled, broken parts. I did it because I didn't think they served my witness or spoke well of God.  How laughable to think that I could edit my faith to protect the reputation of a fearsome and untameable God. What if  the opposite is what's true: that living in victory and faith alongside the hard, unreconciled things speaks the most eloquently about God's character?

The commonality in all these things is that they are more generous and expansive than my former stances.

It takes more mindfulness to be true to God's principles in each circumstance than it was to adhere to a set of succinct rules judiciously if not smugly laid atop every situation, one size fits all. But it's also abundant and deeply satisfying, tethers me closer to my Lord, and keeps me looking and listening for him. It's more like what he said he came to bring us.

I serve a God whose every promise is yes and amen.





Linking with Addie Zierman's "Let Go and Let God" conversation today.

I've been venturing into the gray areas, a learning experience like none other. I'm examining things I used to accept without scrutiny.  I've learned a new ways to approach scripture. I'm beginning to give myself the beautiful gift of weight and space. And all the while, #MeToo happened, and then #ChurchToo, and I've been watching. This convergence of the shift inside me with the shift in society and the shift in the Church seems suspiciously not like a coincidence.

I haven't written about this aspect of my journey yet because it still feels like a work in progress. I am still searching the scriptures in this area of women's empowerment and equality. I still have much to study that will ultimately inform where I land on this issue, so this is not a definitive piece. One thing I know for sure though — my view on women and our roles is changing. And after the events of this week in the conservative evangelical church and some of the reading I've done, I want to process and document some of the shift in me here.

For starters, I can look back even further than my embracing gray confession of last fall and see fault lines becoming unstable. In about 2012 , when my daughters were in their early teens, I began thinking more earnestly about modesty, what that means for me, and what I wanted to teach my girls as they were on the cusp of womanhood. They were experimenting with make up and more mature clothing choices, learning to become themselves in the face of pressure to conform to middle school and high school norms. I wanted to give room for their curiosity and mistakes (a valid part of  healthy learning). I needed to trust the spiritual and soulful training Mike and I had invested in them to that point, let them figure it out for themselves rather than dictate to them what kind of woman they would grow up to be and what positions they would hold. I wanted them to own their own beliefs, approaches to style, and senses of self-worth and self-respect. Dignity and self-respect were things I desperately wanted to communicate. Shame was something I desperately wanted to avoid. I was beginning to feel some judgment from others for what I was allowing with my girls, but I kept my struggle with the judgment private at the time, not feeling I owed anyone else an explanation. I wanted to focus on teaching this tricky issue to my daughters and have all of us come out on the other side unharmed. So I ignored the opinions of others, and instead collected my thoughts and those of others in a folder to process the subject privately. I still have those notes and may revisit them while I'm embracing gray. (Some of my thoughts on the subject bled into this piece.)

Then, during the last presidential inauguration, I thought long and hard about that powder blue suit.

These were the beginnings of my questioning and rethinking how I feel about womanhood.

I wrote my gray post, then one on new (to me) approaches to the scripture, and then on being small.

As I've continued to explore, I have found others who have voiced similar ideas about women adopting an attitude and position of being small, like this piece for Fathom Magazine by Jasmine Holmes. I also found it here, in this article by a male elementary school teacher who has witnessed firsthand how his female counterparts diminish themselves and are expected to do so by colleagues. Chimanda Ngozi Adichi touches on smallness in her TED talk entitled "The Danger of a Single Story."

I see now that my "small" experience is not unique to me as a southern woman or a Christian woman. I am watching the #churchtoo movement spread to the Church with fascination, sadness, humility, introspection, and repentance.

There is still so much work to be done.

I have revisited the complementarian view I was taught in the early 1990s by the founders of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood at the time of its inception, and find it ill-fitting, confining, restrictive, and controlling. This view is lacking in grace, human dignity and freedom, all concepts Jesus came to give freely to all. It diminishes women, regardless that they would claim otherwise. It was my experience and they cannot refute that. It makes entirely too much of our differences as men and women.

This talk by Jen Wilkin helped me to see the biblical support of emphasizing our sameness rather than our differentness.  I listened three times in a row because it was water to my thirsty soul. It's what I want to teach the church ladies and our daughters. I want to empower them beyond traditional roles, just as Jesus did when he commended Mary for stepping out of the kitchen in favor of learning of him at his feet like a disciple, something only men were permitted to do at the time.

I've never studied the egalitarian view before. I am now. I know now that when I look at my own marriage, it functions much more in the vein of egalitarian regardless of the fact that we called ourselves complementarian. We make decisions together, we shoulder responsibilities together, and we acquiesce together to the best ideas, resources, hopes and dreams for our family regardless of where they originated: Mike or me, male or female. We are both completely invested in doing whatever it takes, no matter what it looks like to get the job done with as much excellence as we can muster. And if that means I take the car to the shop when Mike was in cancer treatment and if Mike does the cooking when I have a broken arm, then so be it. And if we prefer jobs that bend traditional gender roles, so what? Does it matter who takes the trash out or does the yard work or fixes the clogged sink drain?

Our differences are biological. That's what weaker vessel means: physical strength. That's it.

The Proverbs 31 woman  is not an actual person. It's a list of traits for Solomon to look for in a wife. One woman cannot possibly rise early and work late into the night. She cannot possibly be a business woman selling fine fabrics at the city square and tend to her children at the same time. Proverbs 31 is a list of valuable traits given to a man for consideration. Context is important. In this case it turns everything I've ever heard about that passage on its head.

There are still passages that make me queasy, Old and New Testament alike, but maybe they don't mean what they appear to mean on their surface through modern Western eyes. Maybe historical and cultural context has been lost or ignored. Maybe those passages validate and empower women rather than diminish and constrain them.  Here's a fine example explained by Wendy Alsup, author of "Is the Bible Good for Women?".

I no longer want to define myself in terms of the people I love. I'm more than a wife and a mother. I love those traditional roles and responsibilities and count them a privilege and joy. Instead I want to define myself by my humanity alone. I have a full body and brain complete with strengths, weaknesses, personality quirks, friendships, growing maturity, a sense of humor, and an introverted streak. I am a thinking, feeling, fully-engaged person. I want to be more than my gender. I want to be more than a sex appeal not to be encountered alone in any public place by a male (The Pence Rule), and I want to see men as more than a sex drive. If we see one another as brothers and sisters as the Bible teaches, we might find common ground beyond sexual attraction and be better for what we might find in those relationships. Surely we can rise above the basest forms of ourselves, and afford one another the honor and dignity each person and each gender deserves.

I am happy to see the validation of women and our rights as human beings not to be subject to abuse, discrimination, and limited educational and career options. I am happy it has begun, even if it started in the world with the #MeToo movement before it spread to the Church. Shame on us, the Church, for following instead of leading in this. I support the brave women who have come forward to lead the charge and the men and women who are listening, making changes, calling unaccountable, powerful male leaders to account, and laying the groundwork for a much healthier future for all of us moving forward.

My three children are millenials. I'm excited to see what ground their generaion will cover in terms of equity and empowerment in their lifetimes. I hope to continue sharing with my adult children all I am learning and all the ways I am refusing to be a product of the errors in my upbringing: Christian, Southern, American, and otherwise. I want to be a part of empowering them to see that women can indeed accomplish and contribute much given the freedom and empowerment in which to thrive. I want to model it for them.

Growth and paradigm change take effort and time. I will continue to seek the Lord, thankful for the promise I will find him, trusting the Holy Spirit to do his job as my teacher who lives within me. I trust this process and method of learning that God created.  It was God's provision for educating and relating to his children. I will embrace it and trust it to conform me to his image in due time.



Photo Credit: Becca Tapert on Unsplash

This may become an ongoing series of posts as I experience the season of Lent as someone from mostly a Christian tradition that does not interact with the Church calendar. I pray that sharing my experience will encourage others to expand their own Christian practices in whichever direction has been neglected or left unexplored.

Early on, I learned to make myself small.

I learned it through layers and repetition, slowly, in a million little ways.

I order my meal with the word "just" in front of it: "I'll just have the grilled chicken."

I apologize too quickly and for things that need no apology. "I'm sorry, could you pass the salt and pepper?" When I bump into someone in the hallway at work, it's always, "I'm sorry," and never "Excuse me."

I eat the leftovers. I play the board games with the pawn nobody wants. I go last and acquiesce to what the other person wants to do, where they want to go, what they want to talk about.

This is not a complaint, because if it were anything other than this way of compliance and chameleon camouflage, I'd be terribly uncomfortable.

I make just a quick announcement at church, sorry to take up precious time in the service as if I'm the hidden stepchild instead of the pastor's wife and the women's ministry leader.

So as not to bring attention to myself, I opt to go along with the prevailing opinion rather than to have a mind of my own. I am thankful for whatever is offered me, not wanting to be a burden. I am praised for being demur, peaceable, and quietly submissive.

Being introverted and shying away from controversy and conflict play right into this small way of life I have made.

I make myself as invisible as possible, discounting and dismissing myself time and time again. "Oh, no problem. Maybe next time."

***

Roxane Gay's book Bad Feminist was on the Campus Bestseller display table for months when I managed a university bookstore. The title intrigued me.

I picked up somewhere along the way a vague notion that feminism was bad, although I can't tell you why. I never talked about feminism or knew anyone who claimed to be a feminist. Maybe it was the rebellious nature intrinsic in feminism that cast it in a bad light for me, and I dutifully kept my distance.

What can I say? I grew up in the South under the tutelage of classy, polite, graceful, and poised female family members as role models. These are the women I love.

There wasn't a single Steel Magnolia in my life until the movie when I was new bride of 20. To date at that point in my life, those six fictitious characters were the only examples I had of unruly, unapologetic, subtly rebellious women who didn't have it all together but would die (or kill) trying to figure life out. There was nothing "just" about any of them. They were large and weighty and loveable.

But I went right back to my life and cultural norm of quiet, small, invisible.

Until Gay's book title intrigued me. Did it support feminism or not? Is a bad feminist good? What, exactly, is a bad feminist?

I never read the book -- again, too complicit to venture outside my lane.

But I did read Gay's next book, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body. Gay is a very different person than me with very different values, beliefs, and life experiences. But the writing was good, and I stayed with it. I am learning there is value in reading things I don't always agree with and hearing out an alternate point of view.

The book is Gay's statement on her relationship with her obesity. One of her coping mechanisms involved overeating purposefully, in order to become large, after she was gang raped as a girl. "I needed to take up space," she says.

After I read those words and the many ways -- both healthy and not -- Gay lived in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, her notion of not wanting to be small still resonates in me.

The concept has taken its time to do its work, my paradigm still shifting, but I'm ready to be large, or at least the right size. Not in stature like Gay, but in value. I'm ready to value myself as equal to the value I afford others.

I'm ready to breathe the air and require resources. I'm ready for my words to have weight, my voice to be heard, my thoughts, desires, and needs to be valid. I'm ready to take up due space and time and consideration. All without apology or just as a qualifier.

I've diminished myself out of expectation, real or perceived, and it's wrong. I am finished being stingy toward myself, while generous towards others, which I have mistakenly done out of a desire to be feminine and humble. It is neither.

I am a full human being. I may have a lot of unlearning to do, but when God made humanity, he stepped back and evaluated his day's work and said it was very good. He gave his crowning creation a greater glory, which is to say he gave them weight. I'm ready to do the same.

I read so many wonderful essays this week on the internet. Wise, somber, deep, challenging words that are beautiful and speak hope and life and truth. 

Addie Zierman has  "been trying, lately, to figure out what it means to be hopeful in this wintering world.What does hope look like in a landscape that keeps erupting into wildfires and tsunamis, landslides and earthquakes? ... the whole world seems to be buried deep underneath the weight of winter itself."

Addie's The Grouundwater of the Soul


Nadine Schroeder wrote a stunning piece called 12 Minute Walks for Off the Page, where she explores all the things there are to forgive, and all the ways we need each other, and how it all adds up to love and many 12 minute walks. And it really did make one cohesive amazing piece of writing.

12 Minute Walks 


Kaitlin Wernet's piece for Fathom Magazine about being the 20-something sister of a brother whose life was snuffed out too soon hit so close to home for me, but is also so achingly beautiful -- for everyone. "I’m no longer satisfied with putting off thoughts about heaven until I get there, not when living a life where the youngest die first and the oldest grieve most."

Only the Good 

Housewife Theologian Amiee Byrd wrote a thought-provoking piece on sibling relationships between males and females in the early church and the timeless body of Christ. "For both the sake of appearances and the threat of lust and sexual impropriety, Christians are often counseled not to text, email, share a lunch, ride in a car, or even share an elevator unchaperoned with the opposite sex. Is this the way we should be seen treating brothers and sisters in the Lord? Is this how we show the love of Christ to the watching world?"

You Promiscuously Call One Another Brothers and Sisters!

I started reading the bible through, but slowly and thoughtfully with the smart and talented Rebecca K. Reynolds. This piece ties together thematically four chapters and as many mini-stories from Genesis. It is lovely and relevant and you begin to see how the one story of all of scripture is a mirror to your soul.

Rain on a Barren Land

And, finally, some spot-on analysis of The Greatest Showman. by Jenna Badeker for The Rabbit Room.
"I can enjoy the story of characters who quickly regain their footing and crow about their life “from now on.” But I truly identify with and love the stories of characters who have done their time in the trenches, who live in the tension longer than they want to before the payoff comes. This is what feels authentic. The groaning of creation. The people in the desert. The silence of God for hundreds of years. The barrenness for almost a century. A hope deferred."
She isn't hating on this movie-musical. Promise. And if it brings you down instead of ringing true, then listen to the soundtrack and you'll be instantly inspired and flying high again, because it is the feel good movie of the year.

The Greatest Showman (or at least the Fairly Decent Showman) 
  

I wrote a post a few months ago called Embracing Gray. I'm still on that journey, both the physical one to gray hair as well as the spiritual one that had a fuzzy, gray start sometime last year.

I'm an avid student of the word and have a deep love of scripture. I learned to speak the language of inductive study method and systematic theology in our seminary days and never looked back. Until now.

Two years ago, my co-teacher of the 3-5 year-olds Sunday school class and I decided to tie all the Bible stories together into one connected narrative with our kiddos, so they wouldn't have a bunch of random Bible stories with no anchor. We pieced together our own curriculum and unfurled a roll of butcher paper around our classroom like wallpaper border to create a timeline as we studied week by week with crayons, glue, and blunt scissors. Impressive, I know, but, honestly, it was the beginning of a seismic shift for me. I just didn't know it yet.

Anyway, we crafted our way through the usual simple versions of Bible stories and added them to our timeline and our larger story. I learned so much from stringing preschool stories together to create a different story that it was downright humbling.

What's worse is, this was my second foray into approaching the Bible as a comprehensive narrative with one cohesive story arc. A decade previously, I read through the bible in a year for the second time in my life, and like the good Precept Bible teacher I was, noticed a recurring key phrase from beginning to end. I began marking it in Exodus and sure enough I found the phrase or any number of variations clear through to Revelation:  So they will know there is a God in Israel. So you will know that I am the Lord your God. Etc.

After our preschool timeline was complete, I was hungry for more, something not on the preschool level perhaps. I researched "read through" plans and audible versions of scripture, website offerings, and different approaches. As last fall approached, I toyed with the idea of asking our church's women's ministry to do it with me. I'd have everyone read on their own and meet weekly for an hour to discuss, stay on track, commiserate, and celebrate.

I opened a word document to write what turned out to be a sales pitch, that touted the value of word studies and micro-study, but then introduced the concept and benefits of macro-study. Preparing that sales pitch taught me that a telescopic view is just as valuable as a microscopic view, and a full grasp of scripture is incomplete without both approaches. In hindsight the person I was trying to sell was myself.

I dusted off what notes still survive from a college English class called Survey of the Bible as Literature I took long ago. I relearned from my state university course, that the Bible is written in basically three literary forms:  Narrative, Poetry, and Prose, and the way to approach literature varies according to genre.

Poetry's purpose isn't to teach an intellectual concept by way of reason, logic and deduction. That is the aim of biblical prose. Poetry wants us to come away from it moved, affected by all the feelings. If poetry takes us to the same destination as narrative or prose, it takes an altogether different route.

Poetry's goal is to make a powerful impression through sparse language that is carefully chosen to evoke imagination and emotion. Poetry isn't conveying information as much as it is providing an experience, and narrative has its own nuances and ways of forming and informing us.

About one third of the Bible is poetry and almost half of the Bible is narrative. So all these decades I've approached 75% of God's word forcing it to be non-fiction/essay/information that I could reason out logically and apply to my life.

What if I let Biblical poetry be poetry in my Christian life? How might the cadence and rhythm and parallelism of Hebrew poetry form me spiritually? How might the piquing of my imagination and the invitation to not just hear the details of Israel's story but to enter into it move me closer to feeling the heart of God, hearing its rhythmic beat? What if instead of "knowing" Jonah was in the belly of the whale, I entered that dark, dank, desperate chamber with him in Jonah's poetic prayer?

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights (Jonah 1:17, narrative).

Water encompassed me to the point of death,
The great deep engulfed me,
Weeds were wrapped around my head.
I descended to the roots of the mountains.
The earth with its bars were around me forever,
But you have brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
While I was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord.  (Jonah 2:5-7, poetry)

See how they aren't at all the same thing? One tells the facts, while the other invites us into Jonah's distress and dire circumstances and plunges us into darkness to feel his peril then relief that that fish has saved him in one gulp. The one gives us knowledge. The other gives us an experience that affects us in a different way than does the narrative or prose. All forms of literature can do their respective work, but they only do what they do. Poetry cannot do the work of prose.

I am ready to embrace that. I'm not abandoning my systematic theology. I'm just finally expanding beyond that starting place. I'm adding to my tools for coming before the scripture and the Lord to let God mold me as he wills with it any and every way he wants to.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it. 

They begin beating it with a  hose
to find out what it really means. 

(Billy Collins, excerpted from "Introduction to Poetry" from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1988)

I'm no longer interested in asking poetry to be non-fiction prose.

I'd much rather approach a burning bush that isn't being consumed and take off my shoes. I want to feel the heat, know its unending intensity, danger, and mystery up close, while standing—trembling—on exposed, bare flesh.

I no longer think reason and observation/interpretation/application are the only appropriate approaches for that. Perhaps the poetic passages are best received by sliding out of our shoes, wiggling our toes into the hot, hot earth and experiencing flesh that is somehow standing on holy ground and yet, merciful miracle beyond explanation, not being consumed.