Category: Choices

No Story Without Leaving Home

No Story Without Leaving Home

It’s there in the beginning – Adam and Eve left the Garden. Noah left. Abraham left. Jacob. Joseph. David. Daniel. Jonah. Joseph and Mary. Jesus. They all left.

There is no story without leaving home.

It means grieving. Even good change includes loss that needs to be grieved. Things will never be quite the same again, and it’s important to acknowledge that.

Love isn’t strong because it doesn’t change. Love is strong because it bears change, even embraces it.

Grief is a funny thing. It means both letting go and holding close. Pausing to sit, or getting a move on. Anger and peace. Hope and release.

Whatever it looks like, grief is part of stepping over the threshold to leave. Or realizing that’s what we already did without knowing it.

Leaving home also means a journey. An adventure. The unknown.

It’s risk and opportunity interwoven – you can’t get one without the other. Which is why sometimes people choose not to go, to live with the smaller story. They are afraid of the risks, and the opportunities don’t feel worth it.

But we’ll never have a capacity for love and joy greater than our capacity to risk pain and loss.

You can’t get one without the other.

The one that would save – protect – their life? They will lose it.

But in accepting the risk and the loss, we can also find life we never imagined. That’s the opportunity – to grow beyond home. To meet people, encounter ideas, face challenges we never would have known at home. And in discovering the world beyond, we will also discover ourselves, finding healing and strength and ability in ourselves we never recognized or needed at home.

There’s no story without leaving home.

It can look like so many things, from moving out to changing paradigms. The thing is, it’s never really done. We know what it looks like for teenagers and young adults to begin to find their own way and discover who they are apart from their family. But so many of us carry home with us without even realizing, like a turtle shell we just assume is part of our very being.

Assumptions we learned from family and community when we were young just look like reality to us, and that shell of home feels like safety and security. But there are places it keeps us from going, life it keeps us from living.

There is no story without leaving home.

And it’s the journey of a lifetime.

Taking Another Way

Taking Another Way

I have not chosen the easy way.

Following Jesus to the place where I affirm and advocate for my transgender and gay and bisexual and lesbian and queer friends has been one of the most challenging and at times painful things I have ever done. It certainly hasn’t been a “feel-good” path.

And I am not where I am because I don’t really know the arguments against same-sex marriage. A member of my family literally wrote the book on those arguments, and I made them myself for many years. Sincerely, and with a desire to be both faithful and loving.

I am also not here because I think I’m smarter than the Scriptures. I’ve sought a good education in the Bible and theology – from a highly respected conservative seminary – and my respect for the gift God has given us in the Bible has only grown. So has my awareness of the assumptions we bring to it, and I want to do my best to engage what’s been given to us on its own terms rather than mine or anyone else’s.

I do believe I know things now I didn’t know before. I’ve met people, loved them, and lived life alongside them. I’ve realized that many things I once believed are only partial truths – there’s more. And I know there’s more than I know now. The more I learn, the more aware I become of how much I don’t know.

Life was simpler before, and easier. But also smaller.

There are many people I love on the path I chose to leave, and I know they don’t understand. The thirty year old me wouldn’t have understood either. I would’ve thought I understood – that this me was rebellious or at least deceived. That this me had to have lost the faith to stay faithful. There was no other explanation. Looking at where I am now, I would have thought I must have sacrificed truth to emotion.

I get it. I do. Which doesn’t mean it hurts any less to be judged in that way.

I wish those who do not agree or understand could trust my love for Jesus and my relationship with him. I wish they (you?) could continue to trust the work of God you’ve seen in my life all along, even if you can’t understand how it’s brought me here. I wish you could trust the fruit of the Spirit in me – the increasing love, joy, peace, faith. The shalom – wholeness and integration – that has blossomed. The way that as love has grown and expanded in me, fear has diminished.

I wish you could see, but I understand why you can’t.

Just know, it wasn’t the easy way.

Nothing to Prove

Nothing to Prove

I used to run because I didn’t know I could.

This year I ran because I knew – I could.

When I was growing up in North Carolina and East Tennessee humidity, my doctors wrote notes to excuse me from running in PE classes. When I ran for any distance, I’d start to wheeze like I had asthma. I didn’t, but the combination of the exertion and the air I was breathing created an allergic reaction that made me miserable.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I started to run at all. In the middle of a snowy Chicago winter, my seminary boyfriend (who had run the Chicago Marathon) took me to get fitted with running shoes and coaxed me into trying.

At first, I couldn’t make it more than a few blocks. We’d walk a couple of blocks and then he’d start me running again. In the biting, dry winter air, even when I started breathing hard from the exertion, I could always breathe freely. It wasn’t long before I had worked up to running a whole mile at a time, and then two.

The relationship didn’t last, but the running did (and I’ll always be grateful to him for introducing me to one of the healthiest habits of my life).

It wasn’t until more than five years later that I even thought about running more than the approximately three miles of a 5k.

An enthusiastic new friend talked me into signing up for a half marathon. That’s thirteen miles. The third weekend of July in downtown Chicago. The one time of the year the humidity approaches southern levels.

I knew it was impossible. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. The idea was ridiculous. But trying the training at least would be good for me.

So I started in the spring. Every weekday morning I ran three miles, and then one weekend day I did my “long” run. The first week it was three miles, then four, adding one mile each weekend. Five miles, then six – those felt challenging but doable. But once I hit seven, it felt impossible.

And each week, as I finished another impossible distance, I was doing something I couldn’t believe I was doing. I started to wonder, what other impossible things might I be able to do? What inconceivable things could I venture to attempt?

I finished that first half-marathon – ran every bit of it. I’ve run three more since. And as I proved to myself that the first year of training was no fluke, I began to discover depths of determination in myself and a comfort in my own skin I’d never known.

I’m the energizer turtle – I’m slow, but I just keep going.

Every year, as winter ends and I hit the sidewalks each morning to see what the Lake looks like at dawn, I’ve wondered, Can I really do this? I’ve run to prove to myself that yes, I can.

But this year was different. As spring came to the city, and I started to run in March, I knew I could do it. I ran because I could. I could find my feet, my rhythm, my pace. I could stretch myself, and I could go farther.

It’s a difference that’s about more than running. It’s about living, unafraid to fall because I can get back up again and keep going.

As a teenager in the middle of chaotic circumstances, my mother found herself largely on her own. She never wanted me to feel that way, so she made sure I knew that as long as I was single, I had a place at home and I didn’t have to be on my own.

That gift unintentionally left me in a place of never really trusting my ability to take care of myself. It was only after years of paying my own way and taking care of my own bills and car repairs and obligations that it finally sank in that I really could do what I’d been doing all along. Somewhere inside I could finally stop trying to prove that I could take care of myself.

I could just do it and get on with living.

Every morning as I lace up my running shoes and head out to find a path to the Lake, I’m not doing it to prove to myself that I can any more. I’m doing it because I can and I know it.

And it’s time to just get on with the living.

Invitation and Calling

Invitation and Calling

A couple of months ago, at a friend’s ordination, the pastor giving the charge spoke of a “calling” as an invitation.

I’ve been mulling over that ever since.

It’s a very different view of calling than what I’ve had. As a kid growing up in the church, we were encouraged to “go forward” during the alter call if we felt “called” to be a preacher (boys only), Christian school teacher, missionary, or missionary teacher. Or we could just feel called to “ministry” more generally. I even knew a few girls who claimed a call to be a pastor’s wife (a second-degree “call” that never made a lot of sense to me).

Those calls were something meant to be obeyed. I remember stories about men called to preach when they were young who followed a different path in the business world, only to come to their latter years convinced they’d done the wrong thing and wasted their lives.

A call was a trump card – not to be argued with. The marching orders of the God who designed you for his purposes.

But what was that supposed to look like? Sound like? A voice calling in the night? A strong desire or interest? Some kind of inner sense or drawing?

I wasn’t sure. I knew my daddy had felt called to the mission field,  had surrendered himself to go anywhere, and when he found himself confined to the Lazyboy in our living room by ALS, Lou Gerhig’s Disease, he concluded that chair was his “anywhere” and shared Jesus with every person who came through the door until he died.

I knew there was a sign above the inside of our church door (and the same one hung over the inside of our front door at home): “You are now entering the mission field.”

I knew things didn’t always turn out the way you thought they would, and I didn’t know how a “call” fit into that.

I was probably 9 or 10 when I walked that aisle. I dedicated my life to be a missionary, or it may have been a missionary teacher. I didn’t hear a voice. Did I have a strong desire? I had been surrounded by missionaries my whole life. They were heroes. And I found other places and cultures fascinating.

And these were the options I knew.

I also loved Jesus and wanted others to know him. I still do. I don’t know if that constituted a call then or now, but I know it’s led me on a journey I never could have anticipated.

Loving Jesus led me to try to listen to and love others, and the world came to look like a very different place than it did when I was that girl walking that aisle.

I always thought a call was something so clear that any other choice could only be disobedience – rebellion. And I never felt that kind of call.

Instead, I had invitation after invitation. Invitations to explore the world, to study, to ask hard questions (of both God and myself), to love.

The invitations never felt like ultimatums. I had a choice, and God would be with me either way, would bless me and use me either way. But one of those options would be a path of lesser faith.

The safer path versus the scarier, riskier path – the one I didn’t know where might lead.

Slowly I learned to follow Jesus in those riskier paths. Have I gotten it wrong sometimes? I’m sure I have. I know I’ve failed the challenge at times. I’m still learning to trust.

Those invitations have led me to places I never thought I’d go, and brought me to choices so clear I’d nearly name them a “call.”

The old call was something to brace for more than to rejoice in.

The invitation of Jesus to step out in faith? Sometimes that means bracing, too – bracing for the disapproval of those who love me but don’t understand. The invitations I’ve heard have sounded a bit crazy at the time.

I’ve come to see them as the invitation of the one who said we’d be taught far more than he had time to teach us (or we were ready to hear). The invitation of the one who said we’d do far greater things than even he had done.

That’s a preposterous invitation. It calls out, promising far beyond what we can imagine. Like music barely heard, a beautiful song in harmonies strange to our ears, coaxing us further up and further in, where there’s always more.

It’s less an invitation down the aisle to the front than back out the door and into the world, where there are untold altars and opportunities to join in God’s joyful work in the world.

Inviting us to come dance with the one who is the endlessly knowable mystery of life and love.