Category: Choices

Risking the Bet

Risking the Bet

I made a big change today. It’s become a bit of a thing for me in the past couple of years — making changes.

If I want my life to be different, but I’m not willing to change anything, nothing’s very like to change.

But the thing is, change means risk. The bigger the change the bigger the risk.

Today, I left my job of seven years and a lot of people I love.

When you let something go in order to pick up something different, that something different may end up being a bust. It could blow up in your face. And even if it’s good change, there’s loss to grieve.

Opening yourself up to something new is a risky bet. Whether it’s a new job, a new home, a new relationship, or new territory in a friendship , there’s a lot to lose.

And we develop defenses around these things. My emotional brain spends a good amount of time telling me things like, “We’re doing WHAT?!?!? What the heck are you thinking??? Don’t you know what could happen here?”

That’s really the kicker — what could happen. The way life has gone before and the way that has taught me, consciously and not, that it will always or at least usually go.

My emotional self doesn’t trust me. Sometimes so much that it tries to take the wheel, even fights me for it.

But my rational and spiritual self has learned (is still learning) that every day really is new. That I can make different choices and impact the way things go. That would could happen isn’t what has to happen.

And so much is on the line. Joy is on the line. And life. Beauty and growth and possibility. Love is on the line.

We will never be more open to love and joy and life than we are open to pain and loss. You can’t guard against loss without also guarding against all the good things.

New life is there for us, but we always have to open our hands and let go of something we know to receive it.

In two weeks I start a new job. I don’t know where it might take me, how it might challenge and change me. But I’m excited for the possibilities, for the room to grow further into who I’m made to be. For good things I haven’t imagined.

The more I let go to reach out for something new, the more my emotional self learns there are more possibilities. She’s learning to relax, at least a little. To trust me and trust the good things. She’s learning that on the other side of loss, there’s always the possibility of new life. That while the unknown is still scary, it’s also full of beautiful surprises.

She’s learning to risk the bet.

Outside the Lines

Outside the Lines

I picked up a book.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve stumbled upon a book that somehow shifted everything, but it is the most recent.

I’d enjoyed reading Anne Lamott and Kathleen Norris for years, and somewhere came across a reference to a small “genre” of authors – liberal-literary-women-who-convert-to-Christianity-unexpectedly – that included the name of Sara Miles alongside theirs. So I picked up her memoir, Take This Bread, at the library, and as I read it, something shifted.

I couldn’t articulate it any better at the time – this book was changing things for me, but I couldn’t tell you what or how.

Sara was raised by two atheist Christian missionary kids in a home so staunchly secular that all she knew about Jesus was that he was a good man who some people thought was God.

After an amazing journey in its own right (read the book!), she finds herself passing an interesting church building on a walk in her San Francisco neighborhood and impulsively decides to go inside.

A service is in progress, and as bread is passed, it comes to her and she puts a piece in her mouth. She says she immediately knew three things: there is a God, his name is Jesus, and he was in her mouth. And no amount of sleeping on it or trying to argue herself out of it could change that knowledge.

It changed her life, ultimately leading her to a ministry of feeding the poor, both physically and spiritually.

It’s a stunningly powerful conversion story, with years of subsequent fruitfulness.

And I had to decide what to do with it, because Sara has a wife.

What do we do when we encounter God coloring outside the lines we believe God drew?

I didn’t know what to do with it all intellectually or theologically at the time, but I could not – would not – deny the fruit of the Spirit I could see so clearly evidenced in Sara’s life.

It led me on a journey of questions, and ultimately into a community of LGBTQ friends in whose lives I saw the Holy Spirit at work first hand. The depth of their faith in the face of often deeply difficult circumstances humbled me. Many have had to face incredibly painful words and actions from Christian family and churches, and yet they still follow Jesus. Their faith is hard won and deep.

I eventually came to realize that the challenge of God coloring outside the lines was not new to me.

In the earliest years of the church, one of the most prominent Jesus followers had a dream.

His name was Peter, and in his dream he saw a huge sheet being lowered down from heaven with all kinds of animals in it. A voice told him, “Kill and eat!”

But Peter was a Jew, and these were animals no Jew would eat – they’d been commanded not to eat them centuries before, and following those commands were a deep part of Jewish identity. So Peter protested, as any faithful Jew would, that of course he would have nothing to do with these “unclean” animals.

Maybe Peter thought the dream was a test of his faithfulness. If so, he got a surprise.

Instead of commending him on his knowledge of the scriptures and upright living, the voice replied, “Do not call unclean what I have made clean.” (The story may be found in Acts 10:9 – 11:18.)

I’m happy to use this story to bless my bacon-wrapped shrimp, but there’s far more going on here.

Peter is about to encounter some unclean, unacceptable Gentiles whom the Holy Spirit is going to descend upon just as he has the Jewish followers of Jesus. God is getting ready to color outside the lines Peter thought God drew, and Peter is going to have to decide what to do with that.

What defines the work of God in the world? In people? Is it the rules previously given? Is it rules at all? Can Peter allow his holiest categories to be shattered?

He gets the message – “Don’t call unacceptable those whom I have accepted.”

I got the message, and it blew my world wide open.