We aren't meant to do this alone

Photo by Rebecca Siegel

January 2018, on a trip back to Maryland:

I’m sitting in friends’ living rooms, and we’re talking about Big Ideas: community and faithful living and hospitality and parenting.

Only, we aren’t just talking about ideas, because their fridge is full of homemade hazelnut milk and granola, their backyard has chickens and a garden, their guest room is occupied by an Ethiopian asylee, they are on the ground entering their kids’ world through some delicate balance of play and instruction, structure and freedom. These friends are imperfect yet living embodiments of the ideas; they are an invitation into an alternative way of being.

And as I drive back to my parents’ house that evening I’m thinking how something in me—some part of me that longs for this deep, hard work of faithful living—is awake.

It is, of course, not the first time that they have invited me in. These are the same people who were once roommates. Who taught me to bike to work by literally showing me the way, who taught me to garden by handing me a shovel and a fresh tomato, who taught me hospitality by letting in the Jehovah’s witnesses for a glass of water, who brought rhythms of community prayer and laughter to my life at a time I needed it.

I have been shaped by them and others like them.

*

It’s a point that sticks with me, especially this month, this year. Here we are: February now, the time when just about everyone has given up on those New Year’s diets and gym habits. And is it honestly any surprise? Trying to muscle change through on the strength of our individual will is, except in the rarest of cases, a futile effort.

A pointed example—we recently marked the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. And I think of all the chatter, the determination a year ago:

The morning after the election when my husband told me, “we might have to hide people in our home,” meaning immigrants in danger of deportation.

The pro-refugee rally we attended with a friend, and spent the whole drive back brainstorming an alert program that could notify people of an ICE raid, so that allies could flock to a home or business and put their bodies in the way, to block violence and dissolution of families.

The millions of desperate calls and letters I wrote—my senators on speed dial, calling once a week at first—determined to do something even though this didn’t feel quite like the something that could make any difference to anyone.

Now, it’s a year later and there is no one hiding in our home. There have been no recent rallies, and far fewer calls to legislators. Maybe I need to muscle up and push through. But if I’m honest, it’s not a different law I’m longing for, not a different governement that will bring the changes I seek, because it’s about spirit and community. It’s about something that has to be lived.

And by the sheer force of my own efforts, I just haven’t been able to keep up the energy.

*

When I talk about the need for community, this is not just a hippie commune idea. It’s the same reason monks live in monasteries, because who could pray the psalms all day long on their own strength? It’s the same reason we have AA or study groups or meetings for prayer or parenting. Because we are better in community.

Growing doesn’t come naturally. Most of the best changes in my life have been painful, like pruning. Which is why we need each other to become the people we want to be. God knows I do.

A Tanzanian host family taught me to give up my private “me-time” in exchange for the treasure of belonging over kerosene-lit dinners of ugali and greens—and my sense of family expanded. That first group house in Maryland inculcated in me the hard work and discipline it takes to bring about a garden and a daily practice of prayer—and I grew more open-hearted. My chaplaincy group this year has given me a devastatingly honest glimpse of myself and in the process taught me how to love better.

I’m grateful for all that. And now I’m longing for a new level of engagement. I felt something real and important last month as I saw the effect of one afternoon in Maryland, soaking in shared wisdom. I’m not sure exactly what this new engagement will look like, or who it will help me be. I don’t know if it means deepened engagement in a current community, or embarking on something new. And I don’t know if it will make climate change stop or save a single person still under threat of deportation or make me better at prayer or teach me to speak more gently when I’m tired.

One thing I do know is that there are a few characteristics all of these great communities in my life have in common:

-Some version--often explicit but sometimes implicit--of a covenant, a commitment to one another. For my group house, or the folks at a summer camp, it was written out. In chaplaincy, we negotiated our norms and expectations with one another.

-A shared vision or purpose. Neighborly life together. Deepened spiritual practices. Reducing our impact on the environment.

-Grace. For ourselves, and for each other, because it’s messy and we couldn’t get far without grace.

Commitment—vision—grace. All of this sounds an awful lot like church. What church could be, should be. Deeper than showing up on Sundays and abstract reflections on Bible passages. The vision that beckoned me to be a pastor.

I’m currently seeking a position as a pastor in a church. So it all comes together, somehow, and the hope and prayer is this: that I may be so lucky as to find myself in such a place of authenticity and growth. That I may have the discernment and courage to commit when the time and place is right. That I may play some part in helping to shape and be shaped by deep community.

Therapy, part 2: seeds of growth

This is part 2 of 2. You can read the first half of this journey here.

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

On my first visit, I walked into my therapist's office sheepishly holding a filled-in PHQ-9, a commonly used depression screening. There had been a really bad week or two, but the last few days, things seemed more okay, so when I'd filled out the screening, I answered most of the questions from my okay state. Which meant: Did I really belong here? Would she give me a funny why are you here look?

I was lucky. She was kind and warm and immediately saw what I needed, saw what a long time coming this appointment had been. And she saw what seems obvious now, but what I couldn't see for a long time--that to want help is to need it. That regardless of PHQ-9 or diagnoses or medical coding, there was something deeper than I could control that was disrupting my life and relationships, preventing me from peace. And that was worth attending to.

From that day forward, she met me where I was, and that was enough.

She actually never told me how she diagnosed me. The diagnosis is not the point. Most of the time, I don’t think I meet the DSM criteria for depression or dysthymia. Or maybe I’m right on the line. If you read part 1, you might have noticed that the fog that has hit me so many times is not quite strong enough to get me flat on my back, or keep me there. You might notice that in seventh grade during the hurricane, apathy gave way to writing. You might notice that friends have at times been able to draw me out, that changing circumstances gave me hope at desperate times. 

Whatever semblance of depression or mood disorder I do have is still hard for me to claim, not because I'm ashamed but because I feel selfish to claim it. As I write all of this, part of me is apprehensive of overdramatization, knowing that my own mental health is mild compared with the struggles of many, and has certainly never been life-threatening.

But this is not about comparison. Each person's path to healing is her own. For me, the truth is that being functional, that having relatively mild and episodic symptoms, that being "less depressed" than others, that having no trauma to speak of—all these things have become excuses I make to myself for trudging on alone, for pretending I'm okay. In the end, no matter how well I can do the work and cook the dinner, no matter how many people fare better or worse than me, there is more wholeness and abundant life waiting if I am brave enough to get help.

*

Therapy, for me, has primarily been a journey in learning how to embrace and accept my feelings, rather than adding layer on layer of rationalization, apology, over-analysis, guilt, or control. It is important to say that to embrace or accept the feelings is not the same as embracing the injustices or sins that cause them. It is simply to be aware that to be alive can be sad and painful at times, and it is only human to let myself feel those things.

So I've been learning to lean in and explore the sadness, the pain, the loneliness.

There are times in my life that have been really, genuinely sad: My grandma died after a hard and beautiful year in and out of hospital and rehab. I’d poured my heart into being with her that year. As the weeks and months after her death passed by, I let myself cry. I did not put a timetable on my grief. I said no to social engagements when it seemed like they’d take too much energy. I was gentle and kind to myself in my grief. I somehow knew that there was nothing more I could have done for her. I knew that the grief was legitimate, real, something that had to be walked through.

More often, though, this is not how I respond to personal distress. If I feel lonely, I wonder about the ways it might be my fault. If I feel nostalgic about a distancing relationship, I think of how I might have tried more. If I feel anxious or angry, I push through and try to ignore it, until it builds up. That is, I’m usually not the best at being gentle and kind to myself.

The times I'm most upset look very similar. Sadness or failure rolls into self-shaming, and picks up speed as it heads down the hill. And then something or someone strikes that tender chord in me and suddenly I am shaking, crying the tears that are enough to make your chest quiver as you strive to catch your breath. I am thinking, I am not good enough. What if I am never good enough?

*

The first week of therapy, my therapist intuited much of this, I think. So she gave me a Self-Compassion Test. I failed. Okay, there’s no failure in therapy. I scored low.

Self-compassion, my therapist explained as I began to balk at any kind of self-care, self-love language (isn’t it against my religion to be selfish? am I good enough to deserve self-love?), is not about making excuses for yourself or trying to lower your standards. Self-compassion means that when you feel sad, you treat that sadness the way you would a friend’s sadness. You sit with it and listen to it and give it a pat on the shoulder; you don’t berate it. And after giving it plenty of time, you move on.

In other words, it is much more like the patience gave myself during that time of grief.

One week, as an exercise, my therapist gave me a sheet of paper called Loneliness. She asked me to act out my typical responses to loneliness. I can punch my loneliness square in the center, I can cower from it, I can crumple it in a ball and eat it, I can put it behind my back and pretend it’s not there, I can hang it in front of my face to further distance me from the world.

These are all the things I tend to do to complicate and increase my loneliness.

On the other hand, my therapist suggested, I can say to the lonely part of me, “You are doing the best you can.” I can pat it gently and let it stay at the table. I can fold it carefully and put it in my pocket, a persistent teacher in empathy and life in the world.

*

As I've slowly and fitfully learned to be more gentle with myself, I think it is even more slowly cascading out to the way I think about and treat others.

For example, as I look back on all the years and all the times I didn't get help, I see that I often and almost sub-consciously blamed my friends for my sadness. I have at times resented others for contributing to my isolation, or felt that if only I had more close friends, I would have been all right. The truth, of course, is that I have damn good friends in all the places I've lived, friends who have made me tea and picked me raspberries and called on my birthday and invited me to brunch or to live with them. The truth is that I have lived for the last five years with my best friend.

When I am sad and lonely, there is more going on beneath the surface, and it has not much at all to do with what deeper level of communion I desire or with adjusting to a new life phase or with moving from south to north or urban to rural or Africa to America. And it has everything to do with that kernel of thought I first remember thinking on a hotel bed in Colorado at thirteen, that I often don't like the me I inhabit, and that I have never known how to ask for help.

I see now that most of my life, help has only been a few moments away. And perhaps the more I grow, the more I will be able to extend compassion not only to my own feelings but to the many wonderful people in my life who are, just like me, not quite perfect but still ever so full of love and sincere effort.

All of this is progress, but all of it is slow. And it is really hard. There are so many times in therapy I've felt more like moving back instead of moving forward. I've had to entertain new ways of thinking that feel silly or sacrilegious . I've had to work harder than it seems one should have to work, often wondering if there is really hope for me after all since I will inevitably grow tired of the work, wondering if my previous sad but functional equilibrium is preferable to digging through so many layers of strange and awkward and painful. Even now I wonder with regularity, What if I never change? 

Perhaps I won't, or only a little. I've seen enough of humanity to know most of us move the needle only the tiniest bit throughout our lives. I will likely always wrestle with accepting grace, granting myself grace, believing deep down that God is grace.

But I know I'm gaining wisdom and perspective that will give me fuel for the wrestling.

*

This is what it has looked like for me, so far. I’m not fixed, and I still don’t think I’ll ever be good enough. I’m thankful now more than ever that God does not see me the way I see myself. And I’m thankful that the last few years have taught me to ask for help. Because as hard as it has been to stare down my weakness, it’s so much better than sitting alone in the dark.

Dear friends, I don’t think everyone needs therapy, but I do think we all need help sometimes. Whatever that looks like for you, I hope you will step into it when you need it, and keep reminding me to do the same.

Therapy, part 1: the times I didn't ask for help

Photo by Kristaps Bergfelds

I first recall the heaviness beginning to descend upon me fiercely the summer before eighth grade, on vacation in the Rockies with my parents and brother. The family reunion had been over for a couple days, and now the four of us were spending some time in the national parks. It was afternoon. We had come back from our hike, and dinner was not for another hour, and it all felt so underwhelming, so disappointing, so empty. I didn’t like the vacation or the food or the expectations or the loneliness or the ennui of summer, and most of all I didn’t like the me I inhabited.

A month later, a few weeks into school, the excitement of new classes and new friends and new activities beginning to wear off again, a hurricane rolled through Maryland that left us home from school for two days. Soccer was cancelled. Piano lessons were cancelled. And I lay in my bed for hours, writing in my journal and crying and feeling myself left alone with my thoughts far too long. The melodramatic short story I wrote in that hurricane, about a woman lost in a rainstorm, determined to carry on, is surely one of the great masterpieces of adolescent angst.

*

As long as I had been aware of my parents as real humans, I had begun to know the story of my dad’s depression, starting in childhood and most severe in his early thirties. I had come to know it as a story of the past, for it seemed, both in the way he spoke of it and in my own experience of my father’s humor, joy, and energy, that it was completely healed.

What happened next—years later, it seems—was that one day as I was talking to my father, he said something I’ve never forgotten. He said that because of his own and his mother’s history of depression, he had been concerned that my brother or I might inherit this propensity. He had watched us closely since we were small and had discerned, to his delight, that we had not inherited this curse. Though certainly I did not suffer in the severe way he had as a child, his statement clanged a dissonance inside me. It didn’t feel true to my experience. 

Funny—that is how I remember it happening. But going through emails, I discovered recently that this is what really happened:

It was midway through college, I was at a break in a relationship and in the midst of a total re-evaluation of all I thought I knew. My faith in God, that solid rock that had brought me through every previous challenge, was now a one-handed grip on a fraying rope. I told my dad, and he sent me an email in which he asked, “Might you be depressed? Though I watched you closely as a kid and you never seemed to have inherited my cyclical major depression, I know mental health can affect one’s life and faith. It’s okay if you’re depressed, and it’s okay to get help.”

Funny how we hear the things we want to hear. Then, I wanted a quick fix for loneliness and doubts, not a lifelong journey with mental health. Now, I wanted to remember this story as a long history of voices telling me I was fine, I didn’t need help. Turns out it was my own voice all along. I have always been the one telling me I didn’t need help.

*

Later on in college, when that relationship ended for the final time, after friendships had become even more fraught and anger had replaced disbelief as the mode of my faith, I noted the quantity of my tears and the changes in my usually robust appetite, and I wondered if I should see a counselor. The google search “am I depressed” turned up myriad online quizzes and evaluations, and some said I might be mildly to moderately depressed, and some said I was fine. Some days I thought I was depressed, and some days I thought I was fine.

At the end of most every quiz, after all the questions about appetite and sleep and hopelessness and self-harm, there was a question worded something like this: “Have any of the above symptoms affected your ability to carry out the activities of your life?” And I would look at my grades and my work and my unchanged outward appearance, and I would check “No.”

I think part of me wanted to get help, find someone to talk to, explore the idea of therapy. But the other part told me that it was self-indulgent to go to a counselor when (according to the internet) I wasn’t even depressed.

Besides, I was still pulling up my pants every morning. And I had learned that to be functional is to be okay. I didn’t yet understand that in mental health, there is more than functional. There is healing and growing and maybe even some version of whole.

But functional has a power over me, and for several more years after that it wielded its scepter: I lived in Tanzania for a year, the year of gulping teary fits, thoughtless peanut-butter gobbling, the feeling of being utterly alone. But of course that was just what it was like to live abroad, right? And it went away when I sang with the girls in the evenings. I moved back to Maryland and there were months of desperate phone calls to college friends. But of course that was just reverse culture shock and learning to be an adult, right? And it went away when I found the new friends and the garden and the laughter.

*

Finally, I met my match. In 2012 in the course of one week I went from single to married, city to country, community to isolation, employed to unemployed. It was too much all at once, I suppose. My mother-in-law had bought us an expansive, welcoming brown couch as a wedding gift, and it opened each afternoon to swallow me. I would binge on Netflix and chocolate chips and watch the afternoon fade, too apathetic to get up and turn on the lights. And all of the things from before—the desperate phone calls to friends, the feeling of being utterly alone, the teary fits, the weariness of being me—they all came back at once and threatened to undo me.

They certainly undid some of me. But even as I found a functionality in Cherokee—a job, a way of writing and running to get by—I felt in my own self that this was different. This thing was deeper than just adjusting to marriage and a rural place that was hesitant to accept me. I waited, as weeks turned to months and beyond, hoping for a ritual or a garden or a new friend to rescue me out of it. When they did not come I blamed my own failure, a failure to be outgoing enough to make people love me or spiritual enough to conquer the dark.

We moved to Durham, and I started anew, and I hoped those feelings would depart with new routines and new friends and new purpose. And although slowly built a network of people I desperately love and trust, yet still I would leave the library each day angry at myself for not trying harder. Still I would end up at home feeling sad and lonely, unable to focus or even get off the couch. I would panic as I looked ahead to a weekend without social plans.

My second summer in Durham, I interned as a chaplain, an experience full of  meaning and friendship. And then one day in a group meeting, pressed to explain my emotions, everything all seemed to collapse around me and I found myself crying under a table, begging to be left alone, my mind repeating over and over "I just want to not be me. I just want to not be me."

And I finally admitted to myself that it was time to ask for help.

---
Want to know what happened next? You can read part 2 here.

Chaplains for the world

It’s been hard to know how to share with you all the wonderful, awful, exhausting, inspiring work that is chaplaincy—partly because it is a fearsome and impossible thing to express, partly out of concerns about privacy. This summer I served as a hospital chaplain and am still wrapping my mind and heart around how it changed me, and what it means to listen, love, and care for strangers.

Photo by Andrew Parnell

After my first overnight shift at the hospital this summer—after twenty-four hours, seventeen calls, eight deaths, $21.50 worth of cafeteria food, and four hours of sleep—I handed the clipboard to the Sunday chaplain, exhaled heavily, and hopped on my bike, speeding hastily away from the clinical halls and towards my church. I knew I needed hymns, prayer and the Communion meal. And then, most definitely, a long nap.

What I did not expect was that they were coming with me, as I pedaled up and down the hills. The one who lost her husband, and the one who’d lost her fiance before the marriage license came in. The one who wanted to tearfully tell her sister’s story, and one who just wanted to know the best donut place in town because it was one am and tomorrow would be even more exhausting than today. Young and old, religious and nonreligious, emotional and stoic, prepared and unprepared, planning to cremate and planning to bury.

They were coming with me. I imagined them now, waking up alone with dogs in an empty house, or spending an anniversary making funeral arrangements, or stopping at Monuts before making the long drive home. I prayed for them, hurt for them, longed to be with them. In moments, they are with me still.

*

The job of a chaplain is rather amorphous and vague. “Spiritual care” can mean a lot of things: compassionate listening, empathy, talking through tough decisions, validation of feelings, prayer or Scripture or rituals, a non-medical advocate, a hand to hold at end of life. When we introduced ourselves as chaplains, some people immediately asked for prayer. Some people cleaned up their language; others told us all their quibbles with God. Some clammed up completely and asked us to leave; others asked us to pull up a chair so they could start at the beginning.

It turned out that first overnight shift was one of my most intense days of the summer. After that, there were a lot fewer deaths. More often, at least on the cardiology floor, there were prayers with old ladies and smiles with old men. There were conversations about new treatment regimens. There were teary confessions of loneliness. There were cheery follow-ups after surgery.

And there was lots that was surprising. That people allowed a stranger into their rooms to listen to their life stories. That people wanted to talk twice as much about their gratitude as about their worries. That today I could feel I was becoming such a great chaplain, just in time to be completely stumped by a situation tomorrow. That the ducks in Duke gardens could bring me such comfort on the days when I needed a lunchtime walk to help me breathe again.

But most of all what surprised me was how many people’s concerns were completely unrelated to their hospital stay. A sick dog. A loss from ten years ago that still stings. A separation. A history of abuse. A distant child. A regret. A complicated and unresolved religious journey.

These people were carrying with them the burdens and bruises that come from living in the world, the kind of burdens and bruises we all carry, the kind that make us human, and make us need each other. And from some I got the sense that this surprise visit from the chaplain was one of the rarer moments in their lives, one of the moments they felt cared about, able to talk about all that was weighing them down.

And maybe it was just the vulnerability of being in the hospital that got them to the place of sharing, and maybe most of the time the tears are forced back down. But they have been carrying these burdens through all their house renovations and business deals, their lonely or sleepless nights at home and their Western movie marathons.

*

The morning after that first overnight shift, as I tried to bike away from it all, I needed a chaplain. Though I was not a hospital patient, though I was not sick, I needed someone to care for my spirit, to listen, to affirm, to care. I’m lucky that I had nine other chaplains as colleagues to care for me over the summer, to care for me still when I pass them in the hallways between classes. I have been carrying the pain of so many beautiful people, and carrying so much hope for them and for me.

But then, aren’t we all? In the grocery stores and on the highways and in class or precept or at work. And though it’s easier for all of us to pretend we have it all together when we’re not lying vulnerable and stripped of agency in a hospital bed, we never really do.

I’m intrigued by this idea that has been with me since the end of my time as a chaplain--the idea that there is a deep need for chaplains in the world, chaplains on every street and in every building. I don’t know what that means. I’m not generally in the practice of putting a hand on the shoulder of the person at the next table in the coffee shop and saying, “Hey, I noticed you’re staring into space, is everything okay?” Some people can do that; I don’t think I can. But I do think I, and all of us, can pay a little more attention, speak a little more gently, and maybe even, when the spirit prods, offer a kind hello. I do think we can imagine that the grocery clerk who’s bagging slowly might have something on her mind, and give her a smile. I do think we can invite the classmate who keeps to himself to sit at our table.

Several years back, stressed and overworked, I had a co-worker whom I saw primarily as a means to sharing my workload, as a means to accomplishing the task at hand. I would become frustrated with him when the task was not accomplished, or when I felt overwhelmed. One night, I had a melodramatic and wildly untrue dream--that he had experienced the tragic death of his soul mate and true love. From that day on I never saw him the same way again. From that day on, I felt the same aching empathy for him that characterized the mood of the dream. In a strange way I suddenly learned to love him.

I am sitting in the library now, rolling my eyes at the always-exasperated woman who seems to have such a sense of entitlement about using the computers here, even though she is a guest of the university, and I am the one paying for these services with my tuition dollars. But who is she, and why does she come here so often, and what is she carrying that makes her so easily frustrated? Could you or I offer her some kindness and compassion? There is always so much more to each of us, beneath the surface.

On our first day as chaplains, we were shown this lovely video. Watch it, and then imagine the stories of all the people around you, and then be kind. You may be needed to be a chaplain in the world.

When you dare to be happy

Photo by David McSpadden

At Dayspring last Friday night, we entered the Great Silence after dinner, around 9pm. We kept it until 10am Sunday morning. In between, we could walk the lovely grounds, journal, read, pray, sit, eat, sleep, anything as we felt led. But we could not speak.

*

Me and silence, 2000 to present:

For a time, music was my silence, my retreat, my freedom. No words needed to explain myself, no people to explain myself to. Just me and eighty-eight keys in a small soundproof room, playing it out.

During a day of silence last fall, I breathed for the first time in a month. Then, I scribbled anger and disappointment at myself, all over my journal.

I am the awfulest person in the world at getting up in the morning. But just before dawn (especially in early spring) is my most favorite time to be silent, alone, alert.

Once on a technology fast, I experienced road rage such as I have never experienced before, until I pulled over to the side of the road to eat a peanut butter sandwich and make growling noises--yes I am that insane--since I couldn't turn on the radio to tune it out.

Silence is boring. Silence is edifying. Silence is restorative. Silence is terrifying. I crave silence and run to escape it all at once. In silence, I see God. I see beauty. I also see myself.

*

I came to Dayspring expecting something. Something angry, and difficult, and cathartic. Something with tears and a rehashing of old disappointments warring within me and (just maybe) a profound new insight that would change everything. I came in expecting that the silence would be, at its core, hard work.

So, anticipating the hours ahead, my first task when silence began was to read over every journal entry I've written since I started divinity school. It only took about 20 minutes. There weren't many, The entries there were consisted of wrangling and wrestling and anxiety and questions. Questions about how to approach my vocation, my marriage, my spiritual life, my relationships. How to process the painful things in my past.

God, I know I can't handle all of it this weekend, so please guide me to what it is you want me to wrestle with.

In the morning morning, after a deliciously fresh breakfast and a run through forested country roads, I was lying flat on my back, stretched out in the cool hallway when it struck me, clear as day, clear as the title of the weekend's program: "The Gift of Divine Time."

This weekend is not for you to wrestle. Having named the questions and anxieties last night is enough. Now, let go--not in avoidance or denial but in trust--and commend all into the hands of the Spirit. Now, simply enjoy. This silence is for you a gift.

*

Something shifts, and I am in the present.

It is a gift that I am here. The sun and the woman in the rocking chair next to me on the porch and the rain and the bed and the fresh food--all is gift.

It is a gift that I am asleep by ten.

It is a gift that I am here in community without needing to explain myself, to worry over my words. I confess I may enjoy people more when we can simply be together, no words.

It is a gift when the storm hits Saturday night, and I am sitting on the porch looking out at the lightning and the rain that has blurred my vision of the horizon and the wind that is making the trees sway violently. I startle when the first tree branch falls, but then I grin, glee splattered over my face as the wind blows the rain under the porch and against my skin. I stare down the storm until it passes, and retire for the evening.


It is a gift that I am running on these rolling hills just before breakfast. I don't want to turn around, I want to keep going, but I know my knees and I know my lack of fitness and further I know that there is more gift--scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, a cinnamon raisin bagel--all waiting for me back at the lodge.

It is a gift that I am for the first time walking a prayer labyrinth, like an interior pilgrimage toward God, and it is a gift that the spider on the porch is spinning her web, slowly, deliberately, in concentric circles, like a labyrinth.

I take in all the gifts, and somehow in taking in the gifts I feel all that is un-gift begin to unclench in me. It is not gone. There is work yet to do. But it is unraveling, and I think maybe it has even been instructive. I think maybe I am learning from this silence to be present in each step of the journey, to trust that I, even with all my noise and junk and wandering--am on a path with God.

It is a gift that I am sitting before the lily pond where the geese go for rest, and I am reading over and over Mary Oliver's "Morning Poem" (look it up) and she is telling me that notwithstanding my sometimes-leaden spirit there is "somewhere deep within you/ a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted" and she is challenging me to dare to be happy, to accept this as gift, to love the earth and the community and the place God has given me.

For this moment, at least, I wholeheartedly do.

*
(An appendix)

Labyrinth
You will have entered, perhaps, with joy.
On a sure path to the center.
You will wind and double back enough times you feel
you might have returned to the place you started,
as though moving backwards.
This only means you are in the thick of it.
Then one day, having relaxed into the rhythm of your steps,
perhaps without noticing it--
you will find yourself there.

Where? A rock, on which is laid a feather, a stone,
some broken pottery.
It is not, perhaps, what you expected to find here.
You find yourself looking outward, at all that impelled you.
From the rock, it appears beautiful.
You want to run to it.

Wait.
Close your eyes, breathe in gratitude.
For waves of green. For each bird
chronicling your journey.
Each stone leading your path.

Then, a moment after it has been too long,
you will begin the slow journey out, which is
perhaps the most important part.
And when having made your final turn,
you find in your pocket the tiny shard
of pottery, you will understand that you
must turn toward the center
again.

The stories we tell and the secrets we keep

Photo by Nicki Varkevisser

Telling your story--I mean your real, honest-to-God, story--is never easy.

You start just because you need to say it, you need to write it, you need to get it out of your singular self and out into the world. As scary as it is to be real, it's even scarier to be alone. One day, you finally blurt it out--that thing you were ashamed of, that struggle, that thing about yourself you've always hated but are learning to accept, that marriage or that baby or job that should be a joy but has been so hard, that long journey that you're finally seeing in its glorious light of growth, of healing, that darkness that has been heavy on you, and is heavy still.

You start small, maybe, test it out on someone you have a hunch you can trust. Or you bust the wound straight open and blast it to the whole family, the whole community, the whole internet.

And then funny things start to happen.

First, you don't die. Nobody even yells at you, usually.

Second, you start to feel that it's okay to be yourself. You start to see God in the painful journey, maybe, or you find one tiny step that might be healing.

Third (and this is the bumpy part, because you will hurt people, too, and you will sometimes wish you'd said things a little differently, or thought through things more fully) your community grows. You start to correspond with a relative you'd never known very well. Your friends start to tell you that you have made them cry with understanding. You get little notes from people you hadn't talked to in years, thanking you for your words because they are not just your words now, they are words of resonance and similarity and love, and they belong to us all.

*

I share my story of faith and doubt in a church. People come up afterwards and commiserate with me about the evils of the secular world, the way college can threaten faith, when I truly meant to say the opposite. I meant to say that going down deeper into the questions has made me stronger, firmer. I meant to say that this whole messy earth, I've learned, is bathed in a kind of light and love and that God can't be kept out of any of it.

I wonder if I said it wrong, if I should have kept that sacred tale to myself, lest it be appropriated for uses I didn't mean. Lest it be turned against me. Maybe I have made myself too vulnerable, too prone to attack.

But then one person walks up to me and says simply, "I felt like you were telling my story." I jerk my head up and he is looking far past me into a memory, and he says, "Almost every single word could have been mine," and I remember again, why we share.

*

This sharing has become a big part of what I see as my calling. I have been changed by people's stories. Listening to people's stories, across lines of race and class and religion and sexuality and nationality, has changed me. It has let me walk for a few minutes in others' shoes. It has shown me how different we are, and how alike. This is reconciliation: the good news that Jesus breaks down walls between insurmountably different creatures--humans and God first, but also men and women, rich and poor, black and white and every shade of brown, gay and straight, young and old.

We are, all of us, wounded. The magic, I think, is that by simply being brave enough to tell it, we have the chance to be a part of the stories of each other's healing. And that is what I hope for, as I practice telling pieces of my story, as I practice listening to yours, as I practice creating spaces where we can all learn to tell each other the truth that is in our hearts.

Four Christmases

At my Minnesota college, the biggest event of the year was neither homecoming football nor even graduation. It was Christmas Festival, a four-day musical celebration during which ten thousand people descended upon campus to wear Norwegian sweaters, to eat lutefisk  and lefse in the cafeteria and listen to the spectacle put on by St. Olaf College’s five auditioned choirs and its orchestra. That is (in part) why I chose to study there, to immerse myself year after year in perfectly blended anthems to baby Jesus.

I did not know that each November, five rehearsals per week would spin lyrics and melodies into my bones, and that those songs, like a scale, would measure out for me the contents of my heart. Christmas has a funny way of making us aware.

*

My first year, I signed up to give the devotional before our first concert. I signed up because I thought I was spiritually deep and had so much to say and not because I love speaking. That afternoon I ripped up paper after tear-stained paper trying to figure out what to say to 100 of my peers who were cooler than I.

So I showed up with scribbled notes and told the choir that our music, which was about Light and Grace being born within us, had something to teach us about grace. We didn’t have to be perfect. We just had to be present and recognize the holy before us.

My words were ahead of my heart. The whole concert through, my mind babbled. I thought I had worried too much what others would think of my talk; I thought about how it sounded; I thought about my brother and godparents visiting and how I could get my work done in time to go out to dinner with them after the last concert; I thought about how I was not really thinking about Jesus, how I was unrelentingly focused on myself, how therefore I was not good enough for this beauty and this moment and this Savior.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, I sang at the end of each night. I was unsettled.

*

I was a sophomore, and something was shifting in me. I was hurting. I had become entangled in painful new experiences. I didn’t know how to make sense of people, or myself. I was tired. The worst of “faith crisis” was yet to come, but the wondering and wandering were beginning.

O why should I wander an alien from thee, or cry in the desert thy face to see?

My comfort and joy my soul’s delight—O Jesus my savior, my song in the night.

I sang the words over and over, harder and harder each time, trying to mean them, trying will Jesus to comfort me. What reached back to me was silence.

In the middle of our Saturday night performance, I thought, How absurd we are, singing to this baby who was born 2000 years ago, calling him God. It seemed absurd in the way that if you look at the letter “h” long enough, you no longer recognize its shape or connections or meaning. It becomes only a collection black lines constructed haphazardly on a page.

Were the rocky friendships and faltering prayers just haphazard elements of my life now? Or was there a pattern? Stay with us, Lord Jesus, stay with us; it soon is evening and night is falling, we sang. I wondered if I believed this, or only hoped for it. I wondered if there was a difference.

*

Junior year: I was broken and small and lonely and full of an overwhelming sense of loss. For two weeks now I had been crying daily. I had ended a relationship that was good and affirming and simply not right. The innocent faith of my childhood was gone, being replaced with something that was still growing, still feeble, still slow. I had lost even my sense of myself.

I had not, however, lost God. I could not quite name it, but I had not lost my belovedness, nor my chance for a dazzling new beginning. Along with my sadness, there was in those nights an almost imperceptible sense of possibility. God so loved the world, we sang, and the conductor told us that the whole song was in the word “so.”

In just a few weeks I would travel to East Africa, and I would love its people and its land and its language and its version of me. I would meet, in great humility and sadness, some wonderful friends and my future husband and a sense of the miraculous that would pull me back to a lasting kind of joy. My friends back in Minnesota would chart their own new paths, some joyful, some more painful than ever before. In all of this, we would be so loved.

*

In every Christmas Festival, there is a magical moment—the choir has taken our places in a great circle around the audience. We are ready to sing our first two songs in the round before processing to the stage. The lights dim to black; the conductor raises his arm; there is a split-second of darkness, silence; the room is pregnant. Then the first lovely aching note of the strings is played, and perhaps a chime is struck, and we have begun.

What I don’t realize until much later is that we hold that empty moment in a tiny cavern inside us and we carry it with us for the rest of the night and it is the hope and expectation from which all our music springs.

*

We were seniors now, and we could scarcely believe it, in the way that twenty-two year olds think time goes by so fast. Before our final performance, Sunday evening, the other senior girls droned on about how they would be sobbing when it was all over, how their voices would crack and they would not be able to sing the last chorus. I, ever slow to process, was sure I would not cry.

After the last cutoff, the audience stood in ovation and I looked out over that crowd one final time. That’s when I spotted the woman, with newly graying hair and a wrinkle or two and a Norwegian sweater like everyone else. Her eyes were shiny with tears and she just kept clapping and clapping, and I could feel the depth of what this music meant to her. Perhaps she had once sung on this stage; perhaps she had been divorced or lost a job or her mother had cancer; perhaps her daughter, who had never quite found a niche in high school, was singing in the front row of the freshman choir; perhaps she hadn’t really heard, for a very long time, that God dwells among us in love.

For the first time in four years of singing, I imagined the life of the audience along with my own. I noticed that we were all there, together, wondering and worrying and over-analyzing and zoning out and then suddenly being caught up all together in the beauty of it—inexplicable, unreasonable, hard-to-believe but absolutely-rock-bottom-still-there. 

The palpable sense of God's love surrounded us all. Tears were streaming down my face.

With practice

The daily examen is a prayer exercise developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. I like its structure (you will see I need it) and how it engenders gratitude and openness. The following is a composite of a few weeks of not-exactly-daily-but-making-a-run-at-it prayer during my summer pastoral internship.

i. Become aware of the presence of God.

You are here, God. Always. If I am a success or a failure. If I remember the kid's name or not. If I sit in a circle of belonging or pace the hall crying. You are here.

(I need to take my medicine before bed. I should definitely set two alarms. Oh no, my phone is dead, I better go plug it in to use as a backup alarm. Why couldn’t I get up this morning? Okay, where was I?)

ii. Review the day with gratitude. Pay attention to the senses.

I woke feeling rested. (Well, I overslept, wasted time, rushed into my meeting late.)

I ate farm-fresh eggs, strawberry preserves, kale chips and watermelon. (I ate half a loaf of chocolate pumpkin bread. I have no restraint. I don’t exercise much here; I feel lazy. I am not treating my body well. But I digress.)

(Why is it so hard to remember my day? I’m not living mindfully and prayerfully into each moment. Social media is destroying my brain. Maybe I should cut myself off. But I have put so much work into my blog!)

Oh! I had a lovely dinner with someone from church. I am grateful for simple hospitality.

I got wonderful news from a dear friend. (I got sad news from another. I haven’t reached out enough.)

iii. Pay attention to your emotions. What is God saying through your anger, or boredom, or contentment?

On my visit to the shut-ins, I felt compassion, empathy. Caring for the outsiders is a good place for me. Maybe all we need to become more loving is to seek out places where love is needed.

Why do I feel anxious and unfocused? I am in transition, but you are with me. You will help me take each step when it is time. Maybe if I were exercising, it would help relieve some worry. (For that, I’d have to get up earlier, though.) Or maybe I should make a to-do list each morning to better organize my day.

But these are self-help tactics. Prayer isn’t self-help. What do you want to say to me, God?

Oh. 

Prayer.

This is why I need to pray, to start and end my day in silence. I worry less when I ground myself in you. 

When I know I am loved and gifted and meant for something beautiful.

Wow.

Good point.

Thanks.

iv. Look toward tomorrow.

I will pray again tomorrow. My prayer will continue to be interrupted by unrelated, sometimes destructive thoughts. But with practice, I can feel myself being changed. (Very slowly. Maybe.)

Poetry, song, and the language of faith

Photo by saffroncisco

When I started asking big questions in college, when I started drowning in my own thoughts and fears and the simultaneous existential crises of my friends, I could not turn to theologians or philosophers or scientists or even pastors for respite. I see now as I look back that even when my mind was rebelling, questioning, unsettling, I had a truer kind of knowing in poetry, music, and art.

During that time of my life, and many times since, the book I have continued to return to is a lovely little reflection on faith and art: Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle, who writes about “probable impossibilities,” about naming and being named, about vulnerability and faithful doubt. Her approach of honest questioning, coupled with the openness to receive and affirm it all, has stayed with me.

“I have been asked if my Christianity affects my stories,” L’Engle writes in Walking on Water, “and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my faith, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner back into an awed faith.”

My stories, yes. And the stories and poems of others. My faith has been formed and re-formed and renewed in the poetry of songs and hymns and liturgy.

So at a time faithful people are abuzz with what kind of programs and churches and relationships and opportunities and strategies are the best for helping the young and the old cultivate their faiths, I want to offer simply this: let us not forget the arts.

I sang in my mom’s church choir when I was old enough to talk. And little by little, as I grew, I noticed the words in the songs. I began to cut out pieces of the church bulletin that held prayers or liturgy or music I liked. I taped them in a little pink journal. I began to close my eyes during the songs we sang, to sense the wonder of Christmas, the agony of the passion story, the joy of Easter.

The poetry of sacred music was not restricted to church, because God cannot be restricted. I found God everywhere good music and good poetry were offered.

In high school, we sang secular music, sure. We also sang gospel: The storm is passing over, hallelu. We sang Mozart: Hail true body, born of the virgin Mary, who truly suffered and sacrificed on the cross for humanity. We sang poetry, scripture, psalms, laments.

There were songs that touched my heart more deeply than any sermon. The idea of listening for God’s guidance first struck me when I was ten and sang, Do you know your shepherd’s voice?

I experienced the power of nonviolence and justice during a high school choral tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.: The world is sick with war. When I lost my voice in eleventh grade, I leaned into Jesus: if my joys and comforts die, I know Truth is living.

I felt peace in the midst of newness in my first college choir rehearsal when we sang the twenty-third Psalm, and I meant it wholeheartedly when I sang in sophomore year of college, the time of my doubt, why should I wander an alien from Thee?

And years later, I still feel shivers of truth and beauty every time I sing certain hymns.

So I think what I want to say is simply that I am grateful: to the poets, the liturgists, the composers; to the music teachers, conductors, and mothers; and to a creative God, for the ways in which art can invigorate us, pull us back to amazement, for the ways in which we, as artists, are made co-creators with God and dreamers in an unfulfilled world.

Mix CDs and mustard seeds

Photo by Linda Tanner

It was six a.m., and I was driving to Duke Divinity School for orientation.

I was thinking of a recent faith conversation with my brother. I did not articulate my point of view clearly, and I was wondering—if I can’t speak definitive answers about theology, do I have any gifts at all for ministry? Has my vision has become too vague?

Naturally, these thoughts led me to the recurring whisper in the back of my head, that little voice which says, do you really believe any of this at all? If you are so scattered, so vulnerable sometimes, so unwilling to prove anything concrete—can you truly be a shepherd for other believers?

I am not ready to become a pastor, I was thinking. I have squandered this wilderness time in Cherokee. I have not prayed enough. I have become more cynical, sometimes snarky. Seven years after the “doubt crisis,” I am still an intermittent doubter—sometimes of God and sometimes of myself.

Besides, I thought, I know that I am good at teaching. Why change careers now? Teaching GED classes matters. It is meaningful. For the most part, it is safe.

My mix CD changed to an old Nickel Creek tune.

Can I be used to help others find truth if I’m scared I’ll find proof that it’s a lie?

Can I be led down a trail dropping breadcrumbs that prove I’m not ready to die?

Please give me time to decipher the signs

Please forgive me for time that I’ve wasted

I’m a doubting Thomas

I’ll take your promise

Though I know nothing’s safe

Oh me of little faith

When the song was finished, and my tears, I pressed repeat. I pressed repeat about eighty times, singing along as a plea, as a prayer, until I arrived at Duke.

*

Imagine, for a moment: this is how it has been for you and doubts.

You have a question and you climb down a rabbit hole to follow it to its depths, because if you don’t you will always wonder, you will always worry. And when you follow it down, you find the hole does not go on forever; there is something solid below, something to stand on. You stand on it.

But you don’t live into these questions every day; you can’t spend all your days chasing shadows and digging holes. So most of the time when the shadows cross, you watch them go. They are mostly shadows you’ve already followed all the way down.

You are going on your memory, and like all memories it is hard to retain the certainty of that feeling. You did find solid ground that day when you reached the bottom, you are certain…right?

The thought of starting seminary this fall terrifies you, because you know you will be diving down into some of the holes again, and it is possible they are deeper than you have yet known.

*

I arrived at campus, still a little weepy, humble.

But as soon as it had begun I could sense that they were going to remind me why I was here.

They said remember that you are loved deeply and gifted uniquely by God.

They said remember that the church does not exist for its own sake; it needs to serve and love the world; it is the body of Christ on earth and it must sometimes learn to die so that it may come to life again.

They said remember that the kingdom of God is about all of us—poor and rich, privileged and unprivileged, powers and marginalized, believers and doubters, black and white—seeing each other as children of God, seeing each other as both gifted and broken. It is about all of us, giving and receiving and sharing together.

I remembered. I remembered that this is good news, particularly for the poor and broken. I remembered that the kingdom of God has grabbed me and continues to grab me, that this is why I believe in spite of my doubts, that I can be healed from my loneliness and my numbness and my fears, that I am not in this for a stable job but for a vision and a sacrifice and a resurrection. I remembered that joy is a fruit of the spirit.

I drove back thirty-six hours after arriving, my heart hurting from the good news and the good people and the good God. I felt crushed, wrecked for my status quo, and certain that this place will continue to draw me forth and form me. It was not the first time I have departed that place in tears of longing and belonging.

When I played the Nickel Creek one last time as I drove over the last mountain back home, I heard it differently.

Oh me of little faith. Perhaps a little is enough. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. He said, a mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it is planted in the ground, it grows and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and all the birds of the air nest in it.

I am embarking on a good and beautiful journey. I am ready to plant my small, sometimes-wavering, vulnerable seed of faith in the soil. I am ready for the Spirit, and the risen Christ, and my new community, to make it grow into a tree where birds will sing. 

The yellow blanket [at Little Did She Know]

Today I am over at Cara Strickland’s blog. Cara is an amazing gal, a kind soul, and a beautiful writer, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know her a little over the past few months. She had the brilliant idea to start a series called De(tales), in which the intricate details of a memory become a springboard for reflection or metaphor or simply the telling of a story.

For the series, I wrote about a little yellow blanket and a lifelong friendship. Here’s how it starts:

I am reluctant to rise so early, but I am so excited for fellowship that I agree. Antonia and I hear a tapping on our dorm-room door around seven, and one of us scrambles over to unlock it for Leanne. The October Minnesota mornings have turned crisp and cool, and I am stumbling out of my bed, not yet dressed, so Antonia grabs the faded yellow blanket from her bed and we sit in a circle on the carpet and cover our legs. Dear God, thank you for this beautiful morning, someone croaks, and we have begun.

The yellow blanket becomes our companion, our touchstone for seven a.m. prayer. In between closing our eyes, we stare down at the swirly white-flowered pattern woven into the fabric, and we hold onto it like a piece of solid ground in this new place far away from home, this vortex of new experiences and new ideas snaking around us. The blanket is cotton, warm enough for winter but light enough for spring, always covering our bare legs. We let it bind us together, hoping it can cover our broken pieces and keep us from hurting each other…

Click here to read the rest over at Little Did She Know.

When words build walls

Photo by The Delicious Life

We are sitting in a diner, the twilight sun of a beautiful day shining across our plates as we talk, as we catch up. I am telling her about my current quest to discern where I will fit as a pastor—in which brand of church. I smile and stutter quickly past the main options, knowing all of them will be more liberal than the churches in which she finds herself at home.

She was my Christian buddy at public high school. In between the singing in choir and eating chocolate and walking to the creek to test the water for our science project, I would cling to her and ask, “what have you been reading about in the Bible lately?” and “can you pray for me?”

Now, as we are sitting eating spinach salads and basking in this first warm spring day, I notice that I feel self-conscious about my career path and my church journey. She hasn't said anything to suggest judgment, but even still, I worry that somehow the new trajectory makes me less Christian in her eyes.

In order to justify myself, I resort awkwardly to the old language. “I’m sure God will lead me to the right place,” I say, though the truth is I feel more vulnerable than sure, and I can’t wrap it up so neatly, and I’m not sure these days how exactly providence does its work.

*

In certain company, I have started to feel defensive about my faith. I feel the need to throw in phrases like, “praying about it” and “God is calling me”—whether or not I’m praying about it, whether it’s God’s voice or my best approximation that I am pursuing.

I’m not sure when it started, but I think it has to do with two litmus-test items in conservative Christianity. I am a woman who decided to become a pastor. And, worse, I came out as a supporter of gay marriage. By simply being who I believe I am called to be, I worry that I have become controversial, maybe heretical to them. They are my friends. I still look up to them in so many ways. They aren't stereotypes (unloving w/ heads in the sand), just as I am not a stereotype (unwilling to take the Bible seriously or sacrifice for faith). I want to stay connected, keep the conversation going. So I feel the need to show them that my faith is still vibrant, real, spirit-filled.

I suspect it is mostly in my perception. There really is no need to be defensive, to throw in the language I usually don’t use anymore because I have become more careful about words and their theological implications. Maybe it is really I who judge myself: I think of how me of five years ago would have looked at me now and wondered about her devotion. Or maybe I am afraid that if I no longer speak my friends’ language, or what I think is their language, we will no longer understand each other. Maybe I am grasping at straws because if I have come to this, there are definitely some ways in which we no longer understand each other, or no longer give each other the chance to sit down late at night and explain where our paths have taken us.

I worry that if I have to prove myself still Christian enough to use those words, maybe I am insecure about something deeper, about my own connection to the source and the ways in which it has become difficult to pray, difficult to hear God’s voice. Maybe that difficulty exists because I am in some kind of wilderness, or because by my pride I have put a wall there, or because I am not trying hard enough, or simply because I am in a spiritual middle where some forms and rituals have to die in order to spring forth again in new life.

I am tempted to end this post by some beautiful description of a transcendent experience in which I show that I am still Christian enough, in which I make you see that I am deeply connected to God, that I am in fact actually more Christian than I was when I used all the lingo without second thought.

But that is not true. We’re on a journey. You, me, the feminists and the LGBT advocates, the ones who have strong convictions against women pastors and the ones who have strong convictions against gay marriage, the ones who believe in hell, the ones who don’t, the ones who don’t know, the ones who are hurting and lonely, the ones who feel like they can touch God when they pray, the ones whose faith is simple and unassuming and matter-of fact. All of us. I have been in different places on this journey, forward and backward and sideways, and I am here now, and maybe we are in the same place or maybe we are in different places, but we are together on this journey. And God is still working, molding us.

So today, it turns out, is really about confession. 

I have not been completely honest. I sometimes use words as walls. I am sorry. 

As our paths diverge and twist and then meet again, I want to give you myself as I am: plain clothes and plain words, weaknesses and deep convictions and wobbly steps towards a kingdom. I hope you will understand and love me that way. I want to share this journey with you, to see you and understand you and love you, just as you are.

Becoming Pastor Katie

This is (one angle on) the complicated, messy story of my journey to Duke Divinity School, where I will begin my studies next month.

Photo by Keith Kissel

We are yawning through our Sunday school or confirmation class and we are debating what societal roles are acceptable for women. I have no desire to join the military so I could care less when we debate the role of soldier, and I am fairly certain we are going to have a woman president within a few years, so that part of the discussion seems superfluous. But when we get to pastor, I pause. I have the sense that this question matters beyond our class today. Matters to us. To me.

My teacher shows us a Bible verse: Women should be silent in the churches. And another one: I do not permit women to teach or have authority over a man. My friend protests, but I am looking at the words right there, and I take the Bible so seriously, and I can’t see a way to wriggle around it.

That night, I ask my mom what she thinks. She tells me some of her best friends are lady pastors, and if they are sharing the gospel of God’s love in Christ, she can’t see why God wouldn’t approve.

*

I have volunteered to share my testimony—the story of my incredibly unexciting spiritual journey to age fourteen—in church. I walk to the front of the congregation, grab the microphone, and talk about learning to pray, learning to trust God rather than popularity or success at school. At the end, I tell them that I want my whole life to be about serving God.

The people in the congregation smile proudly at me as I look around the sanctuary. Afterwards, a few come and tell me they enjoyed my speech.

The official teaching of our church is that women can’t preach. But it doesn’t seep down far into our culture. This feels like a good thing. Women serve and lead in almost every ministry. They are elders, they read the scripture, they serve communion, they speak in church, they lead youth group, they teach Sunday school to adults and to children. I have always felt free. I have never felt limited.

It’s just that when I start to think about serving God with my life, and what that will look like, the idea of being a pastor never occurs to me.

*

At camp every summer, I live with a community of girls for two weeks, and my I get my yearly quota of deep, spiritual conversations. On Sunday mornings, women and men speak in front of the whole camp, sharing their life stories. In Bible studies, my lady counselors blow my mind with new ideas about living life for God. During rest periods, I creep over to counselors’ bunks and ask for wisdom, and these women encourage me to grow.

It is one of my deepest, loveliest summers—a summer of stars and brownies and skinny dipping and late-night whispers—and I am exploring in this place that is expansive, open. I have started to question some of the teachings of my church, especially the political ones. “What do you think,” I ask my counselor, “about women being pastors?”

“Well,” she says slowly, “I don’t know for sure. But I do wonder whether women have the necessary qualities to lead a whole church.” She stutters a little. “I mean, personally, I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors as I have from men.”

I breathe in thoughtfully, nodding. For the moment, it makes sense. I haven’t gotten as much from women pastors either, I think. It is a safe phrase to hide behind when the Bible is ambiguous—this pretense of personal experience. For several years, it becomes my line.

But the truth is, I have never had a woman as an official pastor to “get” things from.

And yet most of my spiritual development has been guided by women.

*

I am twenty-three and working in the nonprofit field, serving God with my life by loving the poor. I enjoy my clients, but something is missing in my relationship with them, something about sharing stories and doing life together and delving into the big questions.

John has been teasing me for a couple years now. He says I need a job where I can talk about faith; therefore I should become a pastor’s wife. He says this flippantly, to mock established roles and bring lightness to heavy conversations.

When he says it, I laugh. The idea that I could take the word wife off of the phrase and then claim pastor as my calling, still doesn’t register.

Until one night I am reading Bonhoeffer, and something in the words on the page leaps out at me, and echoes of the past months reverberate around me, and I realize that pastor is a word for the things I feel most called to.

After a few excited, sleepless nights, I tuck it away. I know my personality; I am an Enneagram Type One whose deepest fear is of being ethically wrong, whose deepest hope is to be so good that I am beyond condemnation by anyone. I am still a tiny bit afraid to make waves, to become something that could possibly be against God’s plan, something that could draw confused looks from my more conservative friends.

I keep working in nonprofit, and then a church job literally drops in my lap and I think, Okay God, point taken, I will try it and see what happens.

*

In June 2012, Rachel Held Evans hosts a “Week of Mutuality” on her blog, which is a glorious bombardment of posts designed to make the case that the Bible supports equality for women in the church. I eagerly tune in each night, learning about women apostles and Greco-roman household codes and an end to patriarchy. I devour everything, and the last strands “women should be silent” are removed, and the last whispers of “I’ve never met a good woman pastor” slip away.

At the end of the week, I feel utterly free.

A few days later, I have this transcendent moment in a glorious church. I confess to God all my fears of being wrong or controversial or inadequate. The organ is echoing in my heart, and the desire to follow this small voice is now greater than my fears, and I know it is time to take the next step.