My family likes to tell the story of how, when I was around 3 or 4, I ran around the house telling everyone that Jesus was in my tummy. “He’s in my tummy and he bit my TONGUE!” That’s the rationale of a child who grew up hearing that Jesus was in everybody’s heart and took that literally. Makes sense, though. If Jesus was indeed in my heart, he’d have pretty direct access to my tongue. What else is he gonna do hanging out in my tummy all day?
I have a really faint memory of the day I “accepted Jesus into my heart”. I couldn’t have been older than 5 or 6, riding in the car with my mom somewhere. I think I asked her something like, “How you do you ask Jesus in your heart?” And she said, “You just ask him!” and so I did and that was that.
I don’t remember a time in my life when heaven wasn’t an inevitability for me. Jesus was in my heart, now I just had to learn how to obey him.
Kind of backwards, isn’t it? Most of our adult choices require us to learn before we choose, but choosing a faith? Feet first. Choose, then learn.
I didn’t know what I was choosing when I was a kid. I didn’t know what I was choosing when I was baptized when I was 12. I was a little closer to understanding when I chose Jesus again at 15. I’d already been baptized though, so I chopped all my hair off to mark my heart change. I’d choose Jesus again and again and again over the next couple of decades because faith never came easy to me. I wasn’t rebellious. I don’t have some exciting, salacious testimony. It’s actually pretty boring. But my journals are full of the words of a little girl, a teenager, a young woman, a wife, a mother, searching and searching to know God, to love him, to serve him, and to obey him. But I always had a lot of questions. I always felt different. I made people uncomfortable. I never felt like I fit who I was “supposed” to be.
Sometimes, I forget that I was always that way. Always questioning things and poking boxes, trying to make sense of things. I look at my hurt and traumatic experiences and blame those events for breaking my brain and making faith harder for me than it is for other people. But my journals remind me that my brain has, in fact, always been “broken”.
I have this visual that I use to describe my work and ministry.
There’s a bridge. On one side of the bridge are people who have been hurt or disillusioned by the church and/or faith in general. They’re at the bridge because they aren’t abandoning their faith yet. They’re trying to figure it out and are desperate to keep even a fragment of what they believe, but they’re finding it harder and harder to hold on. They’re angry, isolated, and closer to walking away from the bridge than across it, but they haven’t turned their backs on it yet. They’re finding friendship with each other. They are seen, heard, understood, and loved by the people who share their same pain. They’re growing less and less interested in what’s going on across the bridge.
On the other side of the bridge are people who may or may not have experienced the same things, but either way, they don’t have the same doubts or questions. Their faith is orthodox, their beliefs are solid, if they’ve ever had questions, they don’t have them now. They know what they believe, they know why they believe it, and they are sure that their side of the bridge is the right side to be on. Most of them aren’t aware that the people on the other side used to be on their side of it. They don’t know that the people over there are searching, hurting, and trying to hold on to the same faith. They might have empathy for them, but they won’t walk across the bridge because they’ve heard that bridge is slippery. They don’t want to end up on the wrong side.
There’s a lot of yelling across the bridge, but very little crossing it.
My work is somewhere in the middle of that bridge. It isn’t to get anyone to switch sides. It’s to help the people on the secure faith side of the bridge understand the ones on the not so sure side and to help the ones on the not sure side feel heard and cared for as they navigate the really murky waters of a decimated belief system.
I’ve been on both sides of this bridge.
Both groups of people are the family of God but they often don’t see each other that way. And it’s so crucial that we do. Maybe we’re starting to change that. I hope so.
I take Paul’s words in Ephesians 4 pretty seriously when he says :
Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
We can’t keep the unity of the Spirit without effort. We’re required to give effort. Not just sit on one side of the bridge waiting for the others to cross over (or yelling at them all the reasons they should be on your side.) The middle is where the effort is made and it’s where the work is done and it’s where the family of God is unified and God is glorified and all the hallelujahs and amens and oh me’s are shared around a table full of people who don’t have the same exact mind, but are “like-minded”1 because of our shared faith - even if it’s just a fragment of it.
So, this email is to ask you to meet me in the middle of the bridge for a few weeks.
I’ve put together a new series for August called, “Growing up Saved”. Every week, I’ll send an email out (two if you’re on my paid subscriber list) with my reflections as a pastor’s kid who grew up in the Evangelical Charismatic Christian world and found my faith, lost it, and found it again.
I hope you’ll feel seen and understood and I also hope you’ll see and understand.
No slippery bridges or slopes here, friends. Just some gritty faith that grew in all the places it shouldn’t have grown, but for all the right reasons.
First email comes on Friday.
Thanks for being here! Hope you have a great week!
If you want to sign up for the extra email every week, you can join my behind-the-paywall list. It’s $5 a month of $50 for the year. You’ll get immediate access to all of the posts I’ve already written, you just have to go directly to my substack to view them. All the new ones will come to your email. Click the button down there to upgrade your email subscription. You can cancel anytime! I don’t do a ton of for profit ministry, so this is just a small way to support what I do and I’m so so thankful for it.
1 Peter 3:8
I love the imagery of the bridge...I think I am in the middle of the bridge with you.
Looking forward to this new series!
Very interesting!