New Stories
It is that time of year when many people, including me, look back at the past year and dream new dreams and set new goals for our next trip around the sun. I don’t know about you, but that feels really challenging this year. 2020 was hard and weird and uncertain. And I am not in the same place I was last year before the world changed on all of us. Even so, I still want to look back, as I also look forward. So I am doing that through stories.
Stories are how my brain processes events, and telling them is the way I interpret what is going on around me. I have a lot of stories floating around in my head right now, and I’d like to share some with you this month as I transition and gather up what I’ve seen and felt. And more importantly, I want these stories to influence how I move into this next chapter.
As I think back on my personal story, I see the story of God patiently and compassionately revealing God’s own character and love for me. I see personal triumphs in my writing as I joined Hope*Writers, began writing daily, and started this blog. I started calling myself a writer this past year! I also began training as a spiritual director through Metagem Institute, moving me steps closer to where I feel God calling me right now.
In my faith community, I’ve watched my church learn to worship and study and fellowship through digital platforms - places that didn’t exist before the pandemic slammed into our way of being the body of Christ. We have in-person and virtual ways to worship now, but a new online community has been birthed and is growing strong and healthy. These things would never have happened without the events of 2020.
In the larger story of our world and nation, I’ve chosen to learn from stories of inequality and injustice - ones that have always been there. I just wasn’t willing to look at them. That is hard to admit, but it is true and important that I say it aloud. I have lived a life of relative privilege. My faith has been marked by certainty. I have too often chosen to operate under the assumption that my understanding of God was right.
So my 2020 story has also been one of deconstructing and reconstructing how I understand and experience God working in me and in this world. I looked my certainty squarely in the eye, and I didn’t like what was there.
I confess that I have excluded people from God’s table on the basis of sexuality. I have chosen to hang on to my frustration with Black voices crying out in anger and pain over continued injustice. I have, too often, viewed my story, as a middle class, white, straight, Christian woman as the standard by which all should be measured.
No more. No more. No more.
My job, I’m discovering, is not to set the bar for receiving God’s love. My job is to love the way God does. It really is that simple. I love. God takes care of the rest.
God’s love is so much more vast and welcoming and equitable than I ever understood. While Jesus was here on earth, he didn’t hang out with the good church folk and pat them on the back for their piety. No, he went out of his way to find the marginalized, the poor, the outcasts. Jesus spent his whole ministry loving people that I have struggled to see. If I am going to follow Jesus in this life, I want to act like he did.
God’s table is wide, and there is room enough for everyone. I understand now that it is not my job to decide who deserves a seat. And so I am tearing down that rigid view of God’s love that I’ve been carrying, and I am opening my ears to hear the voices that are beautiful to God’s ears. I want to love without question, and to check my privilege and certainty at the door.
I heard a phrase in Brene Brown’s podcast with Austin Channing Brown earlier in 2020, and it rocked my world. It has become my my constant meditation. I will leave it here with you so you can ponder it over the next week. I want to "be a better human to other humans.”
God, will you allow this to take root in my heart and become my standard for loving your beloved children, no matter who they are? Amen.