uncomfortable and complicated

Sarah Bessey wrote an essay on the ‘deconversion’ of assorted famous(ish) Christians who've lately made the news. It’s part of her subscribers-only section, and she talks about how she’s tempted to filter their stories of ‘deconversion’ through her own lens of experience, which was to walk away from the faith community she’d begun in - but not to walk away from Jesus, and to rediscover Jesus before finding a community among whom they could worship. In the essay, she acknowledges that this may not be the experience of the people who are confessing their ‘deconversion’, and she can’t cast it in terms of her own experience because she is not them and the experiences that have formed them as people and Christians are not her experiences.

In the last twenty years, I’ve come to understand just how...messy...humanity is. And Christianity with it because the heart of Christianity is all about the heart of humans and the heart of God and how they relate to each other. At this point in life, I feel like there must be nuance because we live in a world of uncomfortable grey zones and life and existence and chaos-entropy-sin gets in the way even as we strive to do the perfectly right thing...

I don’t know if I always succeed.

I do know that I’m not always comfortable with it. I know that my faith is a journey and there are rocky stretches. And I know that insofar as being someone who other people would trust with their faith journeys – as comforter and friend and possibly guide and acolyte – requires me to be more loving than correct – particularly among the groups that I feel more called to minister among: people who have turned their backs on the church and their faith community - and to trust in grace. I like to think of it as a connection that won’t be severed on my end – that’s open for them if they want it to be, that can be a personal connection to Christianity rather than the big amorphous conservative-face-of-Christianity that is mostly depicted in hardline opposition to something. That’s very uncomfortable. And discomfiting. And complicated.

In this, I’m enjoying Pete Enn’s The Sin Of Certainty and Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired to remember that the divinity of God’s revelation can still shine through our flawed humanity, but that we have to be careful about assigning divinity to one category or another of human action.

Yet God has extended grace to me – I don’t have to be right or better or correct – I can just be loving. And sometimes that loving will include words specific to the God who has extended grace to me, and sometimes that loving will involve shutting up and letting care be my words.

Not all answers are neat. A divine God crucified in bloody sacrifice to display the seriousness of our ‘fuck you’ to Him while simultaneously paying the consequences of that ‘fuck you’? Was messy. So, so incredibly messy. And yet God was willing to come and be messy with us in the now.

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Lately I feel very much like I’m not a good fit in Evangelical churches. But I’m pretty sure I’m not a good fit in Pentecostal ones either. And I’m not a good fit in the ‘usual run’ of Uniting churches – more about social good than the good news of God wanting us to be with him. So maybe I’m just not a good fit anywhere in the church?

Does that mean I’m not a good fit for God?

I certainly don’t believe that.

Maybe I’m not the only one who feels this, or maybe it’s a function of my life stage. Maybe this is the swinging pendulum of intimacy and emotion that carries me from feeling like I’m an accepted part of a community to hearing the message of “we don’t like your thoughts here, take them and your questions somewhere else, because we only want righteous certainty here” in the space of six months.

But I'm not willing to let go of God and His word has assured me that He's never going to let go of me so...

I guess it’s the messy and uncomfortable and complicated for me.