welcome home

This is my new space. This is the place where I can be authentic and real, where I can rant, scream, question, stumble around, relish, rejoice and think while being connected to friends who are on a journey with me.

The last post my husband posted on his blog was about his frustration of doing a funeral for a man unknown to him. He talked about the effect of doing this funeral, of the family dynamics, of the lack of interest in the man, etc. Of all the amazing things, this man’s granddaughter was bored and searched Google for my husband and found his blog. She was hurt, we got called by a church elder, we closed down shop, saying we would not blog ever again.

But, we need this opportunity to be who we are. As he said on his new space, “I needed this forum. It feels good to return”.

I think that one of the things that I have been most frustrated with, through all of this, is the fact that we have so little place in our lives to be authentic. I am working out my frustration by writing an article for the ooze about how, in contemporary/traditional ministry I don’t believe there is the option to be completely transparent with those to whom you minister – you always hold something back. They don’t really want to know us, they would run us out of town as heretics if they knew the things we thought, talked about, drank and smoked behind closed doors.

Some days I know that the only place I can really be me is when I step over the threshold of my front door. It is tiring, it makes you feel like a bigot some days. I know that feeling this way also keeps us from having complete community with our church and I struggle with that. Are we limiting what God can do by limiting our interaction with our church members?

We look at friends who have joined, for lack of a better term, “emergent” churches and we are jealous at the community they have. However, many of these communities are constructed of people from the same sociological, economical backgrounds with the same educational backgrounds, lifestyle choices, the same stances on drinking, swearing and secular music. Many are friends who started communities together. While that is so incredible and so awesome, it leaves us feeling cold. The problem is that we were called to this church family, they are completely unlike us. They were pre-fabricated before we came, they had their presuppositions, their lifestyles, and their ideologies set in place. We weren’t friends with them first, we were jammed into a place where we had never been before, in the midst of their already formed relationships. There in lies the challenge….but that’s for another day!

reading: "seven types of ambiguity" by eliot perlman
listening: "iowa" by dar williams (who we get to see next weekend!)