This Journey Is My Own: Part III

Living and breathing for an audience of one

This post is part of a series. If you’d like to start at the beginning, please read This Journey Is My Own: Part I.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I returned for several more early morning services before deciding on attending the main 10 am service. I wasn’t a huge fan of the worship music (a leftover from my Christian fundie days) but when the preaching began, I was captivated. A senior pastor woman preaching! (A big no-no in my church history.) She exposited on the Bible in a way that laymen (and laypeople) could understand. Gay and queer couples sitting together openly and without judgment.

It blew my mind. I’d never encountered anything like it. At the end, a few people greeted me but no one tried to stop and have a lengthy conversation with me. I was able to dash out the door in wonder of what I’d seen. Again, I felt that immediate warm and fuzzy feeling that I’d had when I first began attending morning services and decided to try and bring my kids the following week. My husband, who doesn’t approve of female pastors or accepting the “sin” of living a same-sex lifestyle, refused to attend. So I was on my own with my 2 kids. To be quite honest, I’d never ventured out with them by myself to a place for an extended period of time (other than a playground).

After the offering part of the service, the kids went their separate ways into the children’s ministry: my son with the elementary kids and my daughter in the toddler room. I was able to enjoy the rest of the church service and finally allowed myself to begin talking to other congregants about how I was becoming a regular visitor and looking to integrate my kids into a diverse, inclusive church.

Now I’m a semi-regular church member attendee. I’ve never been good about consistently attending church every week. Sometimes laziness wins out. Sometimes depression wins out. Sometimes sickness wins out. But I’ve finally developed relationships with a few church members, many of them queer(!), who are kind and good with my, ah, hard-headed toddler. And no one shames me for not attending regularly. They express that they miss us but don’t shame us. That’s pretty nice.

After a year or two of working on my spiritual life, my faith had done a complete 180. The Bible wasn’t KJV-only (or Reformed) legalistic, inerrant, and literal instructions to follow to have a relationship with God. Honestly, talking to other disillusioned Jesus followers on Twitter (some called exvangelicals), I learned more about Jesus’s examples and what he did: respected women, let them preach the good news (the apostles didn’t know about Jesus’s resurrection until Mary told them), stood against oppression, fed the hungry, walked with those in poverty, and ate meals with outcasts.

Jesus was a social justice warrior.

After years of only listening to Sara Groves’s first few albums, I decided to revisit them and give them a chance. A long time ago, I’d gone to a concert she held with Derek Webb at Messiah College where I encountered the Food for the Hungry (FFTH) and International Justice Mission (IJM) organizations. We signed up for FFTH after hearing about Sara’s experience meeting her sponsored children in Rwanda.

Now years later, as a member of Spotify with access to her entire catalog, I decided to relisten to the albums I had initially snubbed.

It dawned on me that she was right all along and lighting the path for Jesus followers to imitate him in practical and spiritual ways. Giving time, money, and energy to liberate oppressed people. Not just knocking on doors and converting a person immediately on the steps of their home after praying a prayer, but developing relationships and interacting, especially with those disdained by society. In his century, it was poor people, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and those with other disabilities. In the 21st century, what does that look like? Society, over time, had begun rejecting other groups of people not necessarily called out in the Bible. My heart was particularly moved for the queer community. After being in years of hateful, distancing rhetoric, I wanted so much for them to learn that Jesus was still for them, regardless of their sexual orientation.

This was all social justice:

• learn to do good

• seek justice

• help the oppressed

• defend the cause of orphans

• fight for the rights of widows

And those commands weren’t just Jesus's commands; these were Old Testament commands from Isaiah 1:17, reiterating that the God of Israel cared deeply about justice and righteousness.

Invisible Empires and Floodplain took on new meanings. I stayed away from Abide With Me, an album full of hymns. I was still dealing with church trauma associated with those hymns. I can listen to a lot of hymns now, but it was a slow process to rediscover my appreciation for them again. (Sara’s cover of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is beautiful.)

I began rereading the Bible. I figured I’d start with Isaiah to read some of the Messiah passages. The first half of Isaiah was actually disturbing. God was angry and wrathful and willing to wipe out anyone who wouldn’t listen to him. Then the latter half takes this totally sharp turn and prophesies about the Messiah, what will happen to him, and how he will usher in his kingdom.

Even though I was reading the NASB, there were a lot of passages that I didn’t understand and even questioned. Not just in the Old Testament, but even the gospel of Mark in the New Testament. Things were just popping out at me that I’d never noticed in my 25 years of being a Christian. It was kinda crazy. “How have I never seen this before?”

I learned more about the Bible’s history, cultural context, and how it was assembled. Was it a divine book in which God inspired men to record parts of history? Or was it simply a book of record written by fallible men who captured their experiences with God? Is everything a command? Could some things be suggestions? Is everything supposed to be taken literally or are some of these stories figurative, serving more as parables forcing readers to think critically?

I’d finally stopped accepting what other pastors told me about the Bible. I was finally reading it and learning it for myself. There is no one right way to interpret the Bible. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have so many denominations.

To wrap things up, it seems as though my venture into faith of questioning things and embracing doubt began when I first started listening to Sara Groves’s albums. She made albums about social justice (beginning in 2007), which I now realize was ahead of my time. It’s only been within the past 3 years (2020) that I’ve finally realized social justice is an extension of the Gospel.

I listened to her latest from 2021, What Makes It Through. Following Jesus is not just about going around and telling people how wonderful he is. (Although that’s nice.) It’s about embodying what he taught us. Love. In Action. It’s about getting through the mundane with God quietly helping us in the background. It’s about being imaginative with ways of dealing with the life he has given us.

After having struggled with my faith: theist, agnostic, Jesus follower, maybes, and I don’t knows, I’ve decided on one thing to believe in that will always be my anchor:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” —Matthew 22:37-40