Sincere, if a little dramatic.

For a full decade, the year 2010 has stood out as The Worst Ever, but 2020 has topped that. And then some. Besides all the national and international crap going on, there's plenty of personal grief and struggle-- ghosted friendships, broken relationships, illness, financial struggles, strife, and loss. But the most critical and devastating loss of all has been watching the widening crack in the foundations of an institution that I have loved: the American Evangelical Church.

I've watched, heartbroken, in disbelief, as men and women that I would have considered brothers and sisters have sold their souls for political power under the guise of "protecting the unborn" and "maintaining the rule of law" and "defending the traditional family". Y'all, you begged God for a King and you got a King Saul. You forgot that the way of the Gospel is the low way, the way of humility, weakness, and sacrifice. You wanted a shortcut to Salvation and an easy way to establish the Kingdom of God, but you forgot that only God himself can change minds and soften hearts and you can't vote in a strong man to establish a judicial version of the Kingdom. Y'all, if you want to grab the jawbone of an ox and start slaying Philistines, you better read the whole story and make sure that Samson is really who you want leading that fight. Remember, Samson was a symbol of the depths of Isreal's fallen state. That story isn't telling us to go out and find us a Samson. And you better make damn sure that you're getting Samson and not just a Philistine king who wants a patsy to take care of his political rivals for him.

'Cause, y'all? With love... you've become a patsy. Maybe it started out right. I'm willing to concede that at some point your hearts were in the right place, your intentions were good, but dear God in heaven, look where we've come! Y'all got drunk with power and then you ran amuck and now you're just the shills of a unscrupulous huckster who knows all the right words, sweet nothings, to whisper in your ears to bring you running to his side: "Protect the unborn" he says, and you close your eyes to the weeping children severed from their families. "Defend the rule of law" he says, and you turn your backs to the abuse of your disenfranchised  brothers. Like a gas-lit abused spouse, you're heatbreakingly easy to trigger and control, tagging along, docile, behind the very power that is wreaking your undoing.

Y'all, read the history of the church; every damn time we try to do it our way, every time we try to use political power, force, and militancy to "do God's work" it goes terribly, terribly badly. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition to Colonial-Missionary-ism (or whatever you want to call that)-- whenever the Church has sought to spread the Gospel without humility, sacrifice, suffering, and personal loss, we have failed; utterly and miserably. Christians with political power are a terrifyingly dangerous thing for God's creation. 

And this is why I have to write this... History tells us that God won't stand for it. There's a day of reckoning coming. Y'all, humble Jesus is still in the business of turning over the tables of the rich who take up the space in His temple meant for the foreigners and the social outcasts. He's still in the business of whipping out the greedy men taking advantage of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. At some point, y'all started assuming that the point of that story was that it's ok to pick up a whip now and then, but I tell you what, I'm pretty sure it was way more about warning US not to pollute the House of the Lord. We've got the story backwards in our heads and hearts. At this point, we're the Pharisees. We're the backsliding Isrealites. We're the Phillistines. We're Babylon.

So this is me, shaking the dust of Babylon, the American Church, off my feet. "Come out of her, my People" (Revelation 18:4, Jeremiah 51:6, 45), -- I'm hearing that in my soul. I love the church and I love her people, but for now, I'm going to stand over here, out of the line of fire. 

Paradox

 Every parent is likely familiar with the subtle desire to recreate your children in your own image, but with all the bits you don't like about yourself corrected. We all do this, right? And of course, as autonomous entities, individual souls made in the image of God, they resist this with a mighty will and eventually forge their own paths forward. The ultimate test of the relationship we so carefully molded in their early years: can those loving ties survive the stretching? Will we all enter our new roles of adult peers with all the cords still intact, strongly connecting us to one another, albeit at a mutually respectful distance from one another? That is the question. The final marker of parenting success or failure. It's a little scary.

On the other hand, it can be exhilarating. Every day I'm surprised and delighted by what my children are becoming. And I'm trying more and more to lean into that delight, rather than focus so intensely on the bits of my own sin nature that I want to erase in them. One truly delightful surprise that's emerging as they grow-- something I only notice when I stop trying to make them better than I am at art, sports, music, personal devotions, math, etc--is their affinity for writing. Oh my. While I was busy trying to make them smarter, kinder, stronger, and less addicted to screen time and sugar, they were busy becoming Writers, behind my back. 

And so this morning, in the sideways light of an early fall Sunday morning, I'm sitting side by side with my youngest as we both play with words-- creating new worlds and telling new stories. How funny, and how humbling, that while I was preoccupied with preventing him from becoming something less than I want him to be, God was busy making him something more than I even thought of. Something a bit akin to the best in me...

On surrender.

If I could travel back in time, there's a thing I desperately wish I could tell my twenty-two year old self: newly entered into motherhood, overwhelmed with the immense stretch of required selflessness and sacrifice that unexpectedly opened up before me with the birth of my daughter. I was vastly unprepared for the unraveling of the Self I thought I had known for so long, or for this awkward, almost violent remaking of myself into Mother. It felt as though I'd fallen, unawares, into one of those whirlpools that draw swimmers into deep underground caves and then, if the swimmer has the smarts to simply surrender to the current, spits them out again onto the sunny shores of sparkling blue waters, in delightful hidden coves.

I wish I could go back and have a long talk with that slightly bemused, but adapting-nicely young mother on the beach of that secluded cove. I wish I could impress upon her that those whirlpool currents repeat themselves again and again throughout life. I wish I could have prepared her for the repeated un-makings that lay ahead of her in the journey of being made more like Him.

I wish I could impress upon her the necessity not to get too comfortable here, convince her that the period of time spent in that space of continuous mothering was, mathematically speaking, such a tiny fraction of her life-- the time of being large and in charge, while feeling so inadequate and drained was really just a moment of her life. I would try to warn her that this drastic stripping away of illusory shreds of self-determination and independence was only the beginning...

Would that have changed things? I don't know. If I had realized then that life is really a series of these whirlpool roller coasters from one level of self-loss to another, from one unmaking and rebirth to the next, would I have been better prepared?

He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. He who loses his life, gains the world.

I doubt it would make a difference then. I know it now, and I still fight the current every time. I still arrive on the new beach fighting to swim back to the one I've left, the one I'd grown accustomed to. I lie there, utterly undone, exhausted, wrecked; for far too long, considering how often now I've experienced this remaking process as God's grace to me. Why can I still not trust that the change is, as he promised, from Glory to Glory?

I'm never ready for change-- no matter how sought after, how intensely pursued. I always find myself doubting in the moment of achievement, struggling against the pull. My labors were a physical manifestation of this. Days and then weeks past my due date, I'm still vastly pregnant. Irritated with the delay, exhilarated by every twinge that might signify the start of labor, and yet so doubtful, so afraid. Finally reaching that terrifying middle where one MUST go forward, through, because the backwards way of escape is no longer an option. There's nothing else to do but push the baby out. Die to the past, be reborn. Forgetting what is behind, striving forward to what lies ahead. 

I can only hope that eventually I will learn to surrender to those terrifying currents and anticipate the next stage of growth with something a little more gracious and dignified than my current frantic thrashings and protestations. Hopefully, as I age, I will learn to trust the loving currents, and wait confidently, expectantly for the landing on the next shore.

This is my prayer.