First Drafts

 A lot has happened in my life since I used to blog regularly.  Blogs seem to have gone out of style, but that's ok.  I tend to hang on to styles until they come back into vogue.  I am feeling the need to process in writing again.  These posts will be shitty first drafts, as Brene Brown calls them.  There is a season for perfecting and a season for dumping.  This is the dumping season.  If you feel like reading, great.  If something inspires you to comment, please feel free.  I may or may not respond.  If you are a personal friend and this prompts you to reach out, great, you have my number and/or email.  I'd love to hear from you.

I've been thinking and praying a lot recently about my story.  My story involves some hot topics that are very sensitive.  Often they involve others, and I am committed to not telling anyone else's story.  We all have a right to share our story, but if it involves someone else I believe we have a responsibility to cover that other person first.  

We don't always get to choose our calling in life.  I say that from a Christian perspective.  I am a committed Christian.  I finally submitted to Christ when I was 21 after struggling to be my own god, followed by letting alcohol be my god, and finally letting the God who created the universe take His rightful place in my life.  I believe with the core of my being that God is good.  That ruffles a lot of people's feathers and can be a great conversation starter, or feud starter depending on your context.  It is solid truth in my life.  I agree that sometimes Christians say things that make you go, Hmmm around the goodness of God and the difficulties of life.  That is why faith is called faith.  One of my callings has been to walk with women as they navigate sexual misconduct in the church.  I did not choose this calling, it chose me.  I would have chosen organized motherhood, and how to keep your home beautiful and friends happy.  Being the lady who left (whatever the name) church, or disgraced (whatever the name) man, and I'm sure we can all muster up the names attributed to women who stand up to sexual misconduct.  Yep that's my calling.  I get messages from ladies who need to talk to me about some situation that has happened to them.  They somehow know I have been down that road and will give them a fair listen.  I would love to say that these calls don't come as often as the years go by, but that would be a lie.  As long as their are vulnerable women and children, which is to say as long as there are any women and children, there will be men preying upon them.  And yes, God is still good.  Men however can act very badly.

Of course, women can act badly as well, I'm not man bashing here.  Men, once past a certain age, have the advantage of being in a more powerful position.  After I became a Christian, I really wanted to do the right things.  You know, Christian things.  I didn't want to make all the mistakes my parents had made raising a little pagan like me.  I became the worst kind of Christian.  I became a law abiding, judgy, self-loathing, but also self-righteous Christian that wanted to fit in to the church crowd.  I followed some very strong Christian teachers and pastors.  I got sermons on tape (yes tape, I'm that old).  I read my Bible and every other heady doctrine book I could manage to understand any of.  I wanted my husband to be a strong leader (which he isn't).  I wanted to do all the things right so that my children would grow up to be beautiful, smart, holy, married, child bearing, home schooling, modestly dressed pillars of the community.  I became a really tired, over bearing, impossible to please woman.  I tried to do way too much for God.  I missed His calling to me, and buried myself in my own calling on my life.  Into my life came a host of strong men to tell me how to do a better job.  They talked to my husband, about his weakness and my lack of submission.  They talked to both of us about our parenting.  They talked to us about my lack of attention to the womanly arts.  They tried very hard to get us to fit into their neat package, but we kept poking out awkwardly.  Unfortunately my children seem to have born the brunt of my striving and failing.  I didn't have my eyes on my Father in Heaven, or the needs of my babies on earth.  I left them vulnerable to some really bad teaching and put them in very vulnerable positions.

Sadly what I didn't teach them was the deep and abiding goodness of the God who created them and loves them.  I didn't give them the gift of knowing that they were created in His image and that He loves them as they are in Jesus and that is all they ever will need.  When they sin, they are forgiven.  They don't have to be anything but children of God.  All the laws, and codes, and creeds, and books don't get us closer to God unless they are pointing us to Him.  If they become him, they become sin to us.  Is it any wonder they don't come to the church to find solace?  The church should have been a place of refuge, a place to meet the Savior that comforts, feeds, heals and prepares us to go out and do life.  What church became for us was a place of performance and judgement.  It became a place of impossibly high standards.  I became angry and frustrated.  We attended several different churches over the years.  I am forever grateful for the church that had the music that I didn't love, the liturgy was not my style, the room was dark, but the Word was preached in a way that gave life.  God moves in mysterious ways.  Sometimes you find the truth dressed in ways you find unappealing.  One of the things I love about God is His endless diversity.  He comes to me in crazy places.  For example I attended a top 10 party school for college.  God found me there.  He called me out of the party scene, out of a court ordered probation, out of the bars and made me new.  I was not looking for Him.  He made me, He called me, He saved me.  I was just out living my life.  I trust God to do that for my children.  I sent them to Christian schools, I took them to church, I read the Bible to them, some of them went to Christian colleges.  I did not save them.  I cannot save them.  They are not lost, God knows exactly where they are and what He needs to walk them through.

I don't get to go back and be a better mom.  I will walk with the moms who message me and ask me how I got through some of the valleys in my life.  I do not have all the answers.  Sometimes people ask me parenting questions because I have 9 children.  Often the answer is "I don't know, but I'll pray for you."  Your kids are your kids, they require prayer and insight.  More often than not, I can tell you what didn't work for me.  I just hope I never think I have arrived at any spot.  I believe this journey will go on behind the veil.  Death is not the end for me, or my children.  They got the mom they got, and I got the mom I got and God will help us overcome those obstacles.  Trust God, not men, always.