I’ve been reflecting lately on all the crazy since I threw a square topped hat in the sky and learned how to pay my taxes.
Life post-grad.
It started fast - I left just weeks later for a summer in the Dominican, and I’ve never been the same.
That summer broke me, but to be real I’m not sure I wasn’t broken before that.
All my right answers flew out the door as I walked through life with people who’s experiences were vastly different than my own.
“God, are you still good in the face of such pain?”
I wrestled. And wrestled. And came home to the land of expensive coffee and immediate satisfaction.
And I wrestled. But I didn’t talk about it.
I didn’t talk about how the rug had been swept from under my feet.
The things I’d studied in classes and in quiet time for years I now didn’t feel so sure about.
I tried (and failed) to learn to live with my feet in two different countries. My heart rended, with nowhere to call home.
How do you come back from that?
When your world no longer makes sense and you feel like a foreigner in your own culture.
Fitting in to both and neither cultures at the same time.
I yearned for my people. I longed to be in the Dominican, yet while I was there, I struggled as I missed weddings and birthdays and babies.
How to live in two places at once: a memoir that i never wrote, because I still don’t know.
I battled anxiety and depression.
I was mad at God. “I’m only 22, Lord, how am I supposed to navigate all of this?”
I got a parasite that still lurks in my system, and spent months with no answers and little recovery.
My body was poked and prodded, as doctors furrowed their eyebrows and scratched their heads.
Now they pump me full of antibiotics every six months and shake the dust off their tunics.
At least I can eat.
I went to Africa, Guatemala, and Cuba. But my heart remained in the Dominican.
With my sassy Spanish speakers and lips filled with hallelujah and beginning to realize that God made more sense to me in another language.
But I didn’t know how to talk about it.
Faith wrestling makes people uncomfortable in the US.
They don’t like it when you question, because it means that maybe,
just maybe what they believe to be true might not be exactly who God is either.
After all we’re just fallen people trying to understand a perfect God.
Maybe God really does love everyone - no matter what gender or race or preference.
Maybe God cares a lot less about obedience than he does about relationship,
and things that we drove our stake into and chose as our hill to die on are just the foothills of what really matters.
Maybe we’re called first to love and second to judge, instead of the other way around - with our list of rules and our upturned noses.
Maybe God is much bigger than what i allowed him to be as I shoved him into the boxes of my conservative christianity.
I mumble my prayers in broken Spanish under my breath, because those are the moments I feel closest to Him.
And I don’t talk about it.
I don’t feel at home anymore. Not in any country, city, or state.
But I’m figuring out how to find home in the people around me and in my relationship with a higher being.
I’m learning that home looks like a glass of wine with my husband as we talk about how we see God TODAY,
with grace to see something different hours later.
How my view of God changes weekly, and the way I was raised to see him put scales over my eyes that I’m still slowly peeling away.
How do you talk about your faith being stripped away?
When you wake up each day and chant “God is faithful and God is good, and that’s all I know and need for the day.”
So I don’t talk about it.
I learned the hard way that questioning things that shake foundations isn’t received well by those who stand on that rock.
That desiring to process and talk and explain is often met
with an awkward silence and a pat on the arm with an “I’ll pray for you” bandaid to silence your wondering.
So I don’t talk about it.
Instead, I mumble my Spanish prayers and receive God in the silence.
