Awkward Christian
Dear Awkward, I’ve felt like a walking disaster since being in junior high around all the “churched” kids. I failed sword drills and just about everything since. But I love Jesus with all my heart and I know He sees the true me. I married a Christian man who suffered greatly in his youth at …
Dear Awkward: Help! My family is a crazy mess at church.Read More
Dear Awkward, What do you think if the Instagram account @preachersnsneakers? How do you see wealth, spending, and responsibility in church and or in the kingdom? Is there a place for judgement? Mara Dear Mara, After I received your question, I decided to re-take the Slavery Footprint survey, and discovered that I, personally, employ 52 …
Can I confess something? Every year, Lent stresses me out. Ash Wednesday, the traditional start to the season, approaches, and I think how am I going to commemorate Lent this year? Traditionally, Christians choose some sort of fast for the 40 days before Easter, and participating in that tradition genuinely blesses me. But the decision-making about what to give up is an invitation for major performance anxiety. …
Does your faith often feel more like a to-do list than a place of respite? Do service projects, devotionals, Bible study, committees, Sunday school service, and discipleship sometimes feel like a full-time, very thankless job? At the root of our overwhelming faith are choices. We make thousands of tiny decisions to say yes instead of …
Looking back, it’s still hard for me to pinpoint just where I went wrong in that conversation. I love the earnestness of the girl on that staircase, her eagerness to seek virtue, her willingness to have a hard conversation. I admire her desire to please God, to make wise choices, to follow the counsel of people she respected. But underneath it all, I imagined God as a kind of benevolent torturer.
I read my first and only Frank Peretti novel in ninth grade. My sister, Katie, brought it with her when she moved back from the children’s home where she’d lived for the last seven years, along with her collection of pig tchotchkes and a thin copy of the Living Bible. In the room we suddenly shared, …
The Bible first shocked me in high school. Our pastor read from Psalm 137, and the last verse blew my mind—and not in a good way. It read, “Happy is the one who seizes [Babylonian] infants and dashes them against the rocks.” I recoiled. Our pastor explained that the Psalm was meant to horrify us. …
5 Ways the Lament Psalms Carry Us in Troubled TimesRead More
I knew I had gone deep into researching the End Times when I came across the phrase “immanentize the eschaton,” which—forgive me—sounds like something Han Solo would do to fix the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon. The actual meaning of the phrase? To “…bring about the…the final, heaven-like stage of history.” It was the rallying cry …
What Do Christians Believe about the End Times?—for iBelieveRead More
We all have weird things we dislike. Some people don’t like mayonnaise. Some people don’t like dogs or synthetic fabric or Cincinnati. My pet peeve is the phrase “spiritual gifts”. I’m a little embarrassed that this phrase makes me cranky, especially because my church of thirty years talks about spiritual gifts A LOT. All our …
For twenty years after I graduated, I told people I’d had a good experience in my high school youth group. It was my first church experience, I’d formed my first faith community there, played an active role in leadership, met friends I still have connections to, and learned how to live out my faith. Then, …
4 Things I’ve Learned from My Own #MeToo Story: for iBelieveRead More
One of the main reasons I stay at my church is also one of the things I dislike most about it. This is it: it’s a large institution. I go to a biggish Presbyterian church. A “Presbyterian” church is literally a church governed by “presbyters”—Greek for elders, or leaders. That’s one of the big reasons …
This is going to make me sound like a misanthrope, but I hate greeting people on Sundays. At my church’s weekly service, a pastor gives the announcements, dismisses the children for Sunday school, and then cheerfully announces that we should greet the people around us in the pews. On the worst days, they give us …
When I Hate Greeting People on Sundays: For SheLovesRead More
I really wanted to get excited with Martha. But instead, I felt panicky. At the playground with our kids, she was telling me about a powerful sermon she heard with her husband. “The preacher pointed out that if every Christian family in the US were to adopt, there would be no children in the foster care system. …
Once upon a time, I told God to start sounding more like Cheryl Strayed. You might have heard of Strayed’s most famous book, Wild, which featured Reese Witherspoon chucking a hiking boot over a cliff. Strayed is also the advice columnist Sugar, originally on The Rumpus and now a podcast from WBUR. I love Strayed’s …
I used to hate praying. Let me qualify that statement so you don’t think I’m completely beyond redemption: I’ve always thought prayer was essential for faith. At the right moments—say, praying with other people—I loved laying hands on someone and lifting up their need to God. I loved when others prayed for me. I longed …
My small group started two weeks ago. I was surprised—really surprised—to feel excited about that. When I joined the group at the beginning of last year, I didn’t expect to stay more than a few months. I had my arms crossed rather tightly across my chest during the first meeting. And the second meeting. And the …
I Hated My Church’s Small Groups. And Then I Returned.Read More
Dear Awkward, Several years ago, our family got involved in fostering children with significant medical needs. The nudge to do so came from the teachings of our church…to love God and to love people. But, the very church family who encouraged us to jump in did not throw the life-preserver we expected. Fostering got hard. …
Best are those with minimal blood: perhaps poison, asphyxiation, or even strangulation. But even better is the off-camera death, where we don’t see the victim stalked by their killer. Oh, I like a murder that feels staged—and that’s also available on Netflix. My husband and I watch at least three murder mysteries a week, usually …
The day I realized my anxiety about the Bible wasn’t going away, I thought I’d completely placed my fretting in God’s hands. After settling in my green easy chair, I found the passage in Matthew for my new reading plan—the plan I saw as a new leaf in my spotty devotionals. I wanted to finally …
In college, I read the Bible every day. I prayed every day, writing out my prayers longhand in journals I decorated for the purpose. I did inductive Bible studies too, sometimes from a devotional guide, sometimes using the Observation, Interpretation, Life Application method. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? So spiritual. Except I hated it. Nearly …
In an ideal world, major Christian holidays wouldn’t fill me with self-doubt and alienation. Take this past season of Lent. I abstained from a lot of the apps on my phone and managed to use the Book of Common Prayer to pray through some of the holy days. But as usual, it was less than …
Dear Awkward, I am annoyed and irritated and bored at church. My husband loves it, but to me, our church feels like a big show: entertainment, choir performance, giveaways, and a superficial sermon. How do I look past the trappings and experience a deeper relationship with God? If other people love church so much am …
Can I confess something? I dislike Father Brown. G.K. Chesterton, august Christian apologist, whose prose helped convert C.S. Lewis, created the humble everypriest sleuth. In each story, the curate faces down the sharpest criminal minds in England and wipes the floor with them—with Christian charity, of course. I have no beef with the writing. In …
“Do We Not Bleed”, a book review for The Englewood Review of BooksRead More
Dear Awkward, I grew up in the heart of evangelical purity culture. When I was 13, my parents took me out to dinner and gave me a promise ring. Throughout high school and college, I heard boys would ask me to compromise my sexual standards. I was ready to tell them no, but no one ever …
Dear Awkward: I Had Sex…and then We Broke Up. Now What?Read More
