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Friday, February 25, 2005
Why another online journal?
The Lord has been working in me lately. A lot.
I can't really say "it all started with...", because, well, it all started before the foundation of time, when you really get down to it, and God has been working through events my entire life to bring me into first any relationship at all with him, and then to bring me closer and mold me into the woman He wants me to be. I am, like every follower of Jesus (and every other person, really) a work in progress. However. The most recent chain of events which have brought me to this point where I can feel myself being drawn nearer to Him started with, of all things, a really offensive cartoon about homeschooling, and my response to it. Some of the people who commented on my response left links to their journals, and those journals had links to OTHER journals, and just... wow. These are women who are not afraid to put it all out there for Jesus, and who defend the gospel eloquently and with humor, and who also are likeable people in their own right. I think I developed about four friend-crushes in the space of two hours.
Now, I've been a Christian for twelve years this month. I went through the standard phase at the beginning of my Christian walk when I was really passionate and really in love with Jesus and really vocal about it and also really clueless about how to be anything but very heavy-handed with the gospel. I was everything that annoys non-Christians about Christians, really, with very sharp edges and very little understanding of other positions. Fast-forward ten or eleven years and basically I had the opposite set of problems. I had allowed myself to be immersed in the world so much and for so long, and I was out of the Word, and basically my Christian walk was a façade of church and Bible-study attendance and teaching my children about Jesus, over a morass of uncertainty and apathy. I wasn't witnessing, not just because of the standard fear of rejection but because I had honestly fallen into a trap of not really believing that it was important. I was essentially giving lip-service to being a Christian. Well, not exactly, because my life (from a distance, at least, if you didn't look too closely at how I spent my time and what I read and what I watched and the words that would slip out of my mouth) was also "on the straight and narrow". I was never unfaithful to my husband even in thought; I never stopped going to church or doing my weekly Bible study. But I was at first appalled, and then later I shrugged, at how infrequently I opened the Bible when it didn't directly involve one of those two events. I had no private devotions or prayer time. My online journal was full of posts that bordered on disrespect for God and certainly didn't give any solid impression of myself as a woman who was devoted to Him -- because I wasn't.
You know, in reading over that, it sounds a lot harsher than it was. There was nothing harsh about it. It was all very soggy really. Squishy. Undefined. My whole spiritual life was like wet newspaper.
Then last fall I was "roped into" going to a ladies' retreat. My mom paid for me to go; I assumed she was going as well, and then found out that indeed I was going to go off on my own with some near-strangers from our church to spend three days with a lot of TOTAL strangers, worshiping Jesus and learning about him. Now remember, I had my façade in place, although I think those closest to me knew something of the wet-newspaper-consistency mess that was underneath it, so this wasn't something along the lines of Let's Send Rachel Off To Get Right With God. I think my mom saw it as a way for me to get closer to God, because as I said I think she figured that I was not at the top of my game spiritually speaking, but I don't think she knew how riddled with doubt I was, or how very squishy my Christian walk had become. She just figured that if I were there alone (and if you know me at all you know that I do not mix well. I don't mind being ALONE alone, in fact I like it from time to time, what mother doesn't? but one of the worst places for me to be, comfort-wise, is in a large group of people where I am not friends with anybody, but everyone else there is friends with someone else. THAT is the worst possible kind of alone there is, to someone who had the experiences in elementary school and junior high that I did) it would throw me into God's arms pretty hard.
And it did. When I first got there I was nearly despondent; it was exactly as I had pictured it would be. Three hundred well-kept, stylishly-dressed, put-together women, calling out HELLO!! and It's so great to SEE you!! to each other, and then (homely, unattractive, awkward -- these words come FLOODING to mind when I am in this kind of situation) me, wandering around alone, making occasional snippets of meaningless conversation with the handful of women with whom I was acquainted, when I happened to encounter a chattering group of them. My paper journal from those first few hours is filled with words like "exile" and "reject". Then we went to the first evening's worship/teaching session -- and God reached down his arms and hugged me to him in a way that still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it. The rest of the weekend was amazing. I was no less alone physically -- I didn't miraculously turn around and make a dozen new best pinky-swear friends with whom I meet regularly for tea, or anything like that. But I spent the next forty hours or so in a kind of communion with God that I hadn't experienced in years. I couldn't go twenty minutes without crying. God revealed Himself to me in ways that brought me back trembling to worship at His feet and thank Him for my salvation and His love for me. I spent my alone time reading the Bible (and Persuasion too, OK, I was nearing the end of my annual Jane Austen re-read, but a LOT of the time it was the Bible), and praying. I won't lie to you and say that I never felt lonely again that weekend. I did. But God used that loneliness in a mighty way.
The problem was that the retreat ended. I couldn't spend the rest of my life in that painful kind of situation that sent me running to God until I was so happily out of breath -- nor would I want to. But coming back home took a bit of the glory out of the experience. I was back to the same life, the same situations, and it became easier and easier as the days went by to slough off the defined edges I'd regained at the retreat, and slide back toward sogginess. The doubts didn't return, I'll say that much, but over the course of months from then till now, I found it easier and easier to slip into old habits rather than stand out for Jesus. I'll be honest and say that much of it is simple fear -- that people won't like me, mostly. I want my online friends (some of whom are people I have known at one point or another in real life, while others aren't) to think I'm funny and clever, not to see me as one of those boring judgmental "born-agains". If I'd been confronted by it, I wouldn't have put it in those words exactly; I'd have sugar-coated it with things like "not wanting to alienate people with whom I might be able to share the gospel" -- until the last couple of days, reading these other journals by these Christian women, when I have been having a different sort of spiritual renewal -- one where I honestly assess my situation and find it lacking indeed. No fireworks, just a flashlight that shines into the corners and shows up all my spiderwebs.
So, in answer to the question that is the title of this post, this journal is going to be a chronicle of my movement back toward a walk that is truly "in newness of life". By the grace of God, I know I can do it. "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)
