Trying to Set Ourselves Free

I’m tired. Aren’t you?

There’s a line in a Paramore song that goes like this:

“The truth never set me free, so I’ll do it myself.”

Paramore has already been mentioned once in this newsletter, which is a mere two months old, so my affection for Hayley Williams should be considered well documented. I say that because this essay isn’t about her or her band so much as it’s about what that line brings up in my spirit every single time I hear it.

Which is wow, if that isn’t the motto for my generation.

If you’re a subscriber, I figure you’re acquainted with me at least a little bit. But if not, then hello! I am an Elder Millennial (so sayeth Eliza Schlesinger). I was born smack dab in the middle of the eighties, just as the White Evangelical Machine was gearing up to dominate American Christianity and, therefore, the hearts and minds of kids like me who loved Jesus and desperately wanted to please Him. There were many of us, and early on in life we came to understand that the secret to this pleasing of God was to follow all the rules put forth by the Machine. Any deviation from said rules resulted in a shame-driven identity crisis.

(Oh, and also hell.)

I’m sort of jesting. Sort of not.

I was a happy kid with a lovely, happy life. Like all of us, I endured my fair share of trauma, but it was bolstered and softened by two devoted, affectionate parents, a solid handful of friends, and a sincere faith. I wouldn’t even know to call some of the things I experienced trauma until well into my adult years.

(Things like repeatedly being subjected to Rush Limbaugh’s complaints about the international grief over Princess Diana’s tragic death because she was “just a whore,” and quietly internalizing at age 12 that 1) being female meant my budding sexuality was forever a bad thing, and 2) any sexual sin I might commit in the future would render me immediately and irrevocably worthless. Fun times.)

What I’m saying is I get it.

We had a lot of bullshit fed to us as truth, sometimes straight from the mouths of good people we loved and trusted, and when we got to our own marriages and careers and families and faith, we saw for ourselves how those “truths” did not hold water. And it wounded us.

So here we are, exhausted, throwing up our hands and claiming that truth is unknowable even as we simultaneously declare our previous faith an illusion, perhaps taking note of the logical fallacy. (Or perhaps not.)

We are desperate for truth, but because we now see the harm done to us by the so-called faithful of our past, we are afraid to own any part of that faith at all.

We don’t have to be.

My husband and I have lived in Atlanta for fourteen years, our entire marriage. We both grew up in Georgia, but our hometowns didn’t have the diversity of culture and faith that’s found in a city this size. Naturally, neither did we. Legalism largely directed our way of thinking about how to walk in faith, and, in time, our views evolved into (hopefully?) more nuanced perspectives as we came face-to-face with people and places unlike any we had ever known before. Sometimes, we were encouraged by this; other times, it felt like our world was being upended.

As a mother, I am relieved by this evolution even when I remember the hard days. I think about who I was in my twenties, the rigid way in which I viewed the world at that time, and am glad for the growing pains. The Wendi of fourteen years ago would have passed on a way of thinking about God to her children that, today, grieves me.

A changing life, and a changing faith, is a good thing. It’s evidence of growth. We should be asking questions and getting curious. We should be moving away from the harmful, distorted language of our adolescent years and towards a better, more loving approach…to everything. You won’t find me in disagreement with that line of thinking.

But this is where Millennial Christians have sort of lost the plot: Curiosity is not the ultimate endgame. Where our questions go in the search for truth, and to whom we direct them, matters a lot. And just because God cannot be fully understood does not mean we have no truth on which we can stand.

When we act as though the simple pursuit of knowledge is the only real good, when we declare there is nothing in the world that can actually be known for sure beyond our own personal feelings on a matter, we end up with truth as a perpetually moving target. And that’s no truth at all.

G.K. Chesterton, the English author and Christian apologetic, wrote,

“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

So much of what is noble and wondrous and lovely on this planet is a result of curious minds who kept on going, undeterred by logic, opinions, or even the Church. Jesus was like that. He was a model for us to seek and ask questions. In fact, He often frustrated people because of that very thing. Even further, Jesus often frustrated people because He always led their questions back to Himself. There was a very specific, divinely-gifted purpose to their curiosity (and ours) that we cannot risk ignoring:

Our search to come and know what is True is so we can search and come to know Christ. In Him, we will find everything.

Like Jesus’ disciples, and His enemies, we cannot discover truth outside of who Jesus is because He remains—even now, especially now—after all our years of deconstructing from bad theology, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Our wandering, then, is meant to lead us both through and to.

I’m a question-asker by nature. I’m the person looking up a detailed fact sheet about the actors whilst watching a movie. I’m the amateur genealogist in the family. I’m the writer working to make sense of all the questions in my head by putting them down on paper. I love to know things, and I love to get things right.

But, often, I don’t. (Which you knew already.)

For years, I kinda missed Jesus altogether because my quest to be right, reinforced by the plethora of Machine-made material at my disposal, was considered primary. Being right was as good as salvific. Jesus seemed almost unnecessary as long as I didn’t mess up.

Of course, none of this was explicitly said to me. It was just the snowball effect of a conservative Christian movement intent on gaining back what it viewed as lost souls and lost (often political) ground.

Now, thirty years later, the True Love Waiters are all grown up…and instead of successfully freeing ourselves from damaging theology, we are turning to another side of the very same coin:

Being right—that is, claiming that truth is only personal and never universal—is still our idol. It doesn’t look like the pages of a Brio¹ magazine anymore, but it masquerades for us just the same.

God very purposefully wants to be known. We see this in Scripture all the way from Genesis to Revelation, and we see it most explicitly in the Person of Christ. He came here, embodied in flesh, to be in relationship with us. He had a mother and a father, siblings and friends. He had a hometown with neighbors and a cultural heritage from which to draw on as He grew and moved through the world. This was not a God who wanted to be kept at arms’ length, nor a God who wanted to confuse us further. This was a God who longed—not out of lack but out of supernatural love for us—to be recognized. And, eventually, when Jesus’ friends demanded to know God, as we demand to know God, He answered them simply,

“Don’t you know me…even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9, NIV, emphasis mine)

I rejoice over the stunning simplicity of this statement after decades of walking in convoluted, wonky theology. And I mourn over the ways we confuse Jesus as less than our Savior and minimize His divinity until He’s just some cool boss dude we admire.

Looking back at Jesus’ question to His friend, Phillip, I imagine the gentle frustration in which He might have spoken those words.

Don’t you know Me, even now?

We don’t need to leave our curiosity at the door in order to finally experience a faith that flourishes. It is essential, in fact, that we do not. But it’s a false equivalancy to say that because God can’t be fully known here, and because there are so many things we still have questions about, that we cannot, therefore, recognize Jesus for who He really is.

He told us who He is. Many, many times.

I challenge you, friend, to hold fast to Christ. We have a lot of healing to do, but these wounds we bear were not His doing. They were the result of a Body doing what bodies sometimes do: hurt.

Let us not confuse broken people with the Great Physician. We can cling to Him in our doubts and let the rest go for now. He is steadfast and faithful, with you in this very moment,

grieving the rejection you experienced at church.

seeing your body, with its scars, stretch marks, and tender flesh, as His own.

speaking comfort to your hurts and fears.

celebrating your courage as you wrestle with doubt.

Jesus is better than the story we were first told, and He is a much more capable Savior than the religious figures of our childhoods or the Instagram accounts we follow for enlightenment. He is the Story.

Don’t be fooled into thinking the power that He holds is the same sort of power we grasp for, or that it will be wielded by Him in the same clumsy, misunderstood way in which we use it. You are safe with Jesus, as you should have always been safe with anyone who claimed to represent Him.

They don’t get the last word here.

He does.

And His word is this, always this:

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1, ESV)

1. Fun fact: My first ever published piece was an article for the Brio revamp SUSIE Magazine in 2009. It was titled, “Does True Love Really Wait?” I’m still pretty proud of what I wrote in that piece, even if the title now makes me want to punch a wall.

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Reading in The Nook

For the light-hearted rom com lover who really likes science, grab this.

For anyone who enjoyed The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (which was everyone?) here’s the male version.

For a great parenting resource, you’re gonna want this.

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Links Lately

1. A question to consider: “How on earth was I supposed to train and support my kids about phone use and screen time if my own behavior & phone use is completely out of control?”

2. The womanly art of losing ourselves: “There comes a time in life when a lack of cares is its own sort of burden.”

3. If you’re looking for straightforward answers:

   “We’re women who want to know who God is and how He answers our toughest questions.”