This Little Light of Mine

I’m terrified.  I’ll just get that out in the open to begin with.  There are all kinds of reasons why this is scary… but none of them are good enough to keep me from going forward.  And so this crazy, unexpected, surprising journey that Christ invites me on continues to move forward in yet another way I would never have anticipated… going public with my secret blog.

It was about a year ago that I began to silently lament what seems to be a lack of feminine presence in the online world of the missional church.  I especially noted that each of the blog links listed on the Ecclesia Equipper Blog belong to men.  Take note, I knew better than to lament out loud because I knew the response to my lament would be something along the lines of… ‘well, start a blog then.’  How could I respond that I had already started a blog… but hardly ever wrote on it, and kept it so well hidden that it was impossible to find. 

And so I started asking God why I was so reluctant to let anybody know I had been thinking about blogging… and I realized a few things that were holding me back.  There were more than three, but these emerged at the top of the list:

1)   Pressure – I feel a bit like if I attempt to process my life of leading as a woman, my voice will somehow be expected to represent other women whose journeys are entirely different from mine.  I never wanted to take up the cause of women in the church or to somehow lead a movement… and I tend to want to run away anytime I begin to feel like this is expected of me. 

2)   Time and Mutli-tasking – I am a woman who does a lot of things.  I am called, not only to church ministry, but also to mothering… and not just to mothering, but also homeschooling.  I don’t have a lot of time to read other people’s blogs… so it seems pretty outrageously arrogant to think people will read mine… and if someone does read my blog and comments… how will I find the time to actually interact?  And do I blog about mothering, or about homeschooling, or about preaching, discipleship, or a mixture of all of those?  Does it need to be focused? 

3)   Fear – what if I say something really stupid?  And here’s where I put the pressure from #1 on myself – without anybody doing it for me.  There are some men who already view women as overly emotional, hysterical, irrational, sentimental, and unfit to do theology or lead a church… what if I say something ridiculous that somehow confirms this stereotype? 

So as I mulled over these stumbling blocks, a funny thing happened.  A song popped into my head… “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”  I remembered singing that song in mixed company when I was a little girl.  I never thought about my ‘little light’ being somehow not worthy of shining because I was a girl and not a boy, didn't worry about what others might think of my light, and didn't think about messing it up.  We all had a little light… and we were letting it shine. 

And so, here I am, despite my fears and my insecurities, and my anxiety about pressure and time, letting this little light of mine shine… and hoping and praying that this blog will somehow reflect the light of Christ.

Magical Thinking

In the last few weeks, I’m beginning to see some buried tendencies toward co-dependency and it’s starting to shed some light on my constant habit of reflection.  From my earliest days, I can remember a constant state of looking back… at all the things I should have done differently.  Sometimes, it was coming up with the perfect thing to say long after the opportunity to say it had passed.  Other times, it was changing an action to produce an entirely different result.  Whatever the case, things always turned out much differently, much better, in my reflection than they had in my reality.

Our greatest strengths are often our greatest weakness.  This habit of constant reflection has proven this over and over.  I consider this habit of reflection to be a great strength… because I actually DO learn from my mistakes.  I am intentional about going back and making up for wrongs, asking for forgiveness, making things right… restitution.  And, by God’s unfathomable grace, I actually change my ways and act differently at the next opportunity… repentance. 

But I am also enslaved by this ‘morbid introspection.’  I beat myself up for my mistakes… I replay the errors, dissecting all that went wrong and inserting all the correct responses.  I question my decisions, wondering if I will regret them.  And this is the world I live in… never good enough.  Co-dependency psychiatrists call it ‘magical thinking’ and say it’s a desperate attempt to fix what went wrong in my childhood.

As I face my childhood, there are some things that still hurt… things that I have a hard time calling by name…  and these wounds run deep.  I’m beginning to recognize that these wounds have been robbing my joy for almost 40 years…

It’s time for the tide to turn.  The only 'magical' thinking stands in setting my mind on 'Thy kingdom come'… let me live in the lightness of now and shed the heaviness of ‘what were you thinking?’.

Equality - do I believe it?

I just finished reading a whole lot of books about women in leadership in the church. The reasoning behind my rush of research was because I have finally been convicted of the need to 'land' somewhere in this debate. For years, I've been content to not know what I think about women leading alongside men in the church... but now, as I'm being put forth as a pastoral candidate at our church, I finally needed to decide. Is it OK? Is it biblical to call a woman into a pastoral role? Or this role reserved for men?
As long as I didn't know, I didn't have to risk the possibility of being told that I will not be a pastor. As long as I wasn't certain that the call that I've heard was also confirmed in scripture, then I could deal with the possibility that our community may not be ready to accept a woman. But, as Geoff told me, I was simply resisting an opportunity for sanctification. I was refusing to move forward on the road of faithfulness... and so I had to decide.
So I went away for 24 hours and I read and I prayed. And I was really surprised to find that the old idea of women being inferior beings actually has a root in my soul. I was reading Sarah Sumner's book, Men and Women in the Church, when I was overwhelmed by the reality that I have truly believed that I should not be in a leadership position because I am actually inferior to men. I know I'm not alone in that unconscious belief... because I see it manifested in the way many of us, as women, function in our relationships with men in the church.
But the Lord is gracious... and He is helping me to experientially inhabit the truth that I am equal to men, equally created to bear his image, equally called to be a steward of the earth, and equally called to know Christ and to make Him known. And that is the first step on the road to understanding my role in leadership...