When was the last time you felt free to explore: an idea, a new city, a relationship, a different career?
Some seasons of my life have felt so insecure that I couldn’t help but hold on tightly to what I knew, or believed, would keep me safe. Even if I felt deep down that what I was holding on to no longer fit, letting go and opening up to something new felt one-thousand times scarier.
I remember vividly the weight and struggle that I felt during my first year of marriage, trying to understand another human – watching values clash and crash, feeling incredibly alone and afraid, not sure what was normal and why this season of melding lives was never talked about by my friends or parents. That year, and the few months following, was a time of pure survival. I grabbed on to what I could with what little strength I had and let those things carry me as the birth of our new relationship was forming. Two months after what felt like a thick fog that I would never see beyond, I found myself accepting a new job that I could tell would stretch me.
The job I had in the midst of the turmoil was with a small organization where it was known that I was struggling and where I was given space to grieve and hide and let myself adjust to this new territory I found myself navigating. I remember when I told one of my teammates that I found a new job she congratulated me, not because I was moving up the career ladder, but because I felt safe enough to try something new. That idea has stuck with me and I found myself experiencing it again last night.
I’ve been on a journey of deconstruction for the last several years, a term that even I want to gag at because of how many from my generation have found themselves lost with more anger and eye-rolling than faith and a hope of something more. My deconstruction has left me angry a lot of times and wanting nothing to do with the evangelical roots that I grew up with – the loud music, the lights, the dressing up on Sundays, the guilt, the facade, the terminology used to shame and box people in. In the process, however, I’ve found myself throwing it all out – cringing at the term “Christian” or even rejecting the name of Jesus, finding zero hope or joy in the words of the Bible, categorizing any terms I associated with in my prior faith to be inauthentic platitudes.
But last night, Christmas Day, I found myself reaching for Rachel Held Evans’ Searching for Sunday – a book I had tried reading a couple of times over the last several years but couldn’t get past the Christian language that made me cringe. I found myself curled up next to my t.v. fire (our house is too tiny to have a real fire) reading Rachel’s words and for the first time in years I felt free enough to relate to her stories and experiences. The walls that wanted nothing to do with religion came down enough to where I could let myself find fellowship with a woman whose life on earth ceased to exist before I felt free enough to join her on the journey.
But I feel a shimmer of hope to explore what was, what is, and what is to come as I become more free.
Penned By Katrina 