This post is adapted from a talk I gave on the theme Anticipation vs. Expectation in September 2017, at William & Mary Intervarsity’s New Student Retreat.
1 John 4:12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
If you asked me right now where I’ll be in five years, I can say “hopefully Paris”, but I honestly have no idea. I don’t know if I’m going to be working in art museums, attending grad school, being an au pair, or event planning, or— the list rattles on. At so many points in my life, I have been sure of the next step— until it comes and is wildly different from anything I imagined.
God continuously wrecks my plans. God imagines a world so much bigger and wilder than anything I can picture, a world more fearsome and beautiful and full than my wildest dreams and yet, I have spent so much of my life terrified of God’s plans. I ignored God for the majority of my junior year of high school because I was sure God would replace my hopes and dreams with new desires; that God would make me want to live in the suburbs, have 2.5 kids, go to bed by 10. As an enneagram 4, yes, this was the worst-case scenario I could come up with.
Honestly, I’m still a bit terrified of that, but I have so many touchstone moments I keep close to my heart for when I start distrusting how God feels towards me, why I was created. When I first gave this talk in September 2017, I felt like my world had fallen apart around my shoulders. I was standing on the precipice of sophomore year of college, a year that wrung me out to dry in more ways than one. I had no clue what lay ahead of me, but now, December of my junior year, I can look back and see how God held me. I can see the relationships restored in my life, I can see my own imago dei more clearly, I can see the Love that surrounds me. I can hear the truth in these words I spoke over myself with no knowledge of the future.
I am only able to do so because God has been demolishing and rebuilding my perception of God and faith for the past year and a (bit more than) half.
I grew up in a Christian home and had a very strong personal faith going off to college. I expected that I would always have this strong faith. I expected that the only people who struggled with doubt in college were the kids who had a lukewarm, nominal faith, who just believed because of their parents. I expected that God would alway be visibly present in my life. I expected God would protect my heart. I expected that I would always find the Bible to be a source of comfort.
One Monday evening in late March of my freshman year, God started wrecking those expectations. I had gotten about three hours of sleep the night before, and was sitting in the basement of our library, reading an article for my art history class about the treatment of Eve and Mary in the medieval church. Unsurprisingly, all of the medieval male theologians were clamouring for their turn to bash on Eve. I rolled my eyes and pressed on (amazing how going to church every Sunday inures you to patriarchal nonsense), until they started referencing Bible verses. I figured they were twisting them, and then I read them myself.
“But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God…For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.” 1 Corinthians 11: 3, 7-9
“Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing— if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” 1 Timothy 2: 9-15
Etc.
You didn’t have to do any twisting to make these Bible verses sickening to me. I started tearing up in the library. I felt like vomiting. I felt like I was being told by the book I had staked my life on that I was made in the image of man, not God, that my modesty was equal to a man’s prayer life, that my submission was valued more than my heart, and that my salvation lay in whether or not I would have kids. I couldn’t reconcile this with the Jesus I had known my whole life. Either the Jesus I knew was false, or the book that introduced me to him was.
The following week, I could not stop thinking about these verses. I lost my appetite. I felt God loved me less because I was a girl. I wrote a lot of angry notes in my Bible app. At Intervarsity’s worship service that Friday, a friend asked me how I was doing and I gave the typical college reply: “oh fine, just tired, a lot of schoolwork”. I then proceeded to sob through the entire service— so you know, obviously not fine.
I remember telling someone that all I wanted to do was dive into a deep pool and just keep falling and falling and falling.
I followed the steps the church had told me my whole life. I reached out to all the right authority figures, to my surrounding faith community, but the more I talked to people about it, the more people told me not to worry, that some verses are just “culturally influenced”! One person jokingly asked me where my head covering was— because these verses were so clearly a non-issue, simply a joking matter. How silly of me, a woman, to be disturbed by the implications of the patriarchy in my faith!
This wasn't reassuring. These same types of people had told me my whole life how we were not supposed to pick and choose from the Bible, how we had to accept it as a whole body of God’s words, how we could not dismiss hard things as culturally influenced— and then they turned around and did!
This led me to wonder if I could dismiss this as culturally influenced, what else could I dismiss? What was the basis for declaring any of it Truth? Where was the authority?
I couldn't open my Bible without feeling physically ill at the thought of what I would find. What kind of a god would discriminate because of gender? If that was the god of the Bible, who had I believed in my whole life? Had I believed in anyone? Was there even a god? My appetite disappeared for weeks. I felt unrooted, anchorless, lost at sea. I didn’t realize how much I prayed until every time I went to, there was a hole in my heart and my stomach dropped down to the floor. I pray constantly (thank you for the trees glowing! Help me want to be kinder!), because I have too many thoughts, and so I just direct them at God.
But when you don’t think god is there or you think there’s a God but he’s crappy and values you less than people with male genitalia, you’re less inclined to thank him for trees.
It's heartbreaking to feel like you can't trust your best friend, and even more to think your best friend wasn’t ever there at all, that you had been deluding yourself.
Looking back now though, I can see where God was in those moments freshman year: the moments where I was sure there wasn’t a god, or that God’s nature was certainly not Love. I can see God when I was laying on the floor of a classroom crying because every good and perfect thing in my life was so clearly from God, but I didn't think he was real. I can see him there because I had someone to cry with. I can see him when I was yelling in the English building about how the church has hurt and continues to hurt people in the name of Christ and if that is Christ then I want nothing to do with him! Because, see, he didn't let me yell alone. People came along side me and yelled with me and sat with me and cried with me. My community Loved me.
The rest of freshman year I asked questions constantly. I was honest with people about how much didn’t make sense in my life. I continued to pray in hopes that I was praying to someone. At an Intervarsity retreat that summer, I was sobbing, completely overwhelmed with God’s love and vastness. One of the talks mentioned John the Baptist doubting God, and I sat down in the back, rereading that passage and weeping.
When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”
Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”
As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:
“‘I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.’
Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he …And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come.
Matthew 11
See when John doubted the divinity of Christ, Jesus didn't condemn him. He didn't rebuke him. He spoke words of affirmation over him. I couldn’t see how he would use me as an Intervarsity small group leader, with all my doubts and fears, but he kept repeating that he was big enough to figure it out. He reminded me that he called me to be a small group leader, knowing I would start doubting. I realized how absolutely ridiculous it was of me to think that my doubts surprised or overwhelmed the creator of the universe.
That summer, I read a lot of memoirs by Christians dealing with doubt/hurt from the church. I listened to a bunch of the Liturgists podcast. I looked at sunshine on trees and the ocean and swirling masses of people in Times Square.
All were helpful.
All kept repeating that no step in faith is wasted.
I was given the image of a fallow field, where nothing is currently growing but the soil is being replenished.
God is at work in me—
He moves through people and books and podcasts and nature and you and me.
No collection of human words or art or thought can ever fully sum up God. The creation cannot recreate the Creator. What we believe about God is a facet of God. This Person that we call God is so huge and vast and mind boggling, but he also got blisters from his sandals and drank wine and had to go to the bathroom.
That is why I love Jesus.
He is bigger than I can fathom and yet he is fully embodied, fully human, alive, right now as we speak.
I've come to the belief that moving towards God and trying my best to follow his commandment, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God, is what he is looking for. He is not looking for an automaton who will get all the answers right on a biblical comprehension test or who will love everyone perfectly all the time. He can do that already.
He’s looking for me and he’s looking for you— just as you are, fully yourself in every way, he wants you.
I still have so so so many questions about the nature of God, the relevance and accuracy of the Bible, how to best live out my faith— but I know God is there and I know he loves me, fully, even the messy bits, especially the messy bits, and I know that doing my best to get close to him and love as he loves will not lead me astray. Faith is a lifetime journey.
I will never figure everything out, but that doesn’t mean I’m not determined to get to know my God better.
Once I had no firm expectations for God because everything had been wrecked, the rug pulled from under my feet, I started to see God again. I see God in the other people on similar journeys to mine who invite me to join them, either in real life or through their creative output. I see God through the people who aren’t at similar points in their life but who listen to my questions and fear and confusion and don’t invalidate me. I see God in the constant but always-changing ocean. I see God through every instance of Love extended to me. God is there, bigger than we can comprehend, but I invite you to join me in Love, and in loving others like God, for God’s sake.
1 John 4:12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.