Uneasy Footing

Years after joining a very conservative Lutheran Church, which in itself was sort of an act of defiance, I'm still struggling to find my place there and sitting with uncomfortable conflicting thoughts. This is where I hope to put some of those thoughts, to untangle them and figure them out. It is not a place where I will try to do good writing or be persuasive or anything of the sort. It will be a moderately embarrassing journey for me, I'm sure. 

That said...

Welcome, I guess?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning about love

Image
This morning when I was walking and praying for my friend, my mind started to wander. Usually I feel bad about this and try to stay focused, but today I didn't quite catch it before it really took off. I was remembering something I felt when my firstborn child was a baby. As a stay at home new mom, I had a lot of time to think, and my postpartum brain was full of abstract thoughts and feelings. Probably about 99% of these were about my baby. I couldn't believe how much I loved this tiny being I had grown inside of my body. I couldn't believe it was possible to love someone so much. All I wanted was to protect and nurture this child, to give him all the love he needed and more. He was a difficult infant for whom we really had to work to calm down, but I didn't mind. I was so in love with this baby, I would do anything for him, and I didn't want anyone around who didn't love him that much.  He was just nine months old when I found out that I was pregnant again. Fo...
Continue reading »

There's the rub

 When I told some of my friends about  the Good Dad I had seen,  and how it made me cry, it went the way these things usually go: We talk about the lack of Good Dad examples in our lives. We talk about how, when we see these things, we get happy and weepy at the same time.  And then we talk about what an extremely low bar that is, and we get angry. I wish that wasn't the case, but feelings just ARE. All you can do is acknowledge them and figure out why they are. We wish the default was decency. We wish the default was being loving and giving. We wish it wasn't so shocking to see a Good Dad. What can be done? How can we appreciate the Good Dads without accepting the status quo of Most Dudes Sucking So Much? How do we expect goodness from men and raise good men? How do we not turn into bitter man-hating harpies?
Continue reading »

The fallacy of self-reliance, self-love and healing from within

These messages are everywhere. We are so proud and strong, right? Wow, women who do it all and have healthy attitudes and lifestyles and are somehow humble! Everyone is striving for this and yet what I hear from my female friends is, I'm exhausted. This is an impossible standard and I can't keep going. I wish that for one day, just one, someone else would take care of me.  This week these things are getting to me. How does one try to take good care of their body without the feeling that they need to get better because they are so unhealthy, so hideous, so disgusting? How does one try to be beautiful and virtuous on the inside when they know the truth about what's inside? When "within" one feels... Crazy? Incompetent? Self-obsessed? Undeserving? Rotten?  I can't "love" myself or heal myself. I am too broken to do that.  And that needs to be okay. Woman. It's okay for you to need something from the outside. We need God. God made it this way. We nee...
Continue reading »