Purpose yourself to become perfect at failing.
So you can remember that you are never actually any of your own names.
So you can remember that you are free.
You are no more and no less
than every single one of your rebirths,
and you can't be afraid to light it all on fire.
-- Jamie Lee Finch
I listened with intensity. My palms started sweating. My heart beat a bit faster. Warmth enveloped me. Every word she spoke landed in a place I hadn't nurtured for fear of total obliteration.
But she spoke them. And I was home.
Being a Southern Baptist has never sat right with me. The narrowness of the ideals, the convoluted messages, the judgment of ourselves and others was something I could not sign up for. I always felt disconnected and estranged. I was living something I did not believe. But my questions remained dormant.
Enter Nadia Bolz-Weber. My friend introduced her to me. Little did she know she had just started a nuclear war in my soul.
From the time I was little, I was told I was a sinner. I was given the message loud and clear that I was inherently bad and needed to confess repeatedly for my shortcomings. I was told the world was lost, save our small religious group. I was encouraged to witness to my "lost" friends. I memorized scripture. I prayed without ceasing. I denied myself. By all accounts, I was a Christian who was saved from the fiery furnace because I prayed the Sinner's Prayer. I had this under lock.
I married a man who "became a Christian" while we were dating. That box was checked, so surely our marriage would be wonderful. When he slept on the couch the night of our honeymoon and I cried myself to sleep, the nagging feeling that I had made a grave error became my companion. For three long years I read the Bible. I wept. I memorized scripture. I read books about being a Christian wife. I did Bible Studies about being a virtuous woman.
And filled my journals with anguish.
I prayed consistently that God would give me a clear sign...that I was to stay or I was to go. I lived in limbo for three years until one morning I woke up and clearly saw that the door was open. I walked through it and shot up my middle finger to the words in the Bible that some saw fit to repeat to me...
"God hates divorce."
Being a twice divorced daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher who got pregnant with my beautiful boy out of wedlock is a hilarious combination. Not only was I a woman, but now I was divorced. My chances of rising in leadership in my church were pathetically fantastical. So I took my sad, scorned soul and sat in the back. Mostly seething.
Nadia opened the box of the dormant questions. They flooded my soul and carried away all my maddeningly damaging narratives. How radically life changing would it have been for me had I been given the message that I was inherently good from the beginning? How life changing it would have been if I had been told that I didn't need a Savior to make me good...I only needed a Savior to save me from the false story I told myself...that I was bad, broken, incomplete, crippled, damaged, flawed, unlovable, lacking, feeble.
The truth is..
You are good. You have always been good. Right from the beginning.
And I'm sorry if anyone told you otherwise.
This breath, these hands, those feet, that smile, those ears, that heart, this heart, this beating heart, this breath...it's good. It's all good. So so so good.
You are loved. You are so loved. You are lovable.
You have been working so hard. I don't have to know how to know that it's true.
You are precious. You are not a mistake.
You are very on purpose.
You are not broken. You never were.
I'm sorry that you might've thought that.
I'm sorry anyone made you think that.
That wasn't about you.
But you, you are enough.
You are totally enough.
You don't have to earn your enoughness.
You don't have to grovel for value, for love, for goodness.
You already have it.
You already are it.
You are loved.
You. Are. Loved.
And you ... you are good. So, so good.
Hilary McBride
The Liturgist Podcast