Who Am I? Questions of identity outside of community

Who Am I? Questions of identity outside of community

The women of Women Talking were born and raised in their colony. Every part of their life was regulated by their faith. How they ate, related to others, and their eternal soul. That was not my experience. I chose to join my community as a young person right out of college.

Even as a child I felt called by God. Call it prayer or talking to the sun, I held conversations in my head, sometimes audible, asking for help, guidance, begging for love, mercy. I had a chaotic childhood where I constantly wondered about my place in the family. It’s hard to reduce into words how I felt, much like an outsider. I do not believe anyone in my family “got” me. I was certainly lonely. I yearned for acceptance and was open to fairies, to a make-believe. I imagined a world on the underside of the real one that was perhaps more real than the one we can see and hear, touch, taste, and feel. That there was something MORE to this life. Thus, even as a young girl I was a seeker, a contemplative, on a spiritual journey to find God, solace, love.

Good thing I didn’t turn to boys, alcohol, or drugs. I might have been a prime candidate, but I always thought it involved body and soul in a religious faith. I was always interested in those who did deep dives and entered convents or monasteries, who wore a costume/collar/head covering. I wanted to identify, be part of something much bigger, corporate. In middle school for career day where we prepared papers of what we might want to be when we grew up, I pulled books off the shelf at the school library about nuns, priests, Buddhist acrolytes. About pilgrimage, by hard work gaining paradise, some kind of redemption.

At age fifteen I gave my heart to Christ.

It was easy enough. It was Christmas Day and there was the usual disappointment after unwrapping presents to find that I was still the same person. New stuff didn’t change me or my circumstances. I was still lonely and miserable. I went out for a run—likely to lose some of the calories I consumed from a big dinner and loads of chocolate and Christmas stocking candy. It was a time where many young people were trying to find the One Way, where a new generation wanted the Real Thing. Coke had a commercial about coming together. Flower Power. The Vietnam War was raging, but I had little idea what the conflict was really about. My father talked of a domino effect and Communism. There was also a Cold War going on and that, again, didn’t make much sense to me. But this I did know: Jesus had just made the cover of Time Magazine and there were rumblings of folks tuning in and turning on to Christ. At church camp after a field trip to the mall to see the movie, Jesus Christy Superstar, I asked a camp counselor how I might find Jesus. His answer was confusing.

He’ll come to you when you least suspect it.

Now at this distance, I can read that kind of response as someone talking through their butt. He had no idea. My mind raced through many scenarios—all of which met the criteria of Jesus stumbling upon me when I least suspected it. I concluded that would be with my pants down using the bathroom. I was sure Christ would come for me at that time. Highly unwelcomed.

So for probably a year I always had one eye out for Him in the most compromising of circumstances. Finally I got tired of waiting or being on the look-out, actually afraid of an encounter, and decided to instigate the meeting. While out running, I simply said (maybe out loud): Jesus come into my heart. I might have been told to use those words, I don’t know. I didn’t know anything. Nothing happened, except this—

I decided I was changed. I told myself this was it. The moment, and from this time forward I’d say this was when I accepted Christ. It was a mental thing, where hopefully the cart would lead the horse. If I believe then belief would conjure up the reality. Perhaps, I figured, feelings are not what gives faith wings, but the commitment behind it.

I was all in.

I found a church; actually I discovered a grotto, a Jesus café in the basement of the church annex, where on Saturday nights there was free coffee/herbal teas, snacks available to purchase, live music, and a magazine called Cornerstone out on the counter. Always folks were available to pray with you in the prayer room, a closet separated by beads instead of a door. I spent equal time on my knees in the prayer closet as well on the cushions scattered around the basement listening to Jesus bands.

First Baptist Church of Centerville, Ohio was an anomaly. It didn’t easily fit the theological boundaries of what a Baptist Church should look like. As well as being the Jesus Movement there was also a Charismatic Movement, meaning there was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of gifts, such as speaking in tongues. First Baptist was spirit-filled, and so was I. It might have been all gibberish, but, again, it was a mental thing, I had to think beyond, let go of what things seemed and reach into spiritual realms, to a place where foolishness made sense. 1 Corinthians 1:27: but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.

Yes, I was young and dumb, but I also knew that in the world there were all kinds of power trips. I saw it at my high school. The popular kids versus the freaks versus the nerds versus the jocks. A kind of hierarchy that made my life miserable and also made no sense. Life is more than this I wanted to shout. There was so much I didn’t understand, so many mysteries, I was afraid and at the same time wanted to dwell there, in the hidden things. Going back to my first inklings of God and spirituality: behind the visible is the invisible. This life and then an alternative life. We live in one place while at the same time longing for a parallel world. I already was living as a stranger in my family, I would continue as an exile searching for a home.

NEXT POST about finding a community, a group of people who “got” me.

First Baptist Church, Centerville Ohio