Shifting

I never did learn how to drive a stick shift. I tried once and failed miserably and vowed to love automatic transmissions from that day forward. I have, however, been a passenger in vehicles where I was able to observe with admiration the driver who knew just how to shift to make the car go. I recognized the slight movement of the car backwards when it was time to move on from the stop light or increase in speed.

I was naïve enough to believe that our move back to the Midwest would bring with it a new peace and understanding. I’ve been wrong before; this time, I was really wrong. And it’s not that I expected life to be perfect, but more that I was looking forward to time on the mountain and not paying attention to the potential for valley travels.

The past 18 months or so has felt like a shifting. A few friendships that I thought were moving toward solid ground actually drifted out and new, unexpected friendships moved in. People I love who seemed like they were headed toward disaster were rescued and reeled back in and are now adjusting to a new safety on the shore. My mom, who was her own kind of disaster, is no longer inflicting pain on earth and yet I am still left with scars that she caused.

And in the midst of personal tragedies, losing our home and relocating (again), finding my biological dad and then finding that he, too, is gone, I also felt a shifting of my faith. It started with reading Rachel Held Evans’ book Inspired and continued with more books, podcasts, and my own internal thought process in combination with many, many conversations with my people.

I began looking at the Bible differently and questioning what I had been taught.

I began voicing my doubts in a general way, testing the waters to see who would walk with me and who would throw me out into the dark with the other heretics.

I now know who I can be open with and who will hear me without judging and who will tell me that if I dare believe Jonah was not an actual man swallowed by an actual giant fish, I am destined for eternal punishment with Rob Bell and other sinners.

Over time, the absolutes I had been standing on began to move. Nothing was certain. Nothing was black and white. I do not have firm footing when it comes to who God is or why the Bible contradicts itself. I feel like I’ve been lied to, or at least led astray.

At the same time, I sense a deep love from Something bigger than myself. I do not lead a hopeless life, but I do not give myself the credit for that hope. I still sing worship songs in my car, take the kids to church, and give my ten percent (although it’s not always in the offering plate). While there may be a sense of urgency from friends and family to pull me back from the depths, I do not need rescuing. I have not “fallen away”, as believers in the Certainty Camp like to say.

Falling away implies I had to fall into something. I didn’t just stumble into faith one day, pick it up, and carry it off like a prize. It wasn’t an accidental experience, like the all the times I’ve literally tripped over my own feet.

Falling away implies a separateness, an outside-of-the-circle experience. Which, if that has happened, it wasn’t my choice.

Falling away implies failure and lack of knowledge and a prostrate position. On the ground. On my face. While everyone else steps over with the all the confidence of the middle brother when he took his Bible to school every day of seventh grade. We’ve got this.

I don’t “got this”. In fact, I am so far from “got this” that all the certainty I once walked in is a blurry, cross-shaped haze somewhere far on the evangelical horizon.

I want to know that this is okay.

I want to embrace the shifting rather than run from it.

I want to feel comfortable in that backwards motion, in that slight movement before taking off to wherever it is I’m headed. There is grace in the shifting.