tender, chickified church guys

"You get around Paul when he was a young guy, you got around John the Baptist or Elijah, , these dudes seem pretty rough to me, you know they don't look like church boys wearing sweater vests and walking around singing love songs to Jesus. guys like David are well-known for their ability to slaughter other men. I kind of think these guys were dudes. heterosexual, win a fight, punch them in the nose, dudes. the problem with the church today is that it's just a bunch of tender, chickified, church guys.

When you walk in [to a church], it's sea foam green and fuchsia and lemon yellow, the whole architecture and aesthetic is kinda feminine, the preacher is feminine, the music is kind of emotional and feminine - why aren't we being innovative? Because . . .
ALL THE INNOVATIVE DUDES ARE HOME WATCHING FOOTBALL OR THEY'RE OUT CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN OR MAKING MONEY OR WORKING ON THEIR TRUCK.

IF YOU DON'T GET THE YOUNG MEN, YOU GET NOTHING."

(Caps mine).

Really, just don't know where to start with this one. I can hear a very rational voice in my mind telling me to let it go; there will always be people out there on the fringes of any social movement or religion who you disagree with. That's fine. Just disengage. They want the power that you're giving them by reacting, don't give it to them.

And that's all fine and good, and probably why I don't go around seeking out incendiary videos like this in my spare time. But when I come across them, when I come across this kind of teaching, I don't want to ignore it.

It strikes me first that God, in his infinite wisdom, did not divinely grant the gifts of innovation, creativity, strategic thinking to men only. I know many incredibly innovative women, and believe that it would be nothing less than a denial of God's work in them to say that we have to wait for young men to show up before we can innovate.

Read what follows below, which is excerpted from a booklet Driscoll put out called Church Leadership:

Without blushing, Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men. While many irate women have disagreed with his assessment through the years, it does appear from this that such women who fail to trust his instruction and follow his teaching are much like their mother Eve and are well-intended but ill-informed. . . Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourages liberated women in our day to watch porno with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of three-fourths of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the Serpent is still trolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress, liberation, and equality (p. 43).

If anything could get my blood boiling more quickly, I don't know what it would be. Both because of his glib treatment of significant sociocultural pressures, and the wholesale dismissal of over half the American church population as leaders and influencers in our churches.

As if, it might be fair to say, as if women in the church ought to be defined by the covers and content of magazines in line at the checkout stand. As if women impregnate themselves recreationally and categorically turn down help from their partners who offer endless support because men never run away from the unexpected responsibility of being a father; as if Adam, in the Garden of Eden, bore no responsibility for taking the fruit from the woman and the Serpent is surely not running amid his kind! We are naive and empty-headed, good for looking nice and pouring into our husbands but in a 'seen-and-not-heard' kind of way. As if emotion has no place in the church. As if Jesus himself did not show emotion. Women are gullible and easy to deceive, Driscoll says. And he has every right to think that. And while again I don't buy into this wholesale writing off of all women, and I believe that categorizing ALL women in ONE group makes no sense, EVEN IF IT WERE TRUE, doesn't our God work through broken and weird and gullible people? Or is that just too much for him?

Of course, that isn't true. Women, as a group, don't exist in such a way that they can be characterized by traits. Neither can men. There is no male or female, not anymore, not since Jesus. And if I remember correctly, Jesus, our savior, is the one who let the children come to him when all the men around him said not to. Jesus told Peter to sheathe his sword in Gethsemane, and then put Malchus's ear back onto his head. Jesus reminds us to walk farther than we are required, to be compassionate to those who hurt or cannot care for themselves, to submit to him just as he submits to God. Ours is not a gratuitously violent God, not a God who would belittle those on the margins, not a God who would deny anyone her or his place in his Kingdom for any reason.

Just go read this

From Michele's blog, while she's talking about a friendship that ended:

Drop your expectations.

Remember that people cannot give you what they do not have.

In a nutshell, that’s what happened with my friend and I. I realized that she could not give me what she did not have to give. I still grieve that she didn’t have it; I wished she had it like I wish for my children to have character or my husband to have success. (He already has character.)

And believe me, I still endeavored to get from her what she couldn’t give in all kinds of different ways, all the way up until the end. Coercion, dishonesty, pity, indirect communication—I tried it all.

Sometimes these kinds of “friends” in our lives go by another name: Gaslighters.

The term comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight, where the evil husband tricks and manipulates his wife into thinking she is insane. From the film’s title, “gaslighting” acquired the meaning of ruthlessly and deviously manipulating an individual into believing something other than the truth for one’s own purposes.

Our relationship worked because on some level, I had decided that I needed to tolerate anything, and that I had the power to fix anything. I made up a vision of myself as able to transform any situation, if only I did things right. All the times she made me doubt myself, wonder if I was crazy, even feel safe to an extreme degree–were all part of my quest to prove to myself that I was better than the circumstances. In reality, I was being compromised in ways and with consequences that I am still discovering to this day.

To anyone with gaslighters in your life, even now: you have an opportunity to show yourself a great deal of compassion and accept that there’s no shame in having made a mistake, or even several mistakes. The sooner you can find someplace else to sling that self-blame, the more likely you are to find your way out of the darkness of confusion and fear and into the light of grace and truth. If you need help, ask for it. Grace be to you.

MORE here: http://themoxyprojectblog.com/

yoga, part 2

one thing you learn about yoga is that everybody farts.

it is, i suppose, altogether impossible to get into so many positions with your butt in the air and your head on the floor and not pass gas at least once or twice in your career.

everyone has a different M.O. with this, too. some people, nice, embarrassed people, will look around apologetically and offer a quiet "sorry" to their classmates. not infrequently, the smell will hit you before you even realize what happened and it's all you can do to stay in warrior 3 and not run out of the room, mouth covered. and all too often, you'll hear the telltale noise ('shooting a bunny,' my grandmother calls it) in the middle of the silence and dread the seconds it will take for the smell to waft over your way. everyone ignores the noise because we are, after all, adults; serious adults who don't find anything funny during yoga.

still - i'm ready for it to stop. or at least to buy a hell of a lot of febreze for the studio i go to. ewwwwlll.

competitive yoga

Yoga is a funny thing.

I've been going to classes lately. You're supposed to do certain things in yoga; things like engage and pay attention to and enter into. Sometimes, you're even supposed to breathe for other people. But one thing you are never meant to do in yoga is compete.

Oops.

See, the instructor is forever talking about how you do what only you can do, and how when you're supposed to be doing crow but all you can do is lie on the floor like mush pretending to do a child's pose, you should thank your body for what it can do - and let it not do what it can't do.

Maybe I picked the wrong sport, then. Because how does a woman who, at the age of twenty-four STILL cheats at Scrabble, enter into a room to work out with a bunch of strangers (okay, and my mom) and not compare or compete? I couldn't lose to the kids I was baby-sitting for in high school. What makes me think that I can lose now?

There is no losing in yoga, I can hear the instructor say. Well, that's fine for you because you can do the air splits. But whenever you preface a pose with "For a challenge," or, "If it is available to you," or (my favorite), "If you are really bendy," I AM GOING TO DO IT. Probably really poorly, and with a resultant knee injury that I will nobly hide, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to do what the fifty year-old man next to me or the weird looking redheaded girl (my new nemesis, by the way, since Vince quit Blockbuster, but that's another post) are doing with supreme ease and serenity. You don't just sit idly by in yoga. You win! And you, instructor, may pretend not to acknowledge that reality but everybody sees it. Everyone knows who the winner is when we walk out of class. It's usually the redheaded girl, but I hear that she's going back to fourth grade soon. That's when I'll have my chance.

I think I've finally found my people, though. The ones who are really out in the open about all this stuff. The picture at the top of this post? Sonja Wyche, from Washington, D.C., in a YOGA COMPETITION. It was started by a guru, so you know it's legit.

Because really, why do anything if you can't win?

cling to the promise

there is nothing quite like hard times to make you live in the moment. the worries of the past are totally irrelevant, and the threat of the future doesn't matter at all because the only thing that you can see is right now. and that doesn't make hard times any easier, but it is a glorious and lovely part of pain.

i read this last night in bed and shared it with zack. it is from the inner voice of love by Henri Nouwen, which is a journal he kept when he went through "mentally and spiritually debilitating anguish" during his time at L'Arche. DAMN is he wise.

Cling to the Promise

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected.
People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you
expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you
will feel exposed to ridicule.
You have to close yourself off to the outside world so that you can enter
your own heart and the heart of God through your pain. God
will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish,
who can lead you closer to the true source of love.
God is faithful to God's promises. Before you die, you will find the acceptance
and love you crave. It will not come in the way you expect. It will not follow
your needs and wishes. But it will fill your heart and satisfy your deepest
desire. There is nothing to hold onto but this promise. Cling
to that naked promise in faith. Your faith will heal you.

sadness

sometimes, i fall into these times of feeling great sadness and grief without what i think is a good enough reason, or any reason at all. (i say 'fall into' because it feels involuntary. it is involuntary, really).

and, as might be clear to you, i am in one of those times right now. the sadness is vague but acute, somehow, and is present with me like a small bird that has gotten inside my head, or the cat that is crouching in the corner. i can't go anywhere without it, and my first instinct is to feel powerless over it all. well, that and to complain about everything and wish that things were different.

i talked to one of my friends about this last night, and she reminded me of a lot of the changes that have been going on in my life which, for someone who is practically allergic to change, can bring about a lot of weird emotions. she also talked about leaning into this sadness, feeling it, and living in it. rushing through it or ignoring it or covering it up, tempting as they may be, will never really be helpful responses.

sometimes, like now, this sadness creates an ache right next to my heart, straight under my throat. and usually what that means is that i don't want to grow up. i don't want these changes, i don't want these responsibilities, i don't want to create a new sense of home in a place that doesn't always feel like home. i don't really want God to do anything in me, because i just want to go backwards. and he's not in the business of moving people backwards, or tying them to the past, or preserving comfort above all else.

so, i'm sad.

and anna jordan, you don't have to respond to anything this time
:)

ira glass cares about you

sometimes, when i am going on long-ish drives, i like to listen to podcasts of 'this american life.' so yesterday, as i was getting ready to take off for a couple of hours on the road, i made sure to have a new one on my phone. i was thirty seconds into it when i was hit with a question that i never expected to encounter as a result of radio fundraising:

"Who do you want to be?"

And Ira, in all his Ira-ness, said this a couple of times. He probably said something like this: "Really. Who do you want to be? I mean, think about it. You could be the person who just listens to this podcast every week, who never contributes to their local radio station, who assumes other people will just step in and cover for them. And you know what? You're right. We'll never start charging for this podcast. Your neighbor or teacher or colleague will pay, and you'll get to keep on listening. But again, let me ask: Is that who you want to be?"

I want to hear from Anna again about this one, since she can analyze media content and culture with the best of them. But I really want to hear from everyone, and to express my surprise. How should I feel about this? Should I be glad that this radio program has decided to integrate fundraising and integrity? Or is it scraping the barrel, guilt-inducing stuff? I can't decide. Ira sounded so earnest. Then again, when does he not . . . I just don't know.