Silent No More

Life can sometimes get away from us, can’t it? I blink, and four years have passed. My kids grow faster than a weed, and my daily life of single motherhood – work – clean the house – do laundry – pay bills – repeat, seems like a never ending cycle. Connecting, really connecting with people, usually happens in my job. Some of my patients know more about my personal life than even some members of my family.

One word that has been floating around quite a bit these days is deconstruction. Applied to Christianity, it means dismantling, dissecting, and often rejecting the beliefs that one grows up with. I’ve been in that process for years, but rarely have I sat down and talked about it. It’s a long process, and it’s exhausting. But it’s also freeing.

I want to say right off the bat that I’m still a follower of Jesus. However, my beliefs have changed drastically. I liken it to building a house. If the walls are built halfway, or uneven, or in weird places that don’t make sense, as soon as you put on the roof the whole thing will start to crumble. There will be leaks, and if you try to patch the leaks and holes, more will appear. And before you know it, you’re living in a creaking, wet, disaster. And wondering, how did I get here?

Sometimes the only thing to do is to deconstruct the whole thing and start from scratch. But if the foundation is good you can rebuild something stronger, more effective, and more useful.

I’ve done that.

I feel like I’ve sat in the foundation for a long time and have slowly, oh so slowly, started to lay one brick at a time. But the truth is, I don’t think my house will be fancy. It will be functional, practical, and without the unnecessary trappings I’m used to from the previous house.

I used to die on a lot of hills. The Reformed hill, the charismatic hill, the gender roles hill, the politically conservative hill, the homeschooling hill… SO. MANY. HILLS.

Those hills have disappeared. I’ve swallowed my pride a million times while watching them be bulldozed to rubble. The bulldozer is called suffering. My suffering. The suffering of those around me; my kids, my family, my friends. The world. The older I’ve gotten, the more I have come to realize that I know absolutely nothing. Wisdom might come with age, but so does understanding. I’ve been faced with a choice – cling to beliefs that were false or destructive, or let them go and re-evaluate what I believe. I can choose pride, or I can choose humility. Pride puffs out its chest and claims to be superior, validating itself in an echo chamber, ignoring the ones it tramples on. Humility stops, bends down, and listens. Asks questions. Reconsiders. Chooses to believe others’ experiences even if its different than its own.

The primary means for the re-evaluation of my beliefs came about through several different ways. First, the dissolution of my marriage played a large part. I’d been raised to believe divorce was nearly on par with an unpardonable sin. While I still believe God hates divorce, I now don’t believe God hates it more than He hates, say, unjust oppression. And because my marriage fell apart for years before it finally ended, I struggled greatly, mostly in silence, with the big questions I now had regarding most everything I believed.

Secondly, my job as a home health nurse changed my life. I work in a low-income part of the city where most of my patients are people of color. Their lives were completely different from mine. It’s one thing to talk to people and hear about their experiences, but it’s another thing to actually go see it firsthand. I was a nurse for quite a while before I went into home health. And I’m so grateful that I did. Being in people’s safe spaces, seeing their daily lives, being a witness to the injustices they faced gave me a whole new perspective on everything I used to believe. I used to be an advocate for guns – now? I know too many people affected by gun violence. I’ve seen the pictures on their walls of deceased loved ones taken in senseless tragedy. I used to not believe in universal healthcare. Now? I’ve seen the systemic racism, sexism, and elitism ingrained in the very fabric of healthcare. I’ve seen white patients getting the resources they need and not people of color, even though they had the exact same health insurance plans. I’ve especially seen women of color treated like absolute garbage, not taken seriously, and sometimes die from preventable diseases while men with the exact same issue got the help they needed. I’ve seen people not having access to healthy food simply because of the block they live on. There is an entire zip code in my city with maybe one grocery store and at least thirty fast food restaurants.

It cannot be overstated how drastically my life has changed getting the privilege to care for people different than me. I’ve driven people to the grocery store, taken them to lunch because they don’t have family, driven them to laundromats, picked up their medications, brought them to church, brought them to holidays – all on my own time and sometimes my own dollar. I don’t say this to make me out to be some sort of healthcare hero. I say it because I am a middle-class, white woman who was not exposed in any great degree to the sort of inequality I now see on a daily basis. It’s changed everything I believe in. And by everything, I actually do mean everything.

Thirdly, I had special needs sons. Everything I thought I believed about parenting basically flew out the window. Suddenly, a whole new world opened up to me. A world where homeschooling wasn’t the best option for them. A world where various therapies were all-consuming – therapies that forced me to question how to handle meltdowns, which didn’t include discipline. Where emotions such as anger, frustration, lying, and fear weren’t always a sin problem. A world where “special needs” suddenly became a phrase that doesn’t capture my sons and their identity – AT ALL. A world where “exceptional needs” “differing needs” “neurodivergent” and “spectrum” replaced old vocabulary. A world where hearing “retarded” now makes me see red – whether used flippantly or as a noun. A world where “person with autism” replaced simply “autistic” as a definition. A world where the gospel was boiled down to its simplest message, and describing the gospel changed from something rehearsed (remember the 5 basics – birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension) to something palatable for a child who might not ever fully understand what it means. A world where every tiny victory suddenly became massive and worth celebrating. I have a tattoo of the first time my son Gideon wrote his name on paper, that’s how incredible it was. Now, parenting isn’t about only the bigger picture – things like my children being able to know and answer basic math questions, or work through a problem on their own. Parenting became about learning my children so well that I could anticipate their needs without them being able to verbalize them – and these needs were composed of small, moving parts, not giant cogs in a machine.

Fourthly, I started going to therapy. Sitting down with a professional and verbally processing my life and feelings took me down very many unexpected paths. Working through trauma and doing EMDR on various traumatic events in my life, opened doorways I never thought I would be able to walk through. I’d been raised to believe that therapists were dangerous because they were “too much about feelings” and feelings weren’t to be trusted. Now? Emotional intelligence is something I will never compromise again, in myself or in any future relationships I have. Feelings are guideposts, leading me to discover more about the world, more about myself, more about others. Feelings are symptoms, and symptoms always point to a deeper issue at work. If one of my patients had a cough, I wouldn’t smirk at them and tell them they needed to just stop coughing. Now, when I experience an emotion, or someone I love does, I’m learning not to shove it aside and ignore it, but to ask better questions. Ask the why, which leads to better understanding. Now, my mom and best friend are also therapists. I’m surrounded by them. So my inner circle is full of people who know how to ask questions, know how to get out of me what I’m feeling. And although certain emotions still scare me, I’m learning to dive into them, not run from them. Self-understanding will necessarily lead to change. You cannot look at yourself in the mirror and see yourself for who you really are and not be changed by it. For so long I lived in silence and fear, just surviving. I hated myself because I didn’t believe I was worthy of love. Being taught my whole life about how sinful I am, and that humility meant not thinking of myself at all, led to a belief system rampant with opportunities for rejection and abuse. But now, believing that I’m worthy of love means my tolerance for being treated with disrespect and unkindness has dropped significantly. I’ve walked away or distanced myself from many relationships because of it. And my life is better for it.

Those four things are the major reasons I began to re-evaluate what I believe, and it’s not the end of the story. It’s a work in progress. What I believe now, I might not believe in ten years. But the hills I will die on? They are these.

God loves me.
Jesus died for me.
I’m supposed to love people like they do.

All the rest is on the periphery.