just because i thought it was fun

be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Posted on May 18, 2012 in identity, just because i thought it was fun, spiritual formation | 11 comments

* some of you have already read this post; it was a guest post for lisa colon delay’s blog series on spiritual guidance for bloggers in april. i wanted to post it here in its entirety for my archives. i know a lot of you might not blog, but i think we can easily replace “blogging” with “anything-we-are-trying-to-do-that-is-hard-for-us-to-feel-free-in”. that could be our faith or a vocation or a new passion or a relationship or a whole host of other things. the same principles apply. i am more convinced than ever that learning to be comfortable in our own skin is the work of our lives. have a great weekend!

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“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken” – Oscar Wilde

I first discovered what a “blog” was in 2006, when we planted The Refuge, the wild little faith community I am part of. Honestly, I had never heard the word before; I had been immersed in a hectic ministry role that was very insulated from the wider church conversation and I just wasn’t online. This transition from mega-church to small-church-plant was a messy one for me. I was in a lot of pain from my experience, so I reached out online after stumbling across some blogs while searching for church website ideas. I felt an instant and immediate sense of relief when I discovered I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t alone in some of my feelings. I found others with similar stories & similar church dreams.

The men and women I read were honest, bold, raw, and pure.

They weren’t selling anything, trying to push their agenda, or attempting to make-people-come-over-to-their-way-of-thinking.

Rather, they just told their stories. Shared their experiences. Responded to other people’s comments with simple kindness and respect. And above all, they remained honest about what they were wrestling with and learning along the way.

Reading their blogs gave me hope.

They inspired me.

They pointed me toward God (even when they were wrestling with God).

They challenged me to think.

January 1, 2008, I started my own blog and dedicated myself to two simple commitments:

1. Write as honestly and purely as I could without editing or trying to worry about what other people might think.

2. Write once a week for one year.

It’s been a wild ride, and I have learned so much through the process over the past 4 years.

Out of everything, I think blogging has helped me learn to become more comfortable in my own skin, with my own voice, with who I am.

I think that is a very holy and sacred experience on our spiritual journey–learning to find safety and security in who we really are.

Not who someone else is.

Not who we think we should be.

But in who we are.

I am someone who has always struggled with the message that I wasn’t enough somehow–not spiritual enough, not quiet enough, not domestic enough, not skinny enough, not organized enough, not-whatever-enough.

Blogging definitely intersected with this message, initially making it even worse.

In the first few years of my blog, I had so much internal anxiety about not being good enough, funny enough, theological enough, wise enough, or concise enough. Whatever “enough” it was, I wasn’t.

But something began to shift in the past several years as I continued to find my voice and become more comfortable in my own skin out here.

I began to realize that the world doesn’t need another _________ or __________ or __________ (Insert name of any bloggers you are jealous of, and my guess is they are wrestling with similar feelings and go a little psycho about the same insecurities).

What’s missing is me.

Not because without me the world would stop spinning or the blogosphere would come to a screeching halt.

But because everyone else is taken.

I think God wants us to learn how to become comfortable in our own skin, to be who-we-are, and not try to become someone else.

Blogging is a great place to practice this.

Making peace with who-we-are requires the ongoing-work-of-the-Holy-Spirit. I doubt and question it all of the time. I obsess before I hit “publish” and freak out about not being more like ______ or _______ (insert name of other blogger also obsessing about the same thing).

I need God’s help to remind me: “Um, Kathy, just so you know, in the big scheme of things, it’s just a blog post. And one other thing: it’s a great place to practice just being you–with all your strengths & all your weaknesses. Just you.”

And then I hit “publish” and take a deep breath and am reminded yet again, this is what transformation looks and feels like.

This is how we get more comfortable in our own skin. This is how we learn to offer ourselves grace. This is how we become “us” and not someone else.

Yikes, it’s hard to learn! But blogging is a great spiritual practice that can help integrate this important truth into deep places in our hearts.

Yeah, my spiritual guidance for all us bloggers is this: Be ourselves. Everyone else is taken.

a little laughter every day.

Posted on May 9, 2012 in just because i thought it was fun | 10 comments

* this month’s synchroblog is called lighten up: the art of laughter, joy, and letting go. the links to other bloggers writing on the same topics are below.

as always i am late to the party, been writing my brains out and traveling so my contribution is short and sweet. laughter is the only way i can survive down here in the muck and mire of real life. laughing at myself. laughing at irony. laughing at the dramedy (drama + comedy) that is the best way to describe our lives. fortunately, jose, my husband, makes me laugh every day and i am part of a community that values laughter, too. i am not sure that comes across in some of the intensity of what i write here, but we have a helluva of a lot of fun in the midst of all this darkness. in many ways, it’s the only way we survive.

laughter is so healing.

every day i need a little lightness. david hayward’s stuff makes me laugh out loud all the time. here’s my all-time favorite cartoon from him (i thought it was pretty appropriate for our rebuilding after deconstructing series):

and this one sort of fits, too. my friend jenny posted it last week with a little blurb about church. so funny and oh so true.

and i am not quite sure how you could possibly watch this and not have it be contagious, no matter how many times you might have already seen it.

have a great week. i hope you can find a way to laugh every day. it heals.

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other bloggers writing about this topic this month:

Jeremy Myers at Till He Comes – Lighten Up!
Maria Kettleson Anderson at My Real Journey - The Art of Passionately Lightening Up
Melody Harrison at Logic and Imagination – {I Don’t Do Joy}
Wendy McCaig - Lighten Up: Learning to Let Go From A Man Who Lost It All
Carol Kuniholm at Words Half Heart – Resurrection Laughter
R. Lee Bayes at Southern Humanist – Loving Light
Alan Knox – Be Sarcastic With One Another
Patrick Oden at Dueling Ravens - Truth, Beauty, and Yodeling Pickles
Christine Sine at Godspace – Lighten Up: It Really is the Best Medicine
Glenn Hager - Margaritas, Metallica, and A Serious Case of the Giggles.
Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – A Spoonful of Sugar
K.W. Leslie at More Christ – When Jesus Made A Funny
Maurice Broaddus – Why So Serious?
Ellen Haroutunian – A Laughing God

worth checking out…

Posted on Apr 13, 2012 in just because i thought it was fun | 12 comments

i am a terrible blog linker. there’s so much good stuff floating around the blogsophere that it’s hard to keep up. but once in a while i like to take a little time and share what’s come my way that others might want to know about, too.

check these out:

jim palmer’s newest book being Jesus in nashville. i love jim’s writing & heart. i read divine nobodies when it first came out a chunk of years ago. this new book has quite a story leading up to it and i think many of the thoughts will resonate with those who are finding Jesus outside of the confines of “religion.”

the hunger games & the gospel by julie clawson. i read it on my trip & loved the connections she made to the beatitudes & kingdom living. she’s one of my favorite justice voices.

spirit-lead parenting by megan tietz & laura oyer. i haven’t had a chance to read it yet but i know megan from online and she’s an awesome writer. i’m an awful long way from baby’s first year, but if you’re in the thick of it on little ones or know someone who is, check it out.

letters to a future church – i am honored to be part of this project, which originated from the 8th letter to the church project and was recently released by intervarsity press. i wrote a blog post for it called dignity restorers and they wanted to include it. all of the letters in this book are strong prophetic words to the church, a call to what it could be. here’s an interview with chris lewis, the editor, too.

pregMANcy by christian piatt – christian is so funny & this memoir isn’t just for dads but for all parents. i read a review copy & laughed out loud so many times.

women in ministry series by ed cyzewski – ed is a great advocate for change in the church and has been hosting a weekly blog series with female guest bloggers. such powerful & challenging & encouraging words. i hope as many men read them as women.

parish collective is hosting the inhabit conference centered on practice, presence & place this upcoming weekend in seattle, april 20-21st. here’s a video that shares a little bit more about their heartbeat:

i always want to put a plug in for sheloves magazine. check them out on the web and on facebook. beautiful pieces about love & mercy & life & justice.

as a lot of you know, i am a huge proponent of cross-gender friendships. at the end of the month there will be a first-ever gathering centered specifically on this topic in chicago. i have a series of posts on this topic & dan brennan’s blog is dedicated solely to this topic.

for easter, the refuge compiled a little book of 18 resurrection stories. whoa, they were pretty & powerful. here’s the simple template we used.

my friends phyllis mathis & jen lee have an awesome new resource out called “the iconic self”, which is a retreat kit with 4 discs centered on our stories & discovering who we were really meant to be. watch the video on the link. i love this paragraph about the material: “because playing with a fraction of our moves isn’t really playing at all. because being good only gets us so far. because who we were always meant to be has a way of never letting us go.”

i love any work that is centered on healing & recovery, and one of my favorite new blogs is called soberboots, written by the lovely & wise heather kopp, who i had the joy of recently meeting in real life. raw & honest & powerful stuff.

and lastly is another blog from my friend & awesome musician and writer kate hurley. it’s called the sexy celibate and centers on being a christian single. it’s not just for singles, though, so much to learn from each other on this one.

have a great weekend. if there’s something else fun out there that i or others here reading might like to know about, let me know!

holy rollers

Posted on Mar 8, 2012 in book reviews, just because i thought it was fun | 9 comments

i love the movies. if i could, i’d go every day. i especially love documentaries. last month a friend of a friend asked me to watch a review copy of holy rollers: the true story of card counting christians. i’d watch pretty much any movie, but one that involved christians and gambling made it even more intriguing.

released tuesday, holy rollers is making some good headway in the film circle, winning several awards. as a viewer who didn’t know anything about it before we popped it into our dvd player, i was pretty open to whatever it might bring.

it was captivating! and conversation-stirring.

it follows a christian blackjack team. yes, you heard that right: a christian blackjack team. formed by all christians, its mission is to make as much money as they can playing blackjack by counting cards (which is not illegal but rather a strategic math skill). they have a clear and organized system when it comes to team tryouts, training, work requirements, and payouts as a team.

supposedly, the money they were making funded their “ministries.” a lot of the team members featured were pastors in some capacity; they were using blackjack as a way to make a lot of money in a short period of time so they could then do the work of their churches the rest of the month. they also involved investors who put up money and then would receive a good return on their investment. some of the math was a little hard to follow, but the bottom line is that they found it to be a lucrative enough way to earn a living. and they worked pretty hard at it.

at what cost is another story. the whole thing was a little freaky.

the filmmakers (bryan & amy storkel, jason connell, and bryan liepe) did an excellent job of not leaning one way or another on the big questions of christian gambling and the ethics of the whole set up. the interviews with the leaders and team members were interesting & the hidden camera experiences at the casinos were fascinating.

the most intriguing–and difficult part for me–of the entire film occurred when they were on a losing streak and fairly sure someone was cheating. one of the members “got a word from the Lord” about who it was specifically. because this individual often had a strong prophetic gift, the team listened to him, and the supposedly-cheating member was kicked off the team. there was zero evidence or anything that directly implicated him. yeah, he also just happened to be the non-christian, the perfect scapegoat. it was a fascinating glimpse into group dynamics.

there were a few other things that the film stirred up for me:

the crazy things christians sometimes do to make ministries go. some team members framed their work as “taking money from the casinos” and as modern day robin hoods. if the money was going directly to food in empty refrigerators & tuition for single moms & paying shut-off-power notices, that’s one thing. in their case, it would be a lot more honest to just say: “we gamble to make money to pay for salaries for ministry. it works.”

christian language cracks me up. these guys were coming from that perspective so of course it was a big part of the communication. but as a viewer, watching it with someone who is a christian outsider, i just kept noticing how weird it can sound.

how convenient & easy it is to think christians are ethical and non-christians aren’t. it was stated clearly that there absolutely no evidence for the axing of the non-christian except for someone’s “gut feeling from God.” when that trump card gets pulled, i want to scream.

community is compelling, until you’re on the outs. even though the team was a community, they were also working professionally, and so “just like that” your position could become tenuous. if members weren’t performing, they were asked to leave. i didn’t have any trouble with it in this case because it was, indeed, a profit-seeking business and the team leaders appeared very professional and clear on that. at the same time, it reminded me of the mixed message that so many christian groups send–we are family, we eat together, laugh together, work together, work together, but if you don’t deliver the goods, you’re out.

this is how i know it was a good documentary–i have thought a lot about it since i watched it and have since had many interesting dialogues on the topic. that’s what a solid documentary should do–stir conversation.

this one did that very well.

check all of the details on ways to buy or watch it & the trailer here. it’s rising on a lot of different film ratings’ lists this week. i hope you watch it! if you do, i’d love to hear some of your reflections.

meanwhile, what do you think about this idea of “gambling for God?”

happy 4th birthday, little blog.

Posted on Dec 31, 2011 in just because i thought it was fun, the carnival in my head | 11 comments

4 years ago today 12.31.07, i was holed up in my house over christmas vacation starting this blog & joining facebook for the first time. wow, did those 4 years go fast. i am so thankful for the relationships i’ve made here, many of you i’ve now had the privilege to meet in real life, too, and i can’t say enough how grateful i am for all i continue to learn out here. when i first started blogging i made a commitment to blog once a week for one year to see what happens. that evolved into two years, then three years, and now it’s time to re-evaluate for a fourth year. every time i wonder–should i keep it going or call it a day?

blogging is an extremely vulnerable exercise. so many things can be misconstrued, used against you, misinterpreted. i can’t tell you the number of times the minute i hit “publish” i have felt panic. but i have also learned something really important through this discipline–it doesn’t really matter. it’s just too much brain damage to think through that all of the time. the much more important thing–and why i started this blog in the first place–was to practice staying current and freely sharing (from my heart not my head) my experience, struggles, passions, what-i-keep-learning, and dreams about life & church & relationships without editing all the time.

i hope to continue in 2012, at least as far as i can tell right now. i do know that i’m pretty buried with day-to-day life at the refuge, which is more important than this blog & pretty hard to juggle along with my pile of kids! but i will just keep doing what i can do and leave it at that. i don’t have any big commitments here other than to actually wrap up some of the things i-had-hoped-to-post-in-2011-but-never-got-around to-because-it’s-always-so-nutty-here, like the 8 ways to shrink a church series, a few more view from the margins interviews, and some stuff that got stirred up at our walking wounded weekend (i would love to have you join us for a 4 week online class starting the first week in february, too, if you are hurting & on the outs and would like to feel less stuck–the date changed because of some scheduling things on our end). i want to keep exploring the ideas in down we go, too, and in the first part of 2012 really would like to hear more what some of it has stirred up in your practices. well, that’s plenty to keep me busy.

if there’s anything specific you’d like to process in this upcoming year, let me know! email me or put it in the comments.

meanwhile, here’s a quick round-up of the top 10 posts of 2011 around here:

#1. why sometimes i get sad – my story of getting dumped as a baccalaureate speaker when some conservative pastors found out a female pastor was speaking. just.plain.weird. yeah, we still have a long way to go on this issue.

#2. yep, i guess i’m a heretic – and yep, none of these things are all that heretical when it comes to being a Jesus follower, in my opinion, but unfortunately a lot of systems have been hijacked by a lot of rules. i guess a lot of you are heretics too!

#3. while the world is crying out for hope, we’re talking about theology – my theory is that we’d much rather talk about theology than actually have to practice it because it’s a lot easier.

#4. cross-gender friendships – men & women can learn to live alongside one another as friends, brothers & sisters. it just takes courage & practice & God’s help. in april i’ll be part of a gathering in chicago exploring this topic hosted by my friend dan brennan.

#5. Jesus school: not the most inspiring in town – this is an old post & i think about it all the time, how hard but good it is to be in Jesus school.

#6. rising up from below – sometimes i go a little prophetess.

#7. white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, economic privilege – it’s good for us to remember how much it exists. it’s not bad that we have it; the question is how are we going to use it?

#8. pericardiums – love hurts.

#9. loving God in lots of different ways – i am so happy that so many different people in various contexts used this material in groups & churches to explore how we connect with God. i loved this material & glad it made its way into other people’s hands & hearts.

#10. a nifty chart for the journey: stages in the life of faith – this post continues to be one of the most popular & i think it’s because this chart really helps us identify where we are on the spiritual journey, especially when we’re going through a lot of shifts, and what “going through the wall” looks like. it’s in down we go, too, in one of my favorite chapters–welcoming pain.

lots of love and peace to all of you. thanks for reading & have a fun new years eve! be safe.

movies + books = summer fun

Posted on Aug 9, 2011 in just because i thought it was fun | 6 comments

i really am going to get back to the series on co-pastoring that i started a few weeks ago. the last post on friendship was related but today’s has absolutely nothing to do with it because it’s part the august synchroblog. this month’s topic is light & fun, no theology or politics or deep intention, yay! just “what’s your best summer movie or book?” honestly, sometimes i get tired of my own intensity on this blog (i swear i’m fun in real life), so it’s nice to have a break. plus, i’m hoping to get a few good movie & book recommendations out of the other bloggers (links at the bottom & i’ll add more as they come in through tonight).

some of you who know me well or have read this blog for a long time know i love the movies. three summers ago i wrote about watching a lot of them. i haven’t watched TV regularly for over many years now and am always so busy with people & kids & work & life that there’s something really awesome for me about escaping to the movies. it’s my therapy. and way cheaper by the hour. with the kids home & a bunch of movie tickets from my birthday (plus my mom spoiling us) we saw a bunch together.

here are a few summer movie highlights:

loved kung fu panda 2, just no way not to adore the sweetness of it all, especially that beautiful adoption story.

we are all super-hero fans & with 4 boys, that’s always the top choice. i loved x-men: first class & captain america the best. the kids mocked me for liking the green lantern as much as i did but i am corny & liked the whole fear metaphor.

best laughs were in horrible bosses, which is naughty and definitely not for everybody but i was in the mood for it. if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t go see it on account of this review because you will lose respect for me.

i loved midnight in paris for all kinds of reasons–for pulling off a wild concept and making it work & for the challenge to enjoy the now instead of always looking back or forward.

super 8 made me the happiest because i went with the kids & we all loved it together.

at home i watched a few way-too-intense ones with my oldest son–restrepo, a documentary about an army unit in afghanistan that just about did me in, and then the departed. i had seen it before but couldn’t remember it all until the end. yikes! we watched whale rider for refuge outdoor movie night, too, and that is just a beautiful film.

i also made a pledge this summer to not read any non-fiction & just get lost in a few summer novels. my husband got me a kindle for my birthday in may & i’m totally digging the large print (true sign of getting older, when you get giddy over large print!).

good summer books:

the book thief – intense story set during the holocaust. i think hans huberman will be etched into my mind forever as one of my favorite characters of all time.

a visit from the goon squad – amazing character development & the wild ways she pulled it all together. so fun.

the hunger games – yes, i got sucked in..to all 3. then i sucked my kids in & bought them a copy of the trilogy that they all shared. i felt like i definitely got my money’s worth because it kept them busy.

same kind of different as me - i am reading it right now, about a third of the way done & enjoying it so far it is extra interesting on the heels of finishing down we go.

so there you go, more than you probably wanted to know about what i saw & read this summer! if you have any awesome recommendations, send them my way.

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check out these posts by other synchrobloggers so far: