on the road to freedom

So much of the past three to four years of my life have been marked by an emergence of sorts.  I am still very much myself, but how I live into “being me” is very different now than it used to be.  I’m less guarded, more open, more likely to shoot straight about what I think and volunteer my opinions without being asked; authentic and transparent are the catch-all words for it, I guess, but however cliché those words might be/become, there’s a new freedom I find in simply being myself that hasn’t always been there.

But the lack of freedom I used to experience (and exhibit) hadn’t always been there, either.  Yes, I’ve always been relatively reserved and shy – it’s simply part of how I’m wired – but there was a time when, especially around my friends, authenticity and transparency were the norm.  And I started wondering, when did that change?

I think it might have started to happen the year I moved for a new job.  I knew very few people, and had to build a new life – but I think I built it around some of the wrong things.  I started working insanely long hours, and while I’ve loved all my jobs, and the people with whom I got to spend all that time – the pace wasn’t healthy.  It wouldn’t have been healthy for anyone, but I’m an introvert, and I require more downtime to be truly healthy than a 60-70 hour work week allows.

Additionally, the new church home that I chose when I moved had its own share of dysfunctional issues, which became magnified as it grew rapidly and became a multi-campus church almost overnight.  It was a great place, in so many ways, but there were a handful of people in leadership who failed to be the sort of leaders they could/should have been.  Some seemed to value me mainly for my usefulness in ministry; others devalued me as “not talented enough.”  There were others, like the pastor at my campus, who truly did care – but still, I learned to be extremely cautious about who I did and didn’t trust, and with what.  Ministries were often given to people and then taken away when “better” leadership came along with little care for how it actually affected them.  I was hurt more than once, and I saw others be hurt and displaced by “strategic moves” as well.  It was heart-breaking.  Eventually I decided I had had enough, and headed for the wide-open spaces that marked my just-over-a-year-long experience of being “un-churched” on Sundays.

©Depositphotos.com / Krivosheevv

I experienced so much freedom that year…

…and then I traded it in to go back into ministry.

I don’t think I understood what I was doing.

Over time, and with the help of some amazing friends, I’ve started to drop my guard again – becoming more truly myself by not only trying to be more transparent and trusting, but also by starting to accept some of the things God has called me to.  But I’ve realized over the past couple of weeks that I still have a ways to go on the road to finding freedom.

I’m getting there.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve managed to actually hit “publish” on 4 posts that felt incredibly brave to write:

• in which we get angry and nobody dies
• fighting words
• when healing is coming
• more than this

I’ve also written a guest post for a friend’s blog that took me hours to write because it’s about unhealthy patterns in the church that have personally affected me, and I fear what people will think.  They’re not things I’ve felt free to write about in the past, and I’ve spent so much time over the past decade “being careful” about how I word things so as not to offend and in order to to “protect” others – that speaking freely feels foreign.

Which is why I am so looking forward to Soulation’s Spiritual Healing 101 course, which begins next week.  I need a safe place to start talking about some of the negative things I’ve experienced in church communities.  I need to re-learn that it’s all right to have an opinion, that I’m allowed to tell my story, and that it isn’t wrong to evaluate those experiences – and what I’ve learned from them – out loud.  The community that will form during this course sounds like exactly the kind of place where truth, freedom, and healing are sure to be found.  (Curious?  You can learn more about it here.)

Here’s to freedom – to finding it – and to all there is to learn along the way.