Meet: Lindsey

Lindsey is my next guest.  I don’t know her quite as well as some of my other guests..but she is one of those people  I am drawn to (tattoos/ died hair/ chains/ motorcycles/piercings)…:-)  not saying Lindsey wears chains or has tattoos but I’m thinking  she might have @ one point :-)  The first time I read one of her posts I thought to myself…boy that woman is articulate…I like the way she wrestles with hard questions and isn’t afraid of not having everything fit into  nice tidy boxes….put your hands together and give a big blog welcome to Lindsey :

My favorite passage of the Bible is one of the least quoted ones.  In fact, it comes from a book whose existence I didn’t know of until I was thirteen and decided to read the Bible cover to cover for the first time.  This wouldn’t be that interesting of trivia if it weren’t for the fact that my father was a pastor- so familiarity with the Bible was a given.  Even so- I wasn’t aware of the fact that there was more than one book of John and the book of 1st John knocked my socks off.  1st John 4 quickly knocked my socks off. It talks about love, love, love, and love was part of faith in God that I just hadn’t really considered.  My father has a brash personality described in Evangelical circles as “prophetic”, which may be better described as harsh and sometimes coldly judgmental.  Not that my father is a bad man, and not that he wasn’t fully loving- he was a stay at home dad for part of my childhood.  No, it was simply my own misunderstanding of faith based of off fairly common perceptions of church.  Most sermons preach “against” something, rather than praising the good in people.  Most people fixate and pick at the things that our wrong in people’s lives.  We like to tell others to pick at their own logs rather than our specks when it’s us under the microscope, but even so faith seems to go hand in hand with pick, pick, pick.

Suddenly, at age thirteen, I had a revelation.  God was love.  Love was necessary to true Christianity.

I quickly swept it under the carpet and forgot about it.  It stayed in the back of my mind, and honestly it worked to embitter me.  Again and again I came up against judgment in my life.  Again and again I questioned why these people who claimed to love God so very much seemed to be missing the picture.

One of my Top 50 movies is SLC Punk, which is notable in the context of getting to know me just because it leads into another altar of remembrance.  When I was seventeen I watched it at my brother’s house. There were entire sections of dialog I listened to with bated breath.  I already knew that the punks and rejects of the world were “my people”, so I can’t say that watching the movie led to a revelation that way.  No, it was at the end, where Matthew Lillard’s character walked down the street in suit and tie to the monologue about ceasing to rage against the machine and changing it from the inside.  For the first time in my life I tried looking at myself not as a reject, not as a pink-haired teary-eyed freak, but as a part of the machine.  I asked myself if perhaps I couldn’t make a home for myself in the church, and try to change the way it related to my ilk by being there and being a good example.

I was still a teen, so I answered myself, “no.”

A few years later I was married and now officially a tattooed pink-haired heavily mascaraed freak.  I’d stopped attending church regularly after I’d been a regular face at my parent’s church for nine months, only to have one of my parent’s friends (who had been introduced to me several times) come up and ask me if I was a first time guest.  That compounded the feeling of being outside of the circle that I’d gotten my first time at the church, when a pastor received a “word” for a bright haired young girl who was sitting in the back and feeling depressed.  Despite the fact that the word was probably one I needed to hear (that I was a cherished princess of The Kingdom) the fact that I was called out in a crowd of several hundred made me feel a little ill.  Contrary to the impression people get from reading my writing, I’m actually an incredibly socially awkward introvert.  Having everyone in the room turn around to stare at you, some of them brushing back tears, isn’t a hearty welcome for me.  Especially when some of those crying women didn’t even remember me the next week.  The comes the next altar.  My husband and I move to a new state, and we have dinner with his old pastor- who happens to be the brand new pastor of the church my father started preaching at, the church that had always felt like my “home” church.  Something told me we should go on a Sunday morning, so I did.  And I cried during the worship.  I don’t know why, I just did.  And for whatever reason, an elderly woman I remembered from my childhood came up to me after the service and told me I looked like an angel to her- and she repeated the much hated word from years previous, that I was a cherished princess of the Kingdom.

Suddenly everything seemed to converge- 1st John 4, SLC Punk, and Princess Me.  I was home, and I vowed to stay there.  Which is how I became a youth pastor- but that’s a story for another day.

Hope this is what you were hoping for!

~

Lindsey 

Altars of Remembrance:  throughout the old Testament we see the people of Israel building altars to God in those places that marked important moments in their journey to the promised land.  Here I will mark out some of my own spiritual altars of remembrance- not all of them, just a few of the ones that deserve the most honor.

You can read more from LIndsey @ http://emphaticasterisk.com/

Tags: love