Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God

We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.

But at the same time, I don't know that we are doing folks any favors if we act like when we become Christians or when we follow Jesus, all we do is win. I think it's okay to say that we mess up, that we let people down, that we overpromise and underdeliver, that we go to therapy, that we take our meds, that we go for walks to remember everything good and true, that we're still in the midst of figuring out where God is in the middle of all this, that we're learning our capacity and God's goodness the real way: by living our lives and experiencing both victories and sorrows in the midst.

If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love. —Julian of Norwich

I believe with my whole heart that the number one place where women should be flourishing is in the body of Christ. So I preached about what it might look like when ordinary women like us rise up in faith, at our full strength, instead of silencing or numbing or dumbing down or retreating in response to cultural pressure. It’s dangerous. Women who are awake are dangerous to the powers and principalities around us.

My friend KellyIII told me to pay attention to the difference between self-care and self-comfort. I had a natural bent toward indulging in self-comfort; what I needed now in this season of my life was radical self-care. Self-comfort numbs us, weakens us, hides us; it can be a soporific. But self-care awakens us, strengthens us, and emboldens us to rise.

I remember hearing a preacher once claim the miracle of a good parking spot. As in, she taught a church full of people how to pray for a good parking spot, how to claim it, and how to rejoice when it came. My side eye at this cannot be overestimated. If your greatest notion of suffering is having to walk a few more rows to the Target, then I think we can safely say you've lost the plot.

I pray that you would experience the weirdness of the divine love in ways that leave you disoriented. I pray that you would be caught off guard when God meets you outside of the boxes you have constructed and yet remains in the places you vacated. I pray you will bless the box you once needed for God and that you will treat it tenderly even as you leave it behind you.

I find God most in that wild tang, in the sparse and open space, in the unresolved colors, even in the doubt and the uncelebrated places of our lives often neglected by theologians and philosophers. Perhaps that’s why I keep wrestling with this story of God, with the unresolved Jesus, with the wind and fire and water of the Spirit; there’s an edge to the story, more than we acknowledge at times.

Every time I think I have it figured out - this is how God acts, this is who God is, this is what God will do, this is what God expects - that reorienting, bracing, dangerous Love becomes and unbecomes again. And so I have been made and remade and unmade over and over again in response to the Ancient One. We place a lot of emphasis in our culture on "right learning," but there is something to be said for the value of "right unlearning" and "right relearning." We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.

Like most of us, when I walked through my own valleys of darkness and suffering and loss, God was often revealed to me in the darkness rather than in the light. The valleys were where I became intimate with God, far more than the mountaintops.

I've wanted to be more like my dad almost every day of my life, but I am still me: unable to be too certain because of my uncanny ability to see eight sides to every issue and my yearning for peace above all else, unable to be much more than on the outside edge of the inside, with an eye on the ones for whom the truth is perhaps not true.

We don’t have cobblestones and ancient buildings perhaps, but what we do have is the created world, still there, still breathing around us like a friend we haven’t lost touch with just yet. We may not have cathedrals and forums, but we have the cathedrals of the pines and the forums of wildflowers, and we have our own myths.

Spirituality is always eventually about what you do with your pain. —Fr. Richard Rohr

Once upon a time, I thought Communion was a ritual. Then I encountered the Eucharist as a thin place to meet with God over and over again.

And part of why books matter and writing matters and storytelling matters is because the best writers go first: the best writers say the unsaid and unspoken, the secret truths we all feel but can't quite speak aloud. - Shauna Niequist (Forward for Miracles and Other Reasonable Things)