Integration

It’s time for me to start blogging again, I think.  I’ve been wanting to for months, but something has kept holding me back.  And, well, that something is called fear.  But I have a chasm inside me between my 20 years of charismatic, evangelical Christianity and my 6 or so years of where I’m at now, and I sense that I have to do some of the processing toward integration in this public space.

I’m terrified.  Why?  Because I feel a lot of judgment from people in an earlier part of my life, and they are people I still care about.  So I’m going to open myself up to that judgment…why?  I wrote that sentence in my Morning Pages (a la Julia Cameron) this morning.  Why put my journey out there for public consumption?  Why describe to others what took me out of YWAM and charismatic Christianity, and into a broader place? Why do I feel such a strong need to do this processing out here where YOU, my dear friend from the past, or YOU, my dear friend in the present, can see it?  Why be vulnerable?

Because I spent all those years being part of an entity I didn’t totally agree with, and when I disagreed with the majority opinion, I was silent.  Being silent damaged me.  I don’t want to be silent anymore.

Because I spent all those years being part of an entity I sometimes felt ashamed of, yet my identity was tied up in that entity so I felt trapped into defending it.  Having an identity that was partly formed by something other than me damaged me.  I am creating my own identity now.

Because I’ve been led by Jesus, by the Divine Feminine, by the Tiger spirit that walks beside me, by my beloved Father God, by the Universe, to a broad, sweet, beautiful place of spirituality where I rejoice, and I want to sing from the rooftop about it!

Because writing is a way for me to do soul work, and when I write in public, I’m compelled to be brutally truthful.  In my Morning Pages, which are the junk-dumping space, I can rant and rave and write some crap that I don’t mean by the next day.  But here, I have to ask myself about every sentence, “Is that what I really mean?  Is that really my truth, the thing I believe today?  Even if I change my mind next month or ten years from now, is it really what feels true to me right now?”  So YOU, my reader, by merely being out there and possibly reading my post, are causing me to stay true to myself.  Thank you.

For my next post, I want to write about “What Happened When I Admitted I Didn’t Think EVERYTHING in the Bible Was True.”