The Voice of Faith

Lately, I've been looking back at my Facebook memories every day - that feature that reminds me what I posted on any given day any number of years ago. I started doing this a few months ago after realizing how negative some folks are on social media and wondering if they really hate their lives as much as they pretend to...and then I wondered what I actually say about my own life. 

Am I a person stuck in a rut? Have I grown over the years? Has there been a shift in what's important to me? What does the trajectory of the things I've chosen to post over the years say about me? 

The answers to those questions are, perhaps, answers for another day. 

What I've been struck by, however, and what is most convicting to me is the way that the voice of my faith has changed over the years. Especially in the last three years. 

After years in seminary and working as a chaplain and being engaged in the ministry of persons and presence, I had this really cool season - many years, actually - where I was finding the voice of my faith. Something authentic. Powerful, but generally gentle. Humble, confessional. It was the kind of voice I've always wanted my faith to have, and I was developing it. It was coming from my heart, and it was obvious. (Some of the most powerful places I see this is in my last book.) 

But over the past couple of years, something has shifted. Something has changed the way that I talk. 

At first, I wondered if it was simply the toll life has taken on me. A long battle with Covid, a life that's totally different now, a disabled body, thousands of days of struggle. Certainly, those things have the capacity to change anyone. 

But the more memories I read, the more I realize that I had the voice I wanted to talk even about those things. 

No, what changed...is that I was wounded. I was severely wounded by my church, by the people of God, by the brothers and sisters that I had so long called family. And from that point forward, from the time when I became painfully separated from them, my voice started to change. 

And listen - it's not the woundedness that changed my voice. It's not. I think that woundedness has given me more grace, if anything. It has caused me to reconsider how I love others and how I process their spiritual pain when they share it with me. And it has brought me into a new season where I'm exploring all kinds of new ideas. 

What changed my voice was not the woundedness; it's the loneliness. It's no longer having a community, no longer having a family. It's not having that support structure around my faith that echoes the love of God back to me in human reality and helps shape the way that I understand and present my faith. 

I still love God just as much as I always did, if not more. My relationship with Him is continuing to grow. I am engaged with a new church community, but I'm not plugged in and connected there yet the same way that I was with my congregation of 20+ years, so I don't have that fellowship around me that I'm missing, and it has changed my voice. It just has. 

So what I'm coming to understand in this season is really the "one another" of faith, that thing that God is so interested in in the New Testament, that thing that He keeps telling us that we need. Because what I'm discovering as I watch the voice of my faith shift is that...He's right. We do need that. 

By His grace, I will have it again one day, and perhaps I'll see my voice change once more. 

In the meantime, I just hope I'm still saying something good about Him. Because our God really is an awesome God. 

Even if, in this season, He feels like only my God.