Voice of My People

Here's how I know that it's the loss of my community of faith that changed the way that I talk about God: 

Because I have a new community, not of faith, that has changed the way I talk about things in that community. 

I've been in and around healthcare for more than a decade, in various capacities. I have worked with four different healthcare organizations. I have been a patient in many more. And every single one of these places has shaped the way that I talk about healthcare - the way that I talk about patients, about insurance companies, about systems, about policies, about families. You take on the language of the persons you're around in the places that you dwell. 

It's no wonder, then, that when I lost my community of faith, I lost my language for faith. What had for so long been a beautiful sanctuary filled with hundreds of voices became an echo chamber filled with only mine. 

Language simply doesn't work that way. 

There's no such thing as a language of your own. You don't need one. There is no idea that you would have to communicate to yourself outside of your own brain, outside of merely thinking about it, so there is no use for having any kind of language. Language is only for communities. 

So when I lost my community of faith, my faith became private once more. It became innate in my being, not needing to be expressed. Not having a place for expression. At least, not in the same way. The past few years, then, as I have waited and prayed patiently for God to heal me and bring me back into community have seen me with a faith that only I have to understand, a faith that is only mine, a faith that has no place except in my own heart. 

No wonder I've forgotten how to speak about it. 

It's frustrating for me, for someone who is a wordsmith. I think that over the past few years, my faith has grown in beautiful ways. It is deeper, richer, more robust. It has this essence to it that it didn't have before - the essence it gets from having been so deeply tested in a wilderness. And yet, here I am, stumbling over my words, unsure how to make it as beautiful as it feels, not confident in how I'm presenting it because that voice, that language, is dormant. 

I hope it's dormant. I hope it's not gone. 

And yet, I also know that as I integrate myself into a new community of faith, the language that I develop in this space won't be the same as the one I had. I will learn to speak again, but it will be different. There will be something new and unique about it, just as there has been about every environment in which I have engaged healthcare. Every community has its own language for things; every family has its own dialect. 

I think about that, too. As I visit with my new community, with my new brothers and sisters, that's one of the questions I'm asking myself - is their language one that I want to learn to speak? Is it one that I want to hear sounding in my own voice? Does it resonate with my heart and with what I'm feeling and how I'm growing and the way that God and I are loving each other? That's important. 

For my voice will become like their voice, and my prayer is that our voices become like God's voice - humbly, authentically full of grace, hope, love, and mercy to a hurting world.