Why The Abortion Debate Is Such A Difficult One

What if everyone everywhere woke up this morning,

Feeling collegial?

What if their very first inclination was to trust one another,

And their strivings toward kindness, rather than rage?

Our country has sunk its teeth into rabid defenses

Refusing to yield

Jaws locked around its...

Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus

Queer Christians are on a whole other level. Queer Christians have faith you can't even understand. Queer Christians know God in such a deep and special way. Someone who realizes they're queer and STAYS a Christian has such a powerful belief in God and such an intimate acquaintance with His goodness. I wish homophobic, transphobic, conservative fundamentalist evangelicals could grasp even a tiny bit of the joy and peace and love that I experience through my QUEER relationship with God.

I'm Turning 20 In 10 Days

"I've come so far but I've got so far to go." 20 strikes me as a very odd age indeed. You're two decades old. You're no longer a teenager. You have a different digit at the beginning of your age. I mean, you've had the same first digit since you were 10 years old. And we can all agree that 10 is a very young age. It's a big deal. You're entering into the decade of your life where so many things are supposed to happen. Between the ages of 20 and 30, you might finish post secondary education, start a career, fall in love, move out, get married and have kids. All of those things might happen while the number 2 is the first debit of your age. And I'm not gonna lie, that freaks me out. Adding to my disquiet is the fact that one of my friends is 20 and got engaged just the other day. I'm thrilled for her and panicked for me, and it's implications regarding the stage of life I am entering. Might I add that it did not help when my father said "that's how old I was when I got engaged." It does not worry me that I am single and will not be engaged at the age of 20. What worries me is that I might be expected to be engaged at the age of 20. There's only one day's difference between being a teenager and being an adult. Teenagers have a reputation for doing dumb stuff. But adults are expected to make informed, logical decisions in life changing situations. I know that 24 hours is not going to make that big a difference in my decision-making skills. 20 is a grown up age. But it will not belong to a grown up life. I still live at home. I still ask my parents' permission. I still eat Nutella with a spoon. I still have stuffed animals. I still hate homework. I still have sleepovers. I still get stupid little crushes. For all intents and purposes, I am a child! And yet I feel as though at the age of 20 I'm supposed to undergo some transformation and move out and have a career and find a mate. And then you begin contemplating the future. Do you know what it feels like when all the moments yet to come have weight and they press down on you? When all the breaths yet to be breathed turn to lead in your lungs? When you're suffocating under the expectations of others and your own expectations for yourself? The future is heavy with paths to be chosen, mistakes to be made, hearts to be broken, prices to be paid. Like a stormcloud with rain, it's full of successes and failures, joy and sorrow, triumphs and disappointments. And you begin to wonder, how on earth am I to weather these storms of life without an umbrella? I'm not entirely gloomy about this birthday. I know the future has limitless potential for optimism and that life is what you make it and I'm very excited to become an adult! I can't wait to move out and try new things and explore brave new worlds. That being said, I'm also straight up terrified. And with that thought, I bid you goodnight.

The only secrets I cannot keep are my own.

Not that I don't want to.

If I had my way, every single other person in the world would only ever see the carefully made-up, touched up, photoshopped, filtered, edited, reviewed and revised life. They would never know the dark spaces in my heart where the fear and insecurity reside. They would never see the times when I tripped on the cracks in the sidewalk of life. They would never even bear witness to the grimace at the text from the boy I want but can't have. Would never even know that I'm human enough to feel emotion. If I could, I'd smile and lie my way through every conversation, every interaction. I'd keep all the anxiety, all the "I can't do this", all the self-loathing, all the pitiful, sad, scared parts of me locked up deep inside. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty happy, well-adjusted, social person. But I have the parts of me I'm not so proud of, and I have my moments when they seem like the ONLY parts of me. As do we all. 

But these secrets, they're destroying me. I physically cannot exist pretending that I have no struggles, no problems, no flaws. Thankfully for me, I have people around me who care about me. I have a fabulous mama who thinks I'm fabulous too. I have absolutely wonderful friends who love me and because they love me, they tell me the truth. And by sharing my sorrows with them and confessing my downfalls to them, my secrets don't have that power over me anymore. My secrets no longer loom as a mountain that I'll never scale. They're not captives inside me anymore. They're not clamouring against my ribcage to escape my chest. They're not gripping my throat and choking me anymore. My secrets aren't my demons anymore. I've been given love and advice and perspective and the distorted lens through which I viewed my secrets has been removed by the clarity of other people's words. Wow, you mean I'm NOT a terrible person? My whole life isn't ruined? I AM gonna be okay? What?! 

You know what I mean. We're so adept at creating our own private torture. We're so skilled at turning our own heads into prisons. We obsess over our slip-ups. We play it over again and again and again and again and again and again. The endless loop of failure. We rip it to shreds analyzing every syllable, every inflection in the voice, every glance, ever thought, every breath. 

If you grew up in the church, maybe you, like I, know the fear of transparency that exists in there. We have this tendency to put on a mask every time we enter that building. Casting Crowns wrote a song I love called Stained Glass Masquerade and one of the lines says "am I the only one who's traded in the altar for a stage?" That line always resonates with me. And I heard a pastor say once upon a time "we would rather confess our sins to a sinless God than to our fellow sinful humans." I don't know what it is, but I see it in myself and my close friends - that quality of perfectionism. It's stupid cause the church is not for perfect people. It's for decidedly imperfect people. I recognize my severe imperfection and the fact that I need Jesus. So why am I so afraid to admit it to the people around me? 

Let it go. Let it out. Find someone who loves you. Someone you trust. Don't give the secrets the power. If you have no one else to talk to, talk to me. I'm never ever gonna judge you for anything. Just don't keep it a secret. 

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sermon on II Corinthians 12:9 (via bonniekristian)

For God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son to die for your mean neighbor and your crazy roommate and the picketing bigot and the racist blogger and your gay friend and all the politicians and our crazy parents and the pastor down the street and the uptight religious folk and the girl at work you can’t stand, because Jesus didn’t just die for the people you like, but for people like you and me.

I live ur blog :)))))))) so much

Aww! :) Thanks bro!

Why worry about pleasing "God" and living your life to his standards instead of living for yourself and fulfilling your dreams and desires? I can't imagine living by someone else's rules and standards for a spot in an afterlife that i'm not even sure exists. I understand how strong faith can be, but why live by God's standards for a potential afterlife instead of living by your own standards now in the definite life you've been given.

As a Christian english geek, I am severely suspicious of your use of quotation marks. Because your entire question, in fact your entire world view, can be summed up by your usage of quotation marks in that question.

First up, do you know this “God” that you condemn to dubious ideology with your intellectually patronizing punctuation? Is “God” a lie or a fairytale to you? Is He a made-up story you tell kids, like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny?

Is He a vague, nebulous idea, filed away in your repertoire of knowledge, to pull off the shelf in time of crisis for some warm fuzzy feelings, like Love, Peace and Destiny? Because if you call Him “God”, it’s no wonder that you “can’t imagine living by someone else’s rules and standards for a spot in an afterlife that [you’re] not even sure exists.” Let me tell you about God. GOD cannot be contained to a cute little pair of quotation marks. GOD cannot be banished to history books and fairy-tales by academic snobs. He’s not just an idea made-up by people to control other people’s behavior. He’s not a historical figure in a book written thousands of years ago. He’s not a story or a religious figure or a symbol of the power in all of us, or a name for the forces of good and evil conflicting in the universe. And He’s not even just “someone else”. See, I don’t worry about pleasing “God”. I have the immense, undeserved blessing of knowing GOD:The architect of space and time. The composer of the stars’ song and the choreographer of the planets’ dance.The sovereign ruler of all that was and is and is to come. The infinite, almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, transcendent orchestrator of the universe. He who wove strands of DNA into a person. He who breathes life into our bodies.He who supplies our very power of thought. He who commands the winds and waves to fall silent and they obey. He who can stop the earth spinning on its axis and start it again. He who said “Let there be light” and there was.Because He is light. He is life.He is love. Before you were, or I was, before Jacob was, before Isaac was, before Abraham was, God IS. He always was. Always is. Always will be.All of what we know exists in the mortal world sprang from His imagination.  So I know who He is. And I know that He loves me. Wait…what? He loves me? He loves me! He loves me!!!! I know that He loves me in a crazy, scandalous, outrageous, incomprehensible, all-consuming, unconditional, inclusive, tidal-wave kinda way. Not only that, but as one person out of 7 billion on a planet that is only one millionth the size of the sun. The sun is only a small star among billions of stars in the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Okay, so just take a second to grasp the scope of how massive that universe must be. And then stop and try to grasp that the God who created that universe out of His head knows me and you personally. He knows the number of hairs that are on our heads. He pays very particular and very close attention to our lives and knows the intimate details of our hearts. He saw our unformed bodies before we were even a thought in our parents’ minds. He knit together our unformed bodies in our mothers’ wombs. He knew every single second of every single day of our whole entire lives before we were conceived. That’s how important and precious we are to Him. Okay, so not only do I know WHO He is, and HOW MUCH He loves me, I know what He DID. He died. He stepped out of heaven, out of paradise, out of light and love and perfection…into the dirt and dust and disgustingness of our world. Into the rape and the murder and the genocide and the abuse and the poverty and the injustice and the pain and the shame and the guilt and the ugliness and the wretchedness. Why? For all those reasons. For all the crap and the gunk. For all my mistakes. For every time I hurt someone I cared about. For every time I hurt myself. For every time someone else hurt me. For every single careless word we wish we could take back. For every sleepless night ending in shame and guilt and fear. For every panicked feeling of helplessness. For all the bitterness. For all the anger. For all the feelings of worthlessness. For “every daughter whose innocence was stolen by every son who couldn’t help himself” (Jason Gray). For all the fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and friends who betrayed the trust of a young girl and left her despoiled, abandoned, feeling like garbage. For every affair that shattered a marriage into painful, jagged shards. For every child who was left on the streets because their parents died of AIDS, sniffing an oil-soaked rag to numb the hunger pangs in their stomach. For every child who was abducted in the middle of the night, had addictive opiates ground into cuts on their arms, handed a gun and told to shoot their mothers and brothers and sisters. For every child who was packed into a shipping crate and sent across the ocean like worthless cargo to a brothel where they were assigned a number and put on a menu for people to choose from for their perverse desires. For the thousands tortured and killed in the most inhumane ways by people who thought they superior beings. For every scar on my friend’s arm. For my friends porn addiction. For my friend’s eating disorder. For my pride and arrogance. For your broken heart. GOD, the architect of space and time, transcendent, perfect being, who need not even concern Himself with us, stepped right smack dab into the middle of our colossal mess. And He allowed us to mock Him, whip Him, put a crown of thorns on His head, nail Him to a tree, and let Him suffocate under His own body weight, when He grew too exhausted to lift Himself up to inhale. He could have commanded angels to rescue Him, but He didn’t. He suffered a humiliating, barbaric death and the complete human experience when God the Father turned His back on His son and dumped ALL our sin on His shoulders. So you know that huge list of terrible things I listed back there? That was ALL dumped on Jesus. He felt it ALL. Generations upon generations of pain and hatred and hurt and shame of all humans since the beginning of time and until the end of time stacked on top of each other. More psychological and emotional agony than you or I will experience in an entire lifetime, or even billions of lifetimes. All of it, on Him. Can you imagine the immensity of that soul-wracking Hell on earth? Nope. None of us can. By that point, Jesus was probably BEGGING for that physically-excruciating death. Whose fault is it? Who put Him there? We did. We didn’t mean to. We’re just trying our best. But we don’t really know what we’re doing and we screw up a lot. And we’ve messed up our world, so we can’t go to heaven when we die cause heaven’s perfect and we’re imperfect. But God is like “I know a way. It hurts and it’s terrible and awful and painful but it’s the only way to save these pitiful human creatures that we love so much for no reason other than that we created them.” And Jesus is like “whatever you say, I’ll do it. I love them. I love Katherine and Rebecca and Joshua and Anna and Daniel and Rachel and Kate and Laura and Jessica and Emily and Jonathan and Adam and….” …and all of them. Every person who every existed. Even for a second. Even if they didn’t make it past their mother’s womb. Even if they had no human name, all of our names are written on the palm of His hand. The same hands that took the nails. And so, instead of being bitter or blaming us on that cross, He remembered the names on His hands and He remembered what the nails were for. And He said “Father, forgive them, for they know now what they do.” THEN, not only that! But He went to Hell. Heck yeah, He went to Hell. This is like the Disney Hercules movie for goodness sake! He went to the Devil’s turf, his territory, his playground. And HE TOOK THE FREAKING KEY! He took the key to death. He went and trashed the place! He stole victory from the devil. He conquered life AND death. He broke every chain the devil ever had on us. Then He came back, and now we can live forever with Him in Heaven. My point is that if you’re still putting God in quotation marks, you DON’T understand “how strong faith can be” because you don’t even know what my faith is in. 

If you’re still putting God in quotation marks, you don’t know God. And now that I’ve tried to explain who He is and what He did, it has NOTHING TO DO with “[living] by God’s standards for a potential afterlife instead of living by [my] own standards now in the definite life [I’ve] been given.” I live a life of complete surrender and worship to the God who made me and saved my soul because it’s the ONLY LOGICAL COURSE OF ACTION. If you knew what I know, you would live your life the way I do too. Once I understand what He did for me, I can’t help but pour my whole entire life out as a living sacrifice of praise. Every breath I take, every move I make, every thought I think, every word I say, is only by the grace of God and I am aware of that. I’m just trying to give back all that I can for a debt that I can NEVER EVER repay. So yeah, that’s why I “worry” about pleasing “God”. Ha. Because He’s the only thing in the whole world that matters. Also, the bible says that what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18) so I would say that the afterlife is more definite than this one. If I accept that God is real, I accept that heaven is real, and I accept that He loves me and died for me. Therefore, worship is the natural, instinctive response of this wretched human heart responding to His love and grace. On a side note, from a purely human point of view, living by God’s standards sure as heck hurts myself and other people a lot less. It gives me a moral code that saves me from addiction and heartache. It makes me a kinder, more generous, more compassionate, more loving person. It gives me empathy and a passion for helping the less fortunate. It gives me hope and peace. And it has been scientifically proven to improve my health and extend my life. Why the heck wouldn’t you live life by these standards? They’re awesome! If everybody actually lived by these standards (instead of twisting them through their own corrupt worldview, ahem WBC…), this world would be a beautiful place, and not the terrible place it is today. Jus’ sayin’. ;) To wrap this up, if He was just “God”, I wouldn’t bother trying to please Him either. So I can’t really blame you for your question. But your misunderstanding comes from a place of ignorance. I hope you understand a little better what I believe now. He’s NOT just “God”. I know I may have sounded vicious in this post, but I’m not mad, just passionate. Always, Peace and love!-Katherine 

I was just looking through your posts and I love what you do. I hope you keep doing it. I grew up in a Christian environment that made me so uncomfortable I had to leave. I haven’t been back since. All I can say is the world needs a voice like yours (especially the Christian world), because you are rare but such a beacon of light for the community. I hope so many people learn from you and find comfort in your words. I absolutely admire your words, such a refreshing perspective.

Wow, thank you so much. That is so kind of you to say and it means a lot to me. I appreciate you taking the time to stop by. Feel free to come back to chat anytime :)