When we were on fire!

A couple of weeks ago I taught the last of a series of classes on the topic of Women Counseling Women and invited the ladies to pose questions they might have that I had not answered.  Kind of foolhardy of me, but that’s another story.

Anyway, one of the questions was “What would you have done differently if you had the chance as you raised your children?”  Now there’s something painful to consider because you cannot change the past.  The first thing I told those young women was that there were some things they needed to understand.  First, I did not grow up in a church involved family.  My mother made sure we went Sunday mornings, but for a variety of reasons, she seldom accompanied us. 

Then as a young believer, I wanted to do the faith thing right, so I looked unquestioningly at those around me and my church for ground rules.  This was a long time ago, remember, and my pastors’ wives communicated, as did the church literature of the time, that godly wives wore dresses and skirts, obeyed without question their husbands, and followed the rules the church seemed to communicate about Christian living.  This meant no drinking, no smoking, no movies, no secular music, no worldly (like the world) dress. And, if the church doors were open, we should be walking through them.  Obedience to the rules was key.  And as a young wife in ministry, I had to make sure my kids did not do anything that would embarrass us and especially the church and ministry.

The problem was that no one emphasized all that much that everything was to be done in love, and in response to God’s love.  I wish I knew that then.  As a young wife eager to please, I fear I worried more about getting the rules right than communicating to my children that God loved them and wanted a relationship with them.  I know I did a poor job helping them understand why we obeyed those rules because sometimes I struggled with it as well.

Which brings us to the title of this blog: When We Were on Fire, a book written by Addie Zierman, a child raised in the same era as my children.  Her book is subtitled “A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love and Starting Over.”  This is not an easy read, well, easy to take as a parent.  We thought we were doing all the right things, but we laid out way too many should and not enough explanations.  Consequently, too many kids left home and left the church.  It didn’t make sense to them.  All the warnings they were given seemed over the top, and as it always did, the pendulum swung…for some of them way out.  For Addie, that pendulum nearly cost her marriage, and she journals those years…into drinking too heavily, into never being satisfied in a church because she couldn’t get by the imperfections of church goers – people who could not meet her expectations, not that even she could.

Near the end of her brutally honest story, she wrote the following, “You are beginning to understand that even the best goals and intentions can be corrupted.  That the blind devotion to any Mission can turn dark.  You have learned that it is impossible to divide things neatly, and that the second you begin to define something, you limit it.  There is no such thing as “cut and dried” in a world of broken humanity.  Gray bleeds into gray bleeds into gray, no matter how you slice it.  While American evangelicalism navigates the changing spiritual landscape, you own identity is in flux.  You are neither stereotype.”

So this is longer than I intended, but this book was a good read, one I wish parents and students and adult church kids could/would read it. We don’t all have a parallel journey, but there might be something here that might help us understand each other, and forgive each other.