SO MANY VOICES EXIST TODAY

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I’ve had quite the faith journey and realize that each of us has ups and downs with our belief systems, our organized church experiences, and encounters with God. I hope that by telling my story, you will realize that I can relate to your journey and would love to walk alongside of you to help you become the “FULL YOU” that our Creator lovingly deposited within you, even before your conception!

My Faith story

It hasn't been a typical journey of discovery, of knowing God, and how I thought it would look to have a relationship with him. Now I'm in a completely different place than what my expectations were when I first started.

I grew up in a home where faith was really important. We lived across the street from a church which meant we were there all the time. I was brought up in the Evangelical faith in a pretty wonderful way, where I knew people cared about me and I felt part of a community.

When I was 13, we moved. And then we moved again when I was 16. That disruption of both my family connection and my faith connection got pretty severed and it caused me to put my faith on hold, I wondered if I would ever return to it.

Several years later, a year into our marriage, I got pregnant unexpectedly. I didn't feel ready, and would often wonder (in a panic) what I was going to be like as a mom. My first pregnancy brought up so many vulnerabilities and insecurities, it began to crack my heart open a bit towards God.

The moment I met my oldest daughter, it completely and radically changed me. I suddenly knew deep into my innermost core there was a God who loved me and moved to give me the perfect gift~one I didn’t even know I wanted. A gift I never dreamed would be so important. Realizing God’s goodness through his unexpected gift cracked my heart wide open!

One night while reading, it was as if the words came off the page and entered my spirit and suddenly I was different (I wish I could tell you what I was reading!). From that moment on, I was spiritually hungry. I devoured the Bible in my desire to know this vast loving God that seemed much different than what was presented to me in church.

getting to know god beyond the pages

Once I experienced by awakening with an overwhelmingly loving God, my husband and I thought we should start attending a church. I went with great anticipation, thinking I would find others who were as thrilled about him as I felt. Instead, I felt deflated. People at church seemed to continually put God in a small box and created an expectation that I needed to stay in my box to discover more about him through my daily life.

At one point, I was invited to a “discipleship class” to learn more about how to follow Jesus. I was so excited that my heart was beating in eager expectation of what I was about to discover. Instead, I was presented with a set of rules for how I was to live. I walked away disappointed with a wondering if they were right, is this all that I could expect?

But, that experience drove me to find out for myself who this overwhelmingly loving God truly is. I began to devour the Bible, and over and over, I found stories of God doing really BIG things, and revealing himself to people, inviting them to do really big things with him!

Maybe stepping into a Church Role would enable me to experience more of God:

I persisted and continued to attend church no matter my past experiences. One day I was asked to become the Sunday School Superintendent (I had three little girls at that point!) I thought: "Oh, this is going to be a great way to get to know God better!" Soon after that I moved on to the Children’s Director role, which I really enjoyed. Working with the community, from the children to their families was extremely rewarding. I eventually began making suggestions during our church staff meetings on how we as a church could be more effective. When I’d make suggestions, I’d be told over and over: “You're just the Children's Director.” “You don't have a seminary degree.” “You're just a woman.” “You're just a mom with little kids.” So basically “Go to your corner and stay there, we pastors have it covered.”

God had Other IDeas:

He liked my ideas, as I came to discover later, he’s the One who gave them to me. He was also tired of seeing my voice shut down. But, the reality is that in the 1990’s most seminaries didn't encourage women to become pastors and certainly not the senior leader. There seemed to be a prevailing attitude that the Bible only gave the senior leader role to men.

God’s other idea for me was to go into the male driven life of seminary so I could become a pastor, and possibly even a senior pastor. I like to say I was dumped into seminary with a shovel and interestingly, even on paper, the seminary said only men could be senior leaders. But I did it anyway.

I studied all the classical seminary subjects: hermaneutics, theology, and of course the Bible: we were required to read the Old Testament in six months and the New Testament in 3 months. By that quick reading of the Bible, I discovered the story line of God’s everlasting, unconditional love ran throughout the whole Bible.

It was Greek, however, that opened up a whole new realm to me. Studying the Bible in the original language revealed to me that many different ways to interpret the Bible existed and it wasn’t as cut and dry as I was made to believe, even in seminary.

Shortly after graduating from seminary, my husband got transferred to Seattle, where I thought my dream job awaited. In the back of my head, I still kept thinking, "I really know God's bigger than this!" I knew that our part to play was bigger than what I'd heard all my life, what I learned in seminary and what we were doing at the church. Even as now being “clergy” I was told by other clergy and parishoners, “You can’t do that (fill in the blank). I was frustrated. I knew God was so much bigger than we could ever know and that the box of religion was keeping him way too small and constricted. I, invited God to break out of the box, no matter where it took me.

After I gave God my invitation to Unbox himself, things began to shift. I started to have unexpected encounters with the Spirit that surprised and astounded me!

After a period of time, I realized God had given me a structure that was very different than the institutional church. It was give God’s beloved ones an opportunity to create their own faith communities, following the vision they were given to serve the world. Our energy would go into the communities, rather than the worship service where God’s beloved kids are more like spectators than the ones getting to live the great adventure of following Jesus into the unfamiliar life of heaven on earth.

We created Missio Lux and for several glorious years, we lived the experience of heaven on earth. But, then my husband’s employer moved us to California.

CALIFORNIA: A LIFE-CHANGING PIVOT

Naturally, relocating to California meant continuing what I had been doing, right?

But The Lord had one simple assignment for me. And that was to sit on the land.

Huh? I was used to being in the middle of things, to leading people, to being known. Suddenly, I was in a new place where I didn’t know anyone and it seems God wanted to “unbox me” into a new reality: the life of his kingdom!

I have to tell you the land he told me to sit on was pretty fabulous. We had close to an acre and it was these beautiful gardens with rose bushes, fruit trees, olive groves, rosemary bushes, lavender, and even a pool!

At first, out of my old mindset, it felt like punishment being taken out of my faith community and called to a very different lifestyle. One day in utter frustration, I said to God, “What do you want me to do? His answer was different than I ever expected. “I want you to enjoy my good gifts!” So, every day he showered me with unexpected surprises and gifts. He taught me that “life with him in the garden was serving him.” I wasn’t a slave, I was a beloved daughter and he wanted me to know just how much he LOVED ME, even when I wasn’t performing or serving him.

I want you to sit on this land and I'm going to teach you about Kingdom. And it was in those four years that he really did open my eyes to see that life in the Kingdom of God, which Jesus talked about all the time is so very different than life in the church. And the reality is that for church-going people, for people who have grown up in this slice of Evangelicalism - like I did - the church and Jesus was one, and there was no differentiation between the church and the Kingdom. But in those four years, he taught me the true power of transformation, almost instantly, and the Kingdom ways that are one simple act: Having the ability to change the trajectory of history of a lifestyle of rest versus working yourself to the bone.

My journey has been one step at a time further and further away from the institutional church, from the walls of any church and from Evangelical theology, because this whole “wait till you're in Heaven to have a role with Jesus and you have to die to go there” just doesn't fit with where the world is right now. It's never fit with my heart and my passion. It's never fit with the purpose He's given me, the reality is in the Kingdom, we're both in Heaven and Earth at the same time.

And our role is to partner with King Jesus and to discover all that He's sharing with us. And then to bring that, to release back into the Earth so that the Earth is reclaimed and God can be as big as He wants to be.

That's where I'm at right now. And I am looking for people who have that hunger, who don't want to fit into a theology who don't want to sign a doctrinal statement, who don't want to join a church.

Rather, those who want to commit to a journey of discovery of knowing a God who created you, who has deposited treasures upon treasures in you. Who's given you a Heavenly solution for one of the challenges that the Earth has right now that only you can fulfill. Those are the kinds of people who are ripe and ready to live the Kingdom Realm with a God who is so far bigger than what we ever knew or experienced.

No matter what your journey is to come to this point, I'm inviting you to join me on this journey of discovery and to be part of a community intent on knowing this big God, walking the wild adventures with him and supporting each other in a safe, supportive community where we work through the challenges together.