Leaving Nothing Out
In May of 2000 I wrote my first blog. We called them “weblogs” back then and they were neither aesthetically pleasing, nor the bastion of opinions or vitriol they are now. There were trolls then, just as there are now, but mostly weblogs were places you shared recipes and talked about the weather and updated far-away relatives on life.
In April of 2000, my 14 year old brother was killed in an accident and I had nowhere to put my grief. So I put it in words and put those words out on the web and didn’t tell a living soul about them for a year or more. I don’t even think I told the first reader of my little site, but somehow they happened upon it and then, quietly, quietly, like that Wendell Berry poem about snow, readers grew and I learned to go about this work, “leaving nothing out.”
The “leaving nothing out” part is the difficult thing when you write vulnerably about your life on the Internet.
I am not a masochist and don’t relish the uptick in unsolicited opinions about my life or choices when I share vulnerably. But neither do I believe we should live completely private and sheltered lives. Yes, there is an element of spiritual discipline to keeping some things private, to only our closest community. But I do believe the last work of Jesus before his death was to splay his wounds out, to bleed out, as it were, in front of those he loved. And then, after he was risen, to offer his wounds to the doubter who needed to see them. Barry Jones wrote, “Spirituality in the way of Jesus is about learning to be used as an instrument of his healing grace in the lives of others as we make our wounds available to them.” Sayable, in most of its iterations, has been about making my wounds available to you to be used as an instrument of God’s healing grace. And, as wounds are wont to be, it has been messy.
It has meant public humiliation when plans change or a wedding was called off. It has meant years of “working out my salvation with fear and trembling” and writing about things too wonderful for me to know just yet. It has meant ascribing to certain theologies or structures before fully understanding them. It has meant walking through the mire of mistakes and misfortunes and misunderstandings, and reckoning with those very real human beings whom those misses affected. It has meant exacerbating my wounds at times by exposing them to public opinion or just to the light of day, when they needed a few more days or months or years under the bandages to heal. But I don’t regret any of it. I don’t think everyone can or should do it, but I do know, with a deep certainty, that it—and all the difficulties it has brought with it—has been the most sanctifying agent of my life.
Writing publicly and vulnerably has robbed me of a belief that I am better than anyone or even as good as I might have thought myself to be. It has stolen from me any vestiges of pride that come from pretending. It has taken away my agency in many ways because there are decades worth of my words—sometimes incorrect or arrogant or just plain wrong words—to be found. I only need to dive a month or a year back to find words I disagree with now. People change. I have changed. It is the nature of human beings to change and it is the nature of a Christian to be formed. Sayable has helped to form me—and for better or worse, that formation has been public.
And yet, because I do write so publicly, I do feel a sense of vocational call to be honest about our lives and decisions and leanings and learnings—even if I later regret them or they change. My offering to God is malleability under his master hands. My offering to you is to come along with me on that journey. That has never changed.
Why am I sharing this with you? Well, because we’re about to embark on another big change. I don’t need to give details about what or where or when (these are the sort of things that do remain private, given to those who know us best and love us best for now). But also, because I want to take every opportunity to remind you that every person you encounter is living a life beneath the life you see when you meet them in the grocery store or see their post on Instagram or read their article on a website. Every human has a complex story, formed over the years by delights and disaster and disappointment and death and divorce and determination and more. And their story is different than your story and so they make different decisions because of it. I have chosen to make my life an object lesson for you but that does not mean I am to be objectified by you. Right now, the news is full of humans with complex stories and the stories they’ve lived and are living are informing the decisions they’re making right now—the decisions you agree with and those you don’t. But our collective offering is to trust, as best as we can, that they’re walking in the faith they have for today—even if it looks like fear or anger or freedom or fill in the blank.
Human beings grow and change and are formed. We are like rocks on a riverbed, eroded by the experiences that flow around us. We are like trees of the field, stretching our roots deeper and our branches farther, dropping leaves in the fall and growing buds in the spring. We are like seeds falling into the dark earth, breaking open and dying before we sprout again into life. It is our nature to change and it is in God’s nature to change us. Not all of us have two decades worth of spiritual formation written out for public consumption, but all of us have been spiritually formed and are being spiritually formed, right now. And that formation matters to God. Your formation matters. And your neighbor with the Trump 2020 banner, their formation matters. And your other neighbor with the rainbow flag, their formation matters. And if it matters to God, it should matter to us. To you. To me. To us.
