I am Bisexual
That’s the beauty and the frustration of being bisexual: you have the option to ignore the reality of your sexuality but you can also feel invisible – as if no one can know your fullness without intentional effort on your part.
Naming Spiritual Abuse in Deconstruction
Attempts to shame, cajole, or threaten people to keep them from coming to new theological perspectives is spiritually abusive. We have got to start taking note of what this looks like and call it out publicly when we see it.
No, Jesus Didn’t Die on the Cross to Take Away My Sins
the penal substitutionary atonement theory is just one more toxic belief created by patriarchal Christianity. It does not reflect the nature or desires of God any more than the sexual slavery and genocides seen throughout the Bible reflect God’s purposes. Those things are descriptive of human cultures during those eras, and the Bible records human attempts to understand God with the explanations available to them during their time in history.
The Gift of Rage
Rage has been my friend for a very long time. We have had a complicated relationship full of betrayals and misunderstandings, and truthfully, I’ve been the hurtful one. Rage has stuck by me even when I didn’t love her like she deserved to be loved. When I was around 6 or 7 years old, my pastor’s college-aged son came out as gay. The church was in uproar. I didn’t even know what “gay” meant, but I was heartbroken that the…
Abuse in PIONEERS Missions Agency
I did not expect to wake up this angry today, but grief is a weird companion and where trauma rears its head can rarely be anticipated. Yesterday morning, I received an email from a friend who is still employed by my previous organization, PIONEERS (though not for much longer). She wanted to know if I had seen this article yet. “Sounds similar to your situation,” she said. She had recently found the author, Breanna, through a podcast and suspected it was a…
To Be A Scapegoat
my counselor casually mentioned how my family had been scapegoated in the missions community. After she said that I spent several weeks reading about scapegoating and trying to decide if she was right. I think she was,
Demon Possessed Jewelry and Target Stores
(This is taken from a newsletter sent out a couple of years ago. Having had a number of conversations about my observations on spiritual warfare in Bali, I thought it would be helpful to make it public.) Recently a friend of ours, Adam, came to visit us. One day we arranged for a Hindu friend (Mr. T) who is a driver to take him around a particular area, and that evening ended up at Mr.T’s house enjoying traditional Balinese hospitality. At…
We Need A King
Have you ever wondered about the nasty narratives in biblical book of Judges like the story of Japhthah’s daughter who became a child sacrifice in order to fulfill her father’s rash battle vow? Or what about the one in Judges 19 – 21 that begins with the concubine who is gang raped until dead and ends in the pillaging of Jabesh-Gilead for virgin girls. Why is that grisly story in there? The point of the book of Judges is to…
The Cyclical Nature of Faith
In a linear perspective, one “winter” is okay, but another is a crisis. But this isn’t the reality of nature or faith. We are seasonal beings, and every season contains both hope and hints of the coming change.
Risky Love and Premature Kittens
Sometimes people ask what it is like spending time in brothels with trafficking victims when I am powerless to do anything about it. This is it. It feels like a choice to love and a choice to give whatever I do have, even if it is only an offer to walk through the valley of the shadows alongside. I do it because the women and girls that I encounter are worthy of being loved. They are worth crying for when things do not turn out like I wanted.