I don’t want to be a voice for the Newly Saved.
I don’t want to be looked at as an example of what happens when Christ enters a person’s life.
I don’t want to stand as a representative for all the Pagan converts out there, as though Pagans are so unified a group that there could be such a thing as a “Pagan convert.”
I appreciate the prayers and the support from the Christians who’ve reached out to me on Twitter, but I’m afraid that they have unrealistic expectations of me. I feel like they’re looking at me to fulfill some sort of Prodigal Son role; my story simply fitting into a narrative that they already understand.
I think that all of our stories are more nuanced and complicated than we’d like to admit publicly.
I’m unnerved that immediately after my story was exposed to the largely Christian audience of The Blaze I received my first hateful comment from a white supremacist.
Christians should take note: there is a hateful contingent among you, speaking mean-spirited things in the name of God. It should worry you. It should cause you to take a closer look at your theology, your war-language, your relationship to the “least among us,” your need to be “right” and your engagement with those who you perceive are not.
My concerns and reservations come after a long week of worrying; worrying about being misunderstood, or misrepresented, or misread. I’ve worried that Christians will see me as a champion of The Cause, and Pagans will see me as The Villain. I’ve worried that my hyper-awareness of Audience will get in the way of me listening for the movement of the Spirit in my life. I feel like the experience I had with the woman on the street — the experience which has since become a talking point on the Glenn Beck show — was a call to something. I think it may be a call to ministry of some sort, but I start to get agitated when strangers rush to tell me that they know exactly what I’m being called to.
How can they? How can they know the direction of my own life when I’m still trying to figure that out?
God works in mysterious, disruptive, seemingly illogical ways. We can pretend that God’s Will is a single thing, or a simple thing, or an easily discernible series of choices, but it’s not. We can try to tweet “God’s Will”, but unless the tweet reads “Love God, & love your neighbor as yourself,” we’ll probably be wrong.
So I don’t want to be a voice for the Newly Saved. I don’t want anyone to look to me and expect to see a cookie-cutter Christian. If you think you’ve “won one for the team,” I encourage you to reevaluate your us/them mindset.
Our call is to love.
That’s it.
Period.
Everything else is politics.
If our actions are not an extension of the directive to love, we’re missing the mark.