the dirty laundry show

I’m the last person you’d ever expect to write or produce anything publicly that had the title “Christian” attached to it. Frankly, the word still makes me queasy, probably because of ALL the mess associated with my lived experience of it. I wonder if that will ever change… in any case, messy verbiage aside, I’m about to do the unthinkable. I can’t avoid it. There’s a story here that must be told, and it finally seems like the time has come to tell it.

If you’ve read any of my posts in the previous 10 years, you have borne witness to bits and pieces of a painful process that took the most selfish person in the world (me) and transformed that person into an entirely new being. This is work only the Spirit can do, and I wasn’t always game for it. Much of the time, I was kicking, screaming, and running in the opposite direction – which is why it’s taken a decade to reach this beautiful breaking point.

So many aspects of my life have been that much more difficult because of my staunch determination to make myself comfortable and happy. I avoided trying new things. I quit theater, something I truly loved and enjoyed, because I was passed over for a part in the tenth grade. Worse, I interpreted the voice of the Spirit through a lens of self-serving ambition and felt “intuition.” It never struck me as odd that God’s will often led me in the direction that I most wanted to go.

I wanted to go to college in California. I didn’t care that my parents had to take on more debt for me to do so. It was God’s will. I wanted to attend graduate school in Oregon. I didn’t care that I had to shoulder $60k in loans to do it. It was God’s will. I wanted to marry a man I’d just met who didn’t share my faith. I didn’t care, because he made me feel seen and special. It was God’s will.

Who knows which of these (and many more) decisions truly were in the cards for me. Several of them have resulted in painful consequences, like crippling debt and trying to share my faith with someone who doesn’t quite understand my commitment to “one way, one truth.” But God is faithful, and He has used these possible missteps in incredible ways. He has shown up for me, even when I walked out on Him. And He has worked so many miracles in the process.

He uses my kids almost daily to continue working out the selfishness still festering in my gut. He has transformed me from a mom who couldn’t wait to drop my kids at the kindergarten doorstep to a mom who homeschools my kids and spends an unseemly amount of time with them. He has reconnected my relationship with my dad, which has been difficult my entire life. He has sustained me financially through countless terrible and brash work-related decisions.

At every turn, He has proven faithful. Even though I thought I knew him as a kid, I don’t think I truly let him in until I was 33. Frustrated with faith and ashamed of the Christian label, that was the year I decided to walk away for good. A friend had mentioned that he reads all four gospels every spring, so I determined to read just the book of John and then decide for real. I struggled to empty my brain of everything I’d been told about this Son of God and read it with new eyes. A month later, I had seen Jesus, and things started to get weird.

All of a sudden, I couldn’t get enough of the Old Testament, which, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is an ungainly collection of insane history and complicated stories. Every morning, I dutifully woke early to devour chapter after chapter, book after book. I started listening to apologist podcasts. I bought the world’s biggest commentary. I just wanted to know everything and how it all applied to real life.

I also had a hankering to go back to church… a place that had tortured and terrified me since I could remember. But I wanted to gather with my contemporaries, I wanted to hear scripture taught and discuss it with the brethren. I knew that my previous “I don’t need church to be a Christian” approach wouldn’t satisfy my hunger. For better or worse, God designed me to be part of this sometimes dysfunctional community of believers, so He gave me a heart for it.

The life shift that most took me by surprise, however, was the choice to homeschool. We took it on during the pandemic, purely by force. But suddenly, I was committed. Not because I necessarily enjoyed it – not at first, anyway. It was a slog through knee-deep mud trying to choose curriculum and establish a schedule and assess how my kids learned best. But I got to teach them Biblical principles. Everything I was learning from the Bible, I wanted them to know. I had always balked at hippie Christian homeschoolers, and now I was part of the club. Since then, God has only grown my capacity and desire to continue this work.

Which brings me to a shift that’s still very much taking place in my career-related ambition. I always wanted to be someone important and respected. Someone people looked up to as successful, experientially and financially. But many of the desires and missions that were budding in my soul directly competed with my ability to be “productive” in a financial sense. What’s more, I noticed that when I really went for it in my career, it was always accompanied by a growing ego and disdain for the homeschool and other work to which I felt called.

My flesh has been in a raging war with the Spirit. It has been an exhausting fight, and one that I’m not sure I’ll ever “win.” For me, a quiet and humble life seems to nourish the work of the Spirit, while ambition to achieve and “succeed” flushes it out. Every year, somehow, God provides for my family. Through Nick’s yoga and small writing projects, He has kept us afloat. That in itself is a miracle. But it doesn’t make it any easier to watch others around me succeed and achieve in ways I always expected to. Slowly, God is humbling my heart as I learn to continuously ask “How can I bring you the most glory with my gifts?” rather than “How can I make the most of my gifts for myself?”

Which brings me to today. I have long felt a push from the Spirit to share my own testimony, of which this is just the start. I’ve also been seeking Him about a way to use my gift of writing for His purposes, and an idea has begun to form. The Bible tells us that our testimonies are powerful and that we should be ready to share them at any moment. I’m eager to do just that.

Do you have a God story you’d like the share or art that you’ve created as an outpouring of your walk with Him? I’d like to collect and catalog these stories so that a larger readership can benefit – and help you put the pieces together, if you’re struggling to nail down the story.

You can reach me at LEKGonzalez@gmail.com. I’m curious to see where this weird thread leads.