Present Tension

My embarrassment is somewhat present tense. By that I mean, well, I’m not completely sure, but I think I mean that it is less linked to how I behaved in my evangelical past, though I feel rather sheepish about that, and more linked to how much dissonance I still feel as a result of decisions I made before my questions about faith became insistent.

I had the same example of womanhood that you describe, Michelle, minus the gardening and cooking--we grew up on frozen pizza and hamburger helper, but the example of self-sacrifice and wife/motherhood as the highest or truest calling for a woman was certainly the same. I made major (permanent?) life decisions, i.e. got married, while I still believed that sacrifice was the highest calling for a Christian, especially a Christian woman. Because I chose to marry someone with whom I didn’t feel a natural connection, I went into marriage with a martyr narrative that went something like this: God sacrificed himself for me, the only way I can prove my devotion is to sacrifice that which is dearest to me; therefore, if I sacrifice my ideal marriage I will find true, godly fulfillment. It was something along the lines of “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25). So I went into a marriage that had its built-in challenges (as they all do) with a rather burdensome narrative to define it. (I have since then been able to see that what I thought was martyr-like sacrifice was just as likely some unconscious wisdom on my part that realized that a marriage to some one with whom I connected would likely have been chaos while my husband is patient, kind, and dependable--a remarkable partner, really.) So some of my questions about faith began with my marriage. Having been presented with marriage as the climactic experience for a woman, and then finding that it wasn’t and that I still had a whole life of my own to build within marriage, I felt a little unhinged. What could have been a normal process, the loss of the romantic ideal of marriage was, for me, a spiritual crisis. I'm a little embarrassed by that.

I wondered for a long time if I would have been somehow more myself, a truer expression of myself, if I had not married when I did. I have struggled with what my decision to accept the evangelical ideal of womanhood so readily back then says about me. I have wondered if (and here we go back to the unpreparedness to live the day-to-day) my marriage caused me to miss the life I “should” have had. I suppose here it would be helpful to say that I had intended to be a missionary until I started dating my husband. To me missions didn’t feel like the sacrifice of my talents. After spending a spring break and a summer in the Dominican Republic with missions teams during Bible college (I just blushed. I always do when I say, “Bible college.” That bothers me about myself.), I realized that missions appealed (at least my romantic idea of it) to the wanderlusting extravert in me. I know now that my plunging into missions straight out of Bible college would have been a disaster for everyone involved, but I have struggled with the feeling that maybe I picked wrong and God washed his hands of me and I was, thus, condemned to the mundane.

The story of how my questions about faith became insistent and developed is much like yours, Darby. After I got married I started graduate school. After that it’s really a ditto of Darby’s post from poverty of understanding through scorched faith in Christ. The result is a faith that is drastically changed, even in some key doctrinal ways, and is yet eerily similar to the foundations of the faith I started with.

Back to embarrassment: I am embarrassed by how long it has taken me to make peace with my decision to marry (and that some days I still haven’t). I am embarrassed that my struggle has affected another person, my husband, so completely. I am embarrassed every time a friend (most of my friends now are not “believers”—okay, we have to find some way to say that that doesn’t make our stomachs turn, or maybe that's just my stomach) asks me how long we've been married and then the follow up question, how old I was when I got married, and then, when I tell her, asks why I married so young, and I have to think through my whole narrative again and try to explain it. I don't know why I find that so hard to do.

So here’re some questions: Do you experience that embarrassment when you talk about your past and your previous or current faith with people who may not share it? If so, do you think that the embarrassment is because of the impression of evangelicals held by our culture? Is it from my own insecurity or lack of faith? How do you soothe it?