Who Are You?

I love irony.

In my last post someone asked me about my church denomination, siting that I seemed to have good values and be a real Christian, but not in a way she had seen before. I wrote a little response to her but have been thinking about it ever since. This morning I thought I'd write some more about it and I went in search of some art to add to my post, focusing on being an enigma or contrast or paradox or something. I couldn't find anything I liked, so decided to just find something that I liked that had nothing to do with any subject except that I liked it.

Then I found this and immediately liked it. Beauty and contrast! I love it.

It's been interesting to evolve in my beliefs and style over the years. I've had a strong personality all of my life and have had no trouble standing on my own opinions and beliefs even when I was standing alone, even when I was very young. I'm a firstborn and had parents that always affirmed me as strong, smart, and capable. I don't know which came first (the chicken or the egg) but either way, this is the core ME.

As a young mother (I was 21 when my first baby was born) I hadn't read any parenting books telling me the "right" way to do anything. I think my entire reading of parenting books was one breastfeeding book and What To Expect When You're Expecting. It was not hard for me to follow what felt like the best way to be a mom and to take care of my kiddo, even in the face of people telling me that other ways would be better for one reason or another.

Later on I found that my style actually fit in with a whole movement of parenting that I hadn't known existed, and for awhile I got on a bigger bandwagon than was true to myself. It's easy to get sucked up into group momentum when there is a basic point at which you agree. I think there is something in me (and maybe all of us) that likes to fit into a group. All the better if we can be More Right than all the people not in our group! Have you been there and done that?

Eventually I found my way to homeschooling, did what seemed to make sense to me, but then found movements that branched off of that, and again was, for a time, sucked into a homeschool mom characature of myself in some ways. It's not that I was being a fraud, just that it's easy to get pulled into the black hole of extraneous things that you truly don't care about or perhaps like very much for yourself but don't actually feel there is any deep reason for, but find yourself in the midst of anyhow.

I could bore you with all of my side trips, trying on lots of different ideas and philosophies for size. The thing that I find more interesting than the movements themselves is how at the core of so many of them seems to be a mighty fortress of believing that one's lifestyle, habits, or style makes someone superior to others, particularly in terms of making God happy. Not only is this powerful in creating a monster of those within the movement, but it is also powerful in scaring people to stay within the movement for fear of being not only wrong, but so thoroughly loathed, or at least pitied, but ones former peers.

So many times I have known of a family that put their formerly homeschooled child into school and heard hard-core homeschoolers refer to them as "wimps" or at least declared that we need to "pray for them." Of course, we are not praying for them with a pure heart because we love them or want the best for them. We are to pray that they will see the error of their ways. We pray because of our disapproval. We pray because they are wrong.

I may sound like I regret my side trips and group hugs and superiority complexes that I've had. In fact, no I don't. All of those trips have forced me to try out ideas, roll them around in my head, hear from lots of different people with wide ranges of opinions, and then accept or reject each one, largely with all the available facts in front of me. (so many beliefs come from only knowing one side of a story) All of the trips have helped me know what I believe more clearly than I could have without them.

My little journey in life has shown me so many flip sides of so many things that I now seem to rest most of my philosophy in moderation and mercy. I have too much compassion for other people's situations, and too strong a belief that most people do what they feel is best, to raise my eyebrows and think that I know better than others how they should be living their life. I also believe that most of the issues people get tripped up on are of very little importance to God, and that He sees right through us to our core of trying to fit in, trying to look good to others, trying to cover up something by making our life more shiny in some way. The Bible says that all our righteousness is like filthy rags. How much we need to get ahold of that idea in Christian circles!

The trick to my current state of mind is to not let it become a monster just as the other things were. Not to become haughty about my laid back style. To remember that others are also on a journey, that we are not all walking the same road, and that my journey is still in process too.

It's very unsettling, at times, to feel like there are so few Right Things to hold onto. Those are like walking sticks along my way, and I want lots of them to hold onto as I go up steep slopes and along slipperly paths. If I'm honest with myself, though, there are very few absolutes thatI can find in the Bible. I tend to believe that God left a lot of vague areas so that we can both live authentically, and so that we keep talking to Him to try to find our way. If we had an actual rulebook blueprint for every little thing in our life, why on earth would we need to talk to God? Rules do not produce relationship.

So, yes, you're right. I'm not your Type One Mother of Many of Typical Denim Jumper-Wearing Homeschooler or typical about much of anything. I try to live authentically, be compassionate, think clearly, and love fully. Seems like that's the way it should be, but apparently that makes me an enigma. (which seems fun)