web

A few days ago I was delighted to find myself sitting in a group of uniquely impressive and story-drenched women. Some knew one another well while a few, like me, were new to the group. Our sole purpose for the next almost two hours was simple: get to know one another and discuss any pressing questions, needs or problems that life has dealt. We began with introductions. Where are you from? How did you get here? What do you like? Who are you? And, again, I was excited. I wanted to know these women, to begin building threads between us. We could create a web, giving and receiving stories and burdens. But as we went around, I found that the stories we were telling not only veiled our authentic selves but also left the room feeling pent up. Opportunity left untapped. Maybe we were addressing the wrong questions or maybe we just weren’t giving the unfiltered answers, from fear or habit or example.

Women with degrees and worries and layered lives listed off places lives and the names and ages of children. I sunk a little deeper in the cute Ikea chair, recognizing this familiar scapegoat. Oftentimes parents resort to talking about their children rather than themselves. I get it. I, too, love sharing the adventures of Jack and Ari. But we must go further. These introductions were teasers, were undeveloped trailers for really amazing and beautiful and complicated live pictures. Six children living in an on-campus apartment. An upcoming move to Honduras with two-adopted children of a different race. A job that entails loving boys who otherwise roam dark, violent streets. Social work and seminary degrees. Complicated job offers. Tired eyes. Strained marriages.

I alternated between sinking and shifting my weight. I wanted more from these women, not out of simple curiosity but more so out of a desire to release them from the cropped stories we are telling. Cropped and filtered and instagrammed lives. What I want for them and for myself is a word that makes many of us cringe. I used it in my last post, and even then found myself hesitant to type it, use it, or attach myself to it: confession.

Confession has many religious implications in a troublesome history involving lots of money, blood, guilt, and wrath. But I do not believe God created nor continues to encourage confession for the purpose of whipping us. I have experienced something remarkably different. With confession, I believe, comes the freedom God desires for each of us. In confession, we bring to light what we thought so ugly, dark, savage, and unbearable for others to hear, much less help carry, or, even more improbably, release. Confession is naming the darkness and pain that cower within us and, in doing so, robbing such villains of their power to hinder us any longer.

Now let me pause and acknowledge the fault in my story: I was new. It’s hard to expect grand vulnerability to and from a stranger. I’m not advocating for social media confession booths or office cubicle and Target breakdowns. I am advocating for using gifted time and space to eventually share the honest threads of our lives and, in doing so, create webs that trap darkness and let the light through. Dawn’s light touching a web still enveloped in night’s dew is a remarkable site. The web twinkles.

Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us.” I agree and, thus, do not urge confession for the purpose of improving our standing with God. Rather, I long for men and women and children to present their honest selves and struggles in order to dissolve division and interrupt futile competition. Division is what seemed to take place in that room, in that church, in that gathering of sisters. We divided what we perceived the good from bad, holy from unholy, pretty from foul, safe from “too much,” polite from overwhelming. Competition—the unhealthy kind that leads to envy and shame—has flourished everywhere from the workplace to, sadly, the home.

We live in a culture of competitive parenting, where there are literally entire movements to simply embrace different parenting decisions. Authors and speakers and videographers ask parents to be okay with the fact that another parent whips up homemade food or uses disposable diapers or spanks or co-sleeps. I am glad for them and their message. But, as always, God is leaps ahead of us, beckoning us even further along, asking that we go beyond acceptance and move into a place where we as fellow parents, friends, neighbors, congregation members, or coworkers confess our own hardships, our own trouble making decisions and loving well, or perhaps our paralyzing fear that we have made a muck of everything. In confessing, I believe we’ll find community and ultimately the grandest prizes of peace and blessed freedom.

We will twinkle.