How it started
and how it's going
I wanted to take a moment to share an overview of my faith journey — the 20,000 foot chronology. My motivation is build trust with people who may not know me in real life, in case I sound a little too far “out there.” If you still find it difficult to take me seriously after reading this, I understand. I have that same natural skepticism and I’ve learned not take myself too seriously either, lol.
I started my faith journey in college when I was struggling with substance abuse, toxic relationships and a very low self-esteem. I looked for answers in various forms of spirituality, which eventually led me to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. After college, I became a volunteer campus minister at the College of Wooster. My heart for social justice came to life in AmeriCorps. I was active in a Mennonite church and loved their commitment to simplicity and justice. The church invited me to do justice work in Bolivia, which was my dream job, but I knew that I still had unhealthy patterns with men and substances that I needed to work through first. So I went to graduate school for Development Economics at Ohio State instead. I got involved with a church plant in a charismatic movement, met my husband and started a family.
We bought a big house and lived with people from the church (there were 11 of us at one time). It was a tight-knit community that gave us all a sense of meaning and purpose, but the leader became more and more controlling and it developed characteristics of a cult. It eventually imploded and we were left reeling. We sold the big house, I got a finance job in the government and settled into a normal family life. I shied away from ministry for years, passively attending an established church. Thankfully, I was surrounded by good friends and our weekly dinner and discussions kept me afloat. My life was oriented around gaining financial independence and planning our next big travel adventure, and we had some epic ones! But spiritually, I went to sleep and forgot how to pray. My social justice work and ministry went underground and I felt vocationally barren.
About five years after the church plant disaster, a woman from my church told me that she’d had a spiritual awakening. She invited me to be a part of a new group she was forming. I shared her desire for connection and I had a good feeling about her. When I learned that the group was the School of Kingdom Ministry, red flags started flying. It felt too close to cult characteristics I’d seen. I was reluctant, but then the coincidences started. I’d followed coincidences into the Christian faith when a spiritually awake woman invited me to a gathering 20 years previously. In both cases, I viewed it as a social experiment. And in both cases, being a part of a group awakened my soul to the Spirit in a profound way.
Within a few weeks of learning to pray again, a question appeared in my mind: Does Jesus have a mother or just a father? Since then, the answer to this question has become so apparent to me: Of course he does! I wanted to find ways to awaken other women’s souls to the Spirit. The next year, a friend and I started a group at our church called “Who is the Holy Spirit?” I took a course called Emotionally Focused and became more systematic about healing from my past. I started coaching other women to unpack their emotional formation. I discovered new gifts and a new level of trust in myself. I found courage to mentor teenagers in foster care (not for the faint of heart!) I overcame my sense of vocational barrenness and got a job as an advocate doing social justice. I am still finding ways to invite others onto a journey to awaken more fully to the Spirit, and to answer the question for themselves: Do I have a spiritual mother, or just a father?
So, that’s the 20,000 foot view. There are a lot more detailed accounts here in this blog if you are intrigued. What about you? Have you had a bad church experience? Have you been lost, and found, and lost and found, again? How did you come back around? Do you feel vocationally barren? Has joining groups awakened you to the Spirit before? Are you open to joining a group? I’d love to get to know you and hear about your faith journey too.