The Only True Currency

We couldn’t get to the body.

We already stood out as first-time visitors in a tiny church. Frustrated and trying not to cause a scene, I whispered to Matt that my disposable communion packet was defective. The top layer would not peel, and Christ’s body given for me was unattainable. We moved on to the blood. As the woman was coming around the corner with the trash can, Matt began to make it his mission to penetrate though the deceivingly strong film on my communion packet. Were we making a scene? Did everyone see how desperate we’d become? She held out the trash can and Matt, always the hero, was about to say something to her. Was he going to ask for another? Was he going to keep trying with this one? I motioned to him to just let it go. Throw it away. You could tell he felt wrong disposing of a sacred sacrament that way. When she moved on to the next row, I whispered, “It’s okay. It’s just a metaphor for my life.”

My family needs the body of Christ, but it’s elusive to us right now. There I was, acting it out in this scene during worship just as much as the story we enact together in the rest of the liturgy. “Lord, you see me. Why won’t you give us your body?” Ironically, we sang “Nothing but the Blood” as the follow-up song. It was like Christ’s words of assurance spoken back through the singing voices of the small congregation. His blood is enough sustenance for now.

It’s been one year since we officially left our church and denomination, asking for our membership to be removed. Usually, when you change churches, you can keep your old membership until you find another church in which to formally transfer it. But our entire family agreed that we could no longer legitimize the denomination with our membership, even in name only. And I wasn’t safe there. My elders and pastor would continually be hounded to file ecclesial charges against me or face charges against themselves. One pastor went so far as to post the link to our church on Facebook, with my pastor’s face on it, asking people to call and email the church to urge them to press charges against me. Except there wasn’t anything real to charge me with. It’s all so silly. Regardless, these men persevered in their efforts to vilify me. Once they used a screenshot from an old social media post of me taking my daughter out to lunch after church before I was her first hair client at the salon that afternoon. They wanted to charge me for breaking the Sabbath. Imagine having church officers scouring your social media, and who knows what else, only to publicly shame you. Just to say, “See, I told you she is dangerous!” And imagine that these men are ordained in a culture that enables this to continue.

I wish I could say, “So we said, ‘peace out,’ and now we are in a thriving church community.” This book is in the raw, during our search and fight to love Christ’s church. It’s been a disappointing year. Those of you who have been harmed by the church know how difficult it is to even go. Some of you are processing so much trauma that your bodies just cannot make that step right now. The very place and people God promised as a blessing to you has instead become a source of harm. I don’t want to shame anyone who is suffering like this. God sees and loves you no matter what your church attendance record is. And if you are a church leader reading this, know that your community includes people with open wounds from church trauma. Instead of turning your nose up at those who aren’t answering the call to corporate worship, consider exercising empathy and seeing how you can be Christ’s body to them during this time. With consent. Not as a project. By being a friend.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book, The Hope in Our Scars, that releases one week from today!!! Here is another short excerpt from later in the same chapter. Some of the language—underground, dying to our sole self, and fall as grain to the good earth—are from Malcome Guite’s poem, “A Grain of Wheat.”:

We wouldn’t need faith if we could see our hope clearly. We’ve learned that there is no Christ without his church. This is his kingdom. Christ and his bride. But unexpectedly, we find the rich compost of his kingdom in the underground. As we fight together to help rouse one another to this love, we learn that it is much more than dreamy sentiment. Remember, there’s death involved in love. Buechner really gets this: “To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than to suffer the sadness of it, it is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.” This is why we galivant around without looking at the underground, much less dying to our sole selves to fall as grain to the good earth. Looking involves suffering. We enter others’ suffering. This is where beauty rises. And it does because we need resurrection. In a sense, little resurrections happen all over. We can only see them if we take time to listen and look. Looking around, we learn that love gives grace, doesn’t encourage sin, fights for what’s real, and promotes holiness in one another. Above all, love looks to Christ and trusts he will work in us as a community of faith.

Often in the underground, when we are dying to sole self while facing disillusionment and the trials before us, we develop the fitness to fight for what’s real and what matters. And, man, do we need grace for that. We have to die to our carefully curated self—the story that we want others to see about us and that we are even hustling to ourselves—and tell our stories truly. The true parts of ourselves make appearances when our guard is down, when we are laughing, dreaming, or showing empathy. As Lester Bangs in the movie Almost Famous put it, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re not cool.” But we want to be cool so bad that we don’t deal in true currency enough. What does it take to convince us that this is a false belonging? What will it take for us to dig out the real longings of our souls? When we suffer, we don’t have the strength to keep the hustle going anymore. Facing disillusionment, we see that our lives were far more of a hustle than we realized. And the goal didn’t matter. Everything human and vulnerable becomes valuable again. Here our spines strengthen, hope is restored, and love is trained.

There is one week left to get all the preorder freebies, click here for more information. I’d love to get conversation started, helping one another rise from disillusionment!