journal

The only place with fewer radio-genre choices than rural South Carolina is rural South Carolina on Sunday. We idly flip through the stations on our way home from camping, and land for a minute on a sermon about church. The world’s temptations are many, says the pastor, so we gather every Sunday for a TREATMENT! I think when he says “treatment,” he means “a sermon like this one.” I think I’ve gotten a better treatment in the woods.

For a long time I couldn’t convince myself to go to church. My church had hurt me, and I couldn’t bear to try and fit into another one. Why should I? On Sunday mornings I could pray on a walk or in a coffee shop; learn about the Bible from books; and play worship music on my own. And as far as “Christian community” went, well, the community I thought I’d belonged to had certainly not shown me Christ, there at the end. I already had Christian communities down the street and around the country, people who loved me, cared for me, and held me accountable. I was not about to seek out another formalized group of hypocrites just because the hypocrites told me I should.

When I did haul myself into a service, it was always for one clear and simple reason: I can’t feed myself Communion.

Sure, I could gather my own friends for a meal and call it that. I could declare to myself any old time that God is near, and I would be right. But sometimes I needed more; I needed to confess my sins and hear another voice assure me of God’s grace. I needed someone else to offer me bread, to take and eat this funny snack at the climax of this solemn ritual. And I needed to share it with people I hadn’t chosen—some who seemed kind, some who confused me, some who were hypocrites. Without the ancient words and the physical food and the motley gathering, I would slowly forget what I believe: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. I would lose the thread of wonder and mystery that winds through all the most mundane bits of life—like rough hands, rote words, and hunks of store-bought bread.

There’s something about sharing that bread with people you don’t necessarily know or like. It’s a tangible admission that you need the boring priest, the self-righteous professional, the disabled young man, the giggling children, the person who’s going to beg from you after the service, and even the 5th century theologian whose words made you so mad this week—you don’t get to belong to the body of Christ, but not to them.

Yesterday was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when Martin Luther broke from the Church he’d pledged his life to, unwilling to help it place heavy burdens on the weary any longer. Today is All Saints’ Day, when we celebrate all the children of the Kingdom of God, famous or not, from Saint John the Baptist to Great-Grandma Jane. Yesterday a great schism; today, anticipation of God’s great ingathering.

I feel thrown back to that (very recent) time when I stood between the church that had wounded me and the Church I knew I needed. When I, like Martin Luther, found it intolerable to be in the church, and intolerable to stay out of it. When I stole snatches of grace from all the Communion tables around town, too spooked to imagine actually sitting down to the feast with any one congregation. When I told God a lone-wolf faith was gonna have to do for a while, but still slunk around the edges of village firelights, wondering if I’d ever find one where I belonged.

For a few years, I guess, I lived in the space where today’s fractured church dwells—and where so many souls wander on their own: between a huge, traumatic rift, and a beautiful, impossible hope. Between the intolerable wrongs of the past and the promised great gathering of the future. I longed for healing, but I could hardly believe it really existed.

There were times when the church was not there, but God remained with me. And then there were times when God sent me to beg from the church. Those times, the church bore God to me on golden dishes or in wicker baskets, with kind eyes or with uninterested recitations, and I received with gratitude, because I had nowhere else to go. From all the people who cared enough to show up and serve, all the people I thought I was better than, and all the people I couldn’t risk loving, I received enough bread and wine for another few days.

It’s fine to have a community that shares your interests and activities, your stage of life, or your beliefs about the world. But that’s not the body of Christ. The body of Christ is a gathering of beggars, of the finite, the silly, the oblivious undeserving, invited to take all we need and much more. The body of Christ is an unimpressive group of too-old trick-or-treaters who end up somehow at a Hogwarts feast. The body of Christ is a lot of awful, hurtful screwups, muddling about together and trying very hard, finding clues along the way that it is not all in vain—that we are loved beyond measure even so.

When the clues seem like they’ve all evaporated, you’re always invited back to that simplest, most insistent one: the bread and wine, the body of Christ. Even in the back seat, fidgety and judgmental, or petrified, or wrong, even when you can hardly look anyone in the eye—you’re allowed to tag along, to taste and see, to take and eat, to let Jesus sustain your body though nothing else sustains your soul; you’re allowed to take your place with all the saints.

 For too long I thought the physical body separated our spirit-selves from God; now I’ve learned from the Bible God gave up everything to meet me right here, in the sacred ground of flesh and bone.

I wrote a book and called it Bread, Sex, and Other Devotions: Making Friends with my Body and God.

Every once in a while, I’d look up from writing it and ask myself why I was doing it. With a new political emergency every day, people suffering, a country divided, what does it matter if I or anybody else participate in such hippie nonsense as “making friends with our bodies”? Isn’t God, honestly, busy with other things besides watching me color pictures or whatever this involves?

As these questions rush in, an answer, too: in a word, no. God is never too busy to be with us.

Maybe that’s a nice sentiment you tend to brush past, but stop and hear this good news again for a moment. God with us, the God-man man-God, a bloody birth and a bloody death and resurrected hands still bearing scars: these are the physical facts on which our faith is founded. These are God’s once-for-all declarations that these dirt-bodies belong to all the world, and all the world belongs in God. God’s material creation is very, very good. For too long I thought my physical body separated my spirit-self from God; now I’ve learned God gave up everything to meet me right here, in the sacred ground of flesh and bone.

That means that if I’m not able to dwell here in this body, I’m missing half of what it means to be human. If I try to float about, pretending that my body is less real or less me than all my invisible bits, I lose much of what connects me to other people, to the planet, and to God. Here is God, trying to entice me to actually care for the bodies and soil and people and art of creation, while I try to prove my holiness by being above those things; or to guarantee my safety by keeping away from them; or to succeed on the world’s terms, and consequently make a disaster of them. Here is this gift, this miracle of a body, I spend my days punishing, denying, shrinking, ignoring, cursing, exhausting, overindulging, because I’m not willing to simply be here.

The creation is more than a failed experiment, the physical aspects of life more than incidental to God’s plan for the world. And when I discover this, I rather quickly find myself obliged to care about others’ material well-being along with my own. When I connect to my own body’s strengths and weaknesses, needs and gifts, its very-good, very frustrating finitude, I realize others’ as well. I lose patience for “spiritual care” that neither shapes real-world action nor nurtures whole people, that pretends at compassion but never eases bodily suffering, that requires superhuman virtue from people living in subhuman conditions. But this only happens if I know how to live my own life on a human scale—if I’ve forgiven myself for failing to be superhuman; if I’ve acknowledged my own pain; if I’ve made peace with life lived right in the midst of the muck.

And dwelling fully with my body is about more than a worldview. The more I become involved in the work of caring for God’s creation, the more I need my body to partner with me. Yes, I could run entirely on passion or guilt or adrenaline for a while, maybe a long while. But those inspiring forces won’t carry me across the long haul of loving the world. I have to be grounded down in my own core to withstand all the highs and lows of caring for others’ bodies and souls. I have to be healthy, good to myself, in order to pour good out from me. I need my body’s wisdom: my feet saying we’re tired or my gut saying this situation is dangerous or my backbone saying we can stand another hour. 

At the end of the day, the most important thing I have to contribute to the world is not feverish activity, however noble the cause I serve. What the world needs from me is no more and no less than my one bright, humble being: this simple, beautiful person rooted and established in God’s love. But if I only accept God’s love for part of myself, pretending that my body doesn’t matter, we all miss out on what my body could have offered. If I remain forever at war with my ugly, unwell, disappointing flesh, I can’t invite others to the wholeness of accepting, embracing, and ministering through their own imperfections and limitations.

I hope I have never pretended to be an expert at all this. On the contrary, the depth and breadth of my struggle is what compels me to look for answers. I’m reminded daily that my physical self is small, slow, chronically ill, and comically young-looking. (Also my face is extremely asymmetrical.) But I am learning to turn my attention toward my body’s beauty, its steadfastness, its incredible healing, its irreplaceable wisdom. I am making experiments in self-respect and establishing habits of self-love. I’m sitting with fear of my body, impatience with my body, disgust toward my body, and asking them where they come from. I’m learning they never, ever come from God.

The longer I kept on, the more I could look up from writing the book and already know why it matters. I am finding that being created, inhabiting matter, is an adventure and an honor—in spite of, or because of, the fact that it’s also outrageous and absurd. I look up from the screen and I see beauty, miracle, in all the boring things and imperfect people around me. And as much as the world needs some solid political policy and an anti-racism spiritual awakening, I am seeing that those things may not even happen if we cannot take seriously the material effects of governance or confront the fact of our own skin. I am seeing that the world needs great actions and grand ideas, but it also needs good bread, good sex, and other incarnate devotions.

The first sentence is slow to appear. The longer I stare at the blank page, the more difficult it seems to narrow down the possibilities and begin to say anything. Writing is a labor, and an anxious one—maybe one that can wait a few minutes.

My hands begin to move toward my phone long before I decide to pick it up. It’s not that I really think I’ll find just the right inspiration on Twitter or Facebook. It’s that the phone is a soothing object, a comfort device—just a little more information, one more beautiful photo, a tiny emotional jolt, and I can put off for one more minute the long and dreadful task of writing.

Having your phone next to you while you’re working is like having a bowl of your favorite candy on your desk. It’s an environment designed to “privilege,” as ethicist James Williams says, “impulses over intentions.” Only instead of offering your taste buds a moment of sweetness, you’re tempting your brain with stimulation: the quickest, easiest, most rewarding escape from reality humankind has yet devised.

I turn the phone off altogether. Writing, like anything worth doing, requires a full and unmitigated immersion in reality.

We’ve all heard rumors about the armies of engineers competing for space in our heads; but do I really take them seriously? Or would part of me rather refuse to believe that the red likes and friendly hearts are being doled out to me in the manner most likely to addict me? It’s much easier to believe the apps are simply designed to help me live a better life than to admit that they drive profits for others by monopolizing my time. After all, they make me feel so good.

I’m so deeply entrenched in my own stats and the outrage of the day that I lose track of how effectively I’m being prevented from accomplishing my true intentions. Stalking friends is easier than calling them. Learning new ideas about business is easier than actually maintaining a career. Waging battle in the comments section conveniently eats away the lunch hour when I was supposed to make the dreaded phone call to my senator.

At the end of the day, I’ve sat in my chair and imagined connecting with people and doing good in the world; but all I’ve really done is sit in my chair. And the longer I sit, the less satisfied I am. I’ve pinned thirty beautiful chocolate cake recipes, but the meditative measure of flour and the joyful clink of forks on plates are as far away as ever.

I don’t know why I hesitate to call this “sin.” Something, maybe the fear of sounding regressive, makes me feel like a TV preacher when I do. But it is certainly more than just a waste of time; even if I am just making myself less happy and more anxious, jealous, lonely, or benumbed, I’m living in lies. The evidence: researchers believe I may be making myself less clearheaded, emotionally intelligent, creative, and capable of extended attention.

And maybe it still sounds silly to imagine that God is concerned with my attachment to a little bird icon; but I do think God hopes I’ll pull my head out of the entertainment-box and engage with the neighborhood She made. I think God is concerned when I’ve lost track of where I am and what I care about; when I become ever more resistant to discomfort and surprise; when I no longer even know what I’m worshiping.

Several years ago I started to live and breathe the word “intentional.” I didn’t want to get swept into a life pattern just because the path was well-worn. I questioned everything, researched alternatives, and ran experiments, trying to calibrate different aspects of my life to match up with my values. Every motion and every choice came under scrutiny. It was exhilarating—until it was exhausting. After months, maybe years of this, it slowly occurred to me that I did not have the capacity to reinvent everything all the time; and that often this impulse had more to do with a need for control than a desire to contribute.

Still, I think I’ll always carry the value of intentionality with me, if only to spite the many others—app developers, advertisers, political groups—who have their own crafty designs on my behavior. Only now I’m less interested in constantly examining my every action, and more interested in taking proactive steps to build my values into my life. I’m not playing defense throughout the day; I’m setting myself up for success on a bigger scale.

Most recently, I bought an alarm clock and started turning my phone off between 9 PM and noon. This, it turns out, is completely different from “making a rule for yourself” not to check it at certain hours. Just having to push a button and then wait 30 seconds to use the phone gives me a chance to actually decide when I want to have it on, and when I want to stick with my tech-free mornings. Now walking Miya, enjoying breakfast, listening in prayer, and writing come before the requests in my inbox and the nagging tug of social media. I feel more like I use my tools, and less like they use me.

Likewise, my farm share delivery helps me eat more organic vegetables. My calendar keeps my projects on track. And the process of writing a new devotional has invited me to be even more fully present with the everyday.

Bread, Sex, and Other Devotions: Making Friends with My Body and God really started years ago, with a bunch of theology readings about Jesus’s body. Maybe, the story went, God didn’t just put on blood and bone as a favor to us nasty, stupid creatures; maybe there’s something about the material universe that God loves—that God likes. Maybe following Jesus isn’t just about a hypothetical change in our hypothetical souls; maybe it’s about waking up to our own incarnation—our own enfleshment—and God’s presence with us right here and now.

Over the last several weeks I’ve been praying with my body and taking in more and more of this messy world to try and breathe out some glimpses of that Jesus-vision. This little book’s been plunked out over coffee, on my couch, and in between the steps of my pot roast recipe. It’s sent me running for my Bible and in places, taken shapes I didn’t expect.

Now that it’s almost here, I’m praying daily that it could be light and grace and surprise to you. If you’re trying to be more intentionally present or just looking for a bit of rest, these three weeks of meditations, scripture, and journaling questions could serve you well.

To change our habits, we need to replace a bad one with a good one, so if you’ve thought about skipping the morning scroll, I’d love for this book to meet you over coffee to talk about the practical ways we can more fully inhabit these dear, silly bodies of ours.

To get your ebook or email series on the day it comes out, sign up for the email list in the sidebar (or below).

Then maybe take a walk without your phone.

The sex and shame series begins here.

As with all of these stories, all I can add is my gratitude to the author of this post for her candor and bravery, taking the time to let others know they’re not alone. 

It was called “The Blue String Thing.” The theme of this rally was based around a story about a girl who made a pact with her friends to save themselves until marriage. A few years later and struggling to keep herself chaste, she found out that many of her friends had already broken the pact. In desperation, she threw open her Bible and pointed to a random verse: Numbers 15:37-39.

“The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, and tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a cord of blue on the tassel of each corner. And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.”

Inspired by these words, she found a blue string and tied it around her wrist, so that “whenever [she was] tempted to go too far with a boy, [she’d] never have to look further than [her] wrist.”

I was probably in middle school and this certainly wasn’t the first time I had heard such a message. What struck me about this particular event was the message the speaker imparted to us. He mentioned that he was always being asked, “How far is too far?” His response would shape my sexual ethic for years to come: “When you are walking along the edge of a cliff, you don’t ask ‘How far is too far?’ You try to stay as far away as you can from that cliff edge!”

That analogy made perfect sense to my adolescent brain. Actually having sex seemed an impossible fantasy at that point, but if Sex Ed had taught me anything, it was that one thing always leads to another. The more boundaries I placed between myself and the `dirty deed,’ the more likely I was to succeed in my mission to stay pure. As the worship music played and people went up to the altar to cry and confess, I prayed and thanked God that I had never been kissed and vowed to save my first kiss for my wedding day. I felt so special for being able to impart this treasure on my adoring future husband, who I was sure would be so pleased with my devotion to waiting for him.

I considered myself blessed for the lack of temptation I experienced all throughout high school and the vast majority of college. I remained physically `unblemished,’ which made the hypocrisy of my actual situation all the more stark in contrast.

I think it was at some point during my freshman year of college when I was finally able to admit myself that I had an addiction to pornography and erotic literature. It wasn’t something that happened all the time, but every few months or so, I would feel the urge to dive back into that world. Even more shameful, my sexual desires and fantasies were on the darker side. Looking back, I can trace my online addiction to middle school, when I flirted with a fascination with torture by humiliation and slavery. My Wikipedia perusing led me to the world of BDSM. I quickly clicked away at first, but I found myself going back again and again, always diving a little bit further into that world. I kept this secret very close, because although Christians expect men to struggle with pornography, women who are addicted are often only mentioned in passing. I’ve sat through so many sermons where the preacher was listing off specific sins to elicit contrition and uttered the phrase “…and for the men, pornography…” That adds an entirely new level to the already burning shame. So I kept my shameful secret, and to the world, I was the girl who was saving her first kiss.

I brought all of this cognitive dissonance and sexual baggage into my relationships. On the one hand, I had very strict rules about what behaviors were allowed (no kissing, no sex, etc.). But on the other hand, my sexual desires were solely conditioned by years of kinky pornographic consumption. Any decent guy would be disturbed by the things I confessed to be turned on by, but any guy who wasn’t would never get past my prudish exterior.

I had my first kiss sometime around 25. I was not married, but I had been dating a guy for awhile at that point. We had not actually `had sex,’ but our relationship still had a sexual component (at least in my virginal eyes). I had been taught that the journey to sex was linear, but some of the activities we were engaging in were past the ‘kissing mark.’ As my boyfriend eventually pointed out, most kissing was more affectionate than it was sexual, so eliminating that made our physical relationship feel less intimate and more about mutual masturbation. He didn’t pressure me into kissing him, but I eventually acquiesced on my own. He and I are no longer together, and I have come to accept that my future husband will not be the recipient of my first kiss. Part of me is relieved that I won’t have to bring that burden into any future relationships. If there was one thing I learned from that relationship, it is that I have a tremendous amount of sexual baggage, both from the purity culture of my youth and from my secret pornographic consumption.

If I could go back and talk to my 15(ish) year old self, I would tell her not to vow to save her first kiss for marriage. I don’t say that to condemn anyone who has made that choice or would encourage others to do so, but for me personally, oversexualizing kissing is unnecessary at best and incredibly harmful at worst. I wish I knew what to say to my younger self about her pornographic addiction. I wish I knew how to stop her from starting down a destructive path without further forcing her to repress her sexuality. 

How does porn factor into the purity conversation for you?

How can the church people help people deal with sexual mistakes without piling on more shame?

How has the tendency to attribute certain sexual sins to one gender or another affected you?

Is the “path to intercourse” linear?

The rest of the sex + shame series:

• on the voices in my head
• on making your own choices
• on marrying to stay pure
• on shame after marriage
• on being worthy of affection
• on what it means to be gay
• on trying to get it right
• on not getting the sex life of your dreams

I’m so stoked to introduce you to my friend Kelsy! We went to school together, so it’s no surprise that some of my biggest “me, too” moments have come from reading Kelsy’s story this week. I’m so, so glad I’m not the only one who “reread the more tantalizing sections” and made up fantasies that every boy in youth group was into me because they…couldn’t avoid proximity to me? These are the kinds of stories that make me want to hold a huge meetup in a cabin. with a fireplace. over wine. 

(by the way, meet up with Kelsy on Twitter and at kelsyblack.com!)

(New to the sex + shame series? start here.)

Fifteen-year-old me furtively looks around at the few others currently in my church’s library. Maybe if I pretend to look at the bible study section, nobody will notice my real browsing intentions: teen dating and love. For some reason, I was mortified by the idea of anyone knowing I was interested in the taboo topic of dating. Youth group life (which as a homeschooler, WAS my life) was all about kissing dating goodbye until marriage, something that seemed like a far distant dream for when I was older (like maybe 21 or something)—so nobody could ever know my secret. I devoured anything I could about dating, even secretly rereading the more tantalizing sections of the “Your Body, God, and You” type books my parents had given me as my main source of sex education.

Those dating books became my Bible. Everything those authors wrote became my truth. Boys would say anything it takes to have sex with you? Men are liars and led only by their primal urges? If you have sex before marriage (or date, as some books insisted,)  you are giving your worth away? All became absolute truths. I pledged that I never wanted to get my heart broken by a boy; I wanted to be the one who broke hearts.

Granted, I had nothing to worry about. I had crushes on basically any boy who said hi to me and practically got a pHD in over-analyzing body language (“Wow, he sat in the chair behind me in worship service. That really means that he likes me.”) Around that same time, I started reading Donald Miller (fantasizing that I would marry him one day, of course) and his writings became my new truth. My two obsessions, romance and “living the right story,” became one as I went to college.

I longed to fall in love or experience my first kiss (the trend in high school had been to save it for marriage), but my fear that my story might contain heartbreak or anything above a PG rating kept me from doing just about anything. “How could I tell my future kids/grandkids that my first kiss was making out with some random dude? They would be so ashamed!” I would rather be inert than somehow make the wrong romantic choice and ruin my “love story.”

I didn’t have my first kiss until after college, at the ripe old age of 23. The story I was so longing to be picture perfect? Yeah, my first kiss was with a stranger in a hot tub after drinking a little too much. It was great and I wondered what took me so long to actually do anything fun. Soon after, I went a little wild. My dating life went from famine to feast and I made choices that were immature (because I WAS immature in that arena).

The hardest part was/is realizing that the person I spent my entire adolescence becoming was not me anymore. I made choices that(while I found I didn’t regret them and viewed them as learning opportunities) didn’t quite align with my 15 year old self’s life strategy.  I wasn’t married at 21; at the time, I didn’t even know the last name of the guy I kissed, and I certainly didn’t marry him. I don’t even want to have kids, so there goes the “tell your story to your grandkids” idea.

But I can tell you: I am living a story full of grace, redemption, and a hell of a lot of fun. I’m in a relationship with a fun, kind, unconditionally loving man who is patient with all the things I am still unlearning from those Christian dating books (although he is not interested in reading my old “letters to my future husband” from that same era because he thinks it’s a little creepy). I feel happy in my body and sexy, unafraid of the power of womanhood that once held me back.

For so long, I lived in fear of making the wrong choice and fear of my own sexuality. Now, I am just trying my best to live my best life now and let the stories come afterwards.

Did you ever conflate some other idea with your outlook on dating and sex, like Kelsy’s “story” obsession?

Have you ever realized you would have a lot to explain to your younger self?

Is there a way to become mature in the dating and relationship arena without dating? 

Update on the sex + shame series: I will be back to writing more often in a couple of weeks, but so many people have found this to be helpful that the series will also continue as long as I receive submissions. Most authors have chosen to remain anonymous. I’d be glad to hear your story through the contact form on this site or at lyndseymedford[at]gmail.com.

Meanwhile, you can catch up here:

1. on the voices in my head
2. on making your own choices
3. on marrying to stay pure
4. on shame after marriage
5. on being worthy of affection
6. on what it means to be gay