“You have no obligation to defend your journey. There is no jury for you to answer to. Speak your truth with authenticity and conviction. Stop trying to accommodate people who don’t agree with you.”
Loved this from Jim Palmer and thought you would, too.
Memo to Shedders:
As you deconstruct and shed your former “Christian” beliefs, you will likely be told that you are “New Age” or some other label, meant to cast a dark cloud over you and your journey. I was recently told that I “wandered away from Christianity.” My response was that I didn’t “wander,” but quite intentionally abandoned institutional “Christianity” in order to fully embrace Jesus’ truth.
Other people don’t have the authority to define for you what your journey with Jesus is or looks like. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Who died and made you pope?” I think you get my point. No human being has the right to tell you what it’s “suppose to be.” What it’s supposed to be is whatever it is as you move forward, connecting to what’s real inside you.
You have no obligation to defend your journey. There is no jury for you to answer to. Speak your truth with authenticity and conviction. Stop trying to accommodate people who don’t agree with you. Stop editing and toning down what is real to you because you are worried about what some people think. Of course some people are going to think you are deceived, deluded, apostate, confused, foolish, and in danger of all sorts of horrible things and punishments from God. So!
We have to remember how out-of-sync Jesus was with his contemporaries, those who expected a religious leader and got Jesus instead. He firmly grabbed the corners of the religious rug and yanked.
Hard.
The ones who resonated the most were those who needed kindness and couldn’t find it from “respectable” people. His amazing kindness has no end.
If you are “shedding,” as Palmer says, do not ever fear you are too extreme in your love, acceptance and kindness to those who need it — to any fellow human being. We should be much more afraid of being too accepted, too respectable to the status quo. We should be most concerned about being religious.
Are you being called deceived, deluded, confused, foolish, taking grace too far, radical? So!
You’re in good company — so was Jesus.
[To read more from Susan Cottrell, visit www.FreedHearts.org]
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SUSAN COTTRELL is a national speaker, teacher, and counselor with years of Biblical study and discipleship experience. Her books include: Mom, I’m Gay – Loving Your LGBTQ Child Without Sacrificing Your Faith
She is the Vice-President of PFLAG Austin, and her “Mom, I’m Gay” book has been endorsed by The Human Rights Campaign and others. Sharon Groves, PhD, HRC’s Religion & Faith Program Director says, “I often get asked by parents for resources that can address the struggles of raising LGBT sons and daughters without having to leave faith behind. Susan Cottrell’s book, Mom, I’m Gay, does just that. This is the kind of book that parents will love.”
She and her husband have been married more than 25 years and have five children – one of whom is in the LGBTQ community. She lives in Austin, Texas, and blogs at FreedHearts.org and here in IMPACT Magazine’s FreedHearts and Jesus Blog columns.
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