Theology

Over the past few years I have started to ask more questions about the world then I once use to... for some reason at some point I lost my sense of wonder and felt like it was no longer a safe thing to have...
Yesterday morning I woke up with the question of "why me"... not a question I normally ponder and probably not in the way that you would think... but instead I was pondering it about blessings... why have I been so blessed in my life? I have a situation that we have been praying about for a while and I know some others have too and it looks like God is answering this prayer in a way I never imagined and I am still feeling overwhelmed at the possibility of this... not because I didn't think God can do things like this, but why me? Brent and I have a habit of anytime someone does something kind in our direction of saying "I am sure someone else needs your kindness more." Maybe its our upbringing or culture... honestly I haven't unpacked why we both feel that way and why we both struggle with generosity in our direction. We both love to do things for other people... the only blog post I wrote in April during a really hard season was about rallying our community behind places that love families like ours and it brought me great joy to write a post like that. But I suck at being on the other end... one of my friends very lovingly reminded me this week that we have been praying about this situation and maybe the Lord is trying to provide for us... maybe I need to stop my theological whirlwind... but my head keeps going back to others...
Because I see all the ways that God provides in my life... and all the ways I don't deserve it. All the ways that I mess up. And I look at hurting, hungry, desperate people around me and wonder why not them... why doesn't everyone have food and shelter... why are kids dying from preventable things... why was I randomly born into a country that can provide the medical care for my kids...
See the last many years has been a growing journey for me... because I use to be really good at thinking I deserved things because of how good I was... how I did all the right social things and therefor things should just be easy for me because society said that if you make all the right choices then you don't need things like Medicaid or charities... it was easy to buy into the political turned church philosophy that if you make the right choices in life that capitalism will work for you and you will rise... but my story doesn't look that way... we could have a tax rate of 0 and still never be able to pay all of the medical bills without Medicaid. There are no works I can do to effect this a whole lot.
So over the last few years my views started to shift as I watched some of those social turned "biblical" things not work out in the long run of my life and I started to get angry with the American Church and particularly the prosperity gospel. And once again God brought me the people I needed... in the form of a few podcasts, books and Twitter of all places. People who like me didn't see the story play out in real life but who loved God enough to go digging.
I sat on my couch yesterday afternoon crying the loss of someone I never met in person... a momma with kids younger then mine... but someone who also asked a lot of questions... someone who could be a bit of a bullhead but yet kind and loving... and she was gone too soon... And I watched the Church on Twitter morn in a way I have not seen the church morn before... it wasn't flowery pleasantries... there was some cursing... but there was also hurting broken people loving each other.
There are parts of her story that I really resonate with because if I had been more public and on stages the last few years, I likely would have taken a lot of the same pushback she has received from some of the gatekeepers of the American church... she personally took the heat for some of the things many people of my generation seem to be wrestling with... but I can also see at different parts of my life how I likely would have been on the "side" of the gatekeepers in this situation... the people who are using her death to try to silence people... the gatekeepers on twitter trying to use her tragic death as a reason to tell people to fall in line... the people who see questions as a threat.
Yesterday felt like an emotional whirlwind... but really that is how life has felt since the new year... and today I still sit in a lot of questions but I am thankful for the community that reminded me that it is ok to sit in these questions and that we don't all have to perfectly line up on every view but that love is so important.