..Is the church a safe place to lay bare your soul?
We all want church to be a place of utter authenticity and honesty, but sometimes being honest in a church setting is like stripping off to your underwear, only to find the rest in the home group fully clothed and looking askance at your boldness.
Have you ever taken someone’s hurtful words about you deep into your soul, only to later realise that those words were a lie that you should have rejected?
This post is all about that process, and how to respond when someone’s words cut you to the quick.
I love the church, and I love the evangelical tradition, but sometimes I fear it has not equipped me for dealing with anger, or indeed any strong emotion. I am here, carried on a whirling tornado of fury, and all the church says is, “Stop feeling angry.”
This one goes out to anyone who’s ever been ashamed of their emotions, anyone who’s felt vulnerable for crying in a public space.
Sometimes you have to grieve a difficult year before you can celebrate it. Sometimes we have to feel it all before we can move on.
If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. Sitting on a leather sofa, sipping water and wiping tears, I presented her with my angsty questions. I looked at her proper grown-up mantel piece and knew that I was supposed to be grown up by now, in my mid-twenties. She pulled her fingers through her hair, […]
I was transferring my text books from my locker into my school bag when a fellow student burst into the sixth-form common room. “You,” she said, with eyes full of fire and fury, “you’re a Christian. Where was God when this happened?” She indicated the headline on the newspaper. Sixteen children and one adult had […]
I remember sitting on the stairs, halfway up the stairs, in my childhood home. In a family that was bouncy and exuberant, full of colour and noise, it was important to me to spend some time half-way up. There I would sit, bony knees touching my chin, hand resting on the white paint of the […]
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Tanya Marlow blogs on the Bible, suffering and the messy edges of life [read more]