How to choose between Outrage or Absence

What to do when you don't know what to do

Seven years ago, Nate and I went to Austin for a weekend away from Dallas. The church we were attending, and had once felt at home in, made national news (for good reason) and the news was not good. We had been thinking of leaving the church for two years but kept wanting to give it another chance. We decided needed to get away, get some perspective, think, pray.

We spent one night in a little rental unit on the east side of the city and in the morning, walked to a food truck for a biscuit breakfast.

While we waited for our food, I opened my phone up to an email that sucked the breath out of me. A person who had harassed me for years was escalating her harassment to stalking levels, telling us she knew our address and we should watch out. I showed the email to Nate and we ate our food in shock. While we were talking about the email a few hours later, I got a text from a friend with the most awful, shocking, and bewildering news about one of our church leaders, news that hadn’t yet been made public yet. We decided to cut our weekend short and head home. On the way there, I checked the news again and saw another mass shooting tragedy had just unfolded in our country.

We landed at home exhausted and hurting, feeling pressed in from all sides. Neither of us wanted to go to church in the morning, especially this place we had once loved deeply and now felt bewildered by in many ways. But, we thought, we will go. Surely something will be said, even if it’s just about one of these things. Surely we can mourn together.

There was a guest preacher that morning. He cracked jokes, he tried to warm up the room, I don’t remember anything specific he said, only the absence of what was not said. I remember the feeling of hot growing up from my stomach to my throat to my forehead. I remember leaving, feeling in shock. I remember the sense in my gut that our time there was done, the finality of the moment. I remember turning to Nate as we drove home and saying, “We can’t go back.” I remember him taking a deep breath, swallowing hard, and nodding.

We tried to “leave well” over the next few months, which is evangelical speak for having the right conversations and not gossiping, but also choking any root of bitterness that might grow and also never telling anyone exactly why we left, but casing it in language like, “We’re just moving in a different direction,” or “We feel led to explore Anglicanism,” which were both true, but not the whole truth. The truth was that we had a lot of complicated feelings about the whole thing. We knew and loved (and still love) a lot of people who still call this church home. We met one another there. We were in weddings and attended funerals and cuddled babies and held the hands of people going through tragedies there. We had meals made for us, were visited in the hospital, cried, prayed, and laughed with these people for years of our lives.

We also had wide and growing differences about justice and Jesus, the Bible and gender roles, race and politics, how sexual abuse was handled and what to do when a beloved leader is discovered in horrible sin, how to treat women on staff and women not on staff, what kinds of people were promoted and what kinds of people were “let go,” and so much more. We’d been trying to be faithful, not stir up dissension, and yet also quietly vocal about things we thought should be different. We weren’t silent as we left. But we also weren’t kicking up a storm—despite the Internet’s repeated demand that we do so.

It was nuts to me that so many from the church hurt spaces demanded that we share publicly the details of our leaving. Of all people, I had hope that those who experienced hurt and pain in their own stories, could be patient with the time pain takes to metabolize into something that could possibly be for public consumption.

My hurt, grief, and sadness was complicated, as all hurt, grief, and sadness is. To flatten it into blog-fodder or outrage for clicks or even to position it as an invitation for others to share their own pain with me—I wasn’t there. I’m still not there if I’m honest. This is one reason I’ve never found the spiritual abuse or church-pain spaces to be safe for all people. My pain is still so tender (to be clear, not just from the situation above) that I cannot carry this particular pain of others, nor do I want to share my pain with just anyone especially the whole Internet.

I also do not call what I experienced (again, not just in this church, but in the other situations we’ve walked through) church abuse. Therapists have called it that to me, so have friends. But I don’t call it that. Not because I’m in denial but because I am so conscious of my own human propensity to need labels, want commonality, find identity, and more. And I don’t want that label. I don’t want to find my community among those who’ve experienced similar pains. And I don’t want that to be my identity.

It’s not my identity. It’s a particular grief with a particular pain and it’s my grief, my pain, and only I can walk through it and I can only walk through as I can walk through it. To try and pull in what has worked for others or adopt the language or tactics others use in their pain is disingenuous to them and not very fair of me. Nor will it move me through my pain because it’s a from of pretending, of appropriation, and ultimately, of dishonesty. It’s grasping for the life-preserver that was thrown to another drowning person.

What is a person to do, then, when we don’t know what to do?

(I had to take a deep breath here because I wrote all of that out as a mere preamble to what I’m about to write about and it feels like a lot, but I think it’s necessary for me to share in order to say what I’m about to say.)

Unfortunately, we live in an age where there is a map for everything to everywhere. Everyone is providing some kind of service to help struggling people make sense of their pain, confusion, or disorientation. Or, at the very least, providing spaces where there is a common enemy to hate because rage is a powerful elixir and it is a quicker route to action than the slow, painful work of actual healing.

But the route to true wholeness is for us to learn to listen to our own life.¹ It is to listen to the child we have been and the elderly we want to be and the person we never wanted to be and yet the person we have become, and to get quiet, to hear, and then to walk the way forward.

That’s it. That’s the hardest thing and the most necessary thing we can ever do in our lives. There is no roadmap, no elixir, no Internet community, no book, no story, no quippy quote, or podcast episode. There is only you and your beautiful God-dwelling self.

I started writing this piece because I someone shared a clip from a conservative influencer and the ego was just wafting off her, like green sulfur rising from a rotten egg. The way she was sneering at the person whose words she was about to eviscerate, the way she knew this one was going to get a lot of clicks, and normally the rage I would feel in that moment would waft off of little rotten old me.

But this time, all I felt was sad for her.

“Oh,” I realized, “She doesn’t know who she is. She hasn’t learned to listen to the deepest truth of who she has been made to be. She hasn’t learned that not everything in the world needs her response, her corrective, her gotcha moment.”

It’s not my business why she hasn’t learned it yet, she’s young. She’s in environments that reward gotcha moments and the upper hand. Whatever, it’s not my business. I swiped through.

And immediately there was a progressive influencer, flipping her hair over her shoulder and clapping her hands together, leaning toward the camera, tipping her head, duck-lipping her mouth and saying, “We need to talk.” She wanted to capital S School us all on capital C Current Events and make anyone who didn’t see it her way feel like an inchworm.

I took a deep breath, put down my phone, and thought to myself:

What is a person to do?

I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum today, your social media is probably rife with language that makes you feel better and more justified while at the same time sending your opponents to the slaughterhouse with sarcasm or smarts, facts or figures, video evidence or out of context clips. And all of that (waves hands around) might make you feel like, “If I don’t speak up about my thing, I’m probably doing it wrong.” Or maybe it makes you feel like, “If this person I follow doesn’t speak up, they’re doing it wrong.” Or maybe it makes you feel nothing at all. I don’t know. I’m just speaking to the first two sorts of people here.

The most important work you will ever do in this world is to listen to the stillest, quietest, smallest voice within you. Some people call it intuition, others their gut. Some people call it the Holy Spirit and others God in the cave. I call it the me made in God’s image.

I need the reminder that despite all that is going out out there, in here I am bearing the image of the actual God of the universe. I don’t want anything to get between my head and that space or my heart and that space or my voice and that space or my actions and that space. I want it to feel thin, permeable, accessible, the only place in the world that’s mine, all mine. The only thing in the world that cannot be taken from me, no matter how much someone wants to appropriate it or change it or claim it or crush it.

It has been the hardest and best work of my life to learn when to speak up and when to stay silent, how to speak up and how to exercise quiet.

And, despite my attempts to look for answers from men in leadership and pretty, witty women, the only times I have been able to live with the answer is when I have looked within for it, to the sacred place where God abides within me.

This morning I messaged a friend. We have been messaging back and forth about what’s happening in the world and I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know if it matters what I say.” And as I was saying the words, I realized I do know what to say. It is just that: that I don’t know what to do right now.

In a moment like the one we’re in right now when it is very, very bad for some people, and I don’t know what to do or say or not say publicly, the only thing I know to do is love my neighbors, show up in my own city, have conversations about books and coffee spots, meet a new transplant and see an old friend, meet strangers and play a game together, make a meal for someone, participate in peaceful protest in my city, and it is enough. It is. For me.

I know the influencers will make you feel like it’s not enough. I know the Angry People On the Internet are making you feel like if you’re not refuting this or protesting that or sneering at them or standing with us, then you’re not doing it right. And maybe that’s right for them. But you are you. And you get to decide what is right for you, how and when you want to speak up and about what. You get to discern what is right for you to do in the world, the places and people you feel most called to be alongside in days like these. And I don’t judge you one second for it.

Our choice in moments like these isn’t outrage or absence. It’s presence, to not disassociate from your own self and God in you, so that you can offer a non-anxious, non-arrogant presence to the people around you in the ways it feels most congruent with yourself to offer it right now.

Glorious Devon by Gyrth Russell

Here are some people I am thankful for in the world right now, because they are listening to their lives and doing what is congruent with them:

Laura Kelly Fanucci Laura is on the ground in Minneapolis, rallying provisions for local residents who need them. She is truly one of my favorite people to follow on social media. Not just in this moment, but always. You’ll see why.

Shannan Martin I thank God every day for the language Shannon has given us around the word Counterweights. It has been such a good and tangible mental tool for me to practice.

Shawn Smucker Is it cheating to include one of my actual neighbors? I don’t care. Shawn helps remind me that our work is local work and that it is good work.

Sara Billups In the midst of her grief, Sara continually models for me and others what a non-anxious presence looks like right now. I love this friend and learn so much from her.

Amanda Held Opelt Someone who practices what she preaches and who is so, so careful and considerate in her language. I read everything she writes and am thankful for it.

Joshua Johnson If you’re not listening to Joshua’s podcast, can I commend it to you? He is one of the best interviewers out there in the faith-podcast arena. He is attentive to the ways we build empires in our world today and the things we can do to fight back against them.

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1. I am eternally thankful to Frederick Buechner for this language of listening to your life, and also for Parker J. Palmer for writing his little book, Listen to Your Life, which I have read every year for the past six years.