I Bless Everything That Brought You Here

Or, how patriarchy teaches women to shame themselves and keep themselves small

Last fall I wrote a piece titled You Don’t Belong Here, about the fallout of the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere. I still stand by what I wrote (TLDR: The EWB incentivized women by promising belonging, community, and influence but the belonging was contingent on fitting certain, stringent molds.), but it was a private conversation that followed the post that has lingered in my mind long afterward.

My friend Sarah Bessey commented on the piece and we began a voice message exchange that lasted days. I had just started a new Leuchtturm1917 the day we started chatting about it and so the first pages of the notebook are full of notes from our conversation. I’ve turned back to those notes so many times since November that despite my notebook being near its end, it still automatically opens to those first pages. I say that because I want you to know how meaningful Sarah’s words were to me.

Before I share more about her words, though, I want to share this:

Sarah and I were both writing on Al Gore’s Internet when the personal essay was at its height. We were not what I’d call friends in the late aughts/early 2010s, more just writing acquaintances, albeit on two very different sides of the conversation.

Sarah was a charismatic, spirit-filled, progressive, labeling herself (and her book) a Jesus Feminist. I was in a conservative, complementarian church which lauded biblical literacy above all else. In my initial comment to Sarah on the post mentioned above, I phrased it like this: she was already pressing at the ceiling of what was considered acceptable for Christian women and I was coming in on the floor. I don’t say that to disparage either of us; in both places, there were challenges. It’s just the reality of where we each found ourselves in those years.

She was writing for one set of publications, I was writing for a decidedly other set and rarely the twain would meet. For a time, though, Sarah and I (and other names you might recognize, Shawn Smucker Seth Haines Rachel Held Evans, and more) wrote for the same small publication.

I don’t know about Sarah, but I caught a lot of flack for sharing a platform with her and Rachel at the time. In my circles, they were considered heretics. I don’t know what I was considered in their circles, but I suspect it’s what I was at the time: ignorant.

I had a lot to learn.

One of my first personal interactions with Sarah was when a flagship publication asked me to review her book Jesus Feminist. I read it, wrote the review, was asked to dramatically alter my review to say things I didn’t think were true about the book or Sarah and therefore withdrew my review. I ended up sharing it on SAYABLE.

This was in the fall of 2013 and my trust in the spaces I was inhabiting was already unraveling fast.¹ Publishing that piece was one of the flags I planted saying I wasn’t going to tow this party line anymore. I didn’t want belonging (or their version of it) badly enough to lie in a review. I talked with Sarah about this and she was gracious and kind (because of course she is, she always is).

I’m not going to chronicle my entire journey from there to here but suffice it to say, I had very few contemporary guiding lights for that journey and Sarah was one.

As I said, the notes from our conversation span pages in my journal so I’m not going to share everything with you, but there is one thing Sarah said to me that I think about almost every day—and have especially thought about a lot in light of recent events.