8th church was a return to 5th church. We wanted to attend somewhere where we could be anonymous, and enormous churches are perfect for this. You show up, you leave, and no one knows. It was a relief to me to just be “normal people” at church, and not have any employment connection.
Simon had lost 2 consecutive church jobs over two consecutive summers, and he devoted himself to a nationwide search for a new pastoral position. Four months after miscarrying Zuzu, we were pregnant again (on purpose – surely Simon was going to find full-time work in 9 months, right?). Simon returned to waiting tables; I attended births, eventually I started doing lactation work. One year our smattering of jobs yielded $31,000 — our $8,000 tax refund the following April felt like winning the lottery. Life was a waiting game.
Emotional processing was glacial. Searching for full-time pastoral work mocked our pain. My wonderful husband applied to church after church after church all over America. Many told him no. More told him nothing. Acceptance of our downgraded income bracket came in inches over years. As newlyweds we each enjoyed $200 of “fun money” to spend on frivolity every month. Now we skipped friends’ birthday dinners ($40 steaks weren’t in the budget) and didn’t indulge in Starbucks without discussing if we had $5 of wiggle room.
After five months with my in-laws and while Simon was still working for 7th church, we moved into a tiny 1930’s brick bungalow and back into the inner ring suburbs I knew and loved. I used to hear mice struggling in sticky traps at 4AM. I’d wake Simon up to take the critters outside and execute them swiftly. We stored our pots inside the oven and Simon didn’t have a closet. It wasn’t much but it was ours.
On Christmas Eve 2014, the lead pastor of 8th church noticed that we walked out of the evening service – it was packed and there was no where to sit. He followed us into the cold and offered to help us find a place to enjoy the service if we still wanted. He showed us to the young family area in a separate building on the church grounds, where there was hot chocolate and toys and the service was televised. During a season that felt like everyone else had a place and we were consistently forgotten, it was comforting to know that someone saw us. We wondered if God did too.
Simon and I worked different hours to avoid childcare expenses. When we were both home, we’d take stroller walks through our neighborhood with our toddler, and later our toddler and infant, and process everything out loud.
We felt ashamed for wanting money because the Christian shall not want. But we were humans and had babies and needed it. We were humiliated. We grappled with entitlement and unanswered prayers and a nebulous sense of purpose. We dreamed of living in Seattle because we had this romantic notion of greenery and Pike Place Market and actually being able to afford Seattle.
As summer blended into the fall of 2015 a friend’s grandma died. I attended her funeral at 6th church by myself (well, with kids) because Simon had to work. Carol immediately offered to hold my baby, and Patti promptly handed me a glass of lemonade. Bryan swooped in to entertain my toddler. I felt seen and loved and known. These are our people.
I told Simon about it, and we started going to 6th church again – now 9th church – the next Sunday. I would never have bet on a return to 1st/6th church – I was so hurt by the dissolving of Simon’s position there, and I figured we’d never go back. But we missed our community, and they missed us. And we were tired, so very tired. We were beat up. Eventually the anonymity of 8th church just made us lonely, and we lapped up the embrace of our beloved former church family.
9th church was different – they were more than out of the red zone of 6th church. They had purchased a building, and the parking lot was full every week – they planned to make it bigger and they had the money to do that. We were happy for them, and also very aware that our loss enabled their financial health. I tried not to think about it too much. It was a complex experience, 9th church. We needed and genuinely appreciated our time there. We baptized baby Phoebe there, just as we had baptized Gabe there when it was 6th church, just as Simon had baptized me there when it was 6th church. And…it was tough at times. We had been insiders. Now, we kinda weren’t. We were part of the church family, but not part of the staff family, and that was a bit tender.
Complicating things, I started deconstructing the belief that women should not be elders or pastors once I became the mother of a daughter in April 2015. My questioning evolved from occasional confused musings to ravenous, full-steam research over the first year of her life. As I adopted egalitarian theology, the all-male leadership of 9th church became harder and harder for me to reconcile.
Three years of wandering the desert and then we moved to the literal desert. 2016 was the summer a church said yes. In Phoenix all of my pots were in cabinets. The closets were so huge that Baby #3 slept in one. There were new deserts there, of course, and not just the Sonoran. Different struggles, new questions. I had to swap mice for scorpions. Yet there was Starbucks, and occasionally steaks.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Photo credits in order:
- Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
- Photo by Khushbu hirpara on Unsplash
- Photo by oakie on Unsplash
- Personal photo
- Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash
