I

Maybe a month ago I am at a Bible study hosted by a handful of people I have come to love very much.

There is a moment when it is off-handedly offered that someone read recently in an article that biblical translators, facing difficulty in communicating with inuit peoples in Alaska, were having to be creative in translating some of the Bible’s phrases for a people group with no context to otherwise receive them.

What does Lamb of God mean to someone who has never seen or heard of a lamb, who has no concept of a lamb?

The translators settled on seal.

The Seal of God.

Seals are defenceless, as close to a sacrificial creature as the inuit group in question comes to understanding.

This fact comes up in the first place because we are discussing 1 Peter and have come to the verse about Satan being a roaming lion, another animal the inuit people did not have a concept of, so the translators had rendered it polar bear.

It is offered as interest, but it is by the majority received incredulously. It is not, if I am reading their faces correctly—and here I am becoming a translator too, and perhaps a poor one—it is not a faithful rendering of the biblical text. These are scholars of the Scripture. They are the ones who want to know.

The Lamb of God is a very different kind of thing than The Seal of God and the roaming of Satan as lion very different than as polar bear.

Isn’t it?

II

Everything is an act of translation.

We are constantly translating or mistranslating the Divine.

III

Maybe a year ago now, I was sharing a meal with a good friend and his family. They had spent much of their lives in Nepal, working as Bible translators, producing the Scripture for the first time in the unique language of the native people.

His grandmother was there, a woman who to think of is to think of slow and knowing grace, enfleshed, with a mind that pierces through all your own self-doubt and certain uncertainty and brings forth from you your truth, then leads it on the way to Truth.

“Did I ever tell you about when we were trying to translate the word for forgiveness?”

She asked this while passing the yoghurt for the curry. I told her no. She had, actually, and I don’t think she had forgotten that she had, but I wanted to hear it again.

“They had no conception of forgiveness. None. There wasn’t a word in their language that meant to forgive. They knew about retribution, about revenge, but not about forgiveness.” She leaned back in her chair. “But as we were talking with them, we came to understand that for them, to hold a grudge was to string a person up in their hearts. That’s how they phrased it they strung people up in their hearts.” She offered a small shrug. “So we introduced the concept of forgiveness as the act of unstringing a person in your heart. Loosing the chains. Freeing them.” She smiled. “So when they think of Jesus and His power to forgive, they have a visual sense, an icon that they were once strung up in the heart of God, but now they have been set free.”

She smiled slant. “And you better believe that changes how you think about forgiveness when you’re thinking about forgiving others.”

She’s right. I have never thought about forgiveness the same way.

IV

The Internet ruined us.

For all the good of online community and online spirituality, it has most notably disturbed the fundamental good of regional and contextual theology. You can’t have the Seal of God when someone in white, well-educated, upper middle class America with a Twitter account can instantly denounce it as heretical.

Without regional identity or regional context, the listening for a common language is harder to do, it is harder to find the shortcuts that are still echoes of orthodoxy, or harder still to navigate the careful line between what may be right and true for the church and right and true for the Church.

There is, you know, a difference between those things.

V

I need myriad translations.

I do.

This past Sunday was Pentecost. Pentecost is the day when all the prepositions should be used. In the Incarnation, God is with and among us. But at Pentecost, God is not only with and among us, He is in us, He is through us, He is accomplishing by us, He is within us and without us, He is above us, below us, beside us, He is despite us and He is for us, He is past us and before us and amid us, He is around, between, beside. This is the day when all the words mean something new. This is the day when language itself may be called incarnated.

Is translation so different, after Pentecost?

When the gathered disciples were given those diverse tongues by which to proclaim the Gospel to those diverse peoples outside those walls, do you ever wonder what it would sound like in this language or that, how this word means this or these handful of words mean that. How it takes three words in Greek but one French?

I grant the belief that the Holy Spirit was inspiring them, but I have to marvel, a moment, that God should trust us in this: God trusted us with language and language about Him.

Isn’t that everything?

Do you ever wonder what language Mama Mary spoke in? I’ve wondered more often than not if it was the language of the first humans. She would be prophesying to the earth. The new Eve speaking in the words of the old Eve.

There’s no fact in that. But there is truth.

VI

Good translation is still important. Not every translation is right or every context good. But there needs to be some room for the wild mercy of grace. We need to interpret well, but we also need to want to hear the interpretation. We need to be careful in the how, in the how we go.

And I am thinking here of ideals. And I am unsettled by how rarely we consider ideals nowadays.

Everything is not, in fact, terrible. Everything is not, in fact, gone to shit.

I am thinking of Maximus the Confessor.

“The three young men condemned no one, when they refused to adore the statue everyone else worshipped, … nor did Daniel condemn anyone, when he was thrown into the lions’ den—he simply preferred to die rather than offend God.”

VII

“Aren’t we all working with seals and polar bears?”

She asks the beach this more than she asks me, because that is the way of her. We are walking down from a long lunch, along the grey of a Sunday afternoon, and I have told her the story about the seals and the polar bears.

“All our Bibles are translations, after all.” She stops me, taps me on the shoulder a few times. “Did you know that all the places in Genesis where it says ‘God will provide’ in English, it really says, ‘God sees’?” She shakes her head and we resume walking. “Something about how we can’t understand. We. Well, we want seeing to be about God providing for us, but seeing is more than that. God sees my neighbour. God sees tomorrow. God provides, but God provides in a way that bends the whole of the cosmos to the good He wills. It’s so much more complicated than ‘God will provide.’” She shrugs. “But do I get mad when they say, ‘God will provide?’” She is holding her palms out to me, open, welcoming. “No. Because God sees.”

We keep on after that in silence, along the beach.

The Lamb of God is a very similar kind of thing as The Seal of God and the roaming of Satan as lion very very similar to as polar bear.

Isn’t it?

I

I’ve nearly given up blogging every day for the past two months.

I cannot hear Jesus over the stories anymore.

What I hear is how STORY is saving the world. How AUTHENTICITY is the most important element of sharing.

I’m over it.

I’m tired of it.

Your story, your authenticity, right now I don’t really care.

I’m going through some serious spiritual silence, some hunger pains of missing Jesus, and what I need to hear is about Him and not so much about you.

Your story is not what has redeemed me.

The world was not saved by your story.

II

What is the gospel?

If our answer to that question is anything other than a holistic pronouncement of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we’ve missed the point.

I don’t believe every blog post needs to be an explicit altar call, but if it is a post that does not in some way make a claim that whatever my experience is, I am being transformed by and into the image of Jesus Christ, than I’m not sure we can call it Christian.

Yes, Jesus is the Christ who hears the stories of the people, but He is also the Christ who says Go and sin no more, the Christ who is the Christ of Israel, a true Jew, a keeper of the Law and a fulfiller of the Law, who gave commandments and instruction.

And to paraphrases liberally something St. Paul says to the Corinthians, we have no hope if all we have is our own stories.

If we are not reaching out, into, united with the great Story, then what is its worth?

III

Few personal bloggers are actually scholars.

This is a distinction worth making more often.

The rise of Internet culture’s accessibility to the Scripture, though advantageous, has brought forth a few serious ills. It is now more easy than ever before to misquote a passage of Scripture as proof-text of an argument. It is now more easy than ever before to claim knowledge of original languages when none is actually had.

These easily become actions of violence against Scripture and it is only in the past few decades that the flippancy with which these butchers-block interpretations are carried out has become tolerated.

We all have a right to interpret Scripture. We all have a right to seek its meaning for ourselves.

Except we don’t, exactly.

We do when it comes to personal and private devotion, but when you put your story online and attach Scripture to it as evidence of your experience, when you universalise that experience as dogmatic, when you say that because experience and your use of Scripture leads you to believe, it’s allowed to be scrutinised by those who make a life out of the complex study of that Text.

Entire posts are written around the alleged translation of a word from the Hebrew or from the Greek without the scholarly principles behind it that govern good translation, like familiarity with surrounding comparative texts and linguistic history. The phraseology of the deuterocanonical book of Sirach is all over the New Testament, but you’re unlikely to find a blogger sharing their personal story and then frenzying around a translated word of the Scripture who is also recognising that complexity or bothering to take it into account.

But Scripture warns, Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment; and, further, that many are wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions.

When a blogger sets themselves up as interpreters of the Scripture, they establish an authority. They tell others that because they can read the original languages or because they have done the study, they may be trusted to faithfully bring forth the meaning of the Text. Commenters do the same. When anyone uses a Scripture as a form of proof, they are making an appeal to not only the authority of God but also the authority of their ability to interpret.

I wonder.

I wonder if we need to stay our hands a bit with the hasty use of the Scripture or the presumption of how to translate certain words.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with and interpreted the Scripture. A cursory engagement with some of that background may prove beneficial, may in fact be the faithful requirement of every believer who has access to that information, before subjecting the Scripture to our own stories, rather checking our story against its own.

Otherwise, there is, perhaps, nothing more dangerous than a marginally-informed Christian with access to Wikipedia and only thirty minutes to write a post.

IV

The challenge of positioning.

It is unfair to expect everyone to be in the same place. It is unfair to expect that someone’s story will look like everyone else’s story.

We need spaces where people can be in-process. We need spaces where the stories that have yet to find their footing in the Story can still be shared.

But what I hope to have said, to have paved the way for, is a conversation about knowing the difference.

We weaponise STORY as a concept sometimes as a means of hiding behind the fact that we don’t want to face the consequence of being wrong, or being prideful, or dare we actually say it–sinful, out of line, not conforming to the pattern of God’s logic and design that is woven through the complex strands of Scripture.

We need to find the balance. Let us share all the stories, but let us pledge our allegiance but to the One.

V

I walk along the creek that splits the wood on my way into town.

I’m thinking of L’Engle:

We all feed the lake. That is what is important. It is a corporate act. During my time in the theatre I knew what it was to be part of such an enlarging of human potential, and though I was never more than a bit player or an understudy, I knew the truth of Stanislavsky’s words: ’There are no small rôles. There are only small players.’ And I had the joy of being an instrument in the great orchestra of a play, learning from the play (how much Chekov taught me during the run of The Cherry Orchard), from the older actors and actresses. I was part of the Body. That’s what it’s all about.

And there’s the middling, the balance, I think.

I want to hear your stories in my silence, because your stories are about the Story.

But maybe that’s what needs saying more often than not: don’t just tell me your story, tell it to me like you’ve seen Jesus, like you’ve learned that there are no small roles, like you are a part of the Body.

Because then I remember the Gospel.

Then in your face, I see His.

I

I’m not the sort of person who uses the words miracle and piss in the same post. I’m not the sort of person who uses the word miracle, but that’s what you’re getting today.

A few Sundays ago I took the train down from St. Andrews to Edinburgh with friends to visit a church as part of a class assignment, to consider architecture and a liturgical community’s interaction with space. We got into the city around 9 that morning and broke off to our respective churches. I misread the church I was supposed to go to and walked fourteen blocks down to the arts district holding a cold cortado and my iPhone listlessly, and between the galleries and the paint supply store I realised I had gone the wrong way. Or, really, I had no idea where I was supposed to be going.

Defeated, I searched Google Maps with the vague descriptor Episcopal, because it was last August I had felt at home in a church and had yet to do so in Scotland and this day was, irrationally, the day that I most needed it to work, for church to happen, be felt, be known.

Well, for Him to be. He was silent those days. (Is still, though that’s another story.) I read my Bible. I prayed. I wound the clock. Nothing. I thought I had dealt with this, had reached the place of accepting His silence with some sense of sophistication, but I hadn’t, I was pissed and tired and over it and I needed Him to show up. I told Him as much, there between the gallery and the paint supply store.

I chose St. John’s because Joan Didion’s church in New York was St. John the Divine. It was twenty minutes away on foot and I hastily began the walk back out of the arts district toward the other side of downtown.

I don’t know why you need to know this: Didion, New York, twenty minutes, but there is something that feels necessary about the remnant details, that in a post where I shall speak of miracle I’d better be sure I also speak of ordinary.

II

It turns out that St. John’s was the church I was supposed to go to all along and, as is the way with Providence, I arrived four minutes before the service was to begin.

I sat in the back, making the old, familiar genuflect toward the altar, sliding quietly into my pew and stilling, willing to hear the icons whisper to one another, to remind me of that old Story I forgot so often.

Two women behind me chattered away. Without charity I wished them to be quiet. I wished for a moment of true stillness, true reverence.

Why do we think reverence is a state of silence? Awe a moment of quiet? Again, stray thoughts concerning the ordinary.

Just as it is ordinary to say that in this downtown church, a homeless man nearing seventy lumbered in, reeking of piss, and sat down in the pew behind me, beside those chattering women.

The stench was so strong I nearly gagged. I nearly moved away. But something held me. Something, perhaps a capital S Something fixed me.

The two women beside him excused themselves. I heard a deaconess take their place. “Hello,” she whispered to him kindly, “May I sit with you?”

And I felt church again. Not God, but church. For the first time in months. I felt church in the space of that question, in the stench of that piss.

III

In 1987, the American photographer and controversial artist Andres Serrano unveiled a photograph called Piss Christ.

The image depicted a small plastic crucifix submerged in what was alleged to be the artist’s own urine.

Backlash. Uproar. People called it offensive. And it was.

But shouldn’t it be?

When we put crosses around our necks, when we glibly hang a cross, do we remember that it’s similar to if we were now hanging electric chair talismans about our throats?

We have scrubbed the cross of its horror. We have scrubbed the cross of its pain.

Perhaps we have scrubbed our Gospel, too.

Maybe submerging the crucifix in piss shocks us back to seeing, shocks us back to the pain of the reality that He died.

Artist intent or not, maybe it’s bringing us back to that painful mount, that crooked tree where Word made flesh died, where the Gospel is not free of the stench of death, the stench of piss.

IV

I had to make a decision, early on in the service, that I would pass the peace to the homeless man.

When it came time to reach over my hand, to say The peace of Christ! I would do so, I would not cringe.

The homily was about justice and, as an aside—again, the concern with the ordinary—it was the first homily I have ever heard systemic misogyny used correctly and applied rightly. The creed that followed was not Nicea, not the Apostle’s, but Philippians 2. As a congregation, we professed our faith in the One Lord, Jesus Christ, by reciting

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men …

When I shook the man’s hand, I met his eyes. They were grey and blue, touched with a few speckles of brown. I blessed him with the peace of Jesus and he blessed me with the same. I could smell piss like a cloud around me when I took my hand away. I could taste it in my mouth, feel it burn my lungs. I felt nauseous for a moment but stole myself, settling back into the pew as the offering began.

The woman sitting beside me had taken the man’s hand as well. She leaned over to me, smiling like she knew that old Story too, “There is nothing more true than freely given Love.”

And I nod, because this is the thing you do when someone hands you truth and you presume they capitalise that L in Love and your hands smells of piss and the room smells of incense and the choir is singing again and again, Glory. Glory. Glory.

V

I’m sure I could have written this entire post with the word urine, but I didn’t.

Piss gets at the baseness of this whole thing, at the baseness of us. We are creatures who piss and s— and f— and I am using all of those words for a reason, because they are powerful and harsh and to be honest they better get at what sin is than the cute little euphemisms that spray a cheap air freshener on our tangled messes and false hope for the best.

This is a post in which the most honest word to use is piss. So I used it. Irrationally, I hope you understand that perhaps most of all.

VI

When I went forward to receive the Eucharist, I could still smell the piss on my hand.

It followed me, a cloud of witness, lingering in my lungs and prophesying to my dry bones.

(This is where things change. This is the part where I tell you that the choir sung something particularly well or that the atmosphere was so charged. Or perhaps I say how ordinary it was, I write about the sound of the wooden floor and the tentative movement of my steps, because if I write of loud then miraculous makes sense or if I write of ordinary than miraculous, again, makes a kind of sense.)

I don’t know what to tell you other than things as they so happened.

I so happened to kneel at the altar rail. I so happened to have Body placed into my hand. I so happened to smell that piss linger still. I so happened to dip that Body into the Blood and so happened to respond to The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation with a determined, Amen only to have it resounded back to me with a jubilant thunder, Amen! And I so happened to consume the Blood drenched Body as my hand lingered in front of my face.

My hand that no longer smelled of piss.

I blinked a few times. I crossed myself. I went back to my pew. What else was I supposed to do?

I sniffed my hand every few second on my way back to my pew. My hand didn’t smell of flowers. It didn’t smell of anything, really. It simply no longer smelled of piss.

And then the epiphany, quick and hasty, from Him or within me through Him: this is what the Eucharist is about. This is what all of this is about. That cross is death. That cross is death and disgusting and dripping shame. My sin, my ache, my tangled heart is like a piss-drenched vagabond stumbling into the backs of churches wondering if anyone will offer me peace. And then the Eucharist, Christ our Lord, making all things new, making all things beautiful in their time.

So I call this miracle.

Writing it out, it does not seem so fantastic, that a hand should no longer smell of piss.

But I suppose that’s the way of these things.

VII

In my commitment to the ordinary details, I need to add this—

Over cookies and tea after the service, I chatted with the man for a time and learned that the church had been keeping watch over him, had made it possible for him to work. When it came time for me to leave, I realised that our conversation had taken up so quickly, so naturally, I hadn’t asked his name.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.”

“Gabriel.”

“Gabriel?”

“Yep!”

I shook my head softly. “Thank you, Gabriel.”

When I passed the icon of the Trinity on my way out, I lingered for a moment, made a gesture as if to say, Of course You’d do it this way, before heading back out into the midday sun, into His silence, or whatever this is, washed clean of that stench of piss, washed into whatever is this now.

I have been making lists lately.

There are two sides within me, this part that wants to speak grace like cool water unto every person, to run hands across ash-smeared faces and whisper ancient promises; this part that wants to bring fire to the paradigms of oppression, to burn the institutions of false gospel down.

I have recorded and scripted out the slip-silver transgressions and sins, the scatterings of self that litter my awkward gait, the fumbling steps I make in this world trying to be this person—these two persons?—who is both now and not yet, who is still being made into an Image, who does not know upon waking some mornings if he is truly a temple of the Holy Ghost or a temple of a bastard god with no name, dancing to a song of Dionysius that no one else seems to hear.

I have been making lists lately.

If I don’t publish this post now, someone else will say it before me.

Another email saying that I write about sex because it gets hits. Maybe it gets hits because it’s a conversation the Church needs to be having.

Without numbers, without hits, you can’t convince a publisher to publish a book.

Maybe if I give up this, this, and this for Lent, things will right themselves.

I want to scream sometimes, I want to scream that the flippant comments, the disregard for human life, the women left marginalised, the whole community of the Kingdom that has been ignored because they don’t fit the traditional mold, that all of this is nothing but horses*** and not worthy of the Gospel.

I want to promise sometimes never to swear again, because it’s wrong. … Isn’t it?

Why can’t we be both fiercely angry over injustice and fiercely broken over the oppressors?

I wish I could sit John Piper and Mark Driscoll and the Gospel Coalition down and bake them pie, the very best pie, and listen to them until they had nothing more to say, until all the words were spent, and then maybe, well, maybe, I could speak some small fragment word that would awaken by Holy Ghost something true deep within them. Maybe. I do believe in the prayerful power of good pie.

Today is Ash Wednesday. Each high holy day I come to in the Church year, there is a part of me that wants to name it as the turning point.

I’ll pray more, starting today.

I’ll read my Bible more, because this is the season.

I’ll make this gracious self be known always, speak no ill word, seek goodness in every person, because ashes on foreheads mean grace.

But.

The ashes are not magic.

Our Faith, for all its wonder, is not magical.

The rituals are empty without the heart to receive them.

And here I kneel with this heart, this two-natured heart of water and fire, and I want to pound this sword of self into a ploughshare, I want ashes to be conversion, finger of priest on forehead to be the imposition of Holy Ghost, a sudden and Damascus-road realisation, light blinding power and mercy—I want Jesus but I don’t want Jesus.

What will He ask me to give up?

Grace may be free, but grace is not cheap.

He asks for everything.

Every post.

Every doubt.

Every movement of water and fire.

Lent lasts forty days because it mirrors the time Jesus spent in the desert before His public ministry, right after His baptism.

Lent is about following Jesus into the desert.

These ashes aren’t magic.

These ashes are a sign.

A sign, like baptism, that it is time to go into the desert.

Come what may.

Come what may.

So this awkward temple, this place of bastard god and Image, this heart of sword and ploughshare, this life of fire and water, is going into the desert.

What will He ask me to give up?

He asks for everything.

Maybe, this Lent, I’m learning to give up me.

I’m learning to stop making lists.

Dear friends, you are so good to come to this space and sit with our words each morning, won’t you let us pour your coffee today and share your story here with us?

Use the link tool below (just click to add some information and your link and it’s all set!) and hand over the best of your best from the past month, the words you want us and everyone here to see. We love you, your heart, your grace, and we want to know you better. And, between the many of us, we’ll read every single one.

Come over for a chat today? Send us to your beautiful words. We’ve put the coffee on just for you.

I’m taking a step away from my usual poetic, story-driven and reflective posts to share something I’m been carrying around for a few months now. I hope you’ll indulge this as not an act of self-promotion, but as a blatant critique of the Christian blogging community and the direction it seems to be heading.

Ever since our own Emily was brave enough to share that she has doubts about the feminist cause last October, I’ve been reflecting on the unique space that is Deeper Story and the branches of Family and Church that grew out of it. While there were numerous comments that pointedly but respectfully disagreed with Emily, there were a few that directly challenged why Deeper Story had allowed the post to stand, where the editorial process was, and if this meant Deeper Story was venturing into some new, unforeseen direction. While our fearless editor Nish Weiseth already clarified the editorial policy of Deeper Story, I’d like to take a moment to share first hand why the policy is so important.

In Nish’s own words:

We have a very, very loose editorial philosophy at DS. Meaning, we (the editorial team) VERY carefully select the writers that contribute here, but we don’t step in to directionally edit content.

All of the writers know that they are expected to stand behind their statements individually, because the writing team as a whole does not stand on one form of doctrine or theology. The burden of thoughtful preparation and delivery falls on the writer of the post. Because the writer selection process is so exclusive, we trust them with that burden & we trust them with handling the outcome of their content.

Here’s why this matters: you’re not really going to find this sort of policy anywhere else on the Internet.

The two sides to blogging, the post and its comments, are not always as cut and dry as they seem. Many sites have an editorial board that not only approves the writers but also their content. What this can mean—and I speak from personal experience here, more than once—is that the final post may have altered content that the author has not approved, that potentially changes the meaning or tone of the piece or, worse, the theology.

Hypothetically, let’s say you were invited to write for a major Christian online journal about poverty and privilege last summer and that you produced a piece that worked through the liturgical significance of certain hymns being altered to not make reference to the rich or the poor. You submit the piece, wait a day, and find out five minutes before it posts in a hasty email that it’s going live. An hour later, your good friend is commenting on the post completely disagreeing with you, which is surprising as you share similar feelings about the topic. Then you carefully reread your own piece only to discover that whole paragraphs—paragraphs that made you sound far more liberal, far more social gospel—have been removed. But your name is still on the byline. These are still your words.

Or, let’s say you have a reference to wine in the post and that wine is theologically significant to you, which is the reason for your inclusion, but you discover that it has been changed to a stainless steel French press which makes you sound pretentious and changes the tone of your message.

Hypothetically, mind you.

This happens more than you think. The text you see bolded, the images that are used, the subheadings chosen, the tweets associated with the content—all are often out of the hands of the author and hence your view of an author is shaped entirely by the editorial board that is trying to make its space attract a specific audience with a specific tone.

Is it really your words after that?

Not really. You now represent a body of people, perhaps a responsibility you did not volunteer to have.

How is Deeper Story different?

The content is our own.

While I’ll reach out to a few friends here to review this post before it goes live, the responsibility is mine to make sure there aren’t any typos and that I’ll be able to stand by what I write, even though it may have consequences.

You may not realise how freeing this is.

It means that when a story cannot be told without profanity, it still gets told.

It means that when a public apology is needed, it’s made.

It means that when a story challenges easy theology, it’s shared.

It means that when a position goes against all the modern social norms, it’s shared.

It means when cult isn’t the word we should be using, we argue for better.

It means when the issue is hell, it isn’t taken it lightly.

It means that there are times we mess up, we put our foot in it, we trip over our own cleverness, and we have to own that this is our faith journey and here’s where we don’t always have it together.

It means we disagree. It means we argue. It means we cry. It means we laugh. It means we grow.

These are not how-to posts masquerading as stories. These are deeper and these are stories. These are the stories of us. And in this space, Nish has made room for that telling, without editorial constraint, without oversight to shape a vision, and with enough trust in God and His Spirit that He’ll sort out the Truth from the midst of all of us.

Which warrants reflection on another side of blogging: the comment section.

Just as editors shape the vision of the content that is published, the same is true of the comments. What you may not realise in other spaces is that at times comments are moderated to the point that it’s hard to have an emotional response slip through. Often, such moderation is spoken as a form of grace but results in a very specific agenda. This agenda usually reflects white, male, heterosexual, conservative, mainline protestant ideology and privilege. As someone who is all of those things, I find it troubling when a comment section starts to look exactly like me.

These spaces are where we get gritty and get honest and get combative, but they are also where we discern what is worth the fight, what needs defending, and where we need to grow.

A lovely article, If Your Website’s Full of A–holes, It’s Your Fault, should be extrapolated in this situation to consider blogs as a whole. If your website and its content reflect only one aspect of the Gospel and only one accepted norm about God, this isn’t because there are no good writers able to express dissenting views. It’s because you’ve curated a space where such views are not welcomed. They are against the tone of the site, so they are censored. They are against a version of grace, so they are warped.

But grace isn’t tidy and it should bother us when it just so happens that such “grace” usually ends up looking like Jesus with blonde hair and blue eyes, but that’s how Western Christendom shakes out some centuries.

It would be wrong and would hinder progress to point fingers here, so I am not linking to examples, but as Deeper Story enters a third year, I wanted to take a moment to explain how exceptional this space is and why I am honoured to even share here.

Here, you’re allowed to say what you believe.

You’re allowed to doubt.

You’re allowed to believe till it hurts.

You’re allowed to yell.

You’re allowed to whisper.

Oddly enough, that’s made the posts and the comment section incredible.

You all are the ones full of grace, full of wisdom, and with only a few exceptions, make our disagreements normally beautiful expressions of mercy, hard argumentation, and generous spirit.

How did that happen? Nish Weiseth.

Nish dared to dream of a space that could rely first on God’s Spirit to shape its message, content, and heart. That kind of faith doesn’t come easy, and when Internet spaces for Christians become increasingly overly-goeverened by people who want only one version of the Gospel to be normative, we need her more than ever. Otherwise, we end up with spaces that preach grace but use passive aggressive and manipulative tones to further advance a version of gospel that does not ring True.

On behalf of all the writers here, you go, Nish Weiseth, you go!

Photo credit: Hännah Schellhase