The Story Behind Unveiled
Most of us come to faith in a spiritual “house” of sorts. Most of the time this house is a church building or community of faith, but spiritual houses are sometimes formed from families of origin or even on hiking trails.
Like any good coming of age story, there often comes a time when we “outgrow” our spiritual house, resulting in some sort of conflict–a crisis of faith that leaves us disoriented, disgruntled, or distressed. The pieces of our faith puzzle seem like they’ve stopped fitting, and we’re not sure if we should rearrange it or just throw the whole thing out.
My own crisis of faith began, like many of us, in the midst of 2020. However it wasn’t just the global pandemic and extreme isolation for me, but the convergence of the worldwide chaos with the internal chaos that comes with being thrust into motherhood (and for me, quickly “mother-of-two-hood”) and also the hormonal and emotional turmoil of postpartum depression.
Maybe I’ll carve out all the details at some point in this venture, but the gist of it lands here: I began to question the essential nature of all that I had been taught as essential in my walk with Christ, and I found myself wondering how one might carry forth authentic, meaningful discipleship to Jesus in the midst of my newfound reality of diaper changes, sleepless nights, making so. many. meals, and so-forth.
I believed (and still do), that even though my life stopped allowing time for hours of Bible study or prayer and countless church activities, that my faith could flourish and overflow to the benefit of my children being captured by the gospel, but I wasn’t sure how to take hold of such a truth. So, I began studying… and writing. So much writing. In September of 2020, I began a blog called Mothering by Faith where I aimed to help moms who were in the thick of it, like me, to reach out for and take hold of a faith that went with them into the fray of mom life. This spilled over into a podcast, Motherhood Named and Known, and the feedback was overwhelming–"yes, we need this. We need to know how to name the realities of our difficult, exhausting, and beautiful days while also glimpsing the eternal significance of it all.”
In June 2021, we found out we were having a third baby before my oldest child turned 3. As you might expect, this was wholly unexpected and drove me back down into isolation, contemplation, questioning–forcefully and suddenly. I felt in a very real sense like the Spirit was leading me into the “eremos,” or wilderness, like he did Jesus (Luke 4), and I didn’t feel like I had much, if anything, to share with the online world.
So, I didn't.
Strangely, as I walked through this internal eremos of my own, I looked around and realized that I was walking alongside others in parallel versions of their own wilderness seasons. College-aged men, single women in their late-twenties, widows, and moms of teenagers connected with me in this wilderness season and I began to realize that the renovation of our spiritual lives was a common thread.
What I assumed to be unique to the process of coming into motherhood, came to be revealed to me as a common faith experience, whether the person on the other side of the conversation was a mother or not. We were all, in our respective real-life chaotic difficulty, asking the question, what does “Jesus is Lord” really mean for me right here and now in this season? In this place of mental illness, deef grief, unfair life circumstances, interpersonal conflict, life-stage changes, and the like–how do we continue to receive the light of the world and then shine it outward when life changes shape in uncomfortable and sometimes even painful ways?
In my own quiet spaces of reflection, this scripture began to come to life, and bring me much comfort:
“Therefore, since we have such a hope, we behave with great boldness, and not like Moses who used to put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from staring at the result of the glory that was made ineffective…But until this very day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, but when one turns to the Lord the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:12, 15-18, NET, emphasis added.
Perhaps, I pondered, we were all coming to a place of faith renovation because we were finally turning to the Lord and having our veils removed. Whether due to loneliness, quarantine, friends moving, loved ones dying, learning new pieces of information, or any other myriad of reasons, many of the people I am encountering in my life are in a similar place of having to turn to the Lord. In the process, perhaps we are finding that certain pieces of our faith puzzle have been so-situated as a result of the expectations or teachings of another person. Perhaps our faith puzzle was assembled with our brokenness or sin still tangled up in some way, and the final picture is a distortion of the kingdom-come reality we crave.
My prayer for this new space of the internet that I’m claiming is that we would turn to the Lord, and have our veils removed to reveal a more bare-faced walk with Him. My prayer is that we would discern slowly and quietly the dynamic pieces of our worship and commitment to the Lord, and have Him help us discover what is essential, what needs to change shape, and what it might be time to let go of. Instead of deconstructing our entire house of faith, I hope to share truth in a way that allows the foundation laid by our belief and trust in the God of the universe and his Son who is our great high priest to keep us grounded that we may emerge from this eremos with faces that shine to reflect the glory of the Lord.
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