Things I'd Never do Again

Tomorrow, I'm going to do something I never thought I'd do again. I'll participate in an event that still makes me want to gag a little, even though I'm going now of my own volition. I’m attending a women’s conference. Ugh. I say that, and the cheesiness drips from the words, makes me convulse briefly, and I cannot even stand that I’m saying it.

It is events like this, with their sappy titles and the single women all crying about being single and the married women all telling the single women it’s not that wonderful and that you can still be a Super Christian Woman without a Man that make me recoil. Either I identify with it so much that its disconcerting, or I am just repulsed by the idea that whittling down of the life of a Christian woman to a weekend conference will make a difference. Most likely, it is both.

It is the same with Christian self-help books and the majority of Christian radio. I can’t take it. I really don’t think G-d meant us to be so lame.

I used to blame this stuff for my hiatus from the Church. G-d, Jesus, the Word – all that I could stomach. It was real, raw and rough around the edges. But Hallmark Christianity? No thanks, I’ll pass. It wasn’t “me.” I couldn’t live in this fake Christian world; it felt like high school clicks with a dose of religious zeal to pass for acceptable behavior.

And so, I tried to stand alone. I tried to be a Lone Christian in the Fallen World. This is just as miserable, trust me. And I fell, convincing myself to just try harder, damn it! And I fell some more. Until I could not live with the absence of community any longer.

Now the very things I hated about women’s conferences, or women’s groups in general, I need; I crave. I need other single women who are struggling to find their place, fighting to make sense of where we belong when many of us desire to be supportive Christian women to loving, godly men. And I need other women to remind me that I am serving Jesus just as much by teaching, growing, volunteering, and earnestly seeking Him, as I am by testing my cooking skills on guinea-pig friends in the hopes that one day, I’ll have a family to cook and care for. I need conferences led by talented, intelligent, PhD-pursuing female authors with husbands and kids and full, full lives to push me to never settle and never stop.

And maybe, I need to know that I can belong to this Church, when she is petty and annoying me, so that I am also part of her when she is a beautiful outpouring of Christ’s love to the world.


But I’m still holding off on the ridiculous “I have all the answers with my generous orthodoxy” books, and “contemporary Christian” 90’s “music” garbage. That was harsh.