by Jen Hatmaker
Of course, the inner sanctuary, deep in the belly of the temple, was once only available to the religious elite, the priests, the high and holy Levitical bloodline. No sin could cross the threshold into God’s presence there, and the purification process in which a priest was permitted entry once a year was complicated and wrought. But listen:
We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. . . . Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. (Hebrews 6:19–20; 10:19–23, emphasis added)
We’re in, man.
Jesus permanently made the sanctuary safe, pure, and accessible to all. He didn’t lessen its holiness but rather raised us to heaven’s standards through the cross. It’s just crazy. It was truly a new and living way, and Jesus threw the church doors open to the entire world and bid us come. Obviously, this entire miracle was Jesus’s doing: His life, His death, His resurrection, His dreams for this earth.
There is no such thing as a human hierarchy to approach God anymore. That old system is gone; Jesus completely leveled the field of humanity. There are no gatekeepers, there is no “us” and “them,” no tricky steps or tricky people to get through. No human being can decide who is in and who is out. We’re all the same now, brothers and sisters in one family, and Jesus is the entire substance of the church—our front door, our baptism, our High Priest, our bread and wine.
Nor is there a prototype for admission or, in any case, for sanctioned blessing. In many American churches, the approved stereotype for fully included members is Married (just once!) with Children. Most ministries and sermons and language and structures revolve around the 1950s family model. Obviously, there is a place for this work, as large segments of the population are indeed married with children. But sanctuary means all are safe, equally valued, everyone ministered to and included.
On a macro level, this includes singles both young and old, the divorced, married without kids, single with kids, empty nesters, LGBTQ singles, LGBTQ marrieds, widows and widowers, students. Parents of children with special needs, people with complicated families, couples with failing marriages, parents with wayward kids. People in a minority culture or minority race. Folks in these demographics regularly discuss how difficult it is to fit into the typical church, often feeling sidelined or tokened or dismissed. The Marrieds with Children are generally centered, and everyone else is a one-off.
On a micro level, and let’s speak specifically about women, there are additional deviations from the norm that complicate embrace in the church: those who are assertive, academic, breadwinners, spicy, heady not girly, opinionated, gifted in leadership, those with a seedy past, those with a seedy present. Women with powerful careers, powerful ministries, powerful personalities. Outside the sanctioned category, sometimes the church doesn’t know what to do with the other women.
One of my first speaking engagements to a crowd larger than thirty was at an enormous, traditional church for the Sunday morning sermon. The Sunday morning sermon in front of three thousand people, you guys. As I was on the brink of hyperventilation on the front row, the pastor’s assistant leaned over, two minutes before the service started, and whispered: “Did you know we’ve only had a woman give the Sunday morning message once in our entire history? And the funny thing is, a bunch of people stood up and walked out!”
YES. THAT IS FUNNY. YOU AND I THINK THE SAME THINGS ARE FUNNY, LADY. I try not to be petty, but I asked God to punish her for the timing of that comment, and I’d like to believe He did. (Anne Lamott says that “you know you’ve made God in your image when He hates all the same people you do.”1) Church can be so weird for women. A woman with a PhD can operate on a person’s brain stem but remain shut out of leading a church group because of her lady parts.
The thing is, we all want to belong, we all crave sanctuary, we are all invited guests. Women, I commission us to fix this. Rather than waiting for the church to get secure with everyone (Jesus’s Church: Uncomfortable and Socially Awkward Since AD 33), we can set a bigger table for our sisters. We can pull up chairs, set out more plates, open extra wine. It is sacred work to open our eyes wide and look around: Who is unseen? Who is left out? Who is marginalized? Whose voice is silenced? Whose story is outside the lines? Who would feel isolated by the primary language here?
For those of us in the dominant narrative, it means not defaulting to our own demographic. Just like a white person is so embedded in majority culture, he or she has to deliberately seek racism to see it, the Marrieds with Children must choose to pay attention to folks outside the mainlined category. It is natural to filter language, community, needs, and perspectives through our own grid, but a simple mental channel change would expose how many of our church structures are isolating and narrow.
When I’m sitting by my gay friends in church, I hear everything through their ears. When I’m with my recently divorced friend, I hear it through hers. This is good practice. It helps uncenter us (which is, you know, the whole counsel of the New Testament) and sharpens our eye for our sisters and brothers. It trains us to think critically about community, language, felt needs, and inclusion, shaking off autopilot and setting a wider table. We must examine who is invited, who is asked to teach, who is asked to contribute, who is called into leadership. It is one thing to “feel nice feelings” toward the minority voice; it is something else entirely to challenge existing power structures to include the whole variety of God’s people.
This is not hard or fancy work. It looks like diversifying small groups and leadership, not defaulting to homogeny as the standard operating procedure. Closer in, it looks like coffee dates, dinner invites, the warm hand of friendship extended to women or families outside your demographic. It means considering the stories around the table before launching into an assumed shared narrative. It includes the old biblical wisdom on being slow to speak and quick to listen, because as much as we love to talk, share, and talk-share some more, there is a special holiness reserved for the practice of listening and deferring.
My sister has been married to the guy of our dreams, Zac, for ten years. This is the man who named his slightly trashy backyard “Zacapulco” (complete with signage) and inspired our entire family to dub our patios with this inventive brand of tropical irony, resulting in “Hat-O-Vallarta,” “Kingcun,” and “Cabo san Drewcus” (our friends Andy and Anna Melvin loved our game and named their outdoor porch “Cozumelvin”). Anyhow, like millions of couples, Cortney and Zac have struggled to conceive, and I am regularly shocked at how many invade this tender space with gross insensitivity: When are y’all finally going to have a baby? I guess you just don’t want any kids to mess up your fun life, huh? Chop chop, you guys! Time to get going on those babies! The whole notion of heartache, loss, or even basic privacy doesn’t even register to people who assume others fit their template, and if they don’t yet, they just need some prodding.
When our spiritual spaces are homogenous, it silences the hundreds of alternative stories that experience vibrancy or suffering outside the “norm.” (As a full-time career gal, I sometimes feel the tremors of disapproval, because I’ve defected from the party line.) My dream is for a safe church, a wide table, no secondary kid tables. If Jesus made the sanctuary free and available for all, we should too. If the Savior of the World decided that demarcations and hierarchies and power players were no longer necessary to the health of his church, then who are we to reinstate a ranking system after Jesus rendered it obsolete?
Girls, if you reside outside th
e approved label of Docile Wife-Mom, first of all, I’ve never mastered “docile” a day in my life so, you know, solidarity. But I want you to hear me say that you are welcome here: in my space, in God’s beautiful church, in this family of brothers and sisters. Your voice matters, your presence is imperative, and your story makes broad the body of Christ, which only strengthens the tribe, never weakens. (And Docile Wife-Moms? You are fully welcome too! We all count. Everyone counts. Everyone is in.)
Also, if your husband or family or kid or marriage or history or best friend or parent or personality or passion or orientation or career places you “outside the camp,” I want to whisper something awesome to you: there is no camp. There is only Jesus and His band of scalawags and ragamuffins. Find your people. They exist. Raise your voice, tell your story, take your place. So many sojourners with your story or temperament need you to stand tall and strong; you represent many others, trust me. It only seems like everyone is all the same. But peek over your fence, look out into the big, beautiful world, and you will find it is wide and diverse and fascinating, and every sort of person thrives in God’s kingdom.
Sure, maybe the Bob Hatmakers of the world cause some pearl clutching under the steeples, what with the I-talian girls and squirrel hunting and rough edges and proclivity to fish on Sunday mornings instead of don a tie, but I can assure you the church would have been better for his presence, his inclusion, because he is a good man and a loyal husband and father and a faithful neighbor and he had lovely gifts to offer had he been welcomed instead of banned all those years ago. It was our loss.
Let’s set that wrong right by welcoming in the whole array of God’s beloved.
What a beauty that church will be.
I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.1
— JOAN RIVERS
CHAPTER 13
ON EXERCISE
My very first job as a high school junior in 1991 was at a small, women’s gym in Wichita called Fitness for Her. I only remember two things really, the first being my boss, Venus, who wore spandex bike shorts under a thong leotard every single day as her work uniform, which was understandably stressful for me to navigate on the regular. I wanted to not see her spandex cheeks sandwiching the thong, but how could one not? I’ll answer that: one sees.
The other thing I remember is learning to teach my first step aerobics class. Do people still do step aerobics? Well, in 1991, step class was the shiz and everyone was having it. Simulate walking up and down stairs? With some jaunty side kicks? Genius! After receiving around twelve minutes of training, I “taught” my first class, which was an unquestionable disaster.
With no mastery of the language, I’d give instructions like, “Put one foot on the ground and one on the stair, and do your arms kind of like a soldier and we’ll do like a march move and in a minute we’ll change our feet more like a boxer.” What did this mean? No one knew, my friends. I didn’t even know to lead each step series on the natural four-count; I just started on whatever beat was happening. Think of someone clapping to a song whenever their hands decided to clap instead of on the two and four. I’m pretty sure I caused a few seizures. My step class looked less like an exercise commercial and more like preschool gym time. I’m sure those women were thrilled to pay $49.99 a month to have a sixteen-year-old in Umbros give aerobics instructions by saying “use this hand” and waving it in the air because lefts and rights are hard.
Since 1991, I’ve had a difficult relationship with working out. I want to love it. I do. I possess a fully developed mental vision of myself as a runner—long strides, fast pace, athletic gait. In reality, I am a lumbering, heavy-footed run-walker whose fingers get swollen after one hundred yards so I hold them upright at a ninety-degree angle, like I am about to clap, resembling Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights: “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” It is secondhand embarrassing for anyone who must bear witness.
The problem is, I prefer watching Netflix and eating snacks. This is fundamentally superior to sweating and breathing hard. You get to watch shows and arrange your remote controls on one side and your chips and dips on the other. If your cell phone is within reach, you don’t even have to get up to parent. You can call your kids from the couch like a true modern mom. This is one million times better than getting a side stitch during Body Pump while breathing in everyone’s crotch sweat. I don’t even know why I have to explain this.
To be fair, my checkbook communicates that not only do I love exercise, I like to pay for it in monthly bank drafts that are easy to activate but strangely difficult to discontinue, even if, say, you haven’t gone to that gym one time in ten and a half months. The point is, I pay for it like a committed attender, so surely that counts for something. I am helping fund other people’s exercise space. You’re welcome. My enthusiasm is always concentrated on the front end: Here! Here! Here, Gold’s Gym, Lifetime Fitness, Personal Trainer, Boot Camp Instructor, Fitness Coach, Yoga Master, Nutritional Mentor, Holistic Wellness Practitioner, take my money! Take it! Keep it! Buy some groceries! Pay some bills! Get you something nice! I will use your services for a short amount of time and then not, but please enjoy my money!
None of this gets easier as you get older, dear reader. Every time I drag my fluffy behind back to the gym, class, or studio, I imagine myself as entirely more fit and capable than I am despite all evidence to the contrary: Well, let’s see, I’ve been working my sedentary job every day and haven’t exercised in fourteen months and ate like it was a paying job this winter and haven’t experienced an elevated heart rate since I watched the season finale of Parenthood, so . . . I’ll take the ninety-minute Bikram hot yoga class because that makes physical and reasonable sense!
And then I die.
The aging, uncooperative body is one thing, but the gym is a whole ’nother situation. It becomes immediately clear that many people there have been using the membership they paid for. What is this, the Try Hard Convention? Where my sloths at? And of course the treadmills are at the front of the gym with the TVs, so when I haul up there to get my run-walk on, I give everyone a full rear visual assault, and there is no way their membership fees cover that sort of emotional distress. At the height of what I want for my life plan, having fifty people watch me run-walk from behind while my back flesh flaps squeeze out of my sports bra has to be at the top.
And seriously, I’ve been in (and out of) gyms for twenty-five years, but inevitably I’ll approach a weight machine absolutely flummoxed on how to use it. So instead of asking for help like a mature adult, I loosely figure out where the butt, hands, and legs go and just push, pull, squeeze, lift accordingly. Sometimes I am facing the entirely wrong direction. Sometimes, in an effort not to look like a Nancy, I put the weight on the lightest setting, then fall off the machine because pulling with all your might on five pounds tends to unbalance a person. If everyone is looking at me even one-tenth of how much I think they are, I am certainly an unwitting star on YouTube already: “Watch this chubby mom try to use the tricep machine and hit herself in the face and act like nothing happened!”
At this writing, my girlfriends and I are doing hot yoga. Wait, I’m sorry, practicing hot yoga. (All yoga is a “practice” and specifically “your own practice,” which I take to mean I can lie flat on the mat sometimes because my practice isn’t interested in balancing the entire body on one elbow. That is not a thing my practice wants to attempt. Namaste.) Also, I realize it is fundamental to this brand of yoga and is even found right there in the name, but every time we enter the room, one of us says, “Why is it so hot in here?” Then we spend the next hour trying with all our strength not to get the toots or the giggles, but we often get both.
I once thought yoga was for weirdos, but apparently yoga is for hard bodies. I regularly stare at our fellow yogi with wonder because their muscles are a thing to behold. My friends and I watched a girl hold an unsupported handstand in the middle of the room for three minutes yesterday during “i
nversion practice,” which we interpreted as lying on our backs and “inverting” our legs up the wall. It was what our practices desired. What grown adult can hold a handstand for three minutes? A sorcerer? Every muscle in her body was defined, and we wondered out loud if we had all the same muscles in our mom bodies because we’d never seen most of them. We want to win the Bicep Contest like her, not the Front Butt Contest we are currently winning in our pants. On our third yoga class, I asked our instructor: “How long until we look like you? Because this is already our third time and I have some expectations.”
That is another thing I do. I may go a year and a half with no physical activity, incurring all the pounds and squishy flesh that laziness provides in eighteen months, but after logging four hours of exercise, I expect to fit back into my jeans from last year. I actually try them on after going to the gym three times and weigh myself, anticipating a different second number. I always want a prize for going back, and I want that prize to be a cheerleader’s body after a week of classes, regularly shocked that even with seven days in the gym, I still look like a person who types for a living and also loves chips. What is this horsecrappery? After thirty days, I am ready to quit because obviously exercise doesn’t work. I didn’t lose twenty-five pounds yet, so it will clearly never happen, and I am convinced beyond measure that it is my thyroid.
Anyway, these are my exercise feelings and I don’t see them changing anytime soon or ever. I will just never be that girl who “can’t wait to get into the gym today” or go for “a quick run.” These are not things I will say or feel or mean or do. But I will keep dragging myself back in after another inevitable hiatus, shocked all over again at what inertia does to a forty-two-year-old container, and at the bare minimum, I will wrangle material out of it because I may not lose twenty pounds but I can sure write about wanting to.