by Jamie Wright
But around Jeff and Kathy I could be my own someone. I could be sarcastic and sweary, opinionated, passionate, moody, funny, scared, scarred, and just generally goofy. Not only did they make space for my nature, but they coaxed it out of hiding by showing their true colors first. They were just real. Around their table we talked freely about our doubts and disappointments. We openly shared observations, good and bad, about life and faith and church. We debated. Sometimes we disagreed. But we came in as ourselves and we left as ourselves, and I think this respect for one another’s differences elevated our friendship even further.
Jeff was living proof that there could be a place in the church for the real me, a darkly brooding, depression-fighting, doubtful, brazen, kinda-bitchy bad Christian. And Kathy’s natural bent toward selfless badassery challenged me to serve others in the ways that came the most naturally to me. For the first time in my entire life, I felt like I knew who I was. And maybe who I was wasn’t so awful and embarrassing and worthless. In fact, maybe who I was was who God had intended me to be all along.
Pretending to be someone else is exhausting. I’d given so much energy to keeping up appearances that when I finally realized I could drop the act altogether, it was like stepping out of a furry suit on a hot summer day. In a word, it was refreshing. It was terrifying too, because all of a sudden I was seeing and feeling and experiencing the world as my own self, and I felt exposed. But for the first time ever, I also felt free.
* * *
As a youth group leader, I met with a group of girls every week to talk about everything under the sun. We had sleepovers on my living room floor, watched movies, baked cookies, painted our nails, all while I did my best to answer their hardest questions and address their biggest fears. I learned to say things like “I don’t know” and “That’s a really good question.” But the thing I said most often was “Be who you are.”
The one thing I wanted my girls to know deeply, and truly, and forever, was that who they were was exactly who God meant for them to be. Exactly.
Looking in from the outside, it was easy for me to see how each of them had a place, a spot of their very own to fill, and if they hid who they were by trying to be someone else, the world would miss their one-of-a-kind contribution. Don’t get me wrong, we also talked about stuff like character flaws and bad habits and poor choices and personal responsibility. This wasn’t about encouraging them to settle into life as their dumb fifteen-year-old selves and never change. I wanted them to mature and grow up, but I wanted them to know and respect who they were in the process. Against the backdrop of a culture hell-bent on convincing them they must become someone better in order to be loved, and in the shadow of a church telling them they needed love in order to become someone better, I told the girls in my group, honestly and often, that I loved them most when they were most themselves.
What Jeff and Kathy did for Steve and me we tried to do for the students who passed through our lives each week. We shared our truest selves and made space for the kids in our groups to do the same. For some, our home became a haven, a welcome place where vulnerability would be honored and where honest questions would get honest answers. In us we hoped they would find no false pretenses, no pretending, and no one to impress, so they’d never feel the need to be anyone but themselves.
* * *
Hannah was a student in my small group for a few years. She was a pastor’s kid who played the drums and the guitar and sang in the worship band. According to our kids, she was the best babysitter ever, and one summer she even taught my younger boys how to swim. Once, when she was being kind of a dipshit, she challenged me to a friendly fight, so I wrestled her to the ground, sat on her back, and rode her like a donkey, just to show her who was boss. Hannah was so much fun, but she was also a deep thinker with a tender heart and a sort of tortured soul. The day she told me she needed to talk, I had a pretty solid idea what it was gonna be about.
Hannah laughs when she gets nervous, and also, she cries. I knew the instant she walked through the door that her nerves were firing on all cylinders, because she was a chuckling, teary-eyed mess.
Steve was at work and the boys were in bed, so it was just the two of us in an unusually quiet house. She sat down at the kitchen table, and I immediately set a giant plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies in front of her. They were her favorite, and I thought it would be helpful to pile at least two dozen on a plate and shove them right in her face. For a while she was quiet, sort of picking at a cookie, pressing loose crumbs together with her fingertip, until she looked up at me with a tightly knit brow and her dark eyes welling with tears.
I know that face, I thought. That’s the face of a faker.
Finally, with a deep breath, Hannah took off the mask she’d worn for her whole life and told me she was gay.
She’d been working so hard for so long to deny her own nature, to be someone else, someone worthy, someone good, someone lovable, and she was simply exhausted. She decided to say it out loud, because she couldn’t carry the weight alone any longer.
I will never know the kind of courage Hannah showed that day.
I will never have the kind of balls it must have taken for her to knock on my stupid suburban door, and sit at my lame IKEA table, and cut herself wide open for me to really see the girl who was drowning beneath a pile of labels she didn’t choose—“pastor’s kid,” “tomboy,” “straight girl.” Hannah was already doing at sixteen what I was still learning at twenty-six; she was claiming her own self, taking ownership of all of who she was. And even though she was afraid because she didn’t know how or where she was going to fit into the world or the church, or even her own family, she would at least be free to find out.
Our church, the church where Hannah’s dad was a larger-than-life pastor who looked like a Ken doll and talked like a radio DJ, wasn’t “gay affirming.” Remember, this was way back in the day, before inclusive churches and affirming Christians were even part of the bigger conversation. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t given it much thought prior to that night, and the only thing I’d heard from the church on the subject was “It’s a sin. Duh.” I’d heard some debate about nature versus nurture. I’d read some stuff about the horror of “conversion camps.” I’d seen the news coverage of the scandalized hellfire preacher who’d been caught getting blow jobs from dudes in public restrooms. I’d driven past those disgusting picketers with signs declaring, “God Hates Fags.” So I knew it was a cruel world in which to be a gay teenager, but, I’m embarrassed to admit, until then it had all seemed too distant for me to take an interest. But now here was Hannah in my kitchen, and Hannah was mine. She had a place in my heart, in my family, in my community, and I realized that in that moment my opinion or lack thereof didn’t matter at all. My only job in the universe was to hold her up, to share her burden, to help her become her own someone.
I’m sure I said a few well-meaning things I wish I could take back today, but I don’t remember. I remember admitting that I didn’t really know what I thought about being gay, and I tried to remind her that the Bible has been translated for us and taught to us mostly by straight white dudes, and I wasn’t sure if I fully trusted those interpretations.
At the time, I didn’t know if I thought gayness was a sin or not. I didn’t know what her parents would say. I didn’t know what her future held. And I didn’t know what she should do next.
But I did know some things. God loved her and I loved her, I knew that much for sure, and I believed we both loved her best when she was wholly herself, because I knew without a doubt that who she was was exactly who God had made her to be.
Exactly.
Last year Hannah got married, and I had the immense privilege of walking her down the aisle on her wedding day. What an honor it was to be by her side, once again, as she took a huge step forward in life. Knowing the difficult path she has walked so bravely, seeing Hannah calmly delivered into the arms of h
er beautiful bride, will always be one of the proudest moments of my life.
During the ceremony, I had an opportunity to say a prayer over their marriage, and then I lifted my arms to hug them both at once. When I did this, the knee-length dress I’d chosen for the occasion pulled up far enough to expose my dimply white thighs where they gooshed out from a pair of flesh-colored Spanx, like two enormous links of chicken sausage. This happened in front of at least 150 people with cameras aimed and ready, and I probably should have been mortified, but honestly? I didn’t even care.
I’m no longer a stranger to being exposed, and if there is anything I truly know and understand about this world, it’s that this amazing thing happens when people see the realest parts of the real you: They trust you with their realness too.
The first time I boarded a plane bound for Costa Rica, I couldn’t have told you where to find it on a world map. Was it an island? Was it in South America? Was it populated by angry tribal warriors with loincloths and poison darts? No idea. When other people found out I was going there on a mission trip, they asked me these questions like I should have answers, and I just looked at them like, What am I, National Geographic?
I was headed to this mysterious land as an adult leader with our youth group for my first experience as a short-term missionary, which also happened to be my first trip abroad. We emerged from our plane into the heavy air of the tropics mixed with the smog of a busy city and the smells of wet earth and motor oil. Welcome to Costa Rica. Along with Steve and a dozen excited teenagers, I made my way through customs and immigration at Juan Santamaría International Airport. Despite the fact that I carried no illegal contraband of any kind, I was sweating like a drug mule, convinced that at any moment I would be arrested, strip-searched, and left to rot in a slimy jail cell.
I was so busy dreaming up worst-case scenarios, it didn’t even cross my mind to imagine the best—that the first stamp in my passport could be the first of many. In the years to follow, that stiff new passport would become soft and worn, permanently bent from being jammed in the back pocket of my jeans, ink smudged by moist palms, and dog-eared from being tossed into bags and backpacks and hastily retrieved a thousand times. But that day, as I inched through the line to enter another country for the first time, with armpit stains the size of dinner plates, it was inconceivable to me that someday the pristine passport I so gingerly handed to a bored Costa Rican immigration agent would be filled with stamps from cover to cover, country to country, including pages I’d have to have added.
But before any of that could happen, we would have to make the unimaginable leap from volunteering a few days a week as youth group leaders and chaperoning the occasional short-term trip to living overseas as international missionaries. So what happened, you may wonder, to make a cop and a soccer mom decide to sell all their shit, pack their bags, and drag their kids on a grand adventure? I mean, seriously. What were we thinking?
To tell you the truth, we had no good reason to shake things up. We could have kept on living our safe, comfortable lives in the suburban sprawl of California’s Gold Country indefinitely. Sometimes I wish we had. We could have endured the sparkly light show at church every weekend and been present to invest in the lives of the students we loved. We could have enjoyed watching our sons grow up surrounded by grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We could have simply remained there, basking in the steady glow of a God who, at the time, felt especially present.
Before that first trip to Costa Rica, our lives were pleasant, fulfilling, and so damn easy. And sometimes I wish we’d stayed right there, in that beige house with the three-legged dog, in that city, with those people, collecting that sweet-ass paycheck and hosting groups of rowdy teenagers for as long as they would let us.
But we didn’t.
You know why?
Because we’re idiots.
Also because, together, Steve and I were beginning to believe that God was calling us out into the world to do something bigger, something better. We’d started to suspect that we were supposed to be part of something awesome.
But mostly it’s because we’re idiots.
* * *
It might be important to note that before we became missionaries, we accidentally became the kind of people who could become accidental missionaries.
Just before our first brief foray into Christian missions by way of Costa Rica, Steve and I discovered we had a taste for travel when we packed our kids and an ice chest into our minivan and hit the open road for a cross-country trip, guided by nothing more than the path that lay ahead and our heart’s desire. This was our first real family adventure and, like many to follow, it was stupidly impulsive, poorly planned, underestimated, over budget, and super memorable.
We drove nearly eight thousand miles, from California to Florida, up the East Coast, and back through the Midwest, hitting twenty-three states and stopping along the way to see friends and family, view national treasures, and visit roadside oddities. Bear in mind, this was before GPS and cell phones and screen time. My husband and I were the only navigation, education, and entertainment systems on board, so the success of the trip was completely dependent upon our ability to read a paper map, recall fifth-grade U.S. history, and keep three kids spanning six years of age from crying out of sheer boredom.
When our plan to “hit the road and see what happens” went well, it went very well. Like the night we pulled into a parking lot at the Grand Canyon around midnight. We slept there for a few hours and then sneaked out onto the trail before dawn to watch the morning mist burn off with the rising of the sun. We led our boys through the dark to a flat spot on a rock outcrop, where we sat and snuggled together wrapped in blankets to watch the show, as if God Himself were pulling back the curtain to reveal His spectacular creation. Turns out, sunrise at the Grand Canyon is no joke.
Another day we pulled off the interstate for gas and realized we were only a few blocks away from the French Market in New Orleans. Of course we detoured to do a little shopping and went on to explore the rest of the city. Happy to be out of the car for a while, we walked through the Garden District, utterly charmed by the stunning architecture and giant old oak trees dripping with moss. The day grew more and more humid as we strolled, and we were pretty relieved when we turned a corner into a big park with a path that looked like it would take us straight back to our car. It started off like a typical bike path, but we soon found ourselves stepping over bundles of cords, around large toolboxes, and between folding chairs, until someone official-looking approached us with his hands held out, fingers splayed, in the universal sign for Oh my god, you’re ruining everything, and hissed, “Please be quiet, we’re shooting a scene!”
We were so busy being dumb tourists, we’d accidentally walked right into the middle of a film set. By that time, our kids were tired and hungry, and, it should be noted, it was a hot August day in New Orleans and we are California-dry-heat kind of people. Our hair had melted down onto our purple-red faces, and our clothes were wet, see-through, and stuck against our bodies with unholy levels of perspiration. Let’s just say we didn’t look normal or…healthy…which is probably why they let us keep walking through the set to take the quickest route back to our car.
That’s how we ran into a young Scarlett Johansson as she was being primped and powdered by busy hands in preparation for her next scene. We didn’t know who she was at the time, only that, whoever she was, she was, like, Hollywood important, and she wasn’t happy to see us. She looked physically frightened by our family, Steve in particular, as though she thought he was planning to reach out and slash her face or something. I thought, Sheesh. What a prissy bitch. But in retrospect, we did look like actual swamp monsters, so I guess it’s not her fault for mean-mugging us like we were freaks.
Eventually we managed to extricate ourselves from the live set of A Love Song for Bobby Long (which also starred John Travolta and went straight to vi
deo in 2004), and we trudged on. About half a block from our car, we met a guy who could tell by our sweatiness that we weren’t from the South. This man was tan and blond with crystal-blue eyes, and his shirt was not stuck to his body. He was one of those true southern gentlemen: forward, genial, super polite. He struck up a conversation, and we paused to chat for a minute, and when he invited our disgusting family into his beautiful historic home for a “cold lemonade” in that smooth New Orleans drawl, I practically swooned. Unfortunately, we had to decline his kind invitation because he was probably a serial killer. But still.
More often than not, the no-plan plan worked in our favor, and we enjoyed daily surprises along our route, although from time to time things didn’t pan out exactly how we would have liked.
Without the benefit of TripAdvisor, we were flying blind, usually pulling up to the first cheap motel with a neon vacancy sign and a free breakfast. If I were to write reviews of the rooms we slept in over the span of the trip, I’d say they mostly ranged from “Could use a good cleaning” to “Pretty sure someone died in here.” On the worst night, we ended up in the middle of nowhere at 10:00 p.m., forced to quit driving by exhaustion and an accumulation of delayed potty breaks. We stopped at the only place we’d seen in ages, which happened to be a Motel 6 flanked by two strip clubs. This alone would have been fine, except that all the other rooms were occupied by a minor-league baseball team. We had to keep the TV on all night with the volume turned way up to protect our children’s innocence.