PicoBlog

This is a longer letter than usual, but there are some things I need to share with you. Things I cannot be silent about any longer. 

Dear Friend,

There are many who would like you to believe faithfulness looks like more. Have more children. Vote more politicians of your political persuasion into congress to make decisions more aligned with your values. Give more money to your church or cause. Gather more people in the pews or the follower count on your Instagram. Make more out of your life than you currently are. 

I’ve lived under the mantle of more, and it nearly killed me. (Read chapter 2 of my book, and you will know I’m not exaggerating. It wasn’t my disease that made me want to give up but the cruelty of the church.) When more is the main means you are offered for expressing the kingdom of God on the earth of your life, you will strive and strain and end up feeling ashamed and abandoned when the striving only amounts to continued stress, insecurity, and division.

Far too many Christians have been treated like pawns in the advancement of a kingdom rather than people to be loved. I suspect many of you, like me, are haunted by the harm of being reduced to your utility to serve some leader or church. I suspect you wonder whether you are faithful if you can’t be useful. I wonder how many of you live in a cloud of confusion after being chewed up and spit out by communities who were supposed to nurture, love, and heal. I ache when I hear your anguish that maybe you’ve disappointed God because discouragement or darkness don’t seem to go away. 

I will not sit silently on the sidelines watching you and others Christ loves be crushed by the yoke of a burden you were never meant to carry. I will not quietly acquiesce to socially acceptable standards of what should and should not be said about powerful people and privilege when “Christian” systems, institutions, and leaders are shrewdly reducing people to parts on assembly lines in the apparatus of advancing “the kingdom.”

You are not a product God uses; you are a person God loves. 

Belovedness is your birthright, and I will not watch you be robbed of the freedom and lightness and rest Christ has for you. 

Last week some courageous women spoke up about the spiritual and sexual abuse they experienced under the leadership of the spiritual director and enneagram teacher Chris Heuertz. When I read their words, I immediately believed them, because their story is in many ways mine. I have stayed silent for years about spiritual abuse my husband and I experienced by admired voices in the church. The hour I read their stories, I deleted Chris’ episode from my podcast and arranged to have his endorsement removed from future printings of my book. As someone whose soul has been shattered by spiritual abuse, I was glad to be able to take action to honor others whose stories have similarly been shattered and silenced. 

The Christian addiction to advancement and accelerated growth is the humid climate where the sick spores of spiritual and sexual abuse proliferate and poison saints’ souls into silence. The machine of admired men and women and the systems built around their charisma mold us into the shape of suspicion. In the shadow of the spiritual abuser, we are taught to mistrust our own senses and signals of what is good and true and beautiful. I cannot tell you how subtly and frequently I dismissed my own inner sense of something being off about a leader and later wished I could have trusted my body and its wisdom about safety, goodness, truth, and love. Even after I started trusting the truth within me again, I’ve struggled to know how to speak up about the sickness that wrecked my family and friends’ lives. I know I’m not the only one who holds secret stories of spiritual abuse by people many of you think are “amazing.” Silence breeds more abuse, but speaking up is complex and re-traumatizing in and of itself. 

Both the religious right and left subtly conscript us into slavery of striving for more. We’re tantalized by the promise of participating in a grand effort to make God’s glory known, but we end up participating in the pride of leaders scheming to make their own glory known. Our personal pride is silently drafted into service; we privately hope we’ll be seen, valued, and given a place by the people who seem to hold the power. 

We inevitably make ourselves smaller by passionately striving for influence, power, and even good change because the striving itself demands dismissal of the distress in our souls. In the service of success-addicted spirituality, we learn to slice ourselves in two—the stuff we should show and the stuff we should hide. Suppressing my sensitivity made me a slave to striving, wounded at the whip of “Christian” systems who reward exterior rightness and productivity over inner reverence and attuned presence. The great work of “advancing the kingdom” often involves the silencing of our souls. 

The machine of more makes us less human.

The machine of more wants us to stay small and silent.

But the Maker, Christ himself, invites us to see smallness as the sacred space where the kingdom grows. 

Paradoxically, recovering the small voice within us is what will carry us from silence and subjugation to the strength, dignity, and delight that are our birthright as people bought by the blood of Christ. 

Jesus curiously does not speak of his kingdom in terms of more but in the smallness of a seed. In Mark 4, Christ confounds a crowd of followers who expected a Messiah of might to bring a kingdom of political and religious power back to the people of Israel. (It seems the people of God are always confounded when power is not God’s chosen means of making his majesty known.) Later, in the privacy of conversation with his disciples, Jesus says the secret of the kingdom of God is in seeds and soil, roots and fruit.

The kingdom doesn’t come in flashy words about the future belonging to the fecund or Christians needing to commit to winning some culture war. The kingdom doesn’t come by creating some super-spiritual following or being a bestselling author. Christ says the kingdom comes like the smallest of seeds, that when tended with care grow into something strong, tall, and full of sustenance. 

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use to describe it? It’s like a mustard seed that, when sown upon the soil, is the smallest of all the seeds on the ground. And when sown, it comes up and grows taller than all the garden plants, and produces large branches, so that the birds of the sky can nest in its shade.”

Mark 4:30-32

Smallness is the secret of God’s kingdom.

Your small, sensory world is the soil God has chosen to indwell, and turning toward your emotions, relationships, and community with tenderness is the action that will advance the kingdom and redeem this world. 

This time of tumult is a time of tilling. 

The soil of our souls and communities is being tended and fertilized. Rocks of racism are being removed. The acidity of spiritual and sexual abuse is slowly being accounted for in the climate of what creates an unjust culture and crushes souls. You may not like me naming these realities. You may want to unsubscribe and unfollow and remove me like an annoying stone in your shoe. I can accept that. But hear me out first:

there is a flourishing life meant for you that cannot come without the flourishing of your neighbor. 

Don’t let yourself be crushed under the mantle of more. 

I long for your flourishing and fullness, and I am gently inviting us all to seek that flourishing in the small spaces of our ordinary lives. From emotional awareness of the distress and discouragement we feel to small choices of equity in how we speak, vote, and spend, our small choices are the seed God is scattering, tending, and growing to spread his love like a fruitful vine through his whole world. 

It is time for us to recover our birthright of belovedness. It is time for the church to reorient our lives around the reality that Christ is already in our midst and most shows his face not in the successful or self-sufficient but in the suffering, the weak, the widow, the orphan, and the poor.

May we be tilled and transformed until the plants that grow through our presence bear nourishing fruit that lasts. May God remove everything in me and in you that keeps the soil of our souls and communities sick and selfish. 

I pray we can together dismantle the machine of more and rebuild the church on the foundation of a God who so loved the world he suffered for her. I pray we will surrender the seductive spirituality of success and recover the steps of our servant Savior. I pray we will step off the assembly line of addiction to more and instead be still and know.

The still, small voice within you is the seed of God’s kingdom. Show up in your smallness with willingness to listen and love, to see and be seen. Pay attention to your body, emotions, relationships, and community with courage that it is here Christ dwells. Our smallness is the seed of a kingdom that will last. 

With a broken heart full of love and a boldness and belovedness no one can take away,

-KJ

Last month my first book released into the world! I pray This Too Shall Last meets you with grace, insight, and inspiration to show up in the smallness of your life expecting to see the largeness of God's love. Get your copy here. And if you've already read it, I'd be honored to read your thoughts in an Amazon review!

Forward this edition of Embodied to a friend + encourage them to subscribe

ncG1vNJzZmijmqeurr%2FEsq6roaSawG%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2hwYG59dn6RmJymmp%2BZtqawjKOsp51dZ31zfA%3D%3D