A Lot Like Eve by Joanna Jepson

Author:Joanna Jepson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fashion, Faith and Fig-Leaves: A memoir
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

18

Fish Out of Water

According to an urban parable I once heard these ways of thinking, these views that we hold, can be like the water in which a fish swims. If anybody ever asked us what the water was like we wouldn’t know what they were talking about. A fish doesn’t see the water it’s swimming in; it lives and breathes it. Like fish, we swim around in all sorts of murkiness, circling through the same old patterns of thinking, relishing prejudices that are so familiar to us we no longer see what a comfort they’ve become, recycling behaviours that are so rehearsed we barely hear ourselves saying the lines any more. We can live and move and have our being in these things and never properly see or hear them.

Only when something happens, something that grabs us and takes us out of our normality, can we see it for the first time. And then we have a chance to see that we can choose to inhale and feed off different things. But mostly we don’t freely reject our obsolete ways and thinking; to do so would feel almost deathly. These attitudes and patterns have to be prised from our clutches so that there is distance enough to observe them, so we can see that we are not those things and that we can approach life differently. Usually it’s through something unpleasant, something we name as suffering. But without it we tend not to discover that the things we thought were holding us and protecting us were actually things that were keeping us small and stunted and hidden; like my misshapen beliefs about God.

Operating in a subculture where I expected to see signs and wonders meant that, if I wasn’t experiencing any of the supernatural action, I would be reduced to the role of onlooker: a mere spectator, watching God’s favour poured out upon others while I remained unchosen. So I couldn’t let my zeal wane, I just kept praising. And now I was tired. My uplifted arms seemed to do little more than uphold the image of me as holy, prayerful, good. If that was the deal I had going on with the Almighty I was ready to bow out. It wasn’t enough any longer to expend my energy proving to myself and others it was true. I wanted to live truthfully.

Unfearfully. Messily if I had to.

I knew I was outgrowing it; these superficial confines of our kind of Christianity. The language we used, the clothes we wore, the roles we could play; I no longer wanted to squeeze myself into their narrow parameters.

But it was during a sermon that Cliff preached that I suddenly saw, like a fish being held above the water, what beliefs I’d been swimming in. He was preaching about the return of the prodigal son and he roved about with the microphone making eye contact with us as he spoke about the Lost out there beyond the church who needed to be invited in to meet Jesus.

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