And then there were also gourds...

 My latest accidental pumpkin patch has perplexed me … while I know that I threw a pumpkin out to rot in hopes of a repeat of the spectacular surprise 2018 patch, I am not growing just pumpkins. In fact, while I can boast of a modest  four pumpkins - and three of these quite small,  I have somehow been growing at least two dozen yellow and green gourds. I did not plant gourds. I have no idea where they came from but they are beautiful and interesting…and prolific. More appear regularly and they hide better than the pumpkins. Cucurbita pepo is the scientific name of pumpkin, Cucurbita pepo ovifera is the decorative fancy schmancy gourd which is growing amongst the pumpkin vines. They are so closely related that I wonder if some sort of genetic “thing” happened. 

God gave me my first accidental pumpkin patch three years ago and man, did I feel BLESSED. I’ve never been any sort of a gardener and suddenly I was a pumpkin farmer! I was out there fighting powder dust mildew and slugs, keeping them watered and safe from harm. They kept trying to grow into the street, so I was redirecting vines daily - they can grow more than a foot overnight. Those pumpkins gave me a sense of purpose and a feeling of joy during a very difficult time. I’d started a new job that, while it paid pretty lousy, I felt confident that God would take care of me financially and that it was a place where I could really give back. Unfortunately, it was a Viking slave ship masquerading as a ministry and I was one of many who were burnt out within the first six weeks. Those pumpkins, that beautiful pumpkin patch, were brimming with optimism that was much needed that late summer and autumn. That pumpkin patch taught me so many things about finding life after decay, rising up out of grief and misery and seeing the hope and goodness that could show up unexpectedly and hang around if I would just nurture it.

I tried to purposefully start a pumpkin patch the next year and managed to grow a vine or two. It was planted where I felt it should be, the “perfect” place or so I thought. The little vines flowered but it was always male flowers, so no fruit. I put the plant where I wanted it, tried to take care of it… but it did not grow. The best laid plans of mice and would-be pumpkin farmers don’t always work out.  I was disappointed but I had other fruit in my life at that time. I’d wound up teaching where I was definitely making a difference. I had other fruit to marvel at and thank God for. 

And so this year, I still wanted a pumpkin patch but I knew where it certainly was not going to grow...the place that I thought it should grow.  I had a pumpkin that had survived past Christmas and into the later part of winter. One day I threw it out in the snow in the general vicinity (but safer, away from the road a little) that the first patch had grown. Spring came, the time of pumpkin vines came… and I didn’t see a plant starting at the proper time, so I assumed it was a flop.  It was a season where I also had big decisions to make, a time where I really wanted to escape from charter schools and all the shenanigans. I had purpose, evidence that I was making a difference and yet my integrity, my ethics were challenged. I’m not wired to let that slack. 

And so, a pumpkin vine started. It started small, didn’t seem like it would flourish...but I took care of it. I grew concerned when it was late July and I had not seen a female flower, but still I cared for the patch. Finally, one happy day, the first female flower arrived and I helped the process along with a Q-tip. Happily, the pumpkin that became the bigger one began to grow. I hovered and hoped, but it was a while before another female flow appeared. But then suddenly, mystifyingly, the gourds began to appear. Flower after flower blossomed and while I wasn’t seeing the females clearly, daily new baby gourds were growing. How could it be? I stopped wondering as they became more and more abundant. 

The vines grew, they climbed the Rose of Sharon. Suddenly, I had truly “ornamental” gourds that grew dangling from the bush. How curious and how festive! While enjoying the novelty, I also had to battle the gastropod horde that came to feast, as well as the powder dust mildew that plagues the leaves. Beauty and bounty must be protected. To be blessed is wonderful, and diligent care is an expression of gratitude. 

Back in the months after  Pat passed away, I wrote a poem about how I was never much of a gardener (found here:  https://glynis-p.blogspot.com/2016/11/not-much-of-gardener.html ). It was a poem about hope - about the toil put in a life and then that life suddenly abandoned and finding optimism in that barren dirt. I later had my first accidental pumpkin patch and it wasn’t lost on me that, with the Lord’s help, I had become a capable pumpkin farmer. I wrote about its death here ( https://glynis-p.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-death-of-accidental-pumpkin-patch.html ). It is so interesting that I find myself at this new place - having thought I had pumpkins and also growing gourds - not where I most desired to to try to grow them, but it the spot that the Lord had chosen before and chose again.  Proverbs 16:9 “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” Psalm 37:23 “The steps of a man are ordered by the LORD who takes delight in his journey.”

I can’t say anymore that I’m not much of a gardener, although I seem to do best with the family Curcubitae. I can see something new in myself that has developed, all starting with a blessing and then a desire to protect that blessing and bring it to harvest. Looking at my life in the past several years, God chose to lead me to getting my teaching license and I had just completed my master’s degree three weeks after Pat passed away - starting a career after 33 years of marriage, 4 grown daughters and 10 then, now 12 grandchildren.  Likewise, my ability to garden came late - my plants didn’t start in mid-late spring - nope, my plants grew and flowered in the mid-late summer (and even autumn). It might also be seen as late, this new  phase of my life which has been blooming. I chose to look for blessing in the new life and gaze with hopeful trust  at the barren dirt, so I saw life spring from a rotted pumpkin in a pile of decaying leaves.  I’ve been growing; my plants have been growing. They bloom and bear fruit; I’ve seen blossom and fruition spiritually and professionally. While the patch  suffered from the attacks of slugs and mildew, I also struggled against trials and tribulations. I fought for the pumpkins/gourds, and I sincerely felt the Lord for me. The miracle of my pumpkin patch mirrors the growth and development of the new life.

I felt blessed and perfectly content being able to call myself “gardener” and growing pumpkins; God chose to give me gourds, too.  Who knows what other awesome, fun and exciting things He might do? Look at the barren dirt, break up the fallow ground, and be amazed.

Deconstructing

Over a year ago as the Pandemic had just begun, I texted my best friend about how bizarre it all was and “to top it off, Hank Hanegraaff has left the evangelical church.” For nearly three decades, Hank was The Bible Answer Man - the go-to source for all things apologetic-related. My friend and I greatly respected him. Both of us were shocked, it was as if we heard of someone landing on the moon for the first time. We’d already heard about the deconstruction of Joshua Harris (I Kissed Dating Goodbye) and I’d also become aware of Rhett and Link’s deconstruction. Why was this happening? Was this a “great falling away” or was it something else? If THE Hank Hanegraaff had left evangelicalism, I wanted to try to understand why. 

 I discovered that Hank had some concerns that I had - “We live in an age of ‘pastor-preneur,’ where the pastor is the entrepreneur,” Hanegraaff said. “And the church has become consumerist. Instead of Christ being the end, Christ becomes the means to an end. Instead of people coming to the master’s table because of the love of the master, they come to the master’s table because of what is on the master’s table.” For me, I saw people coming to Christ for what they perceived they could get on a different level, a more social and political level, rather than genie-in-the-bottle prosperity - as the Pandemic revved to motion, it became clear that the white evangelical church inspired adherence to the “Me Version Bible.” And this is where I began to deconstruct. 

 I had a strange little hobby for a while, it was reading up on various plagues and pestilences. I was given books for birthday presents and sought out others in the library. One book that had fascinated me was “Flu,” by Gina Kolata about the 1918 Spanish Flu. I had also read the book that inspired George W. Bush to start setting up a pandemic preparedness plan, “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History” by John M. Barry. Therefore, when February 2020 rolled around and COVID-19 began developing into a serious international problem, I completely agreed with the level of caution that authorities were demanding. From here, my tale of personal deconstruction begins and there are two major catalysts. The way fellow believers behaved during the pandemic and their love affair with Donald J. Trump. I will address the latter first. Up until this point, I was a “hold my nose and deal with it” Republican who disliked Trump but decided he was doing enough stuff that I liked which led to me just keeping my mouth closed. I did tend to believe some of the things about the press treating him unfairly as well as that the mainstream media was lopsided. 

In early 2020, my atheist brother confronted me on this. He asked if I was a Christian and Christ taught “a, b, and c” then how could I go along with (list of DJTs sins here). My answer? He was doing things I agree with and a lengthy list of his conservative-pleasing accomplishments(which I later fact-checked and it was chock-full of spin, spin, spin). The conversation became heated and nasty. I was in tears, feeling persecuted (after all, I didn’t actually like Donald Trump). However, I could not get past the fact that as a Christian, if I truly did believe what Christ taught, how could I say what I was condoning was okay? I began to deconstruct my Christianese excuses for being a silent supporter. The structure toppled in light of Truth. It would only become more apparent that silence was complicity. I am forever grateful for the confrontation and how God used it to lead me back to Him. 

 The behavior of many fellow church-goers as the Pandemic broke out? Startling is putting it mildly. All that we were taught about loving our neighbors as ourselves, esteeming the needs of others more highly than our own, being subject to governmental authorities.... It was all falling by the wayside. I heard the gospel of ME. “My rights were being violated!” “The government is just using these to steal our freedom!” “It’s all a trial run at turning us into communists!” Locally, I was seeing precious little love for neighbor (forget loving enemies entirely!) -Facebook rants and memes were all about “I can’t breathe with a mask on!” and sharing every fly-by-night YouTube video that supported fighting mask mandates and lockdowns, things that I knew from history and common-sense epidemic practices were the best way to save lives. 607,000 American deaths later and many of the same people ranting this stuff still subscribe to it. 

Even as death tolls rose, supposed Christians were sharing heartless posts about how the elderly and immuno-compromised were expendable. It was disgusting. Disgusting on a human level and appalling on a “follower of Christ” level. Yes, I commented on these posts. Yes, I engaged with them scripture. Time and again. No one, not one person - deaconess, worship leader, Sunday school teacher, etc, offered me any Biblical backing for their positions. The response that I did hear a lot was about how “God wants us to FIGHT for our freedom and for the TRUTH.” Again, never backed by scripture, just by intensity that this was what God wants. Funny, I distinctly saw in red letters Him saying something completely different. 

 These two catalytic points converged as DJT did an about-face on the Pandemic health measures. Suddenly, that personal freedom agenda and hatred for liberals infiltrated the feeds of my “Christian” facebook friends. Mockery, scorn, slander were commonplace on the pages of those I had fellowshipped with. It was the evil Dr. Fauci trying to control us, the lying mainstream media trying to deceive us, the socialist agenda trying to ensnare us. Conspiracy theories abounded. Fact-checking was ridiculed. Hatred for those protesting systemic racism. Scorn for immigrants. It’s as if Matthew 25 did not exist. Pastor friends I knew for years were complaining about THEIR tax money going to pay for undocumented immigrants "stealing" from our citizens. (I'm of the belief that if you render to Casear what is Casear's, it's not yours anymore. But honestly, if God tells us to take care of strangers, isn't He able to provide?). I became a terrible person for questioning this behavior. I was called a liberal commie *unt by a run of the mill conservative who decided I'd gone to the left because I was for kindness, justice, mercy. I was messaged by several church and homeschooling people asking, “What has happened to you????” because I didn’t run down that patriot path and join the crowd. Jesus happened to me and I thought He had happened to you, too. 

 I could continue with endless examples of the things I saw, discussions I had, names I was called for not fitting in with the status quo. One thing mattered to me - the testimony of Christ’s church. If the church was sharing hatred, engaging in open mockery and scorn, it was bringing shame to the Name of Jesus. It was sending out a gospel that was totally unlike the Good News that called me to Him. And so, I began to return to that first love, that faith which first brought me to Christ. I began to deconstruct.

When I first became a follower of Christ, I knew nothing of Calvinism or any man-made doctrine. I read the Word, I believed it, I repented of my sins, and asked Him to lead me. He did. My late husband and I were discipled by a church that taught us about love and obedience. They didn’t spend time pounding eternal-conscious-torment into our heads and that is NOT what brought me to Christ. And so, I began to compare what I’d been taught over the years since then with the Jesus that I first met and with scripture. It was very different. 

I’ve always identified with the Bereans and their noble need to research and prove things were correct, not believing anything without checking. Obviously, there was a need to do this because so many Christians who had attended church right alongside me over the years were not embracing a theology of neighbor and enemy loving, of trusting in Christ in the midst of turmoil. In fact, what I was seeing was rage and anger - how everything was lost if DJT was not president, that he had to be restored or we were all doomed. This did not mesh and I needed to find out what was really following Jesus and what wasn’t. 

 Now in the white evangelical church, I had already discovered that people don’t like it if you are smart and, in fact, act as if that is detrimental to your spiritual health. Of course, it didn’t matter that the Apostle Paul was a great intellect or that the other writers of the New Testament were well-read and referenced popular culture of their day. A woman with a brain was a danger to herself… but is that what God thought? Or did He bless me with brains and curiosity because of the simple joy it would give me in seeking to know Him more? 

 At this time, The Gospel Coalition was sharing quite a bit regarding the horrible behavior of evangelicals. Morning discussions on Moody Radio also discussed the fracture that was occurring due to politics and pandemic. I discovered Phil Vischer’s Holy Post podcast, first with his episode on systemic racism (eye opener) and I was soon subscribed. I realized that, “WOW!” There were Christians struggling with exactly what I am struggling with. I didn’t want to be in a place of disillusionment. I loved Jesus with all my heart and did not want to go the way of others before me who left their faith entirely because of the abuses they saw in the church. Thankfully, my son-in-law introduced me to the Bema Discipleship Podcast. 

 Bema Discipleship is a deconstructive study of Scripture. As they describe it: ““BEMA” (or bimah) is a Hebrew word that refers to the elevated platform in the center of first-century synagogues where the people of God read the Text. At that time, the community of God’s people did not gather in buildings that faced a stage with an audience, but rather they allowed their gathering to reflect what they hoped to be true of their lives — it was centered around the Word of God. The BEMA Discipleship program is an attempt to recapture a few of those elements present in the early church. It is not our desire to recreate an ancient world, but to learn from its successes and implement something vibrant into the culture of today.” And I fell in love with Jesus all over again. Through the cultural, historical, geographical and linguistic deconstruction of the Word, I found the story of two kingdoms, the kingdom of Empire and the kingdom of Shalom. I relearned how to create space for God and to be His friend.] because Bema encourages a “A space where asking questions is incentivized and not discouraged. A space that God could fill — the way He desires to fill it. To love God. To love others. To become people of the Text.” 

 Through that I found Tim Mackie’s The Bible Project as well as the man white evangelical Christian leadership loves to call a heretic, Rob Bell. In fact, I hadn’t yet read Bell when a pastor mentioned him and his “heresy.” That intrigued me, so one day while I painted my kitchen, I listened to the audiobook of “Love Wins.” Instead of finding heresy, I found more truth than a twisted, taken out of context, forgetting rabbinical teaching tradition/history/geography human doctrines on “eternal conscious torment.” I discovered that C.S. Lewis, who I grew up on, didn’t espouse that nonsense and that looking at the Bible as a whole story, I no longer was falling for it either. I’ve been reconstructing a faith that’s built on Jesus, not on the doctrines of modern day Pharisees. I've found places to wrestle and discuss, such as The New Evangelicals group. I've found new ways to have my thinking challenged and it has all led me to deeper faith.  The evangelical church has prayed for revival for a long time. This is it. It is here now. I’m a part of a new reformation, as are others like me. 

Yes, there was a great falling away but it wasn’t us. It was a church that married politics and self-preservation rather than Christ. And with that, here I am. I’m in a place where the elders were “concerned” with my “apparent move away from orthodoxy” and my interaction with the worship leader/deaconesses/Sunday school teachers who were sharing all the mockery/hatred/scorn/conspiracy and wanted to meet with me. Due to that concern and the fact that I really do not agree with them theologically, I wrote my letter of departure from that church membership. Where I’m NOT is at a place with no fellowship with other believers. The believers I interact with talk about Jesus and following Him all the time. We informally come together in person, by text, online, with a psalm, a hymn, etc. We encourage one another in the faith as I was rarely encouraged before. Like Hank Hanegraaff, I’ve discovered that life matters and I, too, just want to worship.