for today...
i thought that i might set the stage a little with a fairly raw blog entry from three years ago when i had just started a small house church and was asked to write something about the cost of being a woman in leadership.

for the conversation that will begin tomorrow, i'll try to keep it a little more objective - but for those of you who are not women involved in church planting, i wanted to give you a picture into the ambivalence and pain of being called to this life.  again, this is a repost of something from three years ago - but i think it can still be a good primer for our conversation today:

i want to tell you, readers, how costly it is to lead as a woman. i want to show you my scars and tears. i want to reveal how much shame i feel with regard to my call, how much anger i have for that shame, how much shame i have for that shame.

i want to tell you how fear floods my heart everytime someone asks what i'm studying.

i want to tell you how i wanted to end my journey toward starting a church when our lone man in leadership felt a call away from the church, how i didn't want to engage the fact that two women are starting a church and how i both envied and hated two well-loved friends who are men starting a church and who surely never stumbled over the question, "we're two men - can we start a church? where could we find a woman to start it with us? will anyone come to a church headed by men? what will my brother think? how do i tell my extended family that i'm a man pastoring a church without a woman over me?"

i want you to see that, when asked to write about a biblical narrative that reflects what leadership is like for me as a woman, i broke down in tears because the biblical narrative stage is desolate when it comes to leading women. women lead by washing feet and by being prostitutes harboring spies and by following their mother-in-law and marrying a kinsman redeemer, and by beaing beautiful and making dinner for the king - her husband. i identify with jeremiah, but there is no great, tortured prophetess.

i want you to know how afraid i am to write this blog entry - how i'm afraid of your reaction, afriad that you will think i am overly emotional about the subject, afraid you will voice support and live nothing in response, afraid that i'll reach out only to be left even more alone.

i want to tell you the story of the first time i admitted my call to someone - after harboring it for four years - on a youth group retreat - on my 16th birthday - only to be left weeping, knowing that my calling, unless it was to marry a pastor and not to be one, was from the devil and not from God. i want you to see the roses my dad sent me for my birthday wilting as they are pelted with the salt-water of my flowing tears. i want you to know the jovial smile of late night adolescent-girl goofing off that was lost in the violence of the church against women.

i want you to know that, at the very same church, my brother's call was celebrated - and that i had to watch that and that i couldn't be happy for him - only envious that he was celebrated as i was chastised.

i want you to know how deeply i wish i could just get married and be an at-home mom and abandon my calling. i want you to know that i have tried to. i want you to cry with me over the fact that i have tried to abandon a call simply because i am a woman.

but how do i tell you these things eloquently, so that they are all in one piece and so that you will read this and think better of me? how do i begin to hope that you might see me and grieve with me? where are the words i so often weild to bring you on a journey with me? in my rawness and desperation, they seem to have disappeared leaving only these broken fragments of a life-time of being shamed of what i should know is God's glory sining through me.