Spring Creek BBQ:
I Am Not Embarrassed
(Spring 2013)

It’s amazing how fast our minds work when we’re not thinking about thinking. “Nothing’s broken” flashed forward from the back of my brain, meaning that the slip-n-fall I had just endured had not hurt me seriously. Legs splayed, skirt hiked, ridiculous shoes with little heels that were not meant for actual human propulsion hanging halfway off both feet, the tray of sliced brisket and a mountain of coleslaw coming down in a series of clatters beside me, my iced tea splashing through the air to baptize the unsuspecting diner a couple of yards away—but no broken bones. Nothing’s broken. Thanks be to God. 

And there were my clergy colleagues, all of them men, all of them pastors at churches bigger and richer than mine, all of them the exact make and model of the institutional favorites I’d been trying to win recognition from all my life, all of them now standing over me in sheer horror, their own trays still in hand, every one of them on their feet in their sturdy, sensible man shoes. And there was the restaurant man- ager, race-walking across the dining room panting, “Are you okay?” Every head in the place, including the poor guy dripping with my iced tea, turned toward my humiliation. 

It was not the first time I had endured this exact shame. I never grew out of my adolescent clumsiness and could trip over a shred of dental floss. My mom falls too, and I’ve always thought it’s because we’re thinking too much—sometimes productively, sometimes just mentally dithering in anxiety—and not being all the way present in our beautiful bodies. But whatever. I’ve got a therapist for that. 

So on the floor, even before I clutch at my hem to unexpose myself, that’s normally the moment when my face floods with crimson heat and tears well up and over. Except this time that didn’t happen. No bloom of blush, no crying. Just another rapid-fire realization, right on the heels of the unconscious assessment of my skeletal system. “Nothing’s broken,” came first. And then, before the next breath, “I am not embarrassed.” 

There have been fewer occasions than the fingers on one hand that I feel mostly certain that the Deity has spoken to me. I count this as one. Because it is not in my nature or nurture to not be embarrassed. Embarrassment is my baseline. Life decisions have been made, rightly or wrongly, on the basis of my internal barometer of potential shame. This is the residue of being raised in a church that required frequent and rigorous self-examination, where every church service empha- sized the very near miss of God’s wrath for my sinful self and God’s readiness to reinstate said wrath if I couldn’t keep up with doctrine’s demands, and where I was the wrong gender to want to do ministry in the first place. Christianity, in the denomination of my youth, con- sisted of constant cycling from spiritual cleanliness to filth and back again, except that I could neither repent of nor be “forgiven” for my call to ministry. Long after I escaped the gravitational field of that uprais- ing, my lizard brain reverted to the embarrassment-shame mindset at every opportunity. 

So: I am not embarrassed. Skirt straightened. Shoes on. Help from colleagues to get off the floor and to our table. A new tray of food from the manager and a sweet smile from the sticky iced-tea man. Over lunch, after somebody gave perfunctory but heartfelt thanks for the food, I took a deep breath and said to my brethren, “I am quitting my job and planting a church for spiritual refugees.” 

Church plants fail at an alarming rate. I had done enough research to know that you’re better off Kickstarting your new Styx cover band than planting a church. And if I did what I thought it was going to take to give life to the little vision I’d been carrying around secretly for some months, my failure would be quite public. And humiliating. In front of the very people whose approval I craved. But there they were, and there I was, and I had come up off the floor with a word from the Lord. “I am not embarrassed.” I could fall and fail and still live. This was the word of God for this person of God. Thanks be to God. 

(excerpt from We Were Spiritual Refugees: A Story to Help You Believe in Church, Eerdmans 2020)