God Loves You
I was skinny and feral when the phrase “meeting people where they are at” entered my life. A preacher’s daughter in a white-steepled church and a favorite dress of polyester chiffon with little blue flowers, I was told “You need to meet people where they are. Love them where they are at.” I believed it as I do everything I believe—deeply and sincerely. I tried to discipline my will and my sense of justice towards always expecting to go further and harder for anyone who asked it of me. At the same time, I would stare up at that tall white steeple piercing the night sky and wish for someone to douse it in flames1. I couldn’t argue with the truth of “meeting people where they were at”, but I wanted to somehow. It felt like love was always waiting for me in places I couldn’t reach. In the end, it wasn’t the church that taught me, it wasn’t Jesus---at least not the robed white one looking sadly on. It was the years I was a messy, queer, eager slut on tinder. (I can’t write any good lines right now, they’ll get screenshot for court).
I think this phrase, “meet people where they are at”, actually originated in social work, but got pulled into church culture with the “seeker friendly” church movement of the late 90’s and early 00’s. You might have heard of Rick Warren through his popular book “The Purpose Driven Life”, but for evangelical churches in the early 00’s his church, the Orange County California located, Saddleback Church, was at the forefront of the seeker-friendly movement. “Anybody can be won to Christ if you discover the key to his or her heart.” (The Purpose Driven Life, 219). And the key to discovering their heart was good, old-fashioned target marketing.
Churches were encouraged to look at their communities and model their services to be reflective of what their target audience “needed”. I think every church in every community decided boomers with kids were their target audience. . . except for the ones targeting college students. It was simple—meet them where they were at, make the vision fit on a worship service power point and offerings people will pour in. So, churches changed their worship services, they assembled off-beat bands and put out donuts in the back (for new people only, the deacons would hiss if you looked at them too long). They put new spins on the weekly alter call and started small groups that no one attended. Since then, this style has fallen out of fashion—though nothing has really changed to replace it. But underneath it all was the constant, foundational belief that no 2000’s targeted mailer could overcome:
“What should we do with seekers? At the very outset we should begin by teaching them how they can become acceptable seekers – seekers God will receive. Our job is not to make God acceptable to them. Our job is to help them become acceptable to God. And rule No.1 in becoming an acceptable seeker is giving up your quest for things in this world and seeking eternal things.” —Treasuring God
Even the preachers who liked to remind their congregations that Jesus hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors and people with leprosy, also made it clear that God does not really meet you where you were at, he meets you at the moment you are ready to meet him. You could be a prostitute, but only one whose heart was thirsty for God. A blank slate kind of sinner, ready to be imprinted on in salvation so you could “go and sin no more.” (John 8: 11). It’s why Ethel Cain’s lyrics hit my chest so hard.
“God loves you, but not enough to save to you, so baby girl good luck taking care of yourself.”
-Ethel Cain
Here’s what I mean. When Christians describe salvation, they sometimes might draw a picture. There is a chasm of separation, and you are on one side and God is on the other. “You can’t make it across with good works,” they say as they draw a stick figure plummeting into the abyss. Sometimes they even draw hell fire at the bottom. “So God sent his son to die on the cross” and they draw a cross across the chasm. But this is not for God to cross to you. This is for you to cross to God. And then they lean back, triumphant. “Would you like to accept Jesus into your heart today?”
I’ve been witnessed to a lot. Because no one ever assumed I was already “a believer”. This bewildered and angered me as a girl. No one told me the same look that made the church continually proselytize me would draw in all manner of men who also thought what I most needed was to “get on your knees. . .”
I have felt in need of a savior my whole life. So it only made sense that I believed in Jesus. I’ve written before that abuse becomes addictive. There is a high you get from the suffering, and this distorted control you get from feeling as if this time you can get it right, this time you can cross that chasm. Even as I type, I can taste it in my mouth as a hunger, a sadness, and an eagerness all at once. Christians demands that you, the broken, meet them, the powerful, where they are at. Meet Jesus on the other side of your sins. Meet this man in his anger with your love. Forgive him his abuse because that is what Jesus did for us! In the church, meeting someone where they were at meant speaking in gentle, placating tones to the wolves who would tear open the soft belly of a lamb and then feel bad for themselves while their muzzle dripped with blood. Often, this type of grace is careful to mirror and reinforce the hierarchy of culture—a Black woman must meet a white woman where she is at, but not the reverse. Meanwhile, a white woman must meet a white man. And we must all meet this God on the other side of the abyss.
I never really left the church, but when I left my ex-husband and began talking about the abuse I was fighting to be free from, the church left me. I had to admit, finally that there was nothing I could do to be a Christian. Belonging is not about who you choose, but who also chooses you—and I was not chosen. God loves you, but not enough to save you, so baby girl. . .I gave up and allowed myself to fall face first into the abyss labeled “sin”.
It was on Tinder that I learned, finally, what it meant to meet people where they were at. My true self is a slut, and I mean that in the best way. It took me a long time to acknowledge my queerness, because it seemed easier to describe it like “I’m a pisces, I fall in love a little with everyone,” and it is sloshing water and undefined and delicious. I am also extremely loyal and devoted, so I’d let myself fall in this play kind of love with little bits of people for little bits of time. I most enjoyed falling into the orbits of people who were just as dark and broken as me and romanticized our pain together, which is not a thing I recommend (though I wouldn’t have done it differently). On tinder, I quickly learned that most people were in fact, one single note, maybe a basic chord, and I had an eight-octave personality to play from.
It wasn’t their fault. There’s nothing wrong with a limited range. Some great songs are only three chords! I’d talk to anyone, but it would also be absurd to have the expectation that they could play beyond that or to punish them for not being able to hear my notes. Meeting someone where they were suddenly was not so fraught as it was just basic kindness. I wasn’t expecting or needing these people to love me, understand me, even really see me. It wasn’t personal. They simply didn’t have the capacity to.
My oldest is about to turn fourteen. I had him when I thought parenting was about molding and shaping a child into who they should be. Now, I look at him and cannot imagine a world where I would expect him to be anyone other than who he is, where I would expect him to meet me, the parent, where I’m at. That seems as absurd as expecting someone who can play one chord to sit down and play Debussy's Feux d'Artifice (or vice versa). I cannot imagine treating my own children the way I was treated. When dealing with your past, so many people will tell you that people “loved you the best they could”, but in order to find any healing, any love to pass onto my children, I had to dive into that abyss and accept that in the same way I couldn’t get God to save me, I would never be capable of making my parents love me. It was important I knew that so I could discover what love was. I had to say to myself “you have no mother and no father” so that I could learn to be my own mother and father.
After a roughly five-year estrangement, my mother started texting me again when I was pregnant with Milo. The first time she tried, it was the way she had always been and I just told her “you can’t reach out like this and expect me to answer. If you want to talk, you have to say things like “hi, how are you? How are the kids” You have to be polite.” She tried again, a few weeks later, but this time “how are you? How is the baby?” and so we could communicate. When the custody emergency stuff happened with my oldest three, she called, and we spoke on the phone for the first time in several years. I know it’s because my mother can see me as a mother. She could not comprehend who I might have been when I left my ex or when I began to speak about abuse, and she’s never heard the notes I can play as a queer woman, as an artist, as a philosopher, as a storyteller, as a poet and a person with an appetite for the whole, big world. But she has heard some notes of being a mother and those are the notes we share. Because of tinder, I no longer expect her to hear anything else. Grace, it turns out, was not found in that cross that covered the chasm for me to walk, but at the bottom of the abyss.
It's still painful. I cried while nursing recently, thinking how I would act if I was her and my child was going through something like this. I remember the ways she groomed me for these choices. I remember begging her to leave my father and can’t help but wonder if I would even be here now if she had. It’s not her fault—it really isn’t. Even if she had done those things, who knows where I would have ended up. The world doesn’t run on one-to-one cause and effect like I’m imagining. But I am determined to do it all differently, and I don’t need her to ever see my perspective on it. But even if I don’t expect anything different, it still hurts and I wept and nursed my own wounds and the baby all at once. I can always say “you know what, this isn’t enough for me” and walk back out of the relationship. The cord of mother and daughter has long been cut. But maybe because it has been cut, I don’t feel the need to hold the boundary that far out anymore. It’s no longer fraught, even if I’m still grieving. If she is polite and respectful, she can be in my life. I have it in me now to meet her there.
She recently stopped by to see the kids for a few hours on her way to my brother’s for his baby shower. I had been worried about it a little. In my head all day were the lines I’d written for Tourmaline years ago in my debut novel, “. . . she looked to the mountains as her true mother. . . ”. I took the dog and the baby for a hike in the rain before she arrived that afternoon, hoping that none of this grace disappeared when she was in person.
It went fine. She’s gotten older and her hair has white streaks. She wears it long, nearly all the way down her back. Sitting across from her at my kitchen table, I remember being six or seven and running my hand down the long red curls and asking her to never cut them. She is friendly and respectful both to me and the kids. When she left, I was relieved—both that it had went well and that I could take the baby and crawl into bed to nurse him and rest.
I was not a skinny girl in a polyester chiffon dress when I finally thought of that phrase “meeting people where they are at” and it didn’t feel like a knife to my back, urging me to my knees. But I am still feral. I’m, strangely, still a preacher’s daughter, though I haven’t been to church in years. I didn’t know it then, but the day I accepted that “God loves me, but not enough to save me". was the day I began to save myself.
But there’s also something bigger too, not something I met in the abyss but something all around it, beyond it, and in the very makeup of it. Like dark matter. Something much much bigger than all the god I’d ever known as a girl. I’m still figuring that out, but as the person I actually am, because whatever it is, has always met me exactly where I’m at.
Shortly after thinking this, the son of a preacher down the road burnt down his father’s church.