For Tatterdemalion - Part 2

So. 

Two years ago I found myself in Bainbridge, NY teaching students of all varieties, beautiful each one (even when they tried my patience to the breaking point). My job? Elementary special education teacher. 

I'm going to skip over a ridiculous amount of living here out of sheer necessity. There is no way I can capture it all. Suffice it to say, it is impossible to work with children who have backgrounds oftentimes full of more darkness than light day after day without being changed. It is impossible to continue arranging the world around yourself when you see brokenness and need. It is impossible not to seek God's truth when you're part of a system with glaring flaws that stare you in the face when you go to work each day.

I cannot describe all of my kids, all my little lovely ones. They've made me smile and cry and pray and bite my tongue and ask forgiveness when I don't bite it soon enough. They've made me laugh from my belly with their quirks, their questions, their odd little mannerisms. They've made me ache. 

As I was learning how to reorient myself around all the years-old souls in my classroom, I was changing in other ways, as well. I found myself alone, completely, for the first time in my life. Growing up in a beautifully large and crazy family gives one a taste for familial chaos. As the youngest, I'd grown accustomed to the empty feeling that twisted me up inside each time one of my siblings left the nest. We were all Growing Up. Now I was the one leaving. The only difference was that I was the only sister to live on my own. It was new. It was lonely, and it was hard. 

I'm finding more and more that my soul needs hard things. It's only recently that I've begun to have a bittersweet longing for them, too. Christ comes awfully close in the hard things when I have the sense to feel Him. 

While I was getting used to the rhythm of teaching and coming home to an apartment thick with quiet, growing all too familiar with my friend, Five O'Clock In the Morning, and learning to turn the radio on while I ate my solitary suppers, I was also meeting new friends at a new church. 

Church has been on odd creature in my life. I grew up in a Plymouth Brethren church. Admittedly it is a subculture, defined in completely disparate ways depending on who you ask. Ask a member, and they will tell you they are the little flock following the narrow way (what they might leave unsaid is their belief that said narrow way has been utterly missed by...well, by pretty much Everyone Else...they don't have Darby, you see). I'm being too harsh. It wasn't all bad, but it certainly gave me an exorbitant amount of food for thought. Ask a friend of the brethren, and they will tell you that they are seeking to follow truth without compromise. Ask someone from the outside, and they will tell you it's a cult (I've heard it before). Ask an enemy of the brethren, and they will tell you that it's a sectarian, dogmatic group too full of themselves and not full enough of Christ. 

That was my first experience of church. My family was a bit of a wild card in the group, the black sheep of the church, if you prefer. We females wore pants at home... (after giving a horseback riding lesson to his be-skirted sister, I was once asked by a sanctimonious 7-year old, "Do you love the Lord? Then why do you wear pants?!" Funny thing is, now that 10 years or so have passed his sister wears pants, too). Only two of my siblings asked to take communion (something akin to membership in the Brethren); the rest of us loved the Lord but not the Brethren and didn't come forward. None of my siblings married into the Brethren. We went to Christian school where our Brethren doctrines could be perverted (rather than the accepted route of going to public school, where Brethren doctrines could...well, I never quite figured that one out...). Add up all the preceding, and what do you get? A Family Who Does Not Measure Up. 

I always felt that, the not measuring up. 

To roll many years of living into a few brief sentences, as I grew up I watched my siblings take different paths as they found places to worship. Two Baptists, one proselytizing Roman Catholic who sneakily brought the number up to two, one Reformed Presbyterian, one "Mere Christianity-ite," and me. I just want to be like Jesus. Call me what you like. My fiercely Protestant parents who sent us to a fiercely Protestant Christian school had an awful time of it when my first brother converted to Catholicism. We all did. But looking back, I believe God used it to save my disillusioned, intellectual, tradition-hungry brother from agnosticism. Yes. I believe that many of my Catholic brothers and sisters and I are kin, even though we harbor some pretty deep doctrinal differences. But that is another story for another time. 

So. Back to Bainbridge. With this ridiculously checkered theological background (in addition to which I went to a Wesleyan college and met all sorts of what-have-you's who follow Christ...I'm growing weary of labels...), I found myself in a place I never could have even conceived of. 

From my first Sunday in Bainbridge until now, I've been seeking Christ with other members of His body in a conservative Mennonite church. Well--they'd say they're just followers of Christ. Which is good. But they're followers who wear head coverings and homemade floor-length dresses, they're followers who have large gardens, large families, and grind their own wheat. They're followers who homeschool as a matter of course.

So for simplicity's sake, they're conservative Mennonites. 

More to come in the Spiritual Adventures of Debbie in Installment 3! 

The best is yet to come.