Thing Finding Thursday with Brandy Glows
Today's Thing Finding Thursday features a guest post by Brandy. She is a word-play arteest who writes and plays at brandyglows.com, a blog that chronicles her adventures in Shalom restoration.
Know what else? She's a brave and beautiful soul. Read on.
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Embracing The Thing That Makes Me Gasp
This morning I watched a clip from The Today Show with Tara Mohr. She shared five of her 10 Rules For Brilliant Women and one of them was to do something that makes you gasp. I remembering thinking my "gasp list" was short. I like limbs and I walk them well. I get high from the adrenaline of turning a big dream into a reality. It's one of the things I love about myself. But it's not my thing.
Kelly Diels encouraged us, a group she coached and coaxed into Artful, Heart-full blogging last summer, to share our stories with Tanya. I am excited to write this guest post because I love Tanya and this series she's created. It's been a great source of inspiration as I trek along the bloggard path. Also, I rock confessional narratives. I like being honest about what I've done and where I come from. I hold my stories tenderly and share them openly because they've made me the person I am today. And that's a big part of what I do, but it's not my thing either.
I've never actually said my thing out loud. I could say I didn't know it, but I think it would be more accurate to say that I didn't know I knew it.
I call myself a digital pastor. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I started a house church, so I guess I'm not strictly digital anymore. I follow Jesus, but believe God is bigger than Christianity. I believe in the restoration in all things. And I believe it's our job. I believe in humanity's capacity to partner with the Divine Source to restore Shalom, or wholeness and peace, in ourselves and our worlds.
I am irresponsibly hopeful.
I studied sociology in college but grew weary of just observing and discussing problems. I longed to create real social change. Let's end racism! Let's feed and cloth the poor and hungry. Let's free all the slaves! Let's reduce, reuse and recycle our asses off.
Let's change the world and leave it a better place than it was when we got here.
I am fierce advocate for social justice. I am a voice for the voiceless. I am a dreamer and a make-it-happener of dreams just crazy enough to work.
What's my thing?
I'm a prophet. (This is where I gasp.)
It scares me to admit it. Even though I'd wager God wants us all to be prophets and stand up against stupid crap. People often think of prophets as crazy people, alone and lonely, screaming their messages to a loud, chaotic world. But in his book, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann suggests instead that they are leaders of social movements.
It makes sense. If Isaiah (a prophet from the Hebrew Bible) was a nobody, then nobody would have listened to him when he preached naked. Or they would have called the cops.
Although I do breastfeed in public, but I probably won't preach naked. Still, like Isaiah, I want to foretell hope, peace, justice. Maybe that makes me crazy. I've got to be crazy to believe in the restoration of all things. But it's a gorgeous crazy. And we could all use a little more of that kind of crazy in our lives.
It's us. The bloggers. The stubborn ones who insist we can write and make and work from our living rooms. We are the leaders of the next giant social movement. And unlike our predecessors, we're not limited by space and time. The people in our tribes can follow us from anywhere in the world. I get to share the stories - mine and yours - of radical Shalom. I get to proclaim that we can change the world - and then watch people actually do it!
Being a prophet is a process. I don't own it every moment of every day. Sometimes I feel too weak to shout. Other times my words are too critical or too soft and they lose their prophetic edge.
I know the more I embrace My Thing, the more exciting and dangerous the adventure of life will become. It's already led me on journeys I could never have imagined: Homebirth, helping survivors of human trafficking in India, the World Domination Summit! It's all amazing fodder for the juicy message I've been given.
And it's only the beginning.
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