Ex-Evangelical, Undefined by Fear
by Amy Kline
First, I’d like to send the warmest thanks to Lauren for inviting me here to share a bit of my story!
There’s a point to this whole post, and I want to go ahead and say it out loud, just in case you don’t make it to the end. That is, YOU CAN CHANGE.
Now, I’ll get into it.
Sifting through some of Lauren’s content felt a bit like…I might say, reengaging myself. While I’m now a 32-year-old woman with my own family, undoubtedly removed (if we’re counting years) from the closed-off “missionary kid” life in which I was raised, in many ways, our childhoods never end.
In an interview, Lauren said “DO NOT FEAR BEING WRONG. This is huge. Christians are soooooo scared to be wrong about anything.”
As Lauren points out, many Christians seem to walk in fear -- fear of hell, fear of different beliefs, fear of people who challenge their carefully constructed worldview. They’re afraid of what the world might show them, so they hide in their minds and their communities, and in families like the one in which I was raised, they prevent their children from being “exposed” because they’re afraid of losing them.
This is a whole other hornets’ nest.
For me -- the anxious, shy, seemingly “perfect,” missionary kid, here’s what that Christian fear looked like:
It looked like a child who enforced self-discipline when she misbehaved.
It looked like constant self-devaluation because “self-esteem” and “self-love” are dangerous.
It looked like a teen who didn’t care to form her own opinions because she felt that all the beliefs that mattered had been given to her.
It looked like a girl who attributed her struggles with anxiety to demons, which led to even more fear and self-devaluation. Because why couldn’t she make them go away?
It looked like a young adult who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t read her Bible enough, pray enough, go to church enough; why doing all the right things didn’t seem to make her stronger.
Even as I wrote those bullet points, I felt myself knocking against the bars of the cage. What I mean by that is, that the ingrained habits of self-destruction and devaluation, of anxiety and the fear of forming my own opinions, continue, even today, to feel like the bars closing me in.
Here’s the thing though. We can become so preoccupied with the bars of the cage that we know the bars better than the being dwelling inside of it.
And here’s where my first point comes in. YOU CAN CHANGE.
Whenever you begin knocking against the bars of the cage, remember that those bars have nothing to do with you, the being living inside.
Here’s a personal example.
Although I’ve always loved learning languages, my anxiety of speaking, of people realizing I was worthless or bad, overwhelmed my desire to reach proficiency.
I wanted to major in French in college, but quickly chickened out after a couple classes.
Fast forward to a couple years ago. On a whim, I started learning some Spanish. I became fricking obsessed.
The time came when I knew I had to speak. If I wanted to become proficient, I needed a language partner. I needed to be forced into that uncomfortable situation.
And, this time, I had had it with the anxiety pushing me away.
Because I love learning languages. That’s my being. That’s who I am.
The social anxiety? The fear of being viewed as the worthless person I suspected I was? Those are the bars. They’re not me.
Now, I work with YouTubers, translating and creating subtitles into English and Spanish. I do all my reading in Spanish. I listen to podcasts and watch movies in Spanish. I’m like a Spanish vacuum cleaner who casually chats with Spanish speakers at the grocery store.
You can change. It’s time to stop studying the bars, the ones that were constructed for you. Instead, do what you can to know yourself.
It’s not about invalidating the existence of the bars to cage. I’m not going to say they don’t exist. But, eventually, you’ll be too big, shiny, and brilliant, to let them contain you.
Thank you so much, Amy. To find more of her work - check out her blog: https://www.translationsparati.com/blog