What To Do When You Don't Know What to do - It’s Okay to Not Be Okay Part 4 by Pastor Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 10 May 2020
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Ruth 1:11-21 NRSV
But Naomi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I should have a husband tonight and bear sons, would you then wait until they were grown? Would you then refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.” Then they wept aloud again. Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. So she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them; and the women said, “Is this Naomi?” She said to them, “Call me no longer Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty; why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me, and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”
The story of Ruth and Naomi, we often stop it at the "where you go, I will go, where you stay, I will stay", because we want to laud Ruth as this incredible woman who gives up the opportunity to go back to her family in order to stay with her mother-in-law as being the most important part of that story. Don't get me wrong, that's a hugely important part. It says to us a lot about who Ruth is and how we can strive to be more concerned with the people that we love versus what's best for us. But I think, for me, especially in this time, the most important part of this narrative is Naomi's claim of who she is and how she feels. We live in a society in which we are supposed to be good all the time in which when we ask the question, "how are you doing?", you always respond with, "I'm good" or "I'm fine", because we know that the question is not an actual desiring to know of what our state is, but is instead just a nicety that we exchange.
In fact, so many of us are so terrified to talk about what's really going on in our minds and our hearts that we just clam up and we use the age old, "I'm fine." We never name when we're not okay. Here, Naomi is lamenting over and over and over again, "I am not okay. This is not okay. None of what is happening to me is okay." Girls, none of this is okay for you either. Naomi has lost, not only her husband, but her sons. In this day and age, when Naomi and Ruth and Orpah are experiencing life, you were nothing without a husband. No one owed you anything, no one was obligated to care for you, you could not own your own property, you could not make your own living, there was nothing for you.
Naomi tries to do what she thinks is best for Orpah and Ruth by sending them home because they're still young and there's still an opportunity where they may marry someone else. They may have a chance to be a second wife, or somebody may find marketable to be a spouse. The tradition in Ruth and Naomi's day was that if you married into a family, then you, if your partner died, if your husband died, then you could marry a younger brother and continue the line that way. But Naomi says to the girls, "I am not having any more children. I'm far too old to have someone want to marry me again. And even if he did and I were to bear children, would you wait for them? God has taken everything from me and I do not wish for God to take everything from you. I am not okay. This is not okay."
So often I have found particularly in the Christian Church that you fake it till you make it. We don't talk about how people actually are, we don't talk about what's eating away at us, we don't talk about what's going on in our lives, instead we just go with the, "I'm fine. I'm good, things are good, yeah. It doesn't matter that we're in the middle of a pandemic. It doesn't matter that I'm frustrated with my spouse. It doesn't matter that my kids are driving me up the wall. It doesn't matter that I'm concerned about my finances. It doesn't matter that I'm living in a sense of anxiety that I have never experienced before because I am convinced that somebody in my family is going to die from COVID. No, no. I'm good. Things are great. Yeah, kids are wonderful, spouse is lovely. I'm not worried about anything."
I have found more in Christian circles than anywhere else this deep need to be fine. If you're anything other than fine, you might as well slap a bandaid on it or whitewash it so that you look fine. I will tell you, as a person who grew up with that and a person who lived in that and a person who's a part of that system now, it's complete and utter malarkey. God doesn't call us to be fine. God doesn't call us to lie about what's going on. God doesn't call us to be a community of Stepford women and men who all get along in the same way and everybody is perfectly okay. It's not who we were created to be. It's not what we were created to do.
Instead, instead, we are called to say when we are not okay. We are called to be like Naomi and to own our stuff. See, I think the issue becomes, as Christians, we have this weird belief that because we follow Jesus that everything's going to work out perfectly for us, that we're going to live and exist in a space in which everything is great all the time, and we are so afraid of how the person sitting in the pew next to us or in front of us or behind us or the person standing in the pulpit is going to judge us. It's a lot easier for us to just say, "I'm fine." All that continues to lead us into is the shame spiral that brings us absolutely nowhere except cowering in the darkness of our own fears, our own worries, our own anxieties and overwhelmed with the incredible pressure of trying to be okay when you are anything but okay.
Shame. Guilt is what keeps us from grace. Shame and guilt come from not feeling like we have a right or an ability to safely say, "I am not okay." I remember the first time that I had to admit to myself that I was not okay. When I was a junior in high school, my best friend tried to kill herself. It was horrifying and overwhelming and was spiraling me into a place I didn't want to admit I was spiraling into. My boyfriend of several years, who I really thought I was going to marry, had just gotten somebody else pregnant and broke it up with me. My best friend went through a very, very dark period in her own life, and while she's still with us, which is great, it was a long road of navigating through not being okay.
Where I was in my life was I was the person in my dorm who everybody came to my room and I had this futon, a black futon that my parents had gotten for me, and it was known as a couch. Like in therapy on TV and in movies where people lay on the couch like this and they talk about their problems and they're like, "Yes, I'm just going to lay here and tell you all of my feelings." Well, that was my futon for every person in my dorm, and I lived with 71 other people. Every person came to me and wanted my advice or wanted to be able to talk and I was the first person to come up with coloring it out very shortly thereafter after adult coloring books came out. Just saying, I started that trend. We had lots of other stuff that was going on in our dorm at that time with people that I was working with and just the stuff of life.
It was then that I started to realize how not okay I was, how not together I was, how I was so busy trying to fix everybody else's problems and I was so concerned with trying to tie up everybody's loose ends that at night I would stare in the mirror that hung in my dorm room and spiral. I was the good Christian girl who knew she was being called to be a pastor, who knew that I was headed down a life path in which I was going to deal with lots of people's problems. That thing that kept nagging at the back of my head that said, "If you weren't good enough for the boy, how are you ever going to be good enough for anybody else? If you weren't good enough to keep everything, all of the spinning plates that you had spinning, how are you ever going to make it in ministry? If you couldn't prevent your friend from trying to take her own life, what good were you going to be? How are you ever going to stand in front of a congregation? How are you ever going to give pastoral care?"
I spiraled into this very real sense of absolutely, positively loathing myself. It took me months and months and months to be able to say to somebody "I'm not okay", because I was so afraid of the judgment that I was going to get from the people around me that I would rather live with my shame spiral than talk about how I wasn't okay and not being okay from the good Christian girl who had her life all together, who was at Smith and worked three jobs and was the president of the tour guides, and I was in charge of keeping everything together. On the outside, I looked perfectly all figured out. Showed up to my classes, I ran my boards, but inside I was not okay and I didn't think that I could tell anybody that I wasn't okay because I was afraid if I told someone judgments wouldn't stop.
It wasn't until I very nearly hit rock bottom that I wandered into the downstairs of our chapel at Smith and sat in the office of our spiritual director and looked at Matilda and said, "I'm not okay and I don't know how to be not okay." She listened and she held space and she helped me learn to not be okay. It was a complete and total reshifting of what I thought life was supposed to be about. She helped me work and navigate through the weird way that my brain processes things and the strange way in which the faith that I held so dearly was also a part of an institution that didn't want us to talk about our stuff for fear of what it would bring. No, you always have to be okay.
My question then and now continues to be why? Why do we have to be okay? What is it in the gospels and in the journey that God it gives to us in scripture that tells us that we have to be okay, that it's our job to be okay. There is nothing in all of scripture that tells us that we are required to be okay. In fact, what we see time and time and time and time again in the midst of scripture is that nobody is okay. Naomi is one of the only characters in the whole Bible to be able to say, "I'm really not good. I'm like, nah, this is not okay. I'm not doing okay. Ladies, I don't want to ruin your lives, so you can go be find a way to be okay, but I'm not doing so hot."
Naomi sits with it and allows people to come alongside of her and carry her. Ruth comes alongside of Naomi and carries her in her not okayness and together they forge a life that is more than okay, that is more than what we expected, that is more than what in those moments of not okayness that Naomi ever thought was possible, but she would not have gotten there if Ruth didn't help her. She wouldn't have gotten there if she didn't find a way to be able to say, "I'm really not so good."
We live in a time and a place that is so focused on presenting a good front to the rest of the world and it is killing us. It is killing us because we don't know how to turn to one another and say, "I'm not okay, can you help carry me? I'm not okay, can you help me see the work of the Lord in all of this? I'm not okay, could you just sit with me for a moment." Because the more that we try and shove the not okayness down, the darker we become and the further away from God we are, because then we begin to think that God is like the people we assume are sitting in our pews. We begin to think that if they can't handle our not okayness, then no one, especially not God, can handle our not okayness. When in reality, all God is asking from each and every one of us is the fullness of who we are, the okay and the not okay. All God is asking for us is for an opportunity to reach into our not okayness and sit with us.
There have been many more times since my junior year of college in which I have been not okay. There have been many more times in which I have had to pray for the strength to go to therapy that I need to go to, pray for the strength to be able to get up in front of a congregation and say, "Hey, I'm not okay and I've not been okay before and there will be times in the future when I'm not okay again, and that not okayness doesn't diminish my worthiness as a person In the same way that your not okayness does not diminish your worthiness or the amount that God loves you or your belonging in this place."
My biggest dream for the church is that we become a place in which every person can stand up and say, "This is my stuff", where I can say, "Hi, my name is Gabrielle. I suffer from body dysmorphic disorder. I have an eating disorder. Most of the time I like running on a pretty general medium to high anxiety level, but like I do this all the time anyway, so I'm managing it. I also love star Wars and Harry Potter, and I love to laugh, and I love to read, and I love to take my dog for a walk downtown and to take him to the dog park, and I am so much more than those other things that are not okay, but they're a part of who I am, and they're important parts of me. This is all that I have and all that I am, and I know God loves me because of all of the things that make me who I am, so that you can feel safe and secure standing up and saying, "Hi, my name is so and so, and here's my stuff."
So that we can name our stuff so that our stuff [inaudible 00:19:52] stops becoming such a singular experience, because so often we hold onto these beliefs that I'm the only one who's ever experienced this thing before. So often we put ourselves in a shame spiral that says, "Nobody else has ever experienced this before, I'm the only one." It allows us to be able to connect with one another and two, it helps us to see that we are so much more than the things that make us not okay. The things that make us not okay are just as much a part of our story as the profound and beautiful things that happen in our everyday lives.
I would not be me if I didn't have my stuff and my stuff has helped me to see the world and other people in different ways. It is my dream to be able to see the church get up and be able to name it, to be able to hold it together, and to be able to celebrate the ways that God works in the midst of all of our brokenness. There is not one person, save for Jesus Christ himself who has walked the face of this earth, who is perfect. Story after story after story in the scripture it's mentioned and tales of people who do not get it right, who carry their shame around with them, their stuff around with them, and God uses even them.
King David is lauded as one of Israel's greatest Kings, and yet you all remember the story of Bathsheba. If you don't listen to the song later. That David sees Bathsheba bathing and wants her and takes her as his wife and has her husband killed because he can't handle the guilt and the shame of that. Peter, the one upon whom the rock of the church is built upon, the rock of the church, Peter, he always messes things up. He always gets it wrong.
Today is also Mother's day, and it's a complicated day for a lot of people. Some people carry the weight of this holiday around and they're not okay, and we have not given them space to not be okay. If God can take David and God can take Abraham and God can take Moses and Peter and God can take Paul, God can take Naomi and Ruth and weave together a story and a life that is profound and beautiful and incredible, what more can God do for us?
It is okay to not be okay. It's when we lean on one another and we lean on God, not for judgment, not for punishment, but for fullness of life and the chance to say, "Me too." It is my firm belief that as we all sit in our stuff, the more we share, the darkest, scariest, most unbelievable parts of who we are, our community grows stronger, our faith grows exponentially, and we truly become rooted in the grace that God extends to us as we extend it to all of those who are with us. Wherever you are today, wherever you have been in your life, I hope you again hear these words that it is okay to not be okay. God loves you. This church loves you. I love you.
The best part of God is that there is no darkness that God cannot shine light on. There is no shame that God cannot extend grace to. There is no place that you can hide where God is not already wrapping you up in God's arms and whispering, "It's okay, I am here. Feel your feels and let us begin our journey to the life I have always had prepared for you today and every day." Amen.
