My So-Called Reading Life: 2022 Wrap-up

I read 92 books during 2022, which will seem like a lot to some of you, and laughably few to others. That's about the same as last year, but there was a major difference: in 2022, I did a lot of re-reading, especially during the summer. I was stressed about the wedding and I didn't have enough energy to tackle anything new or challenging, so I fell back on books I already knew I would love. 

So it was kind of a strange reading year. Another way that it was strange was that I didn't read anything that had that immediate knock-your-socks-off this is one of my all-time favorites feeling. Last year there was Deacon King Kong. The year before that, there were a bunch. This year, there were several good solid reads, but no real standouts. 

For the record, probably my favorites were The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, and Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Apparently I just read what everyone else is reading. Honorable Mention to What are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Hell of a Book by Jason Mott, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

Maybe the best book I read in 2022 was an oldie, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), that I finished about two days before the year ended. I didn't think I was going to like it because I'd heard so much about it and it didn't seem like my kind of book. But the sequel, The Candy House, came out in 2022, and it sounded intriguing. So I decided it was time. To my surprise, Goon Squad was great. Then I proceeded on to Candy House, which I didn't like quite as well, but they're both good. 

And the two of them together are astonishing. You can just breeze through them, and they would be great that way, but being as obsessive as I am, I spent a lot of time tracing the connections between the two. There are a lot of them. I have no idea how she kept track of everything while she was writing. I would have needed color-coded spreadsheets and half a dozen poster boards. (I just finished Candy House yesterday, so officially speaking it is on my 2023 list.)

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When I started this blog back in 2015, I was determined that it would not be a book blog. At the time, it seemed to me that there were thousands of bookish-women-of-a-certain-age who were writing book blogs. I haven't exactly avoided writing about books, obviously, especially not recently, but for the most part, I've stuck with my determination to keep the book talk to a minimum. 

Almost eight years later, hardly anyone is blogging about anything anymore, let alone books. And most of the writing I've done in the last few months has been the brief reviews I write on Goodreads for (almost) every book I read. 

They're only "brief" in that they aren't full-scale, professional-level book reviews, because some of them have ended up being pretty damn long, at least compared to the average Goodreads review. Since I haven't had all that much to post about here recently, I think I may back off on my determination to avoid being the stereotypical book blogger and start posting some of the more interesting ones here. You've been warned.

I was talking to some other book lovers last fall and mentioned that I review the books I read on Goodreads. They were a little put off by that, partly because Goodreads is owned by Amazon and we all know how problematic that is. But partly also because, as one of them put it, "I could never believe that anyone wanted to read my opinion about a book." 

Which is also true of me. I can never believe that either. But that's the thing about both Goodreads and blog posts--you're not forcing anyone to read them. I'm not even really expecting anyone to read them. I just like writing them. 

That Reminds Me of a Story™: about ten years ago, I was chatting with a woman sitting next to me at a writers conference. She told me that she was about to start a blog and she had a professionally designed logo and a tagline and a marketing campaign all lined up. I told her that I've had a blog since 2003 (there were three before this one), and she eagerly asked me for advice. Since my blog (and my Goodreads reviews) have never really attracted much attention, I was pretty sure I shouldn't be giving anyone advice, but I told her, well, it helps if you like to write. And honestly, from the look on her face, I'm not sure it had ever occurred to her that she was going to have to actually write posts if she wanted to have any content on her new blog.

I think I might have told you that story before, and come to think of it, she is probably killing it as an influencer on TikTok these days. 

I didn't quite make it through all the reading life topics I had in mind, so this may be continued next week. Or maybe we will move on to bigger and better things. Have a great weekend.

take a bite of this nice shiny apple and learn to see

I was raised Evangelical. My dad was an ordained Baptist minister, although he chose to go into academia instead of the pastorate. I spent my childhood going to church every time our church was open. I went to Christian camps in the summer, I sang in the youth choir, I listened to Christian music and studied my Bible, and I prayed a lot. When it came time to choose a college, I chose an Evangelical Christian one, because of course.

I believed. I bought the whole thing, the whole ball of wax, the whole shooting match, every cliché you can think of. I did all the things, and I had a lot of cool experiences as a result. I went to Explo '76 in Dallas with my parents and heard Billy Graham and Andrae Crouch, and we seriously believed the world was being changed. I attended concerts by Second Chapter of Acts and Amy Grant and others I can't even remember that left me feeling joyously transcendent; I went to fireside talks at camp (and even gave a couple when I was in college) that felt meaningful, like we were really making a difference. I believed it was all about love, God's love, and as Christians, our love for each other. They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love.

But the chinks in my faith were already starting to show, because (of course) Christians don't always act in loving ways, and Evangelical theology usually ends up more about whether or not you've got it Right, whether or not you are correctly supporting the party line, than whether or not you are acting out of love. Going off to a Christian college didn't help. I thought it was going to be like four years of going to my beloved summer camp, but it was just like high school. There were cliques and popular people, and the kids who came from wealthy families or famous Christian families were more popular than the rest of us. 

I had some great experiences there, and I will never regret going. But it didn't help my frustration with the limitations of the theology I was being taught, the theology that we weren't allowed to question. There were certain ways of thinking about the Bible and heaven and hell and salvation that weren't optional. You couldn't say, "The Bible is an amazingly varied historical document with the wisdom of the ancients embedded in it, the history of the Jewish people, and the start of a new religion as described in the Christian New Testament, but I don't believe it contains literal, word-for-word instructions for right now." If you said something like that, you were wrong. Not just a polite disagreement over the dinner table, but you-are-going-to-hell Wrong.

I didn't know there were any alternatives. I thought you either were a Christian (which for me, back then, was synonymous with being an Evangelical Christian), or you were going to hell. I didn't find out until I started visiting other churches in college that there were people--millions of them-- who considered themselves to be Christian, but who didn't believe in the Bible the way I was raised to believe. I thought it was either believe the whole thing, or you're out. And being out was unthinkable, because I had a whole life of sweet, lovely, transcendent spiritual experiences that I equated with being Evangelical. 

But by the time I was 23 or 24, I just couldn't make it work anymore. I started attending one of those other churches, and I gradually extricated myself from the way I was raised. It's a long, slow process that involves a lot of grieving for the way you thought the world was, and the people you wanted to belong to, not to mention a fair amount of self-judgment because why couldn't I make it work? If you're going through it, all I can say is: just keep going. It gets better. But you never entirely get over it. My heart still lifts when I hear those old Evangelical songs.

Then the Moral Majority came along, and Evangelicalism became even less recognizable as the religion of Jesus who transformed the world through subversive acts of love. It became the religion of purity, the religion of 1950s sexuality, the religion of outward acts of moral conformity that had nothing to do with what was happening in your heart and mind. And then Trump happened, and I just can't even begin to figure out how the religion I believed in so deeply when I was growing up has turned into the mass of lies and delusions and the judgmental lack of mercy that characterizes the far religious right today. It breaks my heart that good-hearted people are being preyed upon by power mongers and conspiracy theorists who get a charge out of proving that they can delude people into believing whatever they make up. ---------

-------- This is another one from my drafts folder. I think I felt like people who are new might need some background, but it is surprisingly difficult to believe that this is interesting to anyone but me, so it has been sitting there for months. Also, I compressed a very long, convoluted process into a handful of paragraphs, so if it sounds ridiculously over-simplified, that's because it is. I spent a couple of years in my old blog writing about the process of leaving my childhood faith behind, and even that wasn't enough to really describe it. But at least it gives you a bit of context.

This week's nostalgia listens: Peace of Mind by Boston, and Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band. I think after this week I will let you find your own nostalgia listens, because the ones that take me right back are going to be different than the ones that take you back. The trick to finding a good one is to find one that you haven't heard much in the meantime. I went through a Led Zeppelin phase when I was in my 40s, so "D'Yer Mak'er"-- which used to take me straight back to the summer between fourth and fifth grade (for very specific but boring reasons)-- now reminds me more of being 44 than it does of being ten.

Have a great weekend.

Unsubscribe Day on February 8th

Irrelevant pic from last summer bcuz its January

I know from my days of working in IT that you should mostly just ignore spam and robocalls. Tighten up your spam rules, or use a provider that has spam blocking, and then ignore whatever gets through. 

Here's the reason: spammers buy a database of email addresses or phone numbers, and the information may be months or years old. The spammers have no way of knowing which phone numbers/email addresses lead to a real live person, and which ones are dead ends that are a waste of their time.  

So if you answer the phone, or reply to an email, they know they've got a working, functional contact. That immediately moves you to a different list, a list that they can then re-sell to someone else for more money because these are numbers/addresses that actually work. 

You see the problem. I no longer answer the phone unless I recognize the caller ID. If it's someone that legitimately needs to talk to me, they'll leave a message-- and I'd say more than 90% of the time, there's no message, just a hang-up. If I'm going to be home during the day, I even turn off the ringer (we are one of the seven households in the country that still has a landline.)

That has worked pretty well for the phone. Everyone once in awhile we'll get a day or two of frequent robocalls (and of course, during the election season, it was ridiculous), but if we don't answer, the calls tail off and we're good again for a few weeks. 

But over time, my email situation has become ugly. Once, about ten years ago, we contributed a fairly small amount to an acquaintance's political campaign. We immediately started receiving daily emails, and then several a day, and then a dozen. Not just from that candidate, but from his party, and then from various PACs (fundraising organizations) as my address got passed around. I've never contributed another dime to a political campaign. 

But then even weirder-- somehow my address was passed to "the other guys." I guess they figure everyone in Montana wants mail from gun rights groups and conservative PACs. It got way worse. Last spring, after the primaries, I got sick of seeing all the absurdly overblown subject lines (from both sides, honestly), and I thought at least I needed to get rid of the conservative ones. So I went through and unsubscribed.

(aside: by law, every mass email has to include an unsubscribe link. It may be in tiny print down at the bottom, but it has to be there.)

Unsubscribing worked great for a day or two. But before long, I was getting double the number of emails from the Democrats. Not kidding. There's some kind of sharing going on there. And then within a couple of months, I started getting the conservative ones again ("Dear fellow conservative, help me fight the FAR LEFT TAKEOVER OF OUR COUNTRY").

It is a little better since the election-- for whatever reason, I'm down to 3-4 messages from the left and 6-8 from the right. But it's still really IRRITATING. So, that's why I'm having unsubscribe day on Feb 8th. 

Well, that and also I need to unsubscribe from the previously mentioned trial periods I never cancelled. For example-- I kept a list for a couple of years of Kindle Unlimited titles I wanted to read (Kindle Unlimited has hundreds of thousands of titles that are available for "free" if you pay $9.99/month). When I got up to a dozen, I signed up for the free month. The problem is, six months later, I've only read one or two-- and for the $60 I've spent, I could have bought those two plus three or four others. Thus: Unsubscribe day on February 8th. Since I've told you about it, now I have to do it.

I think this qualifies as MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW. Here's to my dream: Spam- and robocall-free living.

I'm going to start posting once a week, probably on Fridays. Twice a week feels like too much. 

have a great weekend!

creative writing week 1

THE MIGRAINE
    4:57 a.m. Sondra swims up toward wakefulness as if she were rising from the bottom of a lake of mud. For a few seconds, all is well. Then slowly her head starts to throb. Damn, she thinks. Dammit all to hell. Maybe if she goes back to sleep, everything will be fine. (She knows it won’t be.)
    5:32 a.m. She wakes up again, but this time the pain is instant. Fuck, she thinks. She is not one to swear, except when it feels like someone is hammering an ice pick into her brain. She rolls to her other side. Maybe that will help. (She knows it won’t.)
    5:43 a.m. John is still sleeping next to her. His alarm will go off at six. Sondra tries to raise the energy to get up and take the hated meds. She really, really doesn’t want to take them. The side effects—the jitters, the upset stomach, the drugged feeling— will throw off her whole day. And anyway it feels like giving in, like she is too weak to conquer a stupid headache. Maybe if she goes back to sleep. Maybe if she punches up her pillow to support her neck. Maybe if she is tough enough, the pain will subside so she won’t have to take the meds. (She knows it won’t work, but she goes back to sleep anyway.)
    6:10 a.m. When she wakes again, John is in the shower. She must have slept through his alarm. Immediately she knows her head is worse. If she gets up right now, she can take the meds and be back in bed before John gets out of the shower. She doesn’t want him to know. He will worry, and there’s nothing he can do. She hates it when people feel sorry for her. When her head hurts this bad, sympathy just makes her mad. She thinks to herself that she should get up. (She doesn’t.)
    6:23 a.m. She must have dozed off again. Her head is worse. Now it feels like a giant is squeezing her head, like there is a fire burning at the base of her skull, like the backs of her eyeballs have been sandpapered raw. She hates her head. She hates the drugs. She does not want to take them. But if she doesn’t take them soon, she won’t have enough time for them to work before she has to get up at 7:30. Fuck, she thinks again.
    6:25 a.m. There is no help for it. She must get up. She pulls herself up, swings her legs over the side of the bed. Her stomach rolls, but it is not rolling hard enough to make her throw up, and that is a relief. Standing, her head feels slightly better. Maybe if she just takes a couple of Advil and some Excedrin migraine. Maybe that will do it. (She knows it won’t.)
    6:29 a.m. She has taken the Advil and the Excedrin, downed some water. She’s heard that headaches are caused by dehydration, so she makes herself drink as much as she can stand. She gets back in bed. Thinks about her meeting. She could call them and say she has a migraine. But she doesn’t want anyone to know. She is ashamed of her migraines the way someone else might hide their lame foot or cauliflower ear.
    6:48 a.m. She hears the garage door open and then close as John leaves for work. The Advil and the Excedrin are not working. She’s either going to have to take the drugs or stay in bed all day, miserable. This is ridiculous, she thinks. I am an adult. I have a legal prescription for migraine meds and painkillers. I have a migraine. Why do I do this to myself? But the compulsion to hide, to pull the covers over her head and crawl down in, is nearly impossible to resist.
    7:02 a.m. It is dark under the covers, and darkness feels better. But the headache is not going away. In fact, it might be getting worse. She has to do it.
    7:11 a.m. She has to do it.
    7:15 a.m. She really, really has to do it. As it is, she will have to reset her alarm for 7:40 so she can shut her eyes long enough for the damn things to work.
    7:16 a.m. GODDAMMIT, she yells, inside her head. She throws the covers off, rolls out of bed, and stomps over to the cabinet. Or she would stomp, if it didn’t make her head throb. She digs through the basket where her meds are, finds the pill bottles. She shakes out a pain pill, puts it in the pill cutter and cuts it in half. She peels back the paper liner of the Maxalt. She takes the half pain pill and the pink Maxalt and swallows them with more water. Goes back to bed. Resets her alarm for 7:40. Waits.
    7:27 a.m. And waits.
    7:32 a.m. And waits.
    7:38 a.m. Finally, finally, the blessed reprieve begins. She will pay for this later, but for now, the pain recedes, like cool rain washing over hot pavement, like sinking into a feather bed after a night on a bed of nails.
    7:40 a.m. Her alarm goes off. She gets up, gets in the shower, tries not to weep with gratitude for the relief of pain. Next time she will take the meds right away. (She knows she won’t.)

understanding conservatives part 2

I know I've already said this about twenty times, but it bears repeating: my point in writing this two-part post isn't to change your mind or convince you that conservatives are Right. I'm just trying to build bridges instead of continuing to more minutely describe how we disagree. And if you needed further proof of how chaotic it is inside my brain, this post will do it. It's all over the place.

OK, so picking up after yesterday's post....

Another thing: conservatives hate it when we exaggerate to make a point. Once you see it, you realize that we do it all the time. The other night while I was watching the Oscars, at least twice someone talked about some unjust situation in the past and then said something to the effect of "and nothing has changed."

Well, yes, actually, it has. We're a long ways from equality in the workplace, but there are women at the highest levels of corporate American. They're there, and they weren't fifty years ago. Slavery has been illegal for 150 years. Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional in the 1960s. Yes, there is still insitutional racism, and yes, we still have a long ways to go, and yes, I can recognize latent racism in my own mind. We're not done by any means. But we start getting pushback on these issues when we try to say that they are the "same" as slavery or segregated water fountains.

(and if you wanted to make a case that in some ways racism is worse now--because it's so insidious-- I'm listening. But you've lost Mr. Middle Class American White Guy. And maybe you legit don't care.)

I live in the midwest, and since most questions about race seem to center around urban areas and the South, I'll just throw out there that there are a whole lot of people in middle American who grew up in all white towns, went to all-white schools, and never saw a black person other than on TV until they were adults. So maybe we could cut a little slack for the guy who was at the bottom of the pecking order at his all-white high school and rolls his eyes when we talk about white privilege. What does that even mean if you live in an area where everyone is white?

(you don't have to explain it to me. I get it. I'm just pointing out the flip side.)

I listened to a conversation between a couple of conservatives not long ago and realized something that I've been chewing on ever since. I think most liberals would list social justice as the most important issue facing our country right now (or maybe the environment, but I'm leaving that aside for the moment). We might quibble about which aspect of social justice we should tackle first--fighting discrimination based on gender, orientation, race, identity, or sexual harassment in the workplace or police brutality or or or, but for the most part, liberals are all on board with social justice.

But for most conservatives, social justice is not what they want from government. Outside of the truly awful, it's not that they don't care about social justice. Some of them care very much, especially when it's something that's right in front of them in their own community (witness the conservatives that attend my church).

No, I think that for conservatives (at least the socially aware ones), it's that the laws to protect people's rights are already on the books. What else is government supposed to do? If the laws aren't being enforced, then that's a conversation we can have, these conservatives might say. But what exactly is the role of government in fighting social prejudice? After outlawing discrimination, how can the government change attitudes? It's a question that's worth some thought (and I think there are some good answers).

Which brings up the point that conservatives really resent it when liberals act like they have a corner on morality. Well, I'm a liberal, so I care about these things, which you obviously don't, or else you'd be a liberal, too, our reasoning seems to go. It's worth pointing out that George Wallace, the infamous governor of Alabama whose signature issue was opposing the Civil Rights movement, was a Democrat. The Jim Crow laws were legislated by Democratic legislatures across the South. Lifelong Republicans who are in their 60s and 70s have pretty good grounds to be mystified by this sanctimonious insistence that Democrats are the only ones who care about civil rights.

Which brings me to one final thought, and I'm not sure how to put it into words. But here is a pattern that you see over and over again. Liberals see an issue that they think needs work, but conservatives don't see it as a problem. So Liberals crank up the rhetoric, start the (perceived) exaggerations, talk louder. Conservatives still don't seem to care. So Liberals crank it up again, getting more and more hysterical. By now Conservatives are totally and completely tuned out. (Think back to the women following Jeff Flake into the elevator during the Kavanaugh hearings, then posing for social media with triumphant grins on their faces.)

It's a classic case of doing the same thing that's not working over again, but louder. Somebody said (supposedly Einstein), "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results." Yeah, well, by that definition our entire country is completely insane right now. We just keep having the same arguments.

I think it's possible that the older conservatives I know are more turned off by hysteria than anything else. The ones among them that like to cause trouble will even try to set it off, because they know they can. Say something slightly sexist, or slightly racist, or whatever, and watch the fur fly. It's as predictable as the sun coming up every day.

I read a blogger a couple of months ago make an offhand, positive comment about styrofoam cups in a completely unrelated context, and I thought to myself, oh, boy, here we go. And sure enough, the comments started. Don't you care about the environment? Don't you care about what you're doing to the ozone layer? I'm surprised at you! I thought you knew better than this! 

I personally do my best to avoid styrofoam, but that's not the point. The point is that I could see that blogger getting angry and resentful at the sanctimonious comments, comments about a situation that really they knew nothing about. (Maybe styrofoam cups are the one anti-environmental thing she allows herself. Remember my face-wipes?) But they felt they had the god-given right to pass judgment.

And speaking of things that are as predictable as the sunrise, this got way too long again. I can't really think of any big overarching conclusions to draw. Maybe this: avoid hysteria. If you think the world should be different, be the change you want to see. Don't shout, scream, bludgeon, judge, preach. It just makes the walls between us that much stronger.

And speaking of moralizing. I'm getting off my soapbox now. I can't imagine that I will be able to think of anything else to say in time for tomorrow so have a great weekend.

In which I do even more re-hashing about church, or maybe it's just hashing this time, and continue to fail to get to the point.

So when I left off this topic last Tuesday, our little presbyterian church, which has been in the same location for over 100 years, had seen a steep drop in membership, but we still have our dedicated loyal survivors of about 180 members. We're lucky that includes a broad range of opinions, viewpoints, and outlooks on life.

I say lucky because that's really hard to find right now. People tend to congregate (pun!) with the likeminded. Our church is one of the few places I know where people with markedly different opinions about all sorts of things coexist and actually function well together to accomplish good things in the community--we're actively involved in working with at-risk teens, the homeless shelter, feeding the hungry, and an array of other activities.

I highly value that diversity of opinion. There are churches in our town that are more in line with my own opinions, but I don't want to go to church in an echo chamber. I grew up with that, and it's stifling.

It works for awhile because you can get that warm glow of "I know I'm right about this because everyone around me agrees with me," but eventually that sameness becomes restrictive. If your opinions change as you learn new things and have new experiences, you may find that the people you thought loved you for who you are, actually only love you if you fit in. Or they say they still love you (and maybe they genuinely do), but they don't want you in the group anymore.

At least that was my experience. I'm getting way off track here.

About a month ago, someone spoke up during worship with an opinion that was phrased in decidedly liberal/Democrat language.* The person that spoke is so immersed in that segment of our culture that she didn't think she was being partisan, she thought she was just stating The Way Things Are, with a ringing call to champion social justice.

But the conservatives heard a liberal saying "only Democrats care about this issue" and suddenly a wide-open rift has occurred right in the middle of our church. And we're finding out that this particular rift has been on the verge of breaking open for a couple of years now.
It's worth stating the obvious here and pointing out that these conservatives are not way-out right-wing nutcases. They go to a church--some of them for decades--that has no problem with women in church leadership, in a denomination that states that a woman's pregnancy decisions should be between her and her physician, and also allows gay ordination and same-sex marriage.

And yet they vote Republican, and they don't see a problem with that. (I don't either.) They're Republican because they were raised that way, or because of their views about fiscal policy, or banking regulations, or the military, or foreign policy.

In the aftermath of this incident, we're coming to realize that the reason we've been able to coexist for so long is because we don't talk about politics. And I find myself in the unusual situation of being a liberal who is defending the conservatives. It's making me a little nuts. The noise that's being drummed up on the part of the more liberal members of our congregation has become so unbearably tone-deaf that I can hardly stand to be involved. But I'm on session (church leadership) right now and so, voilà. I'm involved.
The whole situation has made me realize how clueless some liberals are about some conservatives. I live in a community that usually votes heavily conservative--in 2016, President Trump took 65% of the votes, and since various other parties took 6%, that means less than 30% voted Democrat. So I have a front-row seat on understanding conservatives, something I think liberals who live in more populous areas don't really have. I can't avoid the Trump base, or the never-Trumpers, or the Libertarians, because I live right in the middle of them.

So as a service to you, my gentle readers, I'm going to pass on some things I've learned about Conservatives in the past two years. Because when President Trump won the election, I made a small promise to myself that I would try to learn, and not just dissolve into anger and despair. (I confess I haven't always been successful.)

Please note that I'm not doing this because I'm trying to convince you that they're right, but because it is time, it is long past time, for us to start building bridges instead of continuing to yell at each other about how wrong the other side is. 

Good grief, how do these things get so long? I was planning to get started on what I wanted to say, but this is already too long. To be continued, and since I want to get this done because I need to sort it out for myself, I may actually post Out Of Schedule. Wtf is the world coming to.

Happy Tuesday.

* Apologies for the lack of details, I'm being purposely vague so if anyone local reads this, it will be unidentifiable.

In which I re-hash some old stuff about going to church

I have some things I want to talk about but I feel the need to do some set up first. So there are several things in this post, which will seem unrelated at the moment, but eventually maybe it will make sense.

First is informational: I think people who are not religious sometimes don't realize that there is wide variation in the political and social beliefs of people who call themselves Christian. There are, of course, the conservative Christians who try to reserve the use of the term "Christian" for themselves, and who are very publicly anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, and pro-virginity (for unmarried women). They also often oppose the ordination of women (i.e., women cannot be pastors in their churches, and in some versions, women are not allowed to even lead worship or pray from the pulpit).

Although that group of people think that they alone are "Christian," there are actually millions of people who honor the life and teachings of Jesus Christ but who don't share that set of prejudices. I was raised to be one of those conservative Christians, and I didn't realize that Christians could be any other way until I was in college and started visiting some other, different churches. That simple realization, which was mind-boggling to me at the time, felt like the truth that had set me free. It was one of the best things that's ever happened to me.

Dean and I have attended the same church in our small Montana town since we moved here in 1992. At the time, the congregation was fairly large for the size of our town (300-ish members), and there were regularly well over a hundred people in worship services.

If you've been around for awhile, you may remember that although we attended church sort-of regularly (1-2 times/month), I didn't join for a long time. Dean joined shortly after we moved here, but I was still feeling ambivalent about church, and although this particular church had many of the things I wanted in a church family (other kids the same age as ours, friendly atmosphere, active in the community, and allowed women to be pastors), it didn't have certain others--most obviously, it discriminated against the LGBTQ community by not allowing them to be elders, deacons, or pastors. (Same-sex marriage wasn't even a discussion in 1992.)

So I attended without joining, and if you want to read more about that, I wrote a post about it in 2011. But that ambivalence was maybe even more important. In 1992, I had only very recently been able to disentangle myself from my evangelical upbringing, and I just wasn't interested in tying myself to another church of any type. Church still filled a need for me, a need for ritual and acknowledgement of a Divine Being, and I loved (and still love) the community of people at our church. But I couldn't really agree with a lot of the things you had to say you agreed with if you joined, so I didn't. Join, I mean.

Ack, I could keep going on about this for paragraphs but it's not necessary for where I'm going with this. Long story short: At some point in there, I read Kathleen Norris's book Amazing Grace, which helped with my ambivalence about the church's creeds. And then our denomination approved gay ordination in 2011, and shortly thereafter I officially joined the church I'd been attending for 18 years. And then in 2014-15, our denomination changed the language of the Book of Order to allow pastors to perform same-sex weddings, and I was even happier.

On both of those occasions, we lost a sizeable number of members of our church. And then of course people left for other reasons, and new people came, and babies were born and people died. So now our church has about 180 members, and we've been through a lot.

And if you read all the way through this post, you've been through a lot, too. I will try to make it worth your while when I get around to part two, which probably won't be until next week.