I have a friend named Ana

I have a friend named Ana.  She comes to the ESL class that I help teach every week.  She is from Mexico.  I’m told that she escaped a really bad family situation to move to the US,  though I don’t know the details.  She works as a housekeeper at a hotel and has lived in the US for 10-11 years.  She’s trying to learn English and I’ve been helping her.  She’s a kind and caring woman.  She’s funny and shares jokes in our class.  Every week, she asks us to pray for her brother who is an alcoholic.  We had a Valentine’s Day Party, and she generously brought a delicious cake from a Mexican bakery that I so enjoyed.

She hasn’t been in the class for a few weeks.  We’ve been trying to figure out what’s been going on.  Someone told us she was depressed, and we’ve been worried about her emotional health.  We called her last week and her phone was disconnected, which is even more disturbing, so we asked another friend in the class who lives near her to go and check on her.

We found out tonight that she’s in jail.  She was arrested at work by immigration services for using a fake social security number, as were many other people at her workplace, yet they were not arrested.  I guess she is currently an undocumented immigrant.  Her friend told us that her partner paid a $2500 bail, but she was arrested again or remained in jail, and now they’re asking for a $10,000 bail.  There’s so much that we don’t know, but we’re trying to find out more, and we’re going to connect her with lawyers and help her and her family however we can.

Don’t try to tell me this is justice, that she broke the law and she deserves this punishment.  Laws can be unjust.  None of that changes my care and concern for my friend.  I want her to be released.  I want to her to be able stay in the US – legally, where she has so long worked and paid taxes and made friends.  The country who’s language she wants to learn.  I long to see her and hug her and rejoice with her that she’s been released, and then I’ll be the one to buy the cake to celebrate.

I’m so angry at our broken immigration system.  I’m angry that families are separated, that children are punished for the decisions of their parents, that undocumented immigrants are regularly financially and sexually exploited, that politicians and leaders speak in racist terms, that police won’t investigate the murder of a black teenager, that people call our president the n word, that racist white people won’t share the peace of Christ with their Latino brothers and sisters in church or will threaten their pastors to try to make the brown people leave their churches.

I’m also angry that my boyfriend has all kinds of restrictions on his student visa, whereas other people from his country are legally allowed to stay and work for years.  I’m angry that his parents can’t come visit him because they’ve already been denied a visa in the past because they applied the legal way.  I’m angry that the system makes it so hard for people to legally move here, to legally visit here, that so many people don’t even bother.

There’s a lot that’s not fair and unjust and a lot that doesn’t make sense to me.  I don’t know what the solutions are, but I know that if we keep treating people that like they’re less than human, like they’re potential criminals, or terrorists, or burdens on our society, then we won’t get anywhere.  I’m sad that people forget that we all cry the same tears, we all bleed the same blood.  I’m sad that people can’t see the worth of other humans, that they don’t see how others dreams and desires, how others and skills and talents and new perspectives to offer that can enrich our families and communities and churches and schools

I’m thankful that I serve a God of reconciliation, a God that welcomes sinners to his Kingdom, regardless of their background, their status.  A God of justice who will set the world right and who invites us to share in that process too.  I’m thankful to know so many people who do care about immigrants and refugees, people who are fighting for reconciliation and justice in so many ways – ministers, professors, students, lawyers.  I’m thankful that my friend Jose was released from jail and is working toward citizenship, that he was reunited with his wife and daughter and our church family.

I’m heartbroken that my friend is sleeping in a jail cell tonight.  But I’m hopeful that I will see her again.

Who is Junia?

Quick, name the women you remember from the Bible that first pop into your head. (and then scroll down past the pictures)

1915 - Shechem and Mount Gerizim, home of Samaritans

1913 - Women's Suffrage Parade depicting Women of the Bible Lands

Ok, what names came up for you?

Mary, the mother of Jesus?  Of course, I’ve celebrated Christmas. Esther, Ruth?  Yup, they’ve got Bible books named after them.  Eve?  Ok, most folks have heard that story.  Sarah, Rebecca, Leah?  I read the rest of Genesis or I went to Sunday School as a kid.

Mary Magdalene?  I’ve heard of the DaVinci Code. Delilah, Jezebel?  The bad girls, there’ve been songs about them.  Mary and Martha the sisters?  Of course, someone’s preached the New Testament to me.  Miriam?  I’ve read Exodus or watched the Prince of Egypt.  Naomi? Cool, I’ve read Ruth.  Abigail? Yup, popular name these days.  Elizabeth?  I read that part of the Christmas story too.  Bathsheba?  Another bad girl.  Well, not really.

Deborah?  Oh yeah, she led the Israelites once, right?  Rahab?  Hmm, she helped those spies?  Salome?  That was a play, right?  Priscilla, Phoebe?  Hmm, maybe if I’ve studied the New Testament on my own.  Joanna, Susanna?  Hmm, maybe I’ve studied the Gospels more in depth too.  Junia?  Who?  Huldah?  Huh?  Noah?  What?  Ok, now you’re just messing with me.  Noah was a man, of course.

Most of these women, except for the last three, I had encountered somewhere in the first decades of my Christian journey, usually in a Sunday School class, or a discussion with other Christian women, and in my own Bible reading as well.  Less frequently, in sermons from the pulpit.

I didn’t become acquainted with Junia until 8 months ago.  I was reading a book called What Have They Done with Jesus? by a great Biblical scholar named Ben Witherington III.  In the first chapter, he talks about women in Jesus’ ministry and he calls them disciples.  Even this was something new for me, as I’d always thought of the “disciples” as the 12 Apostles, who were all men.  But Mary, Martha, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and other unnamed women were also disciples who followed him in his ministry and even financed it.  And Witherington wrote a few pages about why he thinks that Joanna (Hebrew name) in the Gospels is Junia (Hebrew woman with a Latin name) in Romans.  But aside from whether they were one person or two persons, he explained that in the Bible, Junia was an Apostle.  A capital A Apostle.  Along with Peter and James and Paul.  Persons who witnessed the risen Christ and who were commissioned by Him to be missionaries, to teach and preach the Good News, to lay the foundation of the Christian church.  This was absolutely stunning for me.  I had been told that only men were apostles.

How did I not know this before?  Well, Microsoft Word flags Junia as a misspelling as I write this, so she’s obviously too obscure to make into the Microsoft dictionary.  Maybe when I read Romans years ago, I was reading from a Bible translation that listed her as Junias (a made-up man’s name) or that didn’t make it clear that she was an apostle (some say, “great to the apostles,” implying that the apostles thought highly of her but that she wasn’t one of them).  Or maybe I thought I was already through the “meat” of Romans and was breezing through the end of the book.  Maybe I had no clue that Junia was a woman’s name.

I’ve grown up in churches in which women could minister and even get paid for it, but only as leaders and teachers of children, adolescents, or other women, or even as worship music leaders, but not as pastors, preachers, teachers of men, deacons, or elders.  Because the Bible doesn’t permit that.  Men were the apostles and pastors and preachers in the Bible.  Not women.  And only men should fill those roles today.

The crazy thing about this is that I never seriously questioned this until the past year.  I was raised by a family full of strong women, including an unconventional grandmother who turned down a marriage proposal to become a WWII pilot.  I was taught that girls and women could do anything they wanted and grew up truly believing that women could be presidents and CEOs.  Through my higher education, I learned about the many ways that women are oppressed in society and opportunities are denied to them, both explicitly and subtly.  I’ve learned about and protest against rape myths that make sexual assault seem acceptable.  My eyes have been opened to ways that the media and advertising in particular constrains our views of what women should and can be.

But what about women as pastors, preachers, ministers, deacons in the Christian church?  Hmm, this idea wasn’t presented to me until much later, and then it was through denominations that I wasn’t a part of, denominations that seemed too liberal to me for other reasons, so it easy to dismiss this ordination of women stuff as something extra-biblical that I didn’t need to explore further.  The  idea that women shouldn’t be limited in their roles in the church had crossed my mind from time to time, but I didn’t give it serious thought.   Honestly, the suggestion that the churches I’ve gone to and go to, the churches that have taught me so much and loved me so well, were intentionally or unintentionally limiting opportunities for women was possibly too much cognitive dissonance for me to examine whether or not that was true in my Christian tradition.  Whatever my motivations, I didn’t give the whole women in ministry issue much thought until recently.

Another irony is that it was my conservative (compared to me) seminarian boyfriend who loves biblical scholarship that embraced women in ministry as preachers, teachers, and pastors before I did.  One of our recent conversations went like sometime this in a way that I’m completely oversimplifying now:

He – Women can pastor churches.
She – Why?
He – Women led and taught throughout the Bible.
She – Really?  Who?
He – Deborah.  Miriam.  Priscilla.  Junia.
She – Oh, yeah.  I forgot about Deborah, she led the whole nation of Israel.  Wait a minute, are you the feminist in our relationship?  Why are you telling me this and not vice versa?

The past few months, I started visiting Episcopal and Anglican churches with my boyfriend and on my own one time, many of which ordain women as priests.  There, I’ve been taught by the preaching of women priests and received communion from women priests.  While one sermon wasn’t too great, but I wouldn’t have liked it even if a man had delivered it, the other things have been edifying and Spirit filled spiritual experiences, just as if they were led by a man.

I’ve started reading blog posts, many of them written by evangelical pastors and scholars, supporting women in full Christian ministry and the images of God as being both masculine and feminine and beyond gender.  Conservative neo-reformed pastors have been making waves in evangelical circles lately with all sorts of statements about how the church should be more masculine.  One popular blogger called upon Christian men to write blogs posts that affirm femininity and women in the church.

I’ve read many of these posts, and found them eye-opening and encouraging.  Particularly, God’s View of a Woman brought tears to my eyes as I read it.  What a beautiful, empowering message for any woman to hear.

1930's - First woman Presbyterian cleric in Australia

Through this journey, I’m realizing that giving women more roles and leadership in Christian ministry isn’t just a modern feminist thing to do.  There’s actual Biblical support for it.  Though this is still a controversial topic among many circles, more evangelical scholars and pastors are starting to ordain and advocate for women as deacons and priests and ministers because they’ve studied the Bible and believe that’s what it teaches.

Last night, I read Junia is Not Alone by Scot McKnight on my kindle.  In it, McKnight writes about whom Junia was, how she was silenced through incorrect Bible translations, and he tells stories of other courageous Christian women leaders who were silenced.  In the final section, McKnight calls on Christians  to tell women’s stories from the Bible and church history.  Which is why I wrote this post.  Junia has been silenced too long and I’m going to write and speak about her and other women and hope that God’s Spirit uses it to open our eyes to the ways that he can use his children for his kingdom.

If you want to learn more about Junia and women in ministry, Junia is Not Alone is a good place to start.  I encourage you to read it.  It’s only $2.99 on Amazon, it’s just a long essay, and it’s a fast read.  You’ll also learn about Huldah, if you haven’t already googled her name after I mentioned her.  If you’re already an egalitarian and on board with women in ministry, then reading it will confirm your beliefs and provide you with biblical support.  If you don’t think that women should be preaching and leading churches, then I hope this essay and other readings cause you to reconsider your views.  I hope it raises some questions for you as reading these things have for me.

At the very least, I hope this book helps you to understand that the churches who do ordain women aren’t just doing it because of the women’s liberation movement, but that there is evangelical Biblical scholarship that supports women in ministry.  You may disagree with Witherington and McKnight’s interpretations, but I doubt these old white men who spent their lives studying the Bible are just saying this because they’re crazy, liberal feminists who want to undermine family values.  Because they’re respected scholars and many other scholars agree with them, you should give their interpretations a chance.

If God called women to lead and conquer and preach and teach and start the Church in the events proclaimed in the Bible, and if He’s continuing to do so today, who are we to try to get in the way of that?  If God calls women today to preach and lead powerfully in churches, if His Spirit equips them with the gifting for those kinds of duties and roles, then why should any mere humans stop that calling?  Let’s not let patriarchal systems and our own societal ideas about what men and women can and cannot do prohibit God’s people from doing what he calls them to do.

Tags: Gender Issues, The Kingdom of God

The longest night of the year

We’ve experienced another winter solstice – the longest night of the year.  I realized this as I was walking out of my office at 5:30 on December 21st and then was surprised that it was still light outside as I viewed a strip of sunlight disappearing behind the lit office buildings.  Even though this is the longest night of the year, every time this year, in late December or January, I start to get excited for the light.  The days will become longer as the sun sets gradually later and later.  I don’t dislike the night, but I thrive in the sunlight.  I feel more energized and think that there’s more to my day, more time to do things and be with people.  That’s not really true, but it’s just how it feels to me.  (You would think my love of sunlight would make me a morning person, but it doesn’t.  I’m more of a mid-afternoon person.)

This year, I had never been more disappointed by the end of daylight’s savings time.  I started running in August, after work and on the weekends in nearby parks, but living in a city, I don’t feel comfortable running by myself in a park at night.  The end of daylight’s savings meant that I could no longer go the park by myself after work to catch the last of the sunlight.  Instead of reducing my running, I reached out to a new friend and asked her to be my running partner.  We began running one night a week and intend to run together two or more times a week as we return from our holidays.  What could have been a disappointing and limiting time turned into an opportunity to grow a friendship and increase my running performance, things that might not have happened were it not for the darkness.

When we experience darkness in our lives, in the form of depression, anxiety, stress, loss, grief, there is often a tendency to pull away from community – to hole ourselves up and not burden others with our pain.   While I’ve come to value solitude greatly in the past few months (which may be a future post), this is not the healthy solitude that I’m talking about.  What I’m describing is isolation that feeds the darkness by creating a fertile ground for all sorts of harmful lies (self-loathing, despair, self-pity, bitterness).  While there are many ways to defeat those lies, healthy community is powerful in bring light to this darkness.  When darkness falls, we need a loving, accepting, supportive, and challenging community of individuals who will sit with us, listen to us, remind of us truth, and pull us back into activities that restore our spirits.  But mostly, it’s the connection with another that is needed so badly.  I need that kind of light.  It’s what makes us human.  I feel so thankful to seek and find these connections all the time.  It’s not always deep soul-bearing.  Sometimes it’s just a laugh with a coworker or a 30 minute run with a friend.  I thrive off of these connections and the light that they bring me.  I’m thankful for darkness when it leads me to the light.

Tags: anxiety stress, depression anxiety, longest night of the year, winter solstice

Talking to little girls . . . about science!

From a recent White House press relief -

White House Highlights Angela Byars-Winston as “Champion of Change” for Girls and Women in STEM

WASHINGTON, DC – On Friday, December 9^th, twelve local leaders in the effort to recruit and retain girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields will be honored at the White House as Champions of Change. These men and women, who include teachers, industry leaders, students, and non-profit leaders, have each taken great strides to reduce the barriers that drive many girls and women to turn away from high-paying, highly rewarding careers as the Nation’s top innovators . . .  Angela Byars-Winston, Ph.D. is a counseling psychologist and Associate Professor (tenure track) in the University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine, section of General Internal Medicine and the UW Center for Women’s Health Research. Her research examines cultural influences on academic and career development, especially for racial and ethnic minorities and women in the sciences, engineering, and medicine with the aim of broadening their participation in STEM.  Dr. Byars-Winston has translated her research into evidence-based, culturally-relevant interventions to increase the persistence of underrepresented groups in STEM, working with middle school students to early career professionals.

Last week at the doctor’s office, I read a National Geographic article about Marie Curie and all the prejudice she faced being a scientist and a woman.  People were continually attributing her research to her husband, though she had the ideas and was leading the research team.  Pierre was studying crystals until Marie got him into studying what would eventually be called “radioactivity.”  Crystals?  Really Pierre?  Doubt there would have been a Nobel prize for that.  At her first Nobel Prize acceptance, she was described as a “helpmate” to Pierre and when she had children, colleagues would ask her, “Why would you want to be in a lab instead of with your delightful daughters?”  Though improvements have been made, women and girls continue to be highly underrepresented in STEM fields, and it’s exciting to see a woman behavioral scientist using her research to develop interventions in this area.

And then there was this, a wonderful article about how to talk to girls about things other than dresses and make-up – how to talk to them about their minds and what they’re learning.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html

I feel pretty fortunate to have grown up in a household that taught me that girls could do anything they wanted.  I loved to read and learn things as a kid, and I loved to learn about science too.  I devoured books and magazines about animals, loved learning about astronomy, and dinosaurs and archaeology.  The Magic School Bus books were some of my favorites.  As a girl, animals, planets, stars, and the human body were pretty cool.  I won second place in a school science experiment in 5^th or 6^th grade, in which I compared the effects of fertilizers such as coffee grounds and Miracle Grow to a control group (oooh!) on plant growth.  My family had just gotten a computer that year, and I remembered spending what seemed like hours with my mom printing off colorful pages that described my experiment and its results to paste on posterboard.

Though I struggled with body image issues and insecurity about dating and friendships and social acceptance, I never doubted my ability to succeed in school or a career.

With these things in mind, I was inspired to have this conversation with an 8 year old girl at church tonight.  I love this girl.  She’s bright and full of enthusiasm and already has a charasmatic personality that you can tell will make her a natural leader.  She’s precious and caring and sings about her love for Jesus.  I see her potential to be an influencer as she grows older.  I engaged in her in the following conversation -

Me: Hey, W, what’s your favorite subject in school?  What do you like learning about?
W: Um, spelling.  I don’t like math. . . . oh!  Science!  I’m learning about the human body!
Me: That’s awesome!  I love learning about the human body too.  Learning about the bones and organs.
W: Yeah, it’s cool.
Me: Have you gotten to dissect anything?
W: Eeew, no!

(Woops.  Some kids would think dissections were cool, but I had forgotten that at age 8 I was pretty grossed out by the idea too.)

Me: That’s ok.  You don’t have to dissect anything.  I think there’s computer programs about dissections.  And you can look at pictures.

Then I realized another opportunity to encourage this girl’s love of science – by providing her with female role models.

Me: You know what?  M and I are both scientists.
W: You are?
M: Yup.  I was a scientist.  Before I had kids.  I worked in a lab and everything.
W: You worked in a lab?!?!  That’s so cool!!!

Ok, so as an adult I don’t think lab work is as interesting as they make it out to be on TV shows, but I was still pretty pumped to see this little girl get excited about the idea of a woman she knows working in a lab.  Fortunately, she didn’t ask me about my science, as I don’t work in a lab and behavioral science could be more difficult to explain.  And how do I explain my dissertation topic (Men’s reactions to a sexual assault prevention program?) to an 8 year old girl?  Maybe that’s another conversation, when I think about how to explain those concepts in kid friendly terms.

I feel like a planted a seed tonight, by showing her that people care about her interests and mind, demonstrating female role models, and getting excited about science with her.  Her parents are wonderful people and I imagine they encourage her curiousity, eagerness to learn, and talents.  Children have so much natural curiousity to learn about the world around them, before societal pressures squash that and tell them to conform and be pretty and sexy.  I want to encourage the girls and boys I know to explore and ask questions and be adventurous.  And they inspire me to do that too.

The beginning

I’m starting a blog.  The sidebar describes my vision for this blog – writing about things I’m passionate about.  Sharing my opinions, observations, and experiences.  Posting things here that would be too long for Facebook.  Hoping to inspire my curiosity and dialogue with others.  Challenging myself to not be constrained by self-imposed or other-imposed limits.  That sounds pretentious.  Trying to write passionately but with humility.  I can’t predict what shape this will evolve into or if I will even keep up with it for very long, but at this time, it seems worth giving a shot.  As are a lot of great things.