So, What is The Christian Perspective?
We live in the digital age of social filters. Ludwig and Juno are my personal favorites. We use filters to alter the original characteristics of a picture manufacturing an entire new look and (most times enhanced) photo. We're really good at it. Like expert level 5000. We're so good at it, the lines are blurred between applying the perfect social media filter into filtering our real lives. We often slip in and out of "Christian consciousness" and opt to see life through our amazing filters, but miss to see life how God sees it. The Christian Perspective.
Growing up, my attendance at church was spotty at best. When I was younger, I attended with my grandmother and enjoyed the meetings of children's church. Until suddenly, I didn't have to go to church with my grandmother any more (probably because of the time I threw a full blown fit for having to sit through "adult" church). So my appearances in the pew were few, except for of course the routine family visits for Easter and Christmas, but soon those dwindled too. I didn't intentionally reconnect with church until my late middle /early high school years. At that point I attended church solo and was involved in campus gospel choirs and praise dance teams throughout high school and college.
Through this time life was pretty smooth for me, but it also became a checklist of sorts. See, society gives us this generic road map to life and mine looked like this:
- Go to church
- Stay out of trouble
- Be active in community & school activities
- Achieve good grades
- Graduate
- Start your career at a dream job or launch a business
- Get married
- Have kids
- Grow old
- Retire and travel
- Be reunited in eternity with Jesus
Does this sound familiar? I mean nothing is wrong with these milestones and life events, all are very admirable. The problem is living life according to a checklist and not being able to check the list. My life had become a checklist of success until I did not have boxes to check anymore. I found myself in a stalemate against life and was lost to what my next move should be. What does this mean? What should I be doing? Where should I be going? What is purpose? What is identity? What is life? What is a quarter life crisis for $5000, Alex?
Seriously. Everything in my life to this point was like a map. I followed the dotted line very carefully until it stopped and I did not know where to go. Lost in a weird transition phase no one told me about. Everyone knows that teenage puberty is an awkward season of growing pains, but what about "adulting". And the questions aren't the problem, it is where to get the answers!
So, where do lost people go? Hopefully, to church. I challenged myself to become more involved, but I found this weird dichotomy of being too old for the young adults/college ministry and too young for the women's ministry who all seemed to be over 40 and still waiting on their "Boaz" ("Boaz is Dead", btw.). I struggled to find women who looked like me, young twenty something professionals who on the outside had life figured out, but awkwardly in the middle of their own quarter life crisis and intentionally pursuing God to get out. Of course, I welcome wisdom from all ages, but where were the Millennials?! I prayed about it and gradually found groups like Pinky Promise, Saved in the City and God started to make visible young women and groups grounded in Truth and pursuing God.
Eventually, I learned there are no "maps" to life. The scary thing about it is that is that you're winging it. The exciting thing about that is that we are all winging it. But still in the perceived chaos of it all, we have liberty to find our own life the way God designed it. We try to recreate "success" based on someone else's story, but God has given us our own journey. And though we may wander, we are not always lost.
In the midst of my journey, God gave me vision to fill a void and become the solution to my own problem. The Christian Perspective was birthed out of a need and desire for young women to connect with each other to explore biblical truth, engage culture and uncover the many, strong, vulnerable, and sometimes awkward layers of the Christian Millennial woman.
Welcome to The Christian Perspective. Let's find Life together.