There’s a phenomenon within the Christian culture that involves a lot of catchphrases. These are phrases that are more than likely meaningless to anyone outside of the church walls (and often even to those in it) because they are the “right” answers, the easy things to say, the appropriate “Sunday School answers.” (In fact, I’d say that calling them Sunday School answers is, itself, Christianese.) In my mind, it’s akin to jargon. If I describe literature using certain terms, you might think that I know my stuff. But if I use those same terms around other English majors, they’ll push me to go beyond the facade of easy definition to really analyze the piece, because those terms are essentially meaningless without deeper exploration. Jargon is useful on occasion, but ultimately it often belies a deeper meaner or doesn’t tell the whole story.

Urban Dictionary defines Christianese as “A communicable language within the Christian subculture with words and phrases created, redefined, and / or patened that applies only to the Christian sphere of influence,” or, more simply, “Christian buzzwords.” I think both in church and in our culture at large there are some words that we’ve simply overused, to the point that they’ve begun to lose any meaning they once had.

I’ve gone through phases in my life, depending on what church groups I’ve been surrounded by at the time, where I’ve definitely found myself using more of these church-y terms. One I tend to fall prey to using is “feeling convicted.” Theologically, feeling convicted is a deep-seated realization of sin, a willingness to turn around and run the opposite direction, an inner revival of righteousness. But in reality, we often say we feel convicted when what we really mean is that we feel bad or that we acknowledge that we made a mistake. I think sometimes Christians are guilty of doing this with prayer, too. When something bad happens, it’s easy to say, “Well, I’ll be praying for you.” But I often wonder how many of us actually follow through on that. And if we don’t follow through, it’s not really much of a comfort.

Christianese is often made up of empty words.

But I read an interesting blog post recently (well, really, I read a blurb of the post in a comment on another blog and then sought out the original post in order to write this) that asked, “Is Christianese really bad?” The author wrote, “After my miscarriage, sometimes I had no words of my own. I was unable to form coherent thoughts and put words to my feelings. I think this is a common occurrence during grief. […] [O]nce I was able to borrow the words of Scripture to express my grief, I thought and spoke in Christianese a lot. But you know what? I didn’t give a rip. I had words, and I had words that were both helpful and true. So, I sounded like an 80-year-old church lady. Oh well.”

Her statement resonated with me because I had that happen recently. One night last week I was feeling overwhelmingly lonely. While I’m settling into our new life pretty well and beginning to feel like I have some routines and everyday joys, I miss having friends around to whom I don’t have to explain myself. I find it exhausting to have to always be “on” when we go out with people and when I volunteer and every time I go anywhere. There’s a lot to be said for friends who know you so well that you don’t have to cover all the details every time you see them. And I was craving that. So somewhat in desperation (which is unfortunately characteristic of when I tend to do this), I opened my Bible and I turned to Psalm 139.

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

He is familiar with all my ways. Christianese. But Truth. And somehow, that night, those words were just what I needed to hear. Someone knows me. And I was comforted. So while I agree that Christianese is far from all good, I also don’t think it’s all bad. I think there are times when the right words, the easy words, are okay, because they are true. I think it’s valid to be careful of overusing Christianese, but I’m going to give myself the freedom to delve into now and again, as long as it’s the Truth.

What vocabularies do you find yourself using that you’re skeptical of? Have you struggled with using or hearing Christianese? What are some phrases we overuse to the point of making them meaningless?

These have accumulated on the dining room table. An inordinate number of them are mine. I guess I am well-hydrated!

This morning I started a month-long volunteer stint at a local non-profit agency. A new case manager was also starting today, and as her job is much more involved and sensitive than mine right now, she required training and time with the executive director. So, I was trustingly left alone with an old file cabinet and instructed to go through all the files and clean it out. (Coincidentally, this is pretty much how the first day at my last job went. I guess I must be trustworthy.) While I was a bit overwhelmed, seeing that I, as yet, know next to nothing about the day-to-day operations of the organization and was worried I might trash something that is actually useful or necessary, I found that most of the contents were readily categorizable. I ended up with several stacks: old board minutes and budget reports (that may or may not be necessary to keep), grant and foundation application information (to keep), potentially useful or interesting (for the director to sort through himself), and trash. I also ended up with a large stack of empty, and thus reusable, folders.

I’ll be honest, as much as I love organizing, it was a bit of a tedious process. But what I continually found fascinating was opening a new folder to discover what someone once decided was worth keeping. In many cases, there was a hanging file folder containing a manila tabbed folder containing…a single brochure. Someone had apparently painstakingly attempted to create a cabinet full of community resources. However, at this point, many of the brochures were so out of date that, if the organization even exists anymore, the information has surely changed. And secondly, there are entire non-profit organizations dedicated to keeping records of what agencies exist and providing resource manuals to anyone who requests one. Plus, there is now the internet. So needless to say, most of the brochures went into File 13, if you know what I mean.

Having recently moved, and even more recently reorganized our walk-in closet, I’ve done a lot of thinking lately about what’s worth keeping. In fact, even though we got rid of several car trunkfuls of stuff before we moved, I managed to find another sizable pile of giveaways this past week. I am constantly scrutinizing my belongings and find myself, over time, becoming willing to part with things that I once thought were eternal keepsakes. I’m a sentimental person, but I’m trying hard not to let my sentimentality manifest itself in too much stuff.

There are some things I’ll never part with. For instance, the two dolls I have had practically since birth. The first was a gift shortly after I was born, and I became so attached to her that my mom bought a second, identical doll in case the first one ever got lost or damaged. Unfortunately, I somehow discovered the second one and simply added her to my cadre. We were quite a threesome. The dolls had voices and personalities and life stories that I shared in copious detail with my mom and the tape recorder she often left me with. They are now grey where the used to be pink, and one of them is smushed practically to fabric. I doubt any future child of mine will want to play with them. But they’ll sit somewhere on a shelf for as long as I can envision.

Here they are in their wedding day finery.

Other things, though, I have seen fit to relinquish. For example, gifts that, while nice, I know I will never use because they’re not my style. The numerous binders and dividers that my mom trained me to keep tidy and reuse every school year. Some picture frames that we no longer have room for. It’s interesting to note how difficult that is for me, though, and how many purging cycles it takes to make that decision.

What are some things you have trouble letting go of that you probably need to? What will you cherish forever? And what do you have no problem chucking as soon as the opportunity arises?

 

 

I never fantasized about my wedding growing up. I had one Barbie doll, and I didn’t even really like her. My favorite books for a long time were about girls living on the frontier and girls that survived horrific events like the Holocaust and earthquakes. I loved swimming and playing on my monkey bars in the backyard. Wedding? Who wanted to think about weddings?

I’m sure a lot of this stemmed from the story of my parents’ marriage. They were a bit older when they got married, and my mom was pretty hands off about planning their wedding (mostly because her mom insisted that she be!). They got married in a casual backyard ceremony, and I’m pretty sure my mom was literally barefoot and had flowers in her hair. I didn’t grow up ogling pictures from that day, or playing dress-up in her dress, or hearing stories about how magical it was. And you know what? I don’t feel like I missed out on anything.

I think the pressure that our society puts on a girl’s wedding day is too much. Many girls grow up expecting to feel like a princess that day and expecting it to be the best day of their lives, and I think this puts undue pressure on the planning process and the actual day. AND, it takes the focus off of the real reason for the day: the marriage.

Needless to say, when it came to shopping for a wedding dress, I was pretty clueless. I tore several images out of magazines and found some things online, but then on a random Tuesday afternoon when I needed to get away from school for awhile, I called up my friend Kaleigh and said, “You wanna go to David’s Bridal with me?”

I tried on many dresses that afternoon, most a far cry from what I thought I wanted. The first one was magical, I’ll admit, because there was something incredible about seeing myself in the fabled white dress.

I posted pictures in a limited access album on Facebook and got a lot of comments–many of which I utterly disagreed with. So I realized that, ultimately, the dress had to be what I wanted. I had to feel comfortable and beautiful in it, regardless of what other people thought.

But somehow this excluded my mom. I needed her to be a part of the process. She and I made a whirlwind trip to a consignment bridal boutique when I was home for Easter and discovered that we had pretty drastically differing opinions on what my dress should be. In spite of her simple wedding, she envisioned me in something decadent and princess-y. (I can’t believe I’m posting this terribly awkward picture of me on the Internet, but that’s the sacrifice we bloggers make, isn’t it?)

I was surprised but also knew that I needed to stick to my guns that that wasn’t for me.

I went back to David’s Bridal a few weeks later and brought the requisite cadre of friends, thinking it would be fun but not necessarily expecting to find a dress. I wasn’t necessarily looking to cry, or be overcome with emotion, but I did figure I would somehow know.

And then I made The Face.

I didn’t realized I was making The Face, but my friends all noticed it. They exclaimed that I had found it. I was unconvinced, because the dress seemed too simple, too comfortable. It had seemed too easy. But the more I stood around in it, and especially when we added a veil and some shoes, I decided they were right. And conveniently, my parents were coming to visit two days later, so I put the dress on hold, knowing I couldn’t make a decision without them there.

We headed back to David’s Bridal as a family unit and I tried on The Potential Dress, in addition to a few others. At first, my mom was hesitant, and I got frustrated, knowing I couldn’t buy a dress that she didn’t love and thinking I would have to start the process over again. My dad, when pressed, simply said I looked beautiful, though I think he would say that if I were wearing a potato sack, so he was not much constructive help. But as we pondered, a woman came out of the dressing room next to me stuffed into a too-small, too-bedazzled gown that looked heavy and uncomfortable, and my mom’s countenance changed. She was won over by the simplicity of my dress that had made me question it in the first place and, as cheesy as it sounds, said she realized that I was the sparkle. I didn’t need a fancy ballgown in order to shine.

And so we bought it. It was a middle-of-the-range David’s Bridal style. I knew from the beginning that I couldn’t bring myself to spend even a thousand dollars on a dress I would wear for only a few hours, despite having watched countless episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. I was giddy to finally have a dress and felt utterly pleased with my purchase (though I would, inevitably, have doubts about it over the course of the year that would pass until the wedding, which were assuaged each time by trying the dress on and falling in love all over again).

And I also knew practically from the moment of purchase that I had no desire to keep it for all eternity. The fabric was nothing special, and there were no beading or lace details that could become family heirlooms. It was a fairly modern style that I’m not sure would stand the test of time. A. and I will likely be in apartments with limited storage for the foreseeable future, and closet space is at a premium. And I know that a potential future daughter of mine will not miss it if I raise her not to miss it.

The pictures from our wedding I will, of course, treasure. In a last minute panic before the wedding, I frantically insisted that we upgrade our photography package to one that included a professional album, and I’m glad I did. The shoes from our rehearsal dinner I will wear out on numerous dates in the future and smile every time at the memories. And the earrings from our wedding day have become some of my favorites that I wear on normal days, not just for special occasions, and I am glad of that. But I’d rather my dress serve someone else well than have it become a relic. I’d rather make a little money from it to buy Kindle books or go out to a nice dinner than have it sit in a box and turn yellow. I’d rather move on and focus on our marriage and make new special occasions. I don’t want to keep my wedding dress.

I hadn’t even thought about the controversy of this until I posted on Facebook earlier this week that I was finally beginning to search in earnest for a means to sell my dress. A friend’s mom, who has also done her fair share of mothering for me over the years, commented and said simply, “You don’t want to keep it?” And I was reminded in a sentence of the importance we’ve erroneously imbued on the wedding gown.

I’m not knocking anyone who wants to keep her dress, nor am I berating girls who grew up envisioning their weddings and idolizing their mother’s gown. I’m just saying that choice is not for me, and it’s not for my future daughter. My wedding dress felt utterly me; I was comfortable in it, and I felt beautiful. But I’ll never wear it again, and for me that is impetus enough to pass on the love.

Did you dream about your wedding as a child? Will you keep your wedding dress? What are your thoughts on the Princess Culture we and the media impose upon girls?

Guerilla knitting strikes Freedom Park!

And my favorite little guy:

(Pardon the terrible picture quality. I snapped these with my iPhone in full sun and realized later they were terrible. I kept meaning to go back with the “real” camera, but every time I tried it was raining, and by the time I could have, the knitting was gone. I did some mediocre post processing on these to try and help.)