April 16th, 2010
“I know God is good, Martha. He’s just not good to me.”– Susan Isaacs
Angry Conversations with God, A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir is the poignant faith journey of Susan E. Isaacs. A well intending friend once tried to give Susan advice with the statement “our relationship with God is nothing short of a marriage.” To which Susan replied, “Well, in that case, God and I need to go to couples counseling. Because we’re not getting along.”
What do you when the God you knew intimately as a child seems to have abandoned you? Well, of course, you take God to marriage counseling. If the relationship isn’t working, you find a counselor that will help fix it and that is exactly what Susan Isaacs did.
Susan grew up, as many of us did, in the church, really knowing the intimate love of God. However, as life got more complicated, so did her relationship with God. This is an honest story of one woman’s journey. It is a glimpse into her life and the experience of going to “couples counseling” with God. It is a journey where the images of God get entangled with broken fathers and awful relationships. It is a reminder that we all, including ministers, are just people doing the best we can.
This is an unorthodox faith journey story. It does include some unorthodox language but it flows from Susan’s honest heart. It is a book you won’t want to put down. It will have you laughing and crying and wondering how she has been watching you live your life. With Susan Isaacs, the reader learns that even the worst churches can still be used by God, what being a spiritual gold digger means, and that even when our noblest desires are not fulfilled, God is still love.
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April 13th, 2010
I’ve had fun talking with friends over one of the recent articles on the Associated Baptist Press website about dating as a minister. I’ve enjoyed the conversation so much because I’ve been there, out in the dating world with a big “Reverend” on the front of my name that usually sent people off running before they had a chance to figure out my last name. I remember walking into the office of the church where I work in Athens, Georgia, talking to the office manager about the possibility of putting myself on a computer dating service. She looked at me and asked with a twinkle in her eye “Well, in a university town filled with undergrads, how else are you going to meet people?”
So the next week, I got on Match.com and slowly filled out the information sections about myself. Some questions were easy no-brainers. Others I had to choose carefully what I wanted to expose about myself. I debated about identifying words like “Baptist” and “minister” as they might scare men away. I decided that I would use them both to get it out of the way and ward off any folks I’d rather not deal with. I ended up taking out the “Baptist” part because it so readily identified me (I had a few folks I had decided to cross off my list show up to church, and I realized I was the only female Baptist minister in town)!
After a few weeks, and a few e-mails proclaiming that it was destined by God that we meet on-line (in their first e-mail to me, I might add), I met a wonderful man, and we began talking. We quickly learned that we both had only been on-line for a few weeks before finding one another. And to top it off, the music minister at my church was his advisor for his master’s degree. He informed me on our first date that it scared him to death that I was a Baptist minister, but since he figured my being female afforded me a chance. I’m so glad he took a chance. We’ve been married for two years now and have many opportunities to look back at the fun stories and strange mishaps of meeting people on the worldwide web.
Does anyone else have an online dating story to share?
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