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"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11

Tomorrow we’ll be ten days into 2011. This first week of 2011 was eventful. I met new people, tried oysters for the first time and had my email hacked. All in all, everything is okay, and even having a viagara ad sent to all my email connections had a silver lining; friends I hadn’t connected with in years got back to me to say, “Hey, what’s up?” It reminded me of the bible verse, when Joseph was thrown down a well by his brothers, later he says, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” I still struggle with putting some of these words of wisdom from the Bible in proper perspective, but they are imbedded in my head.

We are creatures trying to make sense of our world, our communities and of every little thing (sometimes) that happens in our lives. I am embracing 2011 with hope, so when I saw the verse from Jeremiah again recently (on a church sign? where was that?) I did feel hopeful, and thought, who wouldn’t want to think that their life had some special meaning to a deity that loved them and had their back (so to speak)?

I shared with someone recently that I was a bit embarrassed by my Evangelical past, and I was thinking about that this morning. Why embarrassed? Is that the same as shame? And so then, what value, what internalized message do I have that would make me feel so uncomfortable about having been in a conservative church? And am I ready to go there? I’ve tried to work this out before and been stymied, so I give it time, and then go back.

I value autonomy, which means the ability to direct one’s own thoughts and actions, but autonomy is never total autonomy, because we all have internalized schemas about how life works (or should work), and we inherit these schemas from our parents, our churches, schools, our billboards even. They work their way down into the very fiber of our beings and affect our thoughts and behaviors. So how autonomous can we be? So our awareness of how things might be influencing us is then very important, but you have to be willing to follow that little uncomfortable feeling down into the whole feeling and pay attention.

Maybe I need to just stop prefacing my past with my present chagrin. Maybe I need to stand up for the person I was, whether it was more alright to be born again in a small southern Minnesota town, and less alright to be born again in a metro area where if someone has Christian leanings, they are more likely to be part of a large church community that along with the tradition of faith, they value the tradition of diversity. I dunno. Even for me, following this trail into my head and heart and past gets murky. Sometimes, it just has to take its own sweet time, and then who knows, maybe in a good amount of time, I’ll get that ‘aha’ moment, and go, “So that’s why!”

So as you move into this new year, may you learn more about your controlling schemas, may you find more autonomy if that’s what you need, may you find more community if that’s what you need, be wary of group think, and you’ll be alright. And don’t open links even from friends that have no good title in the subject line.