<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">I've always wanted to write about my faith, but it's by far the biggest, scariest writing challenge for me. I'm at a tricky place: I can honestly say every aspect of my life is interwoven with my faith and belief system, yet at the same time, I am adverse to most things labeled or thought of as "Christian." Makes it kind of delicate to write about, without immediately turning off one crowd or pissing off the other.</span>

Forget delicacy, though. I'll risk pissing some people off (and maybe eventually turning others off too, but I hope not). Here are some of the things labeled or thought of as "Christian" that I tend to react against:

1. Contemporary "Christian music," "Christian art" and  <span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">"Christian fiction," especially the concept of Christian romance or end-of-time novels. (I don't think I need to explain the quotation marks.)</span>
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">2. The Christian </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">political </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">right and neo-conservatism.
3. The facade of happiness and wholeness that most Christians have perfected, particularly on Sunday morning.
4. Pro-abstinence and pro-life advocates who don't address the societal and personal problems that come with unwanted children and STDs.
5. Gay bashing from people who are sure homosexuality is a sin, and are also sure they personally don't sin in any comparable way.
6. General intolerance, and the idea that issues can be black and white.</span>

After my divorce, when I lost many of my Christian friends and was asked by the leaders of the church I was attending to not take communion, I knew first-hand why so many people hate (or at the very least, dismiss) people of faith and religious institutions. I had pretty much had it, and my soul shut down for a while.

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But then I met a few people from this place called New Covenant Fellowship. My most faithful Christian friend, Becca, was also bugging me insistently to leave the church that was at the heart of my stunted growth, and find a place where I could find myself and grow.

I finally put it all together and started going to New Covenant<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">, which in physical terms is a group of quirky, wonderful pilgrims who gather in a refurbished old warehouse building. </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">In that community and place, I've connected—in some cases reconnected, and in other cases discovered for the first time—with the things about God and my faith that have a deeply rooted hold on me. Here are just a few:</span>

1. When I study Jesus' life, it's clear to me that his way—of living and treating others and doing justice—is the best way.
2. God created me to be <span style="font-style: italic;">exactly</span> who I am, so my goal is not to struggle to change that essence, becoming an <span style="font-style: italic;">idea</span> of Christian perfection; my goal is to become even more fully who God created me to be.
3. God created us to be in community with one another, helping each other and learning about love and forgiveness along the way.
4. God truly loves me and wants to bless me, in spite of all the ways I screw up daily—I have evidence of his blessings everywhere I look.
5. There is important work to be done for God's kingdom, and even regular people like me—not a missionary in Africa or Haiti, but a writer and mom in East Central Illinois—are called on to find our own way to do the work.

This is what it comes down to: When I was very far from God and my faith a few years ago, my whole life was out of balance. Everything felt wrong or quickly turned sour, no matter how hard I tried to make it work. Since I've begun worshiping in this warehouse, I feel a foundational harmony in my life—in my relationships, in my waning sense of want and need and restlessness, and in my true self. Whether I'm at the bar or church or home.

Oddly enough, we have t-shirts that sum up this wholeness. They were made from the illustration on our wedding invitations. The shirts, which we gave to friends who helped with the wedding in all kinds of ways, are screen-printed with a continuous single-line drawing that first outlines the New Covenant building, where we were married; then Soma, the "lounge" where we ate and drank and danced after the wedding; and finally our house, where we lead our day-to-day lives, learning to love and forgive and live even more in the light.

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