English Lessons: The Crooked Path of Growing Toward Faith - Hardcover

Lucado, Andrea

 
9781601428950: English Lessons: The Crooked Path of Growing Toward Faith
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1601428952 ISBN 13: 9781601428950
Verlag: WaterBrook, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The Questions Would Teach Her More Than the Answers
 
It wasn’t long after arriving in Oxford for graduate school that twenty-two-year-old Andrea Lucado – preacher’s daughter from Texas - faced not only culture shock, a severe lack of coffee, but also some unexpected hard questions: Who am I? Who is God? Why do I believe what I believe?
 
“So many nights in Oxford, I felt like the details of my faiths were getting fuzzier. Nights turned restless with the questions and the thoughts. I questioned God’s existence and the doubt, it was getting into my bones….”
 
In this engaging memoir, Andrea speaks to all of us who wrestle with faith, doubt, and spiritual identity. Join Andrea as she navigates the Thames River, the Oxford Atheist Society, romance in ancient pubs—and a new perspective on who God is. As Andrea learned, sometimes it takes letting go of old ideas to discover lasting truth.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrea Lucado is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. The daughter of best-selling author and pastor Max Lucado, she inherited an obsession with words and their arrangement. She has a masters degree in English literature from Oxford-Brookes University and contributes regularly to online and print publications such as Relevant magazine and She Reads Truth. When she is not conducting interviews or writing stories, you can find her laughing with friends at a coffee shop or running in the Texas hill country.

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English Lesson
Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose,
A ribbon at a time . . . 1

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
—Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

Field Crickets

Church was not a part of my childhood. It was my childhood. Church, growing up—they twine themselves in my memories. They are the same color, indistinguishable. From my younger years, I remember more about the building itself than the words said within it. I remember the pews were classic, sturdy ones with rough blue cushions that fit nicely and would give you carpet burn if you crawled along them for too long. I remember the communion table from a vantage point underneath it, looking through the wooden slats and holding on to them, demanding my friends “let me out of jail.” I remember where the communion grape juice and yeast-free crackers were stored, in the closet tothe right of the stage in the auditorium. Sometimes we shoveled the crackers into our mouths while our parents had postchurch, prelunch conversations with fellow church members for what felt like forever.

Many Sundays, when I finished stealing the communion crackers, I was off to find my mom so I could tug at her, pull her arm in the direction of the door, and make it perfectly clear I was ready to leave. She was so good at not budging, standing her ground and remaining in conversation with whomever it was, as if a child were not yelling,“Mom! Mom! Mooom!” over and over at her side.

The church was built in the 1950s. Not beautiful, in a strange octagonal shape on a road called Fredericksburg. Home is what it felt like most of the time. So many people knew my name there. I didn’t know their names, but I wasn’t expected to. They heard my dad talk about me from the pulpit each week. I never heard their dads talk about them. Their faces were enough for me. Synonymous with the building itself. For me so many members existed only inside that building, as if they emerged from the walls on Sunday mornings and melted back into them afterward.

My neighborhood streets were the back hallways and classrooms of that octagonal-shaped building. My neighborhood friends were the daughters of elders and staff members. We got to know each other lingering outside our fathers’ offices, playing hide-and-seek. We did church-league basketball together and popped gum during Sunday school together. When we reached the sixth grade, we decided, together, that we had outgrown the church playground and developed the habit of forming circles to talk and gossip with our arms crossed, our weight on one foot, hips out to one side.

Church determined my social life as well as my weekly calendar. Sunday mornings were busy; therefore, Saturday night was early curfew night, a rule I openly hated and disagreed with until the day I left home for college. Sunday nights were for small-group gatherings called life groups. Wednesdays were for midweek service. Spring break was the youth ski trip to Colorado. Christmas was always spent at home because of Christmas Eve service. Summer was for church camp. This is what I knew. This is what deep down, beneath my teenage angst and complaining, I loved. I grew up in church and church grew down into me, as if my body housed a tree of church lessons whose limbs grew inside me and rooted my feet into the church’s ground itself.

This is why when people talk about how wonderful their childhood church experience was, or how terrible it was, it’s difficult for me to understand why they don’t simply say growing up was wonderful or growing up was terrible. How are those two things not twined for them like they are for me?

When your father has been a pastor at the same church in the same city for three decades, people come to recognize your family. At school, everyone knew I was a preacher’s daughter. At church, I was Max’s, the pastor’s daughter.

For some, faith and belief are learned over time, understood and accepted. For those like me, faith and belief have been written into your name. Your family’s profession is, in a way, Christianity. It makes “owning one’s faith” an impossible and confusing feat. For how could I own my last name more than I already do?

Considering my background, you can imagine how I relate to someone with a completely unchurched childhood. That person might as well be from a tiny island off the coast of nowhere near the edge of the universe. This is why when I found myself one day in the early fall of 2008 sitting in a classroom surrounded by tiny islands off the coasts of nowhere near the edge of the universe, I marveled. Nothing about us, our pasts, or our backgrounds braided together. We were from different countries and different continents with the common goal of achieving master’s degrees in English Literature. Now we have all returned to our respective origins, but then we had landed mere blocks from each other in a city called Oxford in a country called England.

Oxford. The place that makes you want to write books about it. It sucks in students from various nations on this earth, plops them together into graduating classes, and then either promptly shuttles them back home or loses them in its dark office corridors forever. I got out. Though it would have been magical to stay.

It was orientation day at Oxford Brookes University when I first met them all, the tiny islands. I left my parents waving at the bottom of a hill as I climbed up toward campus. Mom and Dad had flown over with me to help with the transition, and walking away from them that afternoon felt harder than it should have for a twenty-two-year-old. I left too early, worried I would be late, so I walked slowly as I neared the building.

I had been to Oxford before. As a junior in college, I participatedin a study-abroad program there. My three best friends and I made the journey from Abilene Christian University in West Texas all the way to England to spend four months living with fellow American students and traveling on the weekends. We clutched our Rick Steves guides and felt very grown up as we sat in pubs at the ripe, legal age of twenty. We drank espresso and red wine during a memorable weeklong trip to Italy. We learned how to buy train tickets and book hostels, and we often huddled together on our bunk beds and listed the things from home we longed for:...

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Verlag
WaterBrook
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601428952
ISBN 13 
9781601428950
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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