I Am Not a Genre

And neither are you

Quick News! October Giveaway:

The very best part of my work is getting to write here and be in community with you. It’s what I love best. When you choose to become a paid subscriber, it allows me to set aside the time from other freelance work to write these letters/articles/columns (what should I call them? I still don’t know). So what I’m trying to say is, I really appreciate you. As a *small* way to say thank you, I’m hoping to begin making giveaways a more monthly occurrence!

This month, I’m going to do a random drawing of two paid subscribers to send a copy of Stuff I’d Only Tell God by Jennifer Dukes Lee. I’m interviewing her at the end of the month, and I’ve been doing the journal myself and finding it fun and *also* a little scary to be that honest 😳 I think you’ll love it!

Living a life that’s aware of even a modicum of God’s glory means to be in constant and dazzled awe. It means total liberation from whatever boxes the markets or the masses or the stereotypes suggest we be taped up inside. And it means being an actual living, breathing extension of God’s infinite essence.

Deidre Braley

The thing I like least about being a Christian is wearing the label.

(Not the label of Christ, mind you—if people were to get close to me and get a whiff of Christ, I’d be thrilled; they’d likely find me intriguing and vivacious and irresistible.)

But no, it’s the stereotype that goes with being called “Christian” that bothers me, and I’ll tell you why.

It feels like a pigeonhole. It feels like a word used to take believers and push their heads down into cardboard boxes. It feels like someone is busting out packing tape and sealing us into a three-dimensional enclosure when, in actuality, we are meant to exist in some fourth-dimension, where space and time and creation and souls all collide and intersect in a divine display of God’s glory.

Photo by jesse ramirez on Unsplash

The Genrefication of “Christian”

As a “Christian” and also a “creative,” I’m becoming increasingly indignant about the assumptions that seem to go with that. For starters, I feel a certain tension between the secular world and the Christian world. It’s as though, as creative people, we must belong to one or the other. We can write fiction that drops a well-placed expletive¹ or we can quote scripture, but we can’t do both.

But I don’t believe in this gaping crevice between the secular and nonsecular. Holiness, in fact, is all around us. Hints of Christ can show up in a greasy slice of pizza just as much as in a grand basilica. The Holy Spirit is not nearly as stuffy as we imagine. To pretend that he can’t be in the presence of the mundane or the profane is to also reject the fact that Jesus walked this earth and ate with sinners and tax collectors.