sometimes there is no start over/try again

 

my very good friend Pat explained that the Coptic church

does Holy Communion like this author describes and dismisses. 

***

I am in too much grief to try rewrite everything I wrote

and too sensative to how I felt this book, 

without meanning to,

automatically excluded me on many levels.

***

I learned a lot from it.

But I am too heartsick over how it excluded what is 

dearest to my heart and also excluded me because of 

my own lived experience and how my brain works.

***

So the blog post I wrote I reverted to draft and am simply 

not going to post it again.

I know it was already picked up by some places but 

I just can't fix what I wrote and would rather just have this in it's place.

***

So I am just going to say the main question again, 

which is how can we talk to each other without hurting the other

or excluding them?

Does one's story have to mean that another story is excluded?

***

I often think of God as the One who knows all our stories.

All I can say is that He is LOVE and what we are looking for is found 

in Christ, in the Holy Trinity.

***

In the short pages of this particular book I found much to love, I felt

I learned a lot.  But the gentleness that I associate with her culture,

that I experienced in my own life by Christians form this country,

the place of her Mother's birth, 

I found lacking by her very wounds from which she learned to say

I matter too.  God loves me too.

But in so doing,

she failed to include others who God loves as being just as 

important to God and that God never leaves anyone.

So much of this book was very on point but the heartache of being

so easily dismissed in my own life and experience,

which she did but did not mean to do,

is too painful to try to fix the blog post that I wrote about it first

so I took it down because sometimes,

I can't fix what I wrote or the reality of my experience,

but I am greatful that my friend Pat explained quickly her own and that 

this author may have gone to a Coptic Church,

which also refers to itself as the Coptic OrthodoxChurch but is (sadly) seperate from

the Orthodox church I am in; 

the church splits, esp the early ones, are perhaps the most painful

of all for me.  

I can say that I know amazing stories from Coptic Christians I have met

personally and know of the miracles that God has done for so many of them. 

***

I can say one thing that I said before:

God is not bound.

I know and have seen holiness in many walks of life and from

people in all sorts of Christian traditions and churches.

***

I know my choice to become Orthdoox and to stay Orthodox

has not been done lightly or without suffering.

***

It's just strange when an author's lived experince of being excluded 

and bullied because of her own differentness meant that parts of her book

hurt me because I was excluded and felt dismissed, as if

I was a story not worth being read or told.

***

What I am working on, in my own writing project,

is very much about this and looking at questions of faith and 

our fractured profoundly confused society and what 

it means to be a traditional Christian in what is becoming a very 

unfamiliar world to so many of us.

***

I can tell I am struggling.

It's nearly 1 AM and I can't sleep and just hope

I am not becoming physically ill again.

***

May God have mercy on us.