Dear, Reader,

I was at a scrapbook retreat this past weekend. For those of you who don’t know, you spend a weekend with a bunch of other women, cropping pictures, adding embellishments and journal boxes, and eating lots of snacks. It’s a lovely little creative getaway.

Many of the ladies there practice some sort of faith. They’re a mix of evangelical Protestants and Catholics. I am neither, but one of them asked if it’d be ok if we prayed together before meals. I appreciated the question and didn’t object. Last year when we prayed before meals, I usually made myself scarce because it rubbed me the wrong way. This year, it felt more like…ok, that’s not for me, but that’s cool. Do your thing.

It’s just an interesting experience. I’ve intentionally decided to not be part of that world anymore and yet, I love my friends and family who still choose it.

Last year, this prayer time had power over me. Not in a hugely dramatic way. No one was forcing me to believe the same things, but it made me uncomfortable to the point where I left the table.

This year, they still prayed before meals. But it didn’t land with the same weight. I wouldn’t say that I became more tolerant. That implies I was gritting my teeth just to make it through. I was just less activated. The discomfort still showed up a little, but I could sit there quietly. Nothing about these ladies’ approach changed. Something about mine did though.

Leaving evangelicalism is not as clean as “I don’t believe this anymore, so we can’t be close.” That’s the exact binary that I grew up believing - you’re either in agreement or you’re a threat - and I don’t want to unintentionally recreate that dynamic. Relationships are messier than that. It’s an ongoing process to decide what my capacity is within said relationships at any given moment.

The real power move isn’t leaving. Anyone can leave. The harder thing (and the thing I want to keep getting better at) is staying in the room with people who believe/think/feel differently than I do, and finding the parts where we still overlap. At our core, we’re a lot more similar than the arbitrary lines we’ve drawn around ourselves.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you stay at tables that are abusive or that cost you your mental health. What I’m saying is that perhaps there are some tables we’ve written off as uncomfortable but not unsafe. And perhaps there’s more capacity for us all to sit in that category together than we thought.

Here’s the question I’m asking myself lately and I’ll ask it of you too. Where in your life are you still considering “in” or “out” as the only two options? What would be the cost (and conversely, the benefit) of sitting a little longer with someone at the “uncomfortable but not unsafe” table?

With you in the unraveling,

~Kara

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