The gift of the coattails

Hi friends,

I used to hear preachers speak with disdain about “riding the coattails” of someone else’s faith. Like, “you have to make this thing your OWN.” Especially in those teen years, those years of acquiring fires and manias and whatnot, we weren’t supposed to rely on our parents or grandparents or community’s faith. It had to be our own, mine mine mine, our little individual choices and passions and zealous love and revelations. Like it started and ended and depended on us.

What a dangerous thing, a sad thing.

I can see the seed of what they meant by it, if I’m generous, but honestly, what does that even mean? How can you make any of *this* an individual exercise that depends entirely on your ability to keep faith and love and hope alive or healthy? Have you seen the world lately?

I’ve had long seasons of doubt, of darkness, of despair. And then? That’s when I learned that this whole thing, our whole lives really, are meant to be the group project, as communal as a communal God. Then I finally relied on the ancient believers who left a trail of breadcrumbs that became a feast, as well as the pals with a holy hunch there is always more love available.

I didn’t believe but I believed that they did and somehow that kept the light on long enough for something to flicker in me again.

I genuinely hope my kids find, in my inexplicable deep faith, a glimpse of Love that holds like this, too.

I hope total strangers rest in the conviction that on the days they don’t believe, somewhere, out there, is someone like me up with the dawn and praying for them.

I hope that when prayer makes no sense you can borrow words from the ancestors and the cloud of witnesses.

I hope when you lose grip on hope that there is comfort in knowing someone still has a tail end of it.

Somewhere.

Maybe it was never meant to be just “our own.” That sounds as lonely as it is unhealthy. Maybe this experience of loving and being loved by God was always meant to be ours. Cling to the coattails like the gift they were meant to be.

If you are weary and lonely and tossed to and fro, you could at least set down shame and isolation on top