You can change your mind.

It's not too late.

As I have gotten older, I have been faced with situations that challenged the ways I was taught to see the world as a child. As a teenager, I saw faithful and loving gay and lesbian Christians, something I had been told was not possible. Through study and their living testimony, I changed my mind about what the Bible says about LGBTQ inclusion. Through my own experience, through science, and through a different understanding of the Bible, I came to change my mind about abortion. I obviously changed my mind about the ordination of women. I learned that a lot of the things that I’d been taught about the Bible did not line up with the ways that it was written, affecting not only my daily life but also things like American domestic and foreign policy. I had to learn a new way of being in the world, one that I did not plan for, one that I was not sure I even wanted.

Through all of these changes, my view of God also changed. I began to see God not as a capricious force who was trying to teach me a lesson, but as a loving presence who wants the best for me, grieves with me in my pain, and works with me to make beauty out of broken things. I found a renewed love of God and of the Bible, and space to center them in my life more than ever.

That is not to say that changing my mind was painless. It was destabilizing to learn to read the Bible in a different way. It was painful beyond words to lose our community and our support systems when we left the evangelical church. Even now, years later, I find myself dealing with painful feelings that bubble up from time to time. It hurt to have people think the worst of me. It hurt to feel alone in my convictions. It hurt to see pictures that we ought to have been included in. Mike and I made mistakes as we tried to find new ways of being in the world.

I do not wish to flatten our experience and say that we gained more than we lost, although on balance we probably did. I will say that the community and the support that we gained sustained us through those difficult times of grief and loss and rebuilding, and that is a beautiful gift.

I say all of this to say that I am no stranger to changing my mind. When I applied to divinity school, they asked me to identify my calling, and I said that I believe that my calling is to lifelong learning, a project that ensures that we must be curious and open-minded about the world, ready to take in new information and to let it shape us. A dangerous proposition, as wild and wondrous as God’s own Spirit as she moves through the world.

Maybe you don’t need a lecture from me on changing your mind, because you already did. Perhaps you have family members, people in your life you love very much, who you have lost because you changed your mind, and you do not see a way to bridge that gap. But think about who you were, and compare that to who you are now. If you could learn, and grow, and change, isn’t there a chance that they can, too?

Or perhaps you grew up like I did, and the world makes a certain amount of sense. But things keep happening that make you unsure. You wonder what you might lose if you took a step away from what you were taught. What ground might rumble under your feet if you ask that question that is in the back of your mind?

If the things we are seeing and hearing do not line up with the story we have been believing and living, the courageous thing to do is to try to figure out the truth, no matter the cost. Change is not painless. But refusing to change can also cost us something. It costs us to look at cruelty in the world and to ignore it. It costs us to look away from the suffering of children. It costs us when we elevate lies over the truth, when we eschew accountability, when we elevate some people at the expense of others, when we value power over compassion. I would argue that it harms our very souls.

At the end of Matilda: The Musical (The Movie), there is a song that Matilda and Miss Honey sing called “Holding My Hand.” Throughout the musical, the characters sing about how to change their story and that no one is going to fix things for them. As the movie concludes, they see how they helped one another be brave and create a better world for themselves and for one another.

You kicked down the doors for me
You helped me understand
There was another version of me
You were still holding my hand
You were just there for me (I will be brave)
Quietly taking a stand
Changing the end of my story for me

I have been wrong before, and I will be wrong again. I look back on the person that I was, and I am proud of both her courage and her mistakes. She has, at times, been brave to change her mind to try to do what she thought was right. She makes me feel like I can be brave today, in big and small ways. Only you can change your story, but if you don’t like what you are seeing and you are ready to speak out, I will stand with you. You can change your mind. It’s not too late.