As a child I lived on the high plains of Central Montana.  The world was my playground.  The mountains lined the edge of the horizon and the sky became a friend to my imagination.  Wandering in this vast space was an every day adventure.   As long as my house did not get any smaller than about an inch in my vision, I could always find my way back home.  Home was not a place of confinement, but a place of nourishment at the beginning of the day and a resting place at the end of the day.

I also grew up in the church where God was love and Jesus was a friend.  This simple understanding worked well in a child’s mind.  I knew I was not alone on days when I was lonely under that big sky.  I had some words for why I did not feel swallowed up by the vastness of the world.

There are many chapters between simple childhood days, the disillusionment with my religion and then my process of coming home to myself rather than the institutional church.  This is in the writing process.  But I can say a few things.

As an adult who left Montana and struggled with Sunday school answers that did not make sense in the world where I chose to participate, I began to realize how landscape can effect how one sees the world and perhaps even how one understands God.  My childhood days of exploring under the Big Sky of Montana became a metaphor for self understanding as well as a comfort when I allowed my theology to become an adventure rather than a creed confined by the walls of a church building.  I was relentless in my longing to reconcile religion with reality and the church with creation.  I went on a spiritual journey, trusting I would find a resting place called home at the end of the day.  It became an adventure in which I was captivated by a God who existed in a large universe, marked by the stars, the moon and the sun rather than dogmas created around tables behind closed doors.   The relentless wrestling unearthed what I had worked so hard to bury:  a call to be a minister.  In the study for my MDiv Biblical history and interpretation set the stories free to serve as a touchstone to faith, rather than a tyrant of legalism.  As the Bible was set free from doctrine it became a library of stories and struggle that connected me to the wandering pilgrim that had resided deep in my bones since childhood.

This is my hermeneutic for Biblical interpretation and just a few connections regarding its formation.  None of the struggle took place in a vacuumn.  It began in the early 80′s.  While many Christians were being seduced by fundamentalism and gaining political control of morality, there were many of us challenging the ” narrow way.”   While the church I had been attending narrowed I began to wander and engage in the realities of advocating for women and children who had been abused.  Traditional language was burdensome; new language a necessity to new possibilities for faith’s meaning.   Currently my work as a minister is to find language that broadens the sweep of God’s grace; my work as a community advocate is  being expressed in developing educational programming for youth who live with the stresses of poverty.