Lyz Lenz Quotes

I want to squeeze myself into this role assigned to me — doting wife, good mother, worshipper of the male voice, the male god, the muscular Jesus, that requires I only work in the children’s ministry, or go to women’s Bible studies.

And what does that matter anyway? I don’t want to be a pastor, do I? Why can’t I just fit in? Why can’t I just make it work? And I had for many years. My whole life. I know the moves and the language. I know how to brush my hair, wear my earrings, which books to read, and when to stay silent. I’ve spent my whole life doing it, believing that this was the cost of my life. The sacrifice of faith was to constantly feel the blisters of this ill-fitting religion. So why now?

Is being happy worth it? And the answer is absolutely, unequivocally, yes.

Pastor Travis and Steven did try to reach out with apologies for the misunderstandings, but I refused to speak to them. There was no misunderstanding. I thought I was a smart person, fully capable of studying the Bible and engaging with spirituality on my own, and they disagreed. When someone denies the very core of who you are, it’s hard to dialogue.

Ice diapers and mesh hospital underwear were the two things I did not know I would love until suddenly I did. Until I survived sixteen hours of labor and four hours of pushing and a few minutes of my doctor using the handheld vacuum apparatus to get that baby the fuck out of my vaginal canal, and my lower half felt like a Vegas hotel room after it had been trashed by a B-list rock band. (167)

In her book Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, Jennifer Sherman posits that in places lacking resources, morality is social capital. Appearing “good” unlocks jobs and community resources. But morality is determined in a fluid way; it’s just as much about fitting in and looking the part as it is about good behavior. Being white, wearing the right clothes (not too fancy, not too dirty), being male, being married, and having children were all part of the appearance of morality. But it wasn’t just about “good” behavior. John Sadler had stretched the law in an extra-legal way to get around the tax code. But this was looked on as an example of good behavior — he was conning the government after all. This made him smart and quick-witted, a cunning businessman and someone you would respect. Hell, he was a leader in his community.

am fascinated by this gap in work and perception. The answer, I think, lies in that space between the work husbands do and the work they think they do. What noticing is lost here? In her book The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that this work is upkeep, it is labor, and much like the work of home repair, it requires “noticing, acknowledging, and empathizing with the feelings of family members, patching up quarrels, and soothing hurt feelings.” In sum, the work of a home, of a life, is paying attention. Knowing that the dishwasher drain needs to be cleaned, that the counter is sticky, that the socks need to be matched: It’s the work of noticing that isn’t being done. And what is lost when the people who love us do not see our labor? It’s our happiness. —

It’s a racist narrative trick we always do when we talk about Christianity in America. When we say “Christian” we mean white people. When we talk about great Evangelists in American history, we mean Billy Graham, not Martin Luther King. King is a black activist. But Graham is allowed to be for all. This is the narrative trick being pulled when people tell me to disregard Chicago. It’s the erasure of othering. As if centuries of struggling together and against one another hasn’t left us all deeply and irrevocably changed.

Chicago’s story, like the story of St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Iowa City, is a Midwestern story. The story of the black Evangelical church is the story of the Evangelical church. These stories might not fit the narrative we want to tell about ourselves, but they are as essential to the meaning of who we are as any other story.

In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other’s pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It’s actually freedom. And it’s freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you.

We find significance in our sense of place. The way a New Yorker brags about the cost of a studio in Queens and the time he got punched on the subway, a Midwesterner brags about those two weeks the buses wouldn’t run because it was colder here than it was in the Arctic. Our pain is our significance. Our survival is our belonging.

One year after I moved out of my house and my marriage, I wrote an essay for Glamour titled “I’m a Great Cook. Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Making Dinner for a Man Again.” The article outlined how for eleven years I’d cooked meals for my husband and then for our children. I had liked cooking. I loved it even. I thought of food as my offerings of love. But as our marriage dragged on, cooking became less of a joy and more of an obligation. When my marriage ended, I stopped cooking. “I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as man walking through the door of his home with the expectation that something had been done for him,” I wrote. “I wanted to be free of cutting coupons and rolling dough and worrying about dinner times and feeding. I wanted to rest.

Mark longs for the days when his father was a farmer. Things were hard, but life was good. Easier somehow. He’s conveniently forgetting the farm crisis of the ’80s in order to justify his worldview. In reality, there was never a time when people didn’t engage in a relentless battle with the earth. There was never a time when it wasn’t hard to be a farmer, or a time when all families were good and moral and Christian. Even the belief in the wholesome rural community is ill-founded. According to Rural People and Communities in the Twenty-First Century, rural residents are “more likely to experience chronic or life-threatening illnesses.”5 They are more likely to have cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and mental illness. While rates of drug and alcohol use overall are slightly higher in metro areas, use among young people in rural areas is significantly higher than among their urban peers. Additionally, according to the Rural Health Information Hub, “A 2010 report to Congress from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF)6 states that the incidence for all categories of maltreatment was higher in rural counties than in urban counties, with rural children being [two] times more likely to experience harm or endangerment.”7

So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.

Perhaps the most toxic lie of modern marriage is that it creates a nuclear family unit whole and complete. But it is not whole, it is not complete, and the tasks of life are more than any one family can bear. We need help. We need help at a systemic and personal level. We need paid parental leave, we need affordable childcare, we need childcare tax credits, we need equal pay, and we need a community of friends and family who we can lean on.

In 2022, New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren decried a culture of divorcing for unhappiness, writing, “I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, ‘There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ” Life is, of course, not easy, and no one is going to like their partner every day. But Warren’s column makes misery in marriage sound like a necessary evil of being partnered with a man. It’s not. I refuse to believe that it has to be that way. I have two dear friends who I have known for over twenty years; we fight sometimes and disagree. Between us we’ve had three divorces and four marriages and three children. Never once have they felt like the enemy to me. And if it is that way, if the experience of being with a man means I hate him for at least a third of our marriage and he hates me, too, I’d rather not have it. No, thank you. There is no benefit to that martyrdom. To me, columns like Warren’s sound like the mentality that enables hazing rituals and cults where they sacrifice one of their own every fortnight. I was miserable, so you should be, too. I do not want that curse. I want happiness.

According to Gallup, church attendance hovered around 39 percent in the 1930s and 1940s.7 It increased in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged Americans everywhere to go to services. This was the sales pitch: America was now at war with communism, which was perpetuated by atheism. Americans could differentiate themselves from the godless hordes by exercising their freedom of religion. The call was taken up by religious leaders such as Billy Graham, and soon going to church was more than just something for the religious, it was part of being a good American.