Not So Pinterest Perfect

I am a mess.

I’ll take “This is not news” for 500, Alex.

But for real, though, my life is absolute chaos.

I run between being a full-time seminary student, a part-time web designer, a writer, a wife, a mom-to-be, and what feels like eight million other things during every moment of my life. And I have a feeling this isn’t exceptional–most of you probably feel the same way.

And yet, for some inconceivable notion, I have a Pinterest account.

Why? WHY?!? Why do SO MANY of us think this is a good idea? Raise your hand if you have a Pinterest account, but you haven’t touched it in months because instead of being all crafty and creative like you thought you’d be, you’re just left feeling like you do absolutely nothing with your time.

*Raises hand*

I even have a theology board on Pinterest. I intended to fill it with meaningful quotes from brilliant theologians and find a way to bridge the gap between my highly abstract theological mind games and my much more concrete compulsive social media habit. Instead, this board contains a handful of halfheartedly pinned Rumi quotes pasted over perfectly toned white women doing yoga and some stupid theology jokes.

Not exactly the intended result.

It’s strangely fitting, though. My theology isn’t pretty. It’s not even logical, most of the time. I’m making it up as I go, trying to work out a new hermeneutic every time I’m confronted with a new spiritual reality. Any paper I write that’s more than eight or so pages probably doesn’t have a consistent theological arc from beginning to end. I am the paragon of inconsistency.

In spite of this, my messy theology seems to work. It doesn’t fit any tradition’s doctrinal statements, and it’s almost certainly heretical. As I haven’t been hit by lightning yet, I have to assume that the Divine has seen worse.

As Womanist theologian par excellence (who I have the incredible benefit of having as a professor), Alika Galloway, says, “It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to work.”

And that much, it at least appears to do.

Maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world if we don’t know what we believe. If it draws us closer to the Divine, to ourselves, and to the rest of Creation, if it causes us to keep asking difficult questions, if it causes for love to grow, then perhaps it’s good enough.