Not the God I Know - Esther Nissen

At 26, Esther's life appeared to be perfectly on-track: married to her college sweetheart, gainfully employed, and nestled into a quintessentially suburban home. She was cruising along on the conveyor belt toward her seemingly inevitable happiness when she found herself admitting at brunch that if she continued on her current trajectory, she, like Sylvia Plath before her, would stick her head in an oven.

This is the story of how she found herself at that table, crashing quietly toward rock bottom, slowly realizing she had lost herself somewhere along the way. Yet it is also the deeply hopeful story how God used her journey of divorce to teach her what it means to be saved - not in a "get-saved-from-hell-and-go-to-heaven-when-you-die" kind of way, but in the gritty, messy, too-often-painful, seemingly-nonsensical right-now-ness of life. She uses the story of her divorce to paint a vision of salvation as an intimately personal restoration to what Esther calls Garden Self - the naked and unashamed person God created each of us to be.

This is a story of contextualized theology - of how the heady theological concept of soteriology stepped down out of the theological ether, clothed itself in the flesh of her story, and restored her to herself, even as she walked through the painfully real mess of this life.

We are all are chasing the ability to live as our freest, most authentic selves. What is unique to Esther's story, and the theological reflection woven throughout, is her insistence that Christians do not have to leave their faith in order to find themselves, nor do they have to find freedom in spite of their faith. Rather, she insists that becoming the person God intended us to be and living in shameless freedom as that person is in fact the journey of salvation. In telling this story, Esther is inviting each of us into a terrifying and thrilling new journey of faith, one that allows each of us to be exactly who we were created to be - right here, right now.