Planning for the future is an important part of life. My decisions today affect my day tomorrow, so I better look ahead to make sure I do what I need to. But by creating a plan for tomorrow, I also create an image of what I can expect tomorrow to look like. I create an expectation. My expectations may be based off past experience or from what I’ve heard or may be completely made up. No matter where they came from, my expectations trick me into thinking that I have control over the future and that is what makes them so dangerous.

Planning for the future is necessary for me to reach my goals to the best of my ability but what use do expectations serve in my life? What good is a predisposition that is based on information totally separate from the situations I look forward to? When I expect an event, I am deciding how I will react before having a chance to experience it. Not only does this take away from the experience itself but takes away some level of freedom in my reaction. If I have decided to be bored, I’m going to be a little bored even if the event is more fun than I expected. Continue reading What Do You Expect? →

Editor’s Note: New Christian Woman is happy to welcome Tykah Echols to our management team. We’ve partnered with the Religion Department at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church to create an internship for young women. Tykah, now a freshman, started writing for us on a volunteer basis in high school and we are excited to have her step into this far more involved role of intern. On top of writing articles, she will be managing the Facebook page, helping with promotion, updating and managing the back-end of the blog, and who knows what else.

For this week’s article, We’ve asked Tykah to give us her impression of how her peers are relating to the New Christianity.

It would seem that my destiny is to marry a minister. I come from a long line of minister’s daughters who married a minister and based on the track record of my five older sisters it doesn’t look like our generation is going to be the one to end that streak. Out of the six of us girls, the four who are married are married to ministers while my two brothers pursued other forms of use than the clergy. It would seem that this religious gene is passed through the female line. So now it falls to myself and my other unmarried sister. Continue reading Introducing Our Intern →

I feel that it is my responsibility to learn to act rationally in spite of how I feel in any given situation. Feelings can be destructive if allowed free reign, yet feelings are the very essence of life. Feelings are a way of communicating what we feel is right or wrong in the world around us, they give us insight, and can be a way to communicate with the Lord.

I am working with my children and myself through a time of great change. We are moving from one city to another in South Africa (Durban to Cape Town 1600kms apart). We are leaving the home, friends and family, church community, and school we have known for the past 9 years. For me, it is another move, not as great as the last one from the UK to South Africa, but significant enough to unsettle us all.

My greatest challenge has been to ‘control’ how I feel about it in order to better support our children. First was denial (I didn’t want to go), then acknowledgement (this is going to happen no matter what), to acceptance (I’m okay with this let’s see where it goes), finally to trust. Trusting that it was okay to feel the way I did. They were healthy feelings and healthy for my children to see that I also felt uncertain at times. As long as I didn’t take out those emotions on other people, which happened in times of stress, that was not okay. Ultimately, I needed to trust my feelings and trust in the Lord to support us during this time of change. Continue reading Trusting My Feelings →

Throughout my childhood I was taught that The Lord has many names and that each of these is holy and represents something special about Him. But I’ve recently discovered that there is one of His names I have an aversion to hearing and, I suspect, there are others in the church with a similar handicap. Can you guess which name I mean?

Now my husband is a priest. Which means that a lot more thought and doctrinal research goes into the formation of his opinions than usually goes into mine. He is also a very intentional person. So when he starts to do something unusual, I know he is doing it on purpose. A few months ago, I started noticing him using the term “Jesus” a lot in his sermons and conversations. It felt odd to me—I would have said “The Lord” in those instances—but I assumed it had something to do with the doctorate program he is in at a Presbyterian school. Maybe he was trying to remind himself to use words that they would understand (to the old Christians, “Lord” refers to Jehovah). But recently he gave a (really fantastic) sermon where he used “Jesus” left and right and the General Church woman in me had to call him on it: What was he doing? Why wasn’t he using the acceptable term “The Lord”? “Jesus” sounded so trinitarian and old Christian! Continue reading And His Name Was Called Jesus →