Bekah McNeel
12 min read ⭑
“Love and belonging are not exchanged like goods. They are not transactional. They exist where my ego does not like to go—into realms of trust and grace. My ego likes transactional values because it can look at the ledger and know what it deserves. But at 38, I’m finally understanding that what I feel like I deserve is not nearly as nourishing as what I cannot earn.”
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
During my brief and ill-fated ministry career, I had one resounding success: I perfected my breakfast taco order. It’s the one thing that has not changed since 2008 when a college sophomore asked me to “disciple” her, which was campus ministry speak for getting food and talking about boys. Okay, and God. Sometimes we talked about God.
We met every week at a different taqueria. There are infinite taquerias in San Antonio where I grew up, started and ended my ministry career, and still live. We tested them by ordering the same two breakfast tacos at each one, to find our favorite. My order: two migas with avocado on corn.
For the breakfast taco uninitiated, I need to interpret that. Two corn tortilla tacos containing avocado slices and eggs scrambled with tortilla chips.
We eventually settled on El Milagrito down the street from her dorm. El Milagrito is unpretentious, occupying a multicolored, ad hoc building with covered porches.
It’s on every taco lover’s top 10 list, and no matter how many bougie new places want to add kale or soy products to a food originally developed for field workers (like all the best hand pies, kolaches, and other handheld protein-encased-in-carb dishes around the world), El Milagrito has stuck to the classics in all their greasy glory.
The restaurant is always packed with hungover college students, families with small children, and work crews. I have eaten El Milagrito migas with avocado on corn almost weekly for 14 years. I hosted one of my wedding week events there. I squeezed between the crowded Saturday morning tables as my pregnant belly grew and grew. Even though a Portlandia-style, influencer-friendly brunch village has popped up around it, El Milagrito is where I go to brunch with the friends who know.
El Milagrito tacos reassure me that I don’t have to be trendy or fancy and that there’s an appeal to being unpretentious, consistent, and real.
Louis Hansel; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
I got into wooden spoon carving because my pastor told me that if you work with your mind you should rest with your hands. I needed something so inefficient and pointless there would be no way I could turn it into my job. So I took a wood carving class, and soon felt drawn to kitchen utensils. Serving spoons in particular, though the item I used the most at this phase in my life is the birch peanut butter spreader I carved during a class in Minnesota.
Spoon carving is my meditation on releasing perfectionism. There is no reason, no way to justify getting over-invested in my wooden spoons. They are not keeping anyone alive, not sustaining my livelihood. They are never going to be as glorious as the ones made by artisan craftspeople I follow on Instagram.
I’ve decided to let them always feel amateur and quirky. Not because pursuing beauty is bad—it’s not—but because I need somewhere to underachieve. Even as I’ve discovered new techniques that make for prettier finishes and finer curves, I don’t let myself try to copy other spoons to compare them.
Weening myself off competitive comparison and finding my worth in achievement has been really hard because, until I took up carving, I demanded that everything in my life have an eternal purpose. To earn a spot on my calendar, things had to hold existential value (by my rules), so it was hard to justify doing any of those things less than perfectly. I’d set myself up to obsess. Spoon carving has been my tutor in the difference between doing something well and joyfully, and doing something perfectly.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
Why was I editing that paper at 2 a.m. while breastfeeding a 2-week-old? Because the author “valued my input.”
I’m such a sucker for being valued. Outright praise makes me feel awkward and weird, but if you show me that you see worth in my work or my insight, if you ask for my advice and then act on it, I’m yours to manipulate. So yes, my ego is my weakness. How banal, right?
It’s a common weakness, but it’s gotten me into some unique pickles, particularly in the church, where “valuing your talent” is code for “asking you for unpaid labor.” And I have done a lot of unpaid labor. Turns out “value” really just means “covet” in some contexts. I also thought that what I was getting in return was belonging, a place in the community, respect, and security. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’m learning that when people want your thoughts or your product, it is a transaction, fulfilled when it’s done. Nothing wrong with that. I just have to make sure I’m also part of the transaction and that I’m getting what I need out of it before I’m sent on my way.
Love and belonging, on the other hand, are not exchanged like goods. They are not transactional. They exist where my ego does not like to go—into realms of trust and grace. My ego likes transactional values because it can look at the ledger and know what it deserves. But at 38, I’m finally understanding that what I feel like I deserve is not nearly as nourishing as what I cannot earn. But I’m still struggling to reorient my time and energy toward love.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
My own scorched-earth path out of ministry and into journalism has been painful, anxious, and fraught, but in many ways, it’s more settled now. Not complete, but peaceful. For years, I struggled to reconcile the decade I had “wasted” on ministry when I could have been hustling and building my portfolio.
I always wanted to write books—I love a meaty, thought-filled project—and I thought the wasted ministry decade and then having kids early in my journalism career had slowed me down too much to ever hit that high note in my career.
Turns out, both the ministry career and the disruption of having and raising kids were exactly what led to my first book. I wrote my first book, Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide For Parents Questioning Their Faith, because while I was working through the demons of my fundamentalist upbringing (not literal demons—we were PCA), I met so many people along that road.
We had walked away from churches and ministries, started new journeys, and started families, but we were still mired in old ways of thinking, in resentment and confusion. We wanted better for our kids, but we weren’t sure whether “better” and “different” were synonyms.
Writing the book, and talking about it, has helped me see the Spirit’s presence in my own journey, tying up loose ends, and using the charred bits.
The same Spirit showed up again and again for others during the discussions I had while doing interviews for the book as well as every time I tell someone about the finished product.
They immediately tell me their story, and together, we can make sense of what can seem like a really disjointed journey.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
The Holy Spirit is the connection-maker for me. I feel the Spirit working when I can synthesize ideas or when I see a theme emerge from what should be two disparate stories. When someone hears my story, or one of the stories in my writing and says, “I thought I was the only one!” Or when they find a possible solution to something they had been wrestling with. That’s when I feel the Spirit at work.
Even though my work is creative, I rarely feel the Spirit drawing me towardex nihilocreation as often as I feel him connecting me to where God is in the things already around me. Those connections between ideas, stories, people, or even just physical things help me see and touch God in ways that I cannot, even when I’m meditating or praying directly to God.
When God feels absent, I go into nature, read fiction, or listen to “secular” music. I don’t keep screaming into the void; I surround myself with sensory input and let the connection between thoughts and things emerge. There’s God. In the metaphors and the resonance. In the way the beat of a song makes me feel brave. In the way the river slowly smooths the rocks, just like my kids are smoothing me into a more gentle person. In two people who both realized they were in relationships built on performance and now have clues to share with each other about how to find belonging. That connection-making fuels my work.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So, spill it, which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?
I grew up with a very prescriptive spiritual practice in which devotions were best done every day—without fail—in the morning, in the silence, and with a Bible in one hand and a journal in the other. Even prayer followed a format. Since then, I’ve been desperate for a spiritual practice more responsive to my personhood. I wanted to know if God would show up in my messy, inconsistent, changing inner life.
So my spiritual practice right now is pulling from a variety of places, utilizing a lot of different traditions. But the common thread—and maybe my number one spiritual tool right now—is a question: Where are we?
I got the idea from my kids’ emotions chart, borrowed from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. We have a chart in our house with four quadrants—blue for sad, red for mad, green for calm, and yellow for happy—and in each quadrant are tons of words that might further describe their feelings.
Each person in the family has a pin that we place ourselves. During intense interactions or confusing moments, it helps to pinpoint what we’re feeling on the chart so that we can respond to each other accordingly.
So before I pick up a dynamic equivalence translation of the Bible, pop in AirPods for some white noise, go for my walk, put on my boxing gloves, or start journaling, I ask myself, “Where are we?” I don’t try to force myself to be where I’m not, even if that means putting off a conversation with God until later.
If my mind is racing too fast, then I trust God to guide my work until I can get to a place where I can focus. If I am full of anxiety about the work I need to get done, meditating is actually going to be futile, so I might journal. If I’m devastated by news, I go for a walk. Being responsive to where I am has both made my spiritual practice more effective and reminded me that God is responsive to my emotions. I ask myself where I am so that God can meet me there.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three resources that have impacted you?
No matter how far I get from my Reformed upbringing, I will always love the Indelible Grace hymnal created by RUF at Belmont. I love their music and I love old hymns, even the ones I now find theologically suspect. The music is beautiful, updated with either bluesy or folk arrangements. They have a website with the hymn index on it where people can listen, download, and more: hymnbook.igracemusic.com/hymns.
I will be forever grateful for the work of Rachel Held Evans. Her blog gave me the courage to ask hard questions. And although that eventually led to the dissolution of my ministry career, I felt like I had a big sister walking with me on the way out. I often tell people I was sprinting out of the church and she caught me by the collar and told me to smoke a cigarette and sit still for a minute.
Her books, which I read a little later, continue to be gentle, reassuring voices as I perpetually deconstruct, reconstruct, ask, and answer. Searching for Sunday and Inspired are two of my favorites. I listened to the audiobook of Searching for Sunday, which she reads, and it was like the best coffee date with a new friend ever.
Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ is another book that pretty radically changed the way I think about God and the world God is in. I feel like that book, which makes the argument that God is in all and that Christ’s work was necessarily universal in scope, pushed me from the angry, incoherent phase of my journey out of fundamentalism and into my more joyful, build-something-new phase. I don’t even know if I fully understood (or fully understand!) every single point he makes in the book, but it was an invitation to think about faith differently, and it came at a moment when it felt like doing so was going to leave me in the wilderness.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season—and tell us what it’s done for you.
The three resources that are currently enriching my faith life are: the You Have Permission podcast with Dan Koch, the book If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? by Angela N. Parker, and the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.
Dan’s podcast basically goes through every doctrine I’d been taught not to question and presents different views from sincere people. He covers everything from abortion to penal substitution to aliens. It’s thought provoking and freeing. He’s progressive, but he’s not beating up on conservatives. The conversations are earnest and seeking.
Dr. Parker’s book makes the case that for us to move away from oppressive uses of the Bible, we have to open up biblical interpretation to include the experiences of oppressed groups.
She’s making a great argument for opening up who can participate in translation, and how experience plays a role in translation. The gatekeeping around Scripture and who can interpret it has dried out my faith, I think, and Dr. Parker, as promised by the title, breathed some new life into it for me.
That leads me to my third resource, the First Nations Version, which, in addition to being an acknowledgment of those communities’ place in the family of God, also rephrases familiar passages in a way that helps me come to them almost as if for the first time, something I’ve been desperate to do. Similar to The Message, it breaks me out of what I’ve been taught to assume the Bible is saying, and instead consider what else it might be saying.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So, give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Right now, I’m getting text messages and emails that copies of my first book are hitting doorsteps and mailboxes. It’s a dream come true, and I’m also a nervous wreck.
The release of control is part of communication. But in book writing you get so long to perfect what you want to say, and you know that it will be transformed in a moment when the reader takes it in. They are the partners in communication, and what they get from it is as important as what I put into it. So it feels like the final step of the book’s creation is happening. I’m both excited and terrified!
Book number two is in the works. It’s a tougher subject—my first one was largely personal while my second one will be issue driven.
So I’m slogging through the writer’s cycle of feeling bold, then perplexed, then doubting, then feeling like a total imposter, and then pushing forward anyway until something happens that emboldens me again. Say a prayer for my husband, who never knows if he’s coming home to Truman Capote or Woody Allen.
I would love to keep writing books forever. I love the work. Of course, part of that work is talking to people about their stories and staying engaged with current events, so I can’t imagine that I’ll ever give up journalism completely. The dream is to keep getting stories that are more and more focused on things I like to think about. As much as I wish that were fine dining and high fashion, it’s actually the intersection between religion and politics.
God loves his people—radically and unconditionally—but he knows how imperfect they are. And sadly, it’s all too easy to get hurt or marginalized by the very people God calls to represent him in this world.
The question is, how do we respond to that hurt? And to those questions and doubts that rise up as a result?
Jesus offers us open arms—no matter how disillusioned we feel. He says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30, ESV).
Bekah McNeel is a journalist, wife, and mother of two. Her work has appeared in Christianity Today, Sojourners, Relevant, The Texas Tribune, ESPN’s Andscape, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Public Radio, and elsewhere. In addition to pieces about parenting, she writes about education, immigration, and faith communities as well as the occasional op-ed calling the American evangelical church to lay down its idols of White supremacy and patriarchy. You can find her on Twitter (@BekahMcneel), Instagram (@wanderbekah), and her website (bekahmcneel.com).
