Yo Soy Kristy

Reflections On Faith From Liminal Spaces

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Posted on July 7, 2013

“Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.” – Buechner Next week, my husband Eric and I will close out a long season on staff with a ministry called Cru. When I started serving with them as a single woman right out of college, I had dreams of being a missionary to China. Then I met Eric who had a call from God to go to Central Asia so I quickly and joyfully changed my plans. A year after we married, we had the privilege of moving to that beautifully forgotten part of the world. It is still the place I love most that we’ve ever lived. A few short months after moving there, though, we…

The Prophets and Mission

Posted on July 6, 2013

“The prophets saw themselves as God’s gift to God’s people.” -Arthur Glasser I’ve always thought the role of a prophet was a heartbreaking role. All I have to do is read the first three chapters of Ezekiel to see what a devastatingly sad lot in life he had. I’ve been taking a class on missions, and as a woman who has been serving as a missionary since her early 20’s, the class has felt relevant to me. What’s been most significant has been to see God as a missionary God through the whole Old Testament as well as the New. Reading the entirety of Scripture through the lens of “Missio Dei” has helped give me eyes to see that the Lord has always been…

Humanity’s Amnesia

Posted on June 11, 2013

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in the living room watching tv. My grandfather sat across from me, staring at me strangely. Occasionally, he would ask me questions like, “Are you lost?” or ” Do you need to go home now?” I was only 8 or 9 at the time, and I mostly just thought he was teasing me. I remember he finally got up and left me alone while he wandered the neighborhood asking neighbors if they had lost a little girl. It was shortly after this that our family learned that my grandfather had Alzheimers. It was really frightening for me growing up to watch someone I loved slowly lose his memory. It impacted me and definitely left a…

Submission in Leadership

Posted on May 28, 2013

“Courage is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.” Brene Brown shared this definition in her now famous TED talk on The Power Of Vulnerability . When I first listened to her share this a few years ago, it captured my attention and drew me in to wanting to see how this applied to my ministry within the Latino community. But thinking about vulnerability in leadership is still a fairly new idea to me. As a woman and an ethnic minority that’s served in ministry for the last decade in a majority culture context, what I’ve noticed most is that ethnic minorities usually feel the need to prove themselves in leadership roles that are typically filled by majority culture…

Grieving to Maintain a Soft Heart

Posted on May 5, 2013

“Do you have any identification? Her tone was intimidating. A couple of other ministers and I were on a new campus that morning wanting to get to know the area and maybe meet some people. But as soon as we stepped out of our car to walk towards the college, campus police had stopped us. I found myself in front of a woman who seemed bent on letting me know she had a lot of power and that I looked like quite the problem. “You look suspicious to me,” she continued and told us all that she was chief of campus security and she had major issues with us. Me, suspicious? I thought. I felt more like a lost freshman than a danger to…

To Be Known

Posted on April 15, 2013

I can remember pouring water over the priest’s hands as he prepared the Eucharist. It was one of the many little acts I did as an altar girl for our Catholic church. I remember each Sunday after spending the whole mass next to my priest, thinking he must be so close to God. Why does he seem so far away from me? As a kid, I really wanted my priest to know me. Yet at every interaction, he always seemed so deep in thought. Deep in reflection. Far away from me, the little girl right next to him at the altar on Sundays. So one day when the whole congregation was praying at the end of mass, there I was standing next to him…

Our Lives Are Full of Holy Saturdays

Posted on March 31, 2013

“Our lives are full of Holy Saturday experiences.” That phrase struck a chord with me as we sat in our church’s Holy Saturday service. The congregation was invited to stop and reflect on the space between Good Friday and Easter. The space between death and life, loss and hope. It was meaningful as we sat in the darkness with all the lights off in the room. The contemplation was tangible as we listened to scripture read about Joseph wrapping the body of Jesus and placing him in the tomb. In the midst of this, though, there was one sound that did invade the somber moment. It was the loud snoring of my daughter sleeping in my arms. She walked into the service earlier smiling,…

Estoy Cansada: Reflections on my own Reconciliation Blues

Posted on March 14, 2013

“I’m tired of walking on egg shells with ethnic minorities. I don’t ever do anything right.” “As a majority culture person, I never feel like I’m enough in ethnic minority ministry.” “Im tired of talking about racial reconciliation, justice, and power. Can’t we all just love one another and that be enough?” “I’m tired of being viewed as the angry ethnic minority.” “Working at relationships with majority culture ministers is just too hard. I’m done trying.” “Bringing up pain in my cross cultural relationships typically gets me labeled as ‘the problem’. I don’t want to be the problem anymore.” As majority culture or ethnic minority ministers, have you ever said any of these things or felt these things in your cross cultural relationships? I’ve…

Word Became Flesh

Posted on March 9, 2013

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the Father, full of grace and truth” John 1:14 I once had a college minister tell me, “How could we as humans have known God if he had not moved towards us, put on flesh, and showed us who he was in Jesus?” It was this verse and experience that came to mind this week as I spent some time with a group of Latino ministers who desire to raise up the next generation of leaders on the college campus. I was so inspired by them, was moved by their faith, and was given a picture of the kind of person I…

Listening and Seeing

Posted on February 26, 2013

In my previous post I shared what has been disturbing me lately about vision and how we leaders treat it when things look like they are dying in our midst. So, in light of that, if listening and “seeing” are indespensable in keeping us from falling into selling our people junk food vision, how do we cultivate that in our ministries and lives? I think, obviously, we need to nurture the deeply spiritual in us. Are we listening to God’s voice in our life? Are we growing in being able to discern his movement in us? But beyond listening to God in the inner places of our life, are we listening to the voice of the people we are meant to be serving too?…