If you’re tired, and weary of churchy stuff, but man you still love Jesus, welcome…
Why The Battle Cry? Why now? Who the heck even am I?
I’m a writer, a wife, a girl who left her home in the US at 18 and emigrated to England after a family breakdown. I paint and I cry and I talk too much. I have an MA in Creative Writing and a career teaching Academic Writing, which makes it hard to edit and even harder to read for pleasure. I teach and I learn and I study and I get bored. But honestly, we all know that we’re more than a sum of our parts.
What I will tell you is that I’m a hopeless C.S. Lewis fan, and I don’t know why, but every time Peter shouts “For Narnia, and for Aslan!” I tear up. I hear it like a declaration. Like it’s another way of saying, in the words of Samwise Gamgee, “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!” That “good,” from where I sit, has consistently remained Jesus. Throughout my beautiful, trauma-sprinkled, disappointing, thrilling, exhausting life, I have resisted and failed to see Jesus as anything other than good.
With every grief that has been thrown my way, my entire view of the world wobbles, but when I’ve brought my doubt and questions to God, unashamed of my sass, He has not baulked. He has not turned away. He has only shown me Himself, through the person of His Son, and I can only fall to my knees and cry as the rubble digs into my skin: “For Narnia! And for Aslan!”
This Substack is a place where writing is an act of worship and an invitation to commune as we acknowledge just how shitty our pain is, just how frustrating (and beautiful) church can be, and just how little we understand about God. But it’s also a place to be encouraged as we fight against our grief to say “But I STILL believe He is good.” A place to go back to scripture with fresh eyes and invite Him to teach us who He is in the tiny moments of our life: in the smile of a baby; in the wind through the trees; in the hug of a friend.
We write to reflect and to declare that Jesus is still worth our hope, even when all feels lost. Our life, as Christians, is a battle cry. We cry out that despite it all, He really is good, and our stories WILL, at the very last, affirm our weary shouts of joy.
