My Christian Faith & Yoga
Meet Susan, Senior Pastor at Trinity Lutheran. Yoga is a spiritual practice that over the past eight years has led me deeper into my Christian faith. Yoga provides me one hour each day during the week for stillness, silence, and space to breathe. These times allow me to prayerfully meditate on redemption, forgiveness, faith, and my identity as God’s precious, beloved, baptized child. Without fail every time I leave the studio after a class, I feel lighter, calmer, more free. I have also described this deep sense of peace to friends and parishioners with these words, “It makes me not give a shit,” which for an uptight, high-strung person like me, is a very good thing.
This hour of meditation, breathing, and movement has become a time of prayer for me, a time for me to more fully accept and embrace God’s love for me and to see that every human being with whom I come in contact is also a beloved child of God. The practice of yoga draws me closer to Christ and to the mind of Christ. This time away from the burdens and demands and challenges of the world inspires me to want what Jesus wants and to love who Jesus loves.
My relationship with Greenville Yoga over the past eight years has sustained me in my ministry as the Senior Pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church, Greenville. This has been especially true over the past three years as the congregation I serve began making decisions to become a more inclusive, diverse, welcoming, and affirming congregation. At Trinity we believe that God loves, honors, values, and affirms ALL people – black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight and trans and bi, addicts, folks struggling with mental illness, disabilities, or homelessness. As it turns out this was, for some, a radical decision that was simply too much for them. My yoga practice helped me endure the hatred and vitriol that was directed toward me and my family during this time. My yoga practice sustained, strengthened, and encouraged me during the darkest days of my ministry. In this time of struggle, my yoga practice served to free my heart from anger, self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and deep hurt. Yoga was a healing balm, a place to find strength, love, grace, and wisdom. There is no doubt in my mind or heart that, without yoga and the kindness, grace, and love that I experienced from my teachers and fellow students, I would not have survived this dark time in my ministry. Without yoga, I would not have made it to this beautiful place in ministry of diversity and inclusion. The reality is that yoga is helping me to thrive!
Over the hours, weeks, months, and years, God has used yoga to transform my life by forming me into a more faithful Christian, a more understanding spouse, a more patient parent, a more authentic pastor, a more vulnerable leader, and a more gracious human being. Yoga continues to form me into a kinder, more gentle, less judging version of myself. Love, God’s love, lives at Greenville yoga. And for that I am so very grateful.
