A WOMAN OF THE WEST. THAT COMES WITH A RESPONSIBILITY. (Danish in the comments)
I am a woman of the West. I am Christian. I go to church most Sundays. I am a normal, healthy woman with the values we built Western civilization on.
But I am not “normal” in the way where I have followed the flock. I am not normal in the way where I took what the media and the state told us was best and healthiest for the human being, and simply believed it.
In that way, I have strayed from the norm. I never sat in my stroller. I pushed it myself. I folded my hands for the first time when I was 6-7 years old. Without anyone having taught me.
18 years ago I stepped out of the hamster wheel and started my own business in the middle of a financial crisis, where everyone around me said I should stick to my good, safe job and my good salary. And it worked. With success.
I wrote seven books over time. Five about mental and physical health. The latest two about the fire. One about living with what burns inside you, and daring to follow it all the way, the calling, the direction, the courage to go your own way. The other about the fire in love, about how you keep it alive for a whole lifetime, not letting it die out, but tending it as one of the most sacred things you have.
As an early teenager I drifted away from my natural connection to God. My parents divorced. I cut the connection to my father, and to “my Father”. In grief that my safe and free world was torn apart.
I found my way back. Over time I formed the bonds again, first to the one father, then to the other. I forgave. Myself too. And found my way home again.
And then I healed, the way you do when you surrender and come home.
Today I stand at a place in life with a man at my side for twenty years, where it has never been better. We build. Together. We create content, we speak, we take a stand. We stand for something, and we say it out loud. We train the body, we tend the mind, we nourish the connection between us, and we live our faith as a daily, living relationship with God. Not a ritual. A relationship.
And together we built The Word. A place where faith is worn openly. Where scripture is a confession you carry out into the world, not something you hide away. The Word, worn on the body. Said out loud. Stood by.
And it all connects. All of it connects. The health in the body, the health in the mind, the fire in the heart, the fire between two people, the homecoming to God. It is the same building. The same direction. The Word is simply where it becomes something you can put on and walk out with.
The cross is not decoration to me. It is a position. A place where I stand.
And let me say it as it is.
It is not a glamorous job to stand up and say it out loud. The things we, in our time, are hated by many for saying. You get called names. You lose people. You receive messages and threats you would not wish on your worst enemy. There is no applause that comes with it, and certainly no safety.
But it is not about us.
It is about what we were given, and what we owe to pass on. The freedom. The civilization. The faith. The right to fold your hands and speak your mind, without looking over your shoulder. It is not something we have earned. It is something we have inherited. And an inheritance comes with a bill.
My father fled on foot through Europe during the revolution of 1956 as a 17 year old, after taking part in the people’s uprising, to reach a free country, where he meet my Danish mother and became a prime example of integration.
What they fought against was communism. He got away, even though they were betrayed. 3,000 others did not. Thousands were imprisoned afterward, hundreds executed. Taken in the night, sentenced in swift trials, gone.
Communism does not exist in the same form in Europe today. But the impulse does. The urge to let the state and the flock decide what a human being may think, say and believe. It returns every time someone is arrested for a post, loses their job over an opinion, or stays silent out of fear of what it costs to speak the truth out loud. It is not tanks. Not yet. But it is the same direction.
What he walked for, I am paying off now. With my voice. With my cross. With staying on my feet, when it would be easier to sit down.
So to you, reading along.
You do not have to be “normal” in the way the flock calls normal. You do not have to wait for permission.
You are allowed to push your own stroller. You are allowed to fold your hands. You are allowed to come home, no matter how far you have drifted, and no matter how long ago it was.
The fire is not something you should put out. It is something you should tend. In your heart. In your love. In your faith.
Stand by what you stand for. Say it out loud. Wear it openly.
That is what The Word is about (take a tour on the comment section). And it is why we build, every single day. From the moment we get up, to the moment we go to bed.❤️🔥🪽✝️