What it’s like to be the girl with tattoos at church

Image cred: Pinterest

Everyone has tattoos.

It’s not about whether it’s right or wrong or what you believe. It’s about what is normal to you.

And for me, it was always normal.

Normal to think that everyone smokes. Everyone does drugs. Everyone gets divorced. Everyone drinks. Everyone has sex before marriage. I would have said those things and meant them before I was 20 years old. Maybe my  normal was different than yours. Or maybe it was the same.

I always thought church was boring, judgmental, lots of rules and nothing real. The first time I didn’t was when my even-crazier-than-I-was best friend got saved and started being completely-out-of-this-world crazy. Like saying Jesus talked to her crazy and turning her whole life around for the better crazy. And I loved everything about the way she talked and the way she bought her first Bible and the way she flushed her cigarettes down the drain and conquered her addictions and began to really live.

A few months later, I drove 8 hours to see her so she could help me buy a Bible of my own and pretty soon after that I started really going to Church for the first time in my life.

I made friends with the BEST group of people. We were all college students, all totally in love with Jesus, all young and wild eyed and ready to take on the world. One of them was my future husband (though I totally didn’t know that then) and the rest of them are still my best friends today. We became really good friends, really fast. We were basically together every single night at college Bible studies, church services, movie nights, and when we weren’t doing that, the girls were having slumber parties. Between that and homework, I don’t think I ever really slept.

I remember the first time I realized how different I was. We were all giving our testimonies for the first time (basically just the story of your life before you knew Jesus, how  you met Jesus, and how your life has changed since meeting Him) and I went last.

My story was like something from bad reality TV compared to theirs. Think the bad parts of the Kardashians mixed with Jersey Shore mixed with CSI. I remember just being completely amazed. Amazed at the kind of lives they had led. Amazed that they were so untouched by the things that I considered “normal.” Amazed because they still desperately needed Jesus.

I told them EVERYTHING about me anyway. I mean everything.
And they loved me.
They encouraged me on my journey. They cheered me on. They were my confidants, the ones who shared all of the most incredible moments of my new life. My first mission trip, the night my heart was finally healed, the day I got baptized. I learned the Bible for the first time at 20 and they knew most of the stories by heart. I would ask Chris who Jeremiah was and who Elijah was and he would talk with me for hours about it all.

I remember the first time I heard someone kind of condescendingly say that you could have tattoos and still get into heaven. I remember the first time I heard someone say that the church welcomed sinners and people with tattoos, like we were somehow less worthy and that they would graciously let us in. I remember how it felt to be the girl with tattoos. The girl who had done it all.

The feeling of being the girl with tattoos at church doesn’t mean you have to have tattoos. Maybe you’re the girl who got pregnant before you were married or the person who went to rehab. Maybe you’re the one who slept with her boyfriend and got her heart broken because of it. If we base it on experience and not identity in Christ, I have more in common with the people we would talk to on outreach nights in the ghetto of Peru than I do with most people who stand on stages in churches. But somehow, I always end up on those stages in those churches, and I have become “one of those people.” Someone in leadership, someone who people look to for advice, someone who speaks from a pulpit sometimes.

The first time Chris told me he felt called to full time ministry, I thought yes! The mission field is my PLACE. I can hang out with people in the ghetto in Peru any day of the week and fit right in. I can lead street ministries because those people are like me. It was the first time he told me that he wanted to work in ministry someday in a church that I cringed. My first thought was ohhh no, I have way too many tattoos to be a Pastor’s wife!

It took me a long time to overcome that. I never doubted my place with God but I did doubt my place among God’s people. God had to deal with me about the rest. The first time I spoke in a church outside of the college ministry setting, Chris basically drug me on stage because I was so nervous. And y’all, I prayed. Something really spiritual like, Jesus HELP ME. And to my complete amazement, He did. I opened my mouth and His words came out, and then people even complimented me later on how well I spoke onstage. It was most definitely The Lord! It took me a long time to think I was good enough to stand on stage and speak. It took me a long time to think I could pray for the “church girl” who needed healing. I think it’s one of the main things that the enemy of our souls uses against us when we get saved, because our voices and our testimonies beat him. The spoken message of what God has done in our lives wins. Every time.

It wasn’t until I walked down a path of healing with Jesus that I realized that we are all just God’s children. The ones who grew up wild and the ones who grew up in church and the ones who grew up in the middle. It’s as unfair for me to label someone as “super holy” because of their experiences as it is for them to think I’m not because of my experiences. We are all worthy of standing on the stage and speaking because it’s not us that makes us worthy, it’s Jesus. And the only reason we stand on the stage is to lift His name high. The same Jesus lives in each one of us! I’ve talked to people who came on mission trips that didn’t feel like that had a good “testimony” because they had never had sex or done drugs or had a great moment of need before they came to Jesus. They had just always known him since they were little. And they had a moment of realization that their testimony was just as powerful and just as important as the testimony of the person who God saved out of abuse. Because it is. 

So next time you see the girl with tattoos walk in the church, see her with different eyes. And if you are the person who feels somehow less than, see yourself with the eyes of your Father, God, who loves you with an everlasting love and has known you since before you were even born.

If your story is filled with pain and heartache and you have done it all, use that story to show the world how Jesus miraculously changed your life. Use it to change the world.

If your story is that you have loved God all of your life and never strayed from Him, use your story to show the world how Jesus miraculously directed your steps and set you apart. Use it to change the world.

Each of us carries a crucial and beautiful piece of God’s heart with us that the world needs to see and hear. Our stories are what makes Jesus famous and each story is beautiful and needs to be shared. Because of Jesus, each one of us is worthy to take part in this crazy, beautiful, messy thing that is “The body of Christ.” We are the Church. 

with messy hair and wild grace,

Ellyn