About Me

Welcome to Reimagine Devotion, the site about exploring and questioning faith – without losing it!

My Story

One Sunday morning, about thirty years ago, a phone call interrupted my father in the middle of his sermon. A few minutes later, the tiny, rural congregation stood on the front steps of the church and waved as he rushed my mother off to the hospital where, hours later, I was born. I was in church the very next Sunday – and pretty much every Sunday thereafter.

My name is Shanna Terese. My father is a pastor. If someone could make a career out of being a volunteer Sunday school teacher, that person would be my mother. They raised me to value church, love God, and love neighbor. They also raised me to think for myself, ask tough questions, and dig into everything, including my faith, perhaps even deeper than they themselves found comfortable.

In my twenties, I ended up in seminary. I graduated in 2014 with a Master’s Degree in Christian Education, and then again in 2015 with a second Master’s Degree in Theology. In college I majored in history and foreign languages. In seminary, I focused on the history of the early church and wrote my Master’s thesis on Hell.

That’s right, Hell.

Since then, I have worked in various churches, and done a lot independent research into a lot of topics, mostly related to mythology, language, history, and bible.

Why Reimagine Devotion Exists

My persepective on life, faith, and bible has developed, evolved, and deepened little by little over the course of eight years higher education, more years independent study, and a lifetime of experience in the Church. I had read through the entire bible by the time I was fifteen, and read through it again in college. I know at least the basics of 6 languages, including the languages the bible was originally written in, Hebrew and Greek.

All of that is just information, important, but not what gets me up in the mornings.

My first passion is storytelling.

I have degrees in history and theology, but I approach these topics as a storyteller first, and an academic second. Stories are, at their core, about meaning. Storytelling is how we construct meaning out of facts.

As a Christian, I believe that God is telling a story. That story is the universe. It started with an explosion 13 billion years ago. Its characters developed over eons in the vacuum of space, until at least one cluster of hydrogen and helium gave birth to the solar system that sustains human life. It’s rising action followed life’s war to survive and thrive through change and evolution, kingdoms and empires, until God himself entered creation in a human body to bring us a path even better than survival. It’s climax, the final war of entropy against creation, oblivion against life, Death against God, is yet to come.

And in this story, between whatever endless eons have come before or will come after, we have a part. We find our meaning as people of faith by growing with and into our part in God’s story, partners together with God in the making of a better world. Because the story is meaning.

I am here because I want to share the meaning I have found on this journey all creation is taking toward the ending of the story.

God Bless,

Shanna Terese
shanna@reminaginedevotion.com

Shanna Terese | ReimagineDevotion.com

2 thoughts on “About Me”

  1. Shanna,

    Your story is fantastic. I am a PK/MK. One day, when I was 3 and living in India, my mother explained to me the moon was bigger than the earth where we were standing, looking at space. I told her that couldn’t possibly be true because look how small the moon was. She said it was far away.
    I began to have these recurring dreams at 3, that the earth was cut in half, and there was an 8” ledge around the periphery of the earth. My job was to walk around the earth on that tiny ledge. If I stepped to the right, I would fall into outer space. If I walked to far to the left, I would fall into burning fires. I knew this at 3 years of age.
    I always knew this story, but I forgot it. My sister was born trying to please my parents and her teachers. She read her bible since she was 6. I was born with my head turning constantly, trying to discover the world around me. When I was 26, God told me that if I did not give my life to him 100% right then, I would never have another chance. God won! And so did I.
    Back to the subject, I’m looking at your website because I asked the question, “When God made the heavens and the earth, was the sun already in the sky just swirling around aimlessly, and was the earth floating around aimlessly? Were the planets rotating around the sun? I think this question is above my pay grade, and there may not be answer to this question, but I discovered you and your website.
    I don’t even know how to ask the question because I’m getting lost in outer space. These thoughts are too grand for me because I’m not a scientist, and I’m not going to be watching Cosmos to find the answers.
    Thank you for your wonderful website, and who you are.

    God Bless,
    Barbara Williams
    And by the way I am shocked at how very few serious Bible readers I meet.
    I have a website, but I can’t remember the name of it. It’s been so long since I worked on it.

    Reply
    • Thanks for your story too, Barbara! As to the question, my personal opinion (which is, of course, an opinion and not gospel in any sense of the word) – as you may have already gathered – is that the questions matter more than the answers, because in the questioning itself, we seek God, and until we finally stand face-to-face with God, we will not know the full answers anyway. God exists beyond time and space, and to communicate with those of us inside time and space is a tricky business (at least from our perspective). To do it, God uses story, dream, fable, fact, and history, all of it. No fact science or scholarship ever finds can contradict what God has told us already in story. I have seen the faith of so many in my generation destroyed by those who cling, in fear of the questions, to the idea that the bible is a static list of unassailable facts and historical absolutes. Truly tragic, because the more I read of the bible, and study the times and cultures that wrote it, the more I see that the bible’s great and staggering beauty – its very inspiration – comes largely from the fact that this is not the case.

      Reply

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