We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Leslie Strange. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Leslie below.
Leslie, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Beginning a new venture of any kind always starts with risk. How will I get the word out about what’s happening? Will anyone be interested in joining? How will I recruit the right people to come alongside me? But, when you feel the Lord leading you in a direction, the outcome is really his from the start, so it takes the pressure off in many ways. When I first learned about the Embrace Grace organization based out of Texas I was intrigued. The Lord had already safely brought me through my own rocky journey with faith in my adolescence and young adult days, so he had given me a passion for working with young women many years prior. I spent several years as a Life Group leader to high school juniors and seniors telling them the truth that, as hard as they may run, Jesus is and will always be where the real joy lies. However, we are all human and our temptations get the better of us and when you work with young people it doesn’t take long before someone calls you frantically because they think they might be pregnant. In that particular case, she wasn’t, but my eyes began to open to the world of young, single women who feel completely isolated and alone not having the same outcome as this young lady. One year as a group, we volunteered to be childcare workers for a local organization that ministers to young single mothers so that they could enjoy their meal and group time together. Another year, our group volunteered at a local homeless shelter in downtown Nashville. Looking for ways to impact the community in the name of Jesus had become very important so when I felt the Lord leading me to begin a chapter of Embrace Grace at Judson, it felt like a risk in some ways, but I think he had been preparing me for greater service all along.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Leslie Strange and I grew up in Nashville so I am one of the rare natives in my city. In fact, on both sides of my family, we go back for generations in the Middle Tennessee area. I grew up in the church and was there almost every time the doors were open, but in all honesty, as much as I was exposed to Jesus within the walls of my church, I never invited Jesus into my personal spaces outside of those walls. As I grew up, I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself, “As long as I am here on Sundays and Wednesdays, God is pleased with me and that should really be enough. The life I choose to live outside these walls is my business.” As anyone who has been in that same position knows, you’re generally aware you are telling yourself a lie, but there will be plenty of time to deal with it later. Thankfully in my case, there was time and the Lord finally got a hold of my heart in a completely new way in my late twenties. After all the “fun, carefree and work hard to play hard” living had resulted in emptiness and unfulfillment, I think the Lord knew I was finally ready to submit my life to another way of being. His way. And I was, but the truth is, it’s hard to make the changes needed to literally do a 180 and begin living a completely different life. The one constant that kept me going was the fact that my husband had come under the same conviction as me at the exact same time and we were able to be on this new faith journey together, but more than that it was the overwhelming sense of peace even in the midst of those early years. When your life changes drastically, that means your behaviors change too. When your behaviors have to change, your friend groups might have to change. When your friend groups have to change, you are left feeling isolated for a time. But all the while the sense of joy that comes from living in and pursuing a right relationship with Jesus spurs you along because you know the best is still coming. And it did, in a way that my husband and I are eternally grateful for. The friends we lost touch with were replaced tenfold, the parties we “missed out on” were exchanged for experiences that brought more fulfillment than we could have imagined. So fast forward almost twenty years and that’s a lot of life lived in service to Jesus, but I can still intimately recall the heartache of shame as well. Coming back to church after a long season of worldly living can be filled with lots of conflicting emotions. You are so glad to finally be chasing after the one thing that matters most, Jesus, but at the same time you are a total newbie and feel like a fish out of water around others who have been pursuing the Lord for years. This is Satan’s favorite kind of mental playground and he loves to try to convince us that our shame can never really be turned into anything that would glorify the Lord. He’s wrong of course and just as Jesus gave me a new name and identity, I am intent on telling as many potentially shame-filled young women that the same is available for them. I don’t think God ever wants one of his children to walk away from him and experience the darkness of the world, but I also know that not a single minute of our lives is wasted and he will use it all for our good and his glory. In Embrace Grace, I can invite young, single women experiencing one of the most challenging circumstances of their lives into church and look them in the eyes and tell them with certainty, “This is your place too because Jesus is for you.” I can listen to their stories of feeling hopeless, ashamed, lonely, and judged because I felt that way too. Humans can be hard on each other and we can be terrible communicators, but when a young woman begins to realize that her identity is not based on what other people say she is, but on who Jesus declares she is, her whole worldview shifts. When the leaders tell our own stories of overcoming our pasts and when we share the biblical accounts of the huge ways God used other women with pasts such as Rahab, Ruth, and the Woman at the Well, these ladies begin to see themselves as God sees them. Trust is built within the church as other women wrap their arms around them and look them in the eye and tell them they are glad to know them. We recently established our Embrace Grace Boutique and it is filled with new and gently used donations from church members and others and each week as a benefit for coming to group, the girls can shop for whatever they need completely free. Our policy is, if you see it and you need it, grab it and take it home. As a final gift, we plan a day at the end of each semester to give the girls surprise make-overs, hair, manicures, foot scrubs and more and then we have a photographer come and take maternity photos or family photos if she has already given birth. There is a moment in this special time when we ask each participant to look in a full-length mirror and we remind her once again that the beautiful woman standing there has the right to become a daughter of God if and when her decision is made to trust Jesus as her Savior. When that decision is made, her eternity is secure. This life might still throw punches, but what’s coming will be worth the wait. Then from there, we move into our church-wide baby shower where we provide each of our moms with gifts that cover her most pressing physical needs. I love this group for so many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is because we get to potentially affect change in multiple generations at once. These women come to us scared, unsure, and sometimes doubting they have what it takes to be a great mom. Once again, when her foundation becomes secure in knowing and trusting Jesus, we begin to build on that layer by layer. We have seen women trust the Lord to provide jobs, cars, safe housing, food and so much more. We have women who now come to Judson regularly on Sundays and who have joined our Young Moms Life Group. And now this fall we are bringing a new group called Embrace Life to Judson as well. This is the sister group to Embrace Grace and allows our participants to continue being discipled with new leaders who are eager to do life with them on their motherhood journey. The Lord has truly blessed this endeavor and I would encourage more and more churches to start an Embrace Grace group on their campuses as well. It’s cliche, but true, if I can do it anyone can.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As everyone knows, the Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate is a heated and many times nasty place. Before I decided to approach my church leadership about bringing an Embrace Grace group to Judson, I read several articles that helped open my eyes to see the commonalities between these polarized groups. Almost everyone who has a fist raised in this debate is doing so because they believe in their heart of hearts that they are fighting injustice of some kind. Both are correct. The injustice that the Pro-Choice movement brings to light is the fact that for a long time the baby was the only life that seemed to matter. The injustice that the Pro-Life movement brings to light is the fact that there is an unborn life that can’t speak for itself yet and deserves a chance to live and to find that voice. Everyone is fighting to protect someone else and when you slow down for just a moment and turn off the noise, at the very least you can learn to appreciate that fact. In a group like Embrace Grace and many others who offer the same sort of help to single, pregnant women, we simply believe that we can fight for two lives instead of just the one. Why not try to affect change in multiple lives and generations instead of one in spite of the other? There is a mother and a baby and if there is even the slightest chance of giving them both a solid foundation for which to build a future, that’s worth it every time. However, there have been times when I have been accused by strangers of preying on young women’s vulnerability and causing harm. Those words hurt a lot, but I’ve seen the ways the Lord has rescued the women who come to our group time and again, so in all honesty, I have to “count it all joy” just as the book of James tells us to do. I remember the way of Jesus when Isaiah 53 says, “…and like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not open his mouth.” As long as we are on this side of heaven, conflict will rage on. My prayer is that as long as this work remains squarely in the center of God’s will, that he will be the one to keep it going for as long as it’s useful in his kingdom.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
Leading a ministry of any kind brings its own set of challenges. Doing life with people whose needs sometimes feel insurmountable can start to weigh heavily at times and lead you to feel burdened and unequipped. However, at the end of the day when you remember that these women (or whoever else you happen to be ministering to) belonged to God way before they ever came to you, it lessens the weight tremendously. We can be the hands and feet of Jesus, but the outcome is his. We can be used by Jesus as a tiny part of someone’s story, but we are not the whole of the story. Jesus has been in the business of changing lives since the beginning of time. Oftentimes when we start to feel overwhelmed, we might be in a season of ministry where we’re not praying as much or relying on his leading. There have been several times when a need comes up that just seems too great to bear, but we feel an overwhelming sense that there’s something the Lord is working towards, and he just needs us to pray and back up. Then, inevitably the door opens, the opportunity presents itself and the need is met. If we had barged in the way of his work, he would have eventually provided in the same way, but he might have had to sidestep us to get there. Each time something like this occurs, it makes the next time easier because there’s always a next time. We allow ourselves to reflect on all God has provided for our moms and although ministry is still challenging every day, our reliance on the Lord grows because we know he is in every detail.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.EmbraceGrace.com
- Instagram: @embracegrace.jbc
- Facebook: @embracegraceatjudsonbaptistchurch
Image Credits
These were all taken by me or someone else using my personal iPhone