Okay, so you guys? You Christian men, leaders in the church?
You hurt me.
You probably don’t even realize it. I’m pretty sure you have no idea what a catalyst your words and actions were. Yeah, you know by rote that every person has a story, but you don’t realize that those stories are layered.
Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.*
I don’t know exactly what “one thing” I was in your eyes, but I can guess that it was some kind of obstacle. You got caught up in an idea, and the problem with ideas is that they’re always less complicated than flesh-and-blood humans. You had eyes only for your idea, and so you stopped seeing the dust-and-bone layer of stories that was sitting there, teary-eyed, in front of you.
(That was me, in case you didn’t catch it.)
I’ll be the first to admit that your idea? It was a good one. Is a good one. Just like you guys are good people.
The complicated thing about good and bad people is that most of us can be both at the same time.*
Even as all of the painful stuff went down, I know I was both. I know you were, too. I know we still are. Good and bad, right and wrong, fallen and redeemed. I’ve asked for your forgiveness, because maybe you’re as deeply hurt by it all as I was. I don’t know, because I haven’t read all your layered stories, either.
Maybe it just all gets to be too much, after years of ministry? I can see that, even with my limited experience. I didn’t work in a church for very long, but there were nights I sat in my car, head bowed, tears in eyes, praying for the bright young lives I was privileged to shepherd. That was about eight years ago, and I still name them in my prayers today.
It’s a hard thing to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but neither does anyone else.*
So maybe you were just too tired to muster up the energy to care by the time I came along, with my invisible layered stories. It had been one heck of a year by that point, and you all seemed so sure of yourselves. And I was anything but confident. I had been slowly fighting back a haze of postpartum depression & anxiety for six months, and then the world turned upside down. (That’s just one layer of my story, by the way.) But talk about getting kicked when you’re down, huh? This last chapter was like that for all of us. And I think maybe if you’d known the state I was in, you’d have responded differently? But you didn’t know, and so in your words and your actions, this is what my hurting heart heard:
“You may be a lost sheep wandering… but we have ninety-nine here, and more coming every day, so….”
"You just don’t matter enough, even for an apology.”
“You are too much and too little at the same time.”
(You guys didn’t mean it that way. I know that. I’m just letting you know how your words and actions came across to me.)
You should know that I’m not writing this because I want you to feel guilty. I really don’t. I’m writing it because hurt caused by the Church is an all-too-familiar layer in too many people’s stories. We Christians are the most contradictory group of people out there, and it’s probably about time we start making that more obvious.
… many of our worst deeds are the result of our never wanting to admit that we’re wrong. The greater the mistake and the worse the consequences, the more pride we stand to lose if we back down. So no one does.*
I don’t think we Christians should be afraid of doing that. Because when we claim to have the God of the universe living in us, people expect perfection. And when we don’t live that out—stuck as we are in the tension of the “already and the not yet”— people around us stumble. Not so much because we sin, but because we fail to show grace and humility when we do. And in doing that, we make it hard to distinguish between our community of stumbling Christ-followers and the perfect person of Jesus Christ.
We have to stop living like we have all the answers. That’s not what it means to be a Christian.
What it means is this: we are fallen people, layers of tattered stories, who believe that while we were yet sinners, Jesus died for us. We believe in the ongoing work of redemption: of ourselves, of each other, and of the world.
It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win.*
I’m writing this because you need to know that I am choosing love; love that bears no record of wrongs. I am desperate to live in a world where the impossibility of love conquers the reality of hate, and if I claim to follow Jesus, then this needs to start with little old me. Not with you guys; not with some abstract somebody somewhere… but me in the small sphere of my own life.
I am hopeful that in writing this, I’ll be able to move from saying “I forgive you” to “I have forgiven you”. Hopeful, but not overly optimistic, because I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. (Most things aren’t.) It’s the black and white that give us contrast in art and clarity in life, but it’s the gradient of color that makes things come alive.
I know the black-and-white Truth: forgive others as God forgave me.
But I know the nuanced colors of forgiveness, too: it’s hard work to choose that over and over again.
So the reality is probably going to be this: when I see some of you guys in person, or catch a glimpse of you online, my human nature is going to react first. My stomach is going to drop; my pulse will quicken; I’ll get that nervous, quivery feeling in my limbs; and I will feel the pain again. (Talk about the flesh being weak, huh?) But then, by the grace of God, my spirit (which longs to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God) will catch up and take over. I will take a breath and give thanks; I will laugh and rejoice; and I will pray—again, again, and yet again— that God would soften my heart toward you. I will choose faith in a redemptive God, who makes all things new, over the sure and certain fear of being hurt again.
We will never forget this year, not the best of it and not the worst. It will never stop influencing us.*
And you guys? I am confident that God will use it to influence us all in a good way, because that’s what He does. Go in peace, with my forgiveness.
-Your sister in Christ
*All quotes are from the beautiful novel by Fredrik Backman, Us Against You
