Author Archives: Rebecca

The director and the actor, part 1

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I don’t write allegories. Well, except for this one — inspired over two years ago by someone’s chance comment —  which practically wrote itself.

Like all allegories, it’s not perfect, so please don’t plumb it for depths of meaning or hold it up to theological scrutiny. Also, please don’t assume you can guess at the identities of the actor and the actress— they aren’t representations of anyone in particular. They could be an unhappily married couple…a pastor and his unruly flock…people trying to minister to the lost and broken..coworkers…family members…fellow Believers…or just about anyone. 

If you find anything in this allegory helpful or appropriate to your own situation, that’s great. I’m dusting this off and showing it the light of day only because I hope it might provide someone else with the same hope and comfort — and sorrowful conviction of sin — that it gave me back when my writing it caught me by surprise. 

More recently, I added a fourth part. Stay tuned.

The director sighed. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Of course I’m serious!” the actor retorted. “I shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff. Things need to change!”

The director replied calmly and gently. “Look, I hope by now you know how much you mean to me, my friend. But it’s time you faced reality. You’re not the big star in a blockbuster movie; you’re just one of the many actors in Hours of Our Lives. Julia Roberts doesn’t even waste her talent on soap operas and, even if she did, our show couldn’t afford her. Plus, she’s way, way out of your league — she is very picky about her leading men.”

“OK, maybe not Julia Roberts, but someone else…anyone else! You cast the wrong person for this role! And the script — it’s all wrong!”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t you come to me, asking for my help and guidance? You could have chosen another director with a script you liked better. I warned you that working for me can be difficult and painful at times, even dangerous, and that I might ask you to make some big sacrifices. But you insisted you wanted me — and no one else — to direct you, that you trusted me, and that you would play any role I gave you. I tailor-made your part of the script for you, and I hand-picked the actress to play opposite you. Are you telling me you that I don’t know what I’m doing?”

“Of course not. You’re a great director, and you know how much our friendship means to me. But, you see, I have my own script. And, in my script, I have a much better wife. The one you came up with to play that role is terrible! She’s one big royal pain in the rear to work with. She argues with me all the time. It’s gotten so bad that I hate coming to rehearsals. She refuses to follow my script. She can barely act. She’s not at all pretty. How could you do this to me? It’s hard to even like her! Either you made some big mistake, or you’re trying to ruin my life. I know she is!”

The director sighed again, and spoke even more gently, “I can see that you’re upset. I know this is not an easy role that I’ve given you. But it’s nowhere near as bad as your description! I think you are making things more difficult than they need to be. Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do. How can you even ask that? It’s just that I have this really great script I’ve been working on for years, and I know it’s the right one for me — and I know this…this ‘actress’ you came up with is completely wrong for the role of my character’s wife.”

“I see.” The director sounded grieved. “So you think your script is better than mine?”

“Um, no. I just thought maybe we could work on the script together, you know…a lot of my ideas are based on your script, anyway. For example, there’s the part in your script that describes the wife as being ‘sensitive’. Well, my script has all these scenes showing exactly how a sensitive wife should treat her husband, and your script seems to be missing that.”

“But my script has scenes about how a loving husband is supposed to treat his wife, yet you refuse to play them.”

“That’s not true! I play them exactly as written! My character is extremely forgiving towards his awful shrew of a wife. Even though she is so terrible, he puts up with her.”

“I don’t think you’ve read my script carefully enough,” the director said, but his voice was so soft that the actor chose to ignore it. So then the director said, “You need to realize something. The actress you are so upset with is also my friend. You know how I give you the lines you need each day? Neither of you has read each other’s parts…and neither of you has read the entire script. You don’t know how it plays out.”

“Well, if you’re friends with her, you must know how awful she is and what a terrible job she’s doing with this role! I can’t believe that she is even consulting your script — surely you wouldn’t write such a horrible story!”

“Oh, she comes in here a lot — ”

“What? She’s probably complaining about me — she is always complaining — and I bet she argues with you a lot — she is such a contentious woman that I dread being around her!”

“Not at all. I love her company…even when she cries. Unfortunately, she does that a lot —”

“Trying to manipulate you with her tears, huh?” the actor didn’t bother hiding his contempt.

“No.” The director looked straight into the actor’s eyes and, although his voice stayed gentle, there was a firm edge to it. “I think you are forgetting what I just said. She is my friend. And I am the director, remember? That makes her a friend of the director. You don’t know her as well as I do. Just like you, she is one of my most precious friends. I was hoping you and she could be friends also, but instead, I have watched you snub her, deliberately rebuff her every offer of friendship, and even go so far as to publicly humiliate her.”

At this point, the actor got defensive and tried to make excuses, but the director cut him off. “You can pretend to yourself, but I see right through it.” He paused and then went on, “You know how you often tell me that you want to be just like me, that I’m your role model? Then why are you refusing to follow my example?” He held up his hand to silence the actor’s protests. “If you were like me,” he said in the saddest voice the actor had heard him use in a long time, “you would love her, because I love her. Besides, she is trying to be like me also — if you were truly my friend, you would love her for the ways she takes after me. And you would thank me for choosing her to play the role of your character’s wife.”

Love her? Thank him? What kind of crazy talk was that? The actor muttered after he left in a huff. Obviously the director didn’t understand. That terrible actress was nothing like the director! He grew angrier the more he thought about their conversation. “That’s some fine way for the director to treat me after all my years of devotion to him! I’ll play in his stupid show, because I’m a decent guy who keeps his word, but I’m only doing it out of a sense of duty. I’m not going to like it, and there is no way I will ever thank him for making me work with such a terrible actress!”

**********

Read Part 2.

About the smallness of man’s theology 

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Recently I was involved in an online discussion of John Piper and Calvinism. I had especially taken issue with something Piper said to victims of child molestation about the abuse they suffered: “And so you try to say there is no sense in which the sovereign God willed that, you will lose God for the rest of your life.”

My first response to that statement was admittedly made in anger:

God did not will my molestation, my rape, or any other of the evil things I suffered in my life — especially not in the sense John Piper says. Is God sovereign? Yes. Are we puppets on a string? No. Missing from all this is the concept of free will, but the hyper-Calvinists don’t seem to believe in that anyway.

This statement of Piper’s makes me angry. Furious, in fact. Because it is a lie from the pit of hell, and I don’t say that lightly. Thank God that I did not encounter this when I was struggling with the whole question of where God was when horrible things were happening to me or to people I care about.

I have NOT lost God. I am closer to Him now than ever before in my life. That includes during my time spent in the Reformed theological camp. I understand God’s love much better than I ever have. I trust Him much better. It is His love that has brought me a greater degree of healing than I ever thought possible in my wildest hopes and dreams.

My life, especially over the past two years, exposes Piper’s statement as a damnable lie. Don’t believe it. Not for a second.

ACK!! I’m so angry that I better stop before I get to ranting.

The next morning my anger and indignation was gone, and I posted this:

I am alive today because God does intervene in people’s lives, and He graciously and mercifully rescued me out of the dark theological quagmire that people like Piper are trapping people into. The God of the Bible is not as small, mean, petty, and easily defined as they claim. He is, to our puny human minds, simply incomprehensible. There is no answer this side of Heaven to the tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will.

I’m alive today because the real God — the God that Jesus revealed — captured my heart. It turns out He didn’t ordain or will or cause the awful crimes committed against my person, nor did He merely look the other way. He HATED what was done to me, and it was His outrage, His heart for the oppressed, His compassion, His extravagant love, and His wild, scandalous grace that not only saved my life but won my heart.

Calvinism has a ready answer for everything because they believe in a small, easily explained God. I have had to become content with mystery — a lot of mystery — because the God I worship is too immense and great for human comprehension.

He is also a loving Father whose tenderness and intimacy continues to break my heart — in the best of ways. He’s the great, awesome Creator of the universe, full of power and might, powerful beyond all understanding…and He’s my Papa, my Daddy, my Abba.

I can’t wrap my brain around that, but it’s true.

Last night I was furious at Piper. Today I want to weep for Him. If only God would wreck his theology the way He wrecked mine!

Today, my prayer is that you — and each reader of my blog — would encounter the real, living God, in a new and fresh way.

Allowing others to define us | Survivor Saturday

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Recently I was listening to a podcast that discussed, among other things, the difference between guilt and shame. It gave the example:

  • Guilt says, “What I did was bad.”
  • Shame says, “Who I am is bad.”

As I listened, I was contemplating the place in my healing journey when I began realizing that I am not my actions. I may fail at something, but that does not mean my identity is “Failure”.

Much of my healing has involved dismantling lies and replacing them with truth. Sometimes those lies were told to me by others, but sometimes they were things I told myself. As I was reflecting over this, I was reminded of some of my previous blog posts, especially one titled We are not fragile or weak. I ended that post with the following:

We can’t help the blindness of others. But it is important that we open our eyes to who we truly are. We are survivors. We are the ones who cling to hope. We are the ones who bend, but never truly break. We are the ones who put back together the pieces of our lives that are broken, and emerge even better than before. We are not fragile, or we could not endure. We are not weak, or we could not do the hard work of healing. We are survivors. We are overcomers. We are strong.

Looking back over my healing journey, it’s obvious that I didn’t act like a strong, brave, victorious, conquering Super-Survivor every step of the way. Sometimes I felt like I kept getting knocked down, over and over again, and could barely pull myself up to stand one more time. I felt weak. Sometimes I felt like the most dismally frail and weak failure of all time. I would drag myself up the stairs to my therapist’s office and whine, “I can’t handle this. It’s too much for me.”

He would point out that I was, in fact, “handling this”. I had managed to climb the stairs once again, had managed to sit myself down on his couch yet another time, had managed to continue to bring to light the most terrible of my terrible secrets…and I did this week after week after week. As we were winding things down, and I was getting ready to “graduate” from therapy, Donny let me know that he had asked me the most difficult questions that he could, and that I had bravely faced every single one. We left no stone unturned.

Healing from trauma is messy. Sometimes it’s kind of like being stuck in a time warp. We may find ourselves feeling, acting, and being like our much younger selves. It would be funny if it wasn’t so disconcerting. Other times, it’s not even remotely funny, but simply raw and ugly. None of that looks particularly admirable to those who don’t understand the healing process. So, when they attempt to label and define us — even if they don’t mean to be insulting or belittling — they tend to accentuate the negative. Often, it’s all they see.

When people define and label us…even if they are using positive labels…they are attempting to speak into our identity, to tell us who we are. I am not sure anyone really has the right to do that. Even if they refuse to separate what they observe about us from who we are — our actions from our identity — we need to insist on doing so.

We are not our sins. We are not our failures. We are not our trauma. We are not our pasts. We are not what people did to us. We need to be very clear on this. We will not be freed from the burden of shame — the burden that Christ bore for us on the Cross — until we stop allowing the lies of shame to define us.

Guilt should lead us to conviction and repentance — and that’s a good thing, because it heals our relationship with God and makes intimacy with Him possible. Shame, however, leads to condemnation, and that never leads us to anything or anywhere that is good.

One of the most powerful parts of my healing took place this past year, when I received some intensive inner healing ministry. Probably the most beneficial aspect was examining the whole concept of identity, and getting rid of the false beliefs — and the resulting shame — that had plagued me for far, far too long. Only God, my Creator, has the authority to define me, to speak the definitive and enduring truth about my identity, and to tell me my worth. And I need to remember that the same applies to other people: it is not my place to label or define. It’s time we agreed with God about who we really are. Our truest identity is found in Him, and in Him alone.

Purity: it’s not just for virgins | Preaching to the choir

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There are a lot of wrong messages coming out of “purity culture”, and I’ve written quite a bit about my concerns. One of the things that troubles me greatly is that the message of the gospel is too often being perverted by a false teaching of what purity is. The entire concept that we are born pure and can lose our purity should seem like jarringly false doctrine to evangelical Christians who believe in original sin and the power of redemption. It should, but all too often it doesn’t.

Another troubling aspect of “purity culture” is that it’s all about what one shouldn’t do, and doesn’t give a hope-filled message of what one should do. Furthermore, it’s a message that becomes meaningless the instant one marries…or at least the instant the marriage is consummated. The message is also skewed heavily towards young women, especially when the emphasis is on an intact hymen and the vehicle is father-daughter “purity balls”. Purity is seen as less important for young men.

This is not a Christian ethic, no matter what one tries to claim.

There’s an old-fashioned word I don’t hear very much, at least not in Protestant circles, but it’s an important one to use in discussions of sexual purity. That word is chastity. Sometimes chastity is thought to be synonymous with celibacy; however, the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church teaches otherwise:

Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. Sexuality, in which man’s belonging to the bodily and biological world is expressed, becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman.

…either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.  Man’s dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint. Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good and, by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end.

This flies in the face of what is taught to too many girls within “purity culture”, where purity is equated with virginity marked by an intact hymen. This emphasis is so out of proportion to reality that I’ve known girls who agonized over whether using a tampon would cause them to “lose their virginity” and thus sacrifice their “purity”. I’ve read of a growing number of young brides who grieve the loss of their virginity on their honeymoons when they “give up their purity” to their husbands. What now? they wonder. The most valuable thing about them is gone forever. The precious gift has been given, sometimes to a husband who acts more entitled than appreciative, and now what do they have left?

Chastity, on the other hand, is a lifestyle. It is not something we are born with and must guard lest we lose it to the wrong person. It is, instead, a virtue we must cultivate with the help of the Holy Spirit, and it is just as important, if not more so, after the wedding night as before. Chastity is the healthy, God-honoring expression of our sexuality in a way appropriate to where we are in life, whether single or married. It is one way in which we present our bodies to Christ as a living sacrifice. It is one of the outworkings of sanctification.

By the grace of God, one can begin living a chaste life at any point. Even the most sordid past sins can be forgiven, and the Holy Spirit can empower the weakest of the weak to walk in repentance, in purity, and in holiness.

That’s the power of the gospel.

“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”  (Philippians‬ ‭1:9-11‬)

Purity: it’s not what you think, part 2 | Preaching to the choir

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Why am I so opposed to equating virginity with purity? It’s not just because I grew up in the era of “technical virgins” who did “everything but”. It’s not because, as some legalists might accuse, I “hate purity”. In fact, it’s because I value purity so much that I don’t want to denigrate it, reduce it to something that it isn’t, or render it meaningless. (Read the rest of my previous post here.)

I’ve written about what purity isn’t, without saying enough about what it is. If we are discussing a Biblical perspective of purity, obviously we need to look at what the Bible has to say on the topic.

From BibleStudyTools.com:

In the New Testament, there is little emphasis on ritual purity. Rather, the focus is on moral purity or purification: chastity ( 2 Cor 11:2 ;  Titus 2:5 ); innocence in one’s attitude toward members of the church ( 2 Cor 7:11 ); and moral purity or uprightness ( Php 4:8 ;  1 Tim 5:22 ;  1 Peter 3:2 … ). Purity is associated with understanding, patience and kindness ( 2 Cor 6:6 ); speech, life, love, and faith ( 1 Tim 4:12 ); and reverence ( 1 Peter 3:2 ).

Purity is far more than virginity, and it’s not just about sex. I’ve noticed that those I know who walk out a lifestyle of radical purity are not trumpeting it forth loudly on the internet, nor do they draw undue attention to themselves in general, nor do they boast of their purity. It just becomes apparent as you get to know them, and it also becomes apparent that their purity is accompanied by other virtues…especially, it seems, humility.

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I have always loved the promise of 1 John 3:2-3 — that seeing our Savior as He really is will transform us radically. We shall be like Him! In the meantime, if that is our hope and our longing, we should be purifying ourselves, following the example of Christ.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls,” said Jesus in Matthew 11:29. We never find Christ boasting about the sins He didn’t commit. Instead, we find Him serving, being about His Father’s business, loving the unlovely, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, seeking and saving the lost, binding up the brokenhearted, setting the captives free, and sacrificing His very life for us. All along the way, He keeps reminding us that, when He lived among us in bodily form, He was showing us the Father.

We can’t become like Jesus all by ourselves. First, we need Christ to cleanse us from our sins, but then we need the power of the Holy Spirit to undertake the process of sanctification — that old-fashioned theological term that can be defined simply as being used for the purpose God intends. That means an ongoing, radical transformation…or at least it should, if we truly want to follow Jesus. More obedience, less rebellion and wandering. More love, less selfishness. More compassion, less indifference. More of His will, less of mine. More of Him, less of me. Gradually, we should become more and more holy — consecrated and set apart for service to God, more and more conforming to His will.

That’s purity. Anything less, and we’re just kidding ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got a long, long way to go.