by Jamie Wright
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Man, those were the glory days—back when Sunday sermons were fill-in-the-blanks, everybody ate muffins and scones at weekly Bible studies, and following Jesus seemed as simple as following the rules. But then gluten intolerance and intolerable Christians went and ruined all the fun.
My attempt to conform to the good Christian way was genuine and heartfelt, but later I would come to realize that I hadn’t actually become a good Christian at all. I was just really good at looking like one.
I’d spent my whole life pretending to be someone I wasn’t so that I would be safe, accepted, popular, worthy, wanted, and loved. Walking into church was no different. Except it was worse. Because if you slip out of character and go against secular social norms, people just think you’re weird, but when you push against the church order, people in the club think you’re bad. And they call you names behind your back, like “dangerous.”
I was doing all the good Christian things and obeying all of the good Christian rules, and just when I thought I finally had the whole church thing figured out…Jesus swooped in and fucked everything up.
The questions started during a study of the life of Christ, because that was the first time I truly looked beyond how everyone else was doing it and started to see how Jesus did it. I began to really see what he said and where he went and what he did and how he treated people. The guy touched lepers with his bare hands and hung out with the neighborhood undesirables. He talked to the impoverished, the infirm, the outcast as though they mattered as much as anybody. And when faced with greed and corruption in a house of God, Jesus braided a whip and quite literally overturned the tables of injustice. When I took the time to examine how he lived out his days on earth, it changed everything about how I saw the club. Following Jesus started to make a lot more sense—but the church started to look kinda wonky.
For the first few years, I kept quiet, though. In the club, you don’t express dissent. I didn’t want to be seen as immature or unfaithful, disruptive or dangerous. Why would anyone in the clubhouse want to look like a bad Christian?
Inherently I just knew that to question the system was a violation of some unspoken law. But secretly I was also dying to know if anyone else was giving a proper side-eye to some of the stuff we were doing and saying.
Like, did anyone else notice that you can follow all of the good Christian rules and still be a huge dick about it? Seriously. I can say things right to your face that’ll make you want to slit your wrists, and I can do it with church-approved language, dripping with sweetness and an air of concern. I can lead you to believe God hates your guts and I can make you wish you were never born while I claim to “speak the truth in love,” promising that I only want what’s best for you.
I wondered if others were plagued by the same nagging feeling that Jesus would probably be going to church with the whores and the hobos.
It was only a theory, as I was still pretty new to this Christianity thing, but I suspected that Jesus might have leaned more toward meeting the felt needs of the poor and the suffering, and less toward providing flavored coffee, comfortable chairs, and acres of accessible parking for throngs of upper-middle-class suburbanites. That’s not to say wealthy white people don’t need God, but c’mon, you know what I mean. This was perhaps the most confusing part of it all, because I really loved my church! I loved the music and the messages and the kids’ program, and I loved the people. But the more I learned about Jesus, the more I thought he probably wouldn’t have designed the church around…well…me.
In the beginning, all I knew was that I needed to follow Jesus, and I thought that meant acting like a good Christian. Strangely, the longer I have walked with Jesus, the more strongly I feel that to align myself with the so-called good Christians is to stand in stark contrast against his teaching. When I started down this path, I simply didn’t know the difference. I thought a good Christian was a weak man with a strong will, who bent his life around the rule of law, and I imagined Jesus in the same way. But when I really got to know him, what I found in Jesus was a strong man with a submissive will, fully and courageously given over to God’s wild purpose for the world.
Jesus was just a badass. He was a rule breaker. A system-bucking ball buster. He boldly pushed back against social norms and the religious order of the day to engage in his God-given duty to heal the sick, feed the poor, call out injustice, and pave the way for everyone to know the saving grace of faith, hope, and love. The world called him weird and the club called him dangerous. They spit on him, they threw things at him, they drove him away, and hell, eventually they killed him. But Jesus was such a motherfucking badass, he just kept loving.
For that kind of life I was not prepared.
When I walked into church for the very first time, I did it for me. To fix me. To help me mother my child. To heal my ailing marriage. To redirect my messy life. And to be frank, I didn’t really care where the whores and the hobos went to church. I didn’t think about enslaved or exploited or starving people. Orphans and widows were not my problem, because I was busy getting myself right with the Lord. All I really wanted was to be a good Christian, and then to sit and stay in that satisfying goodness forever.
My intent to follow Jesus was genuine, but I really wasn’t planning on following a fearless leader into battle. I didn’t know that this decision might someday draw me into the fight for justice and equality. It never occurred to me that I could be called upon to help tend the wounds of the world, or to push against the order of a broken institution. And I most certainly did not think I was embarking on a journey that would land me in a foreign country or compel me to write a stupid book.
I guess I’m glad I had no idea how much work following Jesus would be when I dragged my weary soul into church that first Sunday. I just never imagined that after I learned to sit and stay, I could be asked to stand and go.
Over the next few years, we added two more little boys to our ranks, becoming a family of five wrapped up in our neatly manicured American dream.
We were the essence of picture-perfect suburbia. I mean, sort of.
We had the house and the hedge and the minivan in the driveway, but I didn’t really look old enough to be the mother of three crazy little boys. At the park, strangers assumed I was an exasperated nanny, and at home, solicitors smiled and asked me to get my mom. We also had a three-legged shelter mutt called Peanut, who worked endlessly to set us apart from our dignified neighbors, with their eight-hundred-dollar purebred pups still sporting all four limbs. Despite her disability, Peanut was incredibly fast. She was constantly escaping out the front door and running me ragged just trying to catch her. We lived right across the street from the elementary school, and once, during recess, a kid saw this embarrassing spectacle and pointed it out to my boys, shouting, “Look! There’s your babysitter chasing your tripod across the soccer field.”
Feeling the need to defend my honor, my oldest puffed up his chest and said, “That lady that looks like a teenager is our mom!” And then his baby brother piped up from behind, “And that’s not a tripod. It’s a dog!”
While the shenanigans raged on at home, Steve was out keeping the peace as a deputy sheriff, bringing home the bacon in the form of a government salary, great benefits, and a kick-ass retirement plan. We bought a nice little house in a nice part of a nice town, and our kids did all the things nice suburban kids do, like playing recreational soccer and taking karate lessons and eating pay-by-the-ounce frozen yogurt. We believed we’d chosen the ideal place to raise kids, knowing they would grow up going to National Blue Ribbon public schools, riding their bikes on the sidewalk, and spending the days of their youth gallivanting around on pristine playgrounds with blue foam padding where dirt would normally be.
For all the world, we looked like a successful, happy couple, and in some ways, we really were. But behind closed doors, our relationship continued to be strained by the
ongoing demands of parenthood and mutual disappointment. As I got more and more involved with churchy stuff, an almost palpable tension grew between us. Steve became more distant than ever, sometimes going days at a time without speaking to me or looking at me or acknowledging my existence, and I remained blind to the varying clues that he was seeking fulfillment outside of our marriage in increasingly destructive ways. I wanted to share the incredible things I was learning about God and about myself. But, wary of conflict, I avoided the topic of my growing faith almost as thoroughly as Steve kept his own secrets.
In my baby-Christian zeal, I thought that if only Steve knew Jesus, everything would get better. So, week after week, I asked the ladies in my women’s Bible study to pray for my husband, suggesting they ask God to do things like “soften Steve’s heart” and “touch Steve’s spirit.”
And I’ll be damned if God didn’t do exactly that.
While I was still busy cutting a path as a good Christian, trying to find quiet time in the chaos of my days between diaper blowouts and kindergarten meltdowns, openly weeping with my arms raised at Women of Faith conferences, and reading Francine Rivers novels as if they were academic companion guides to the Bible, Steve was having his own kind of spiritual awakening.
One day he burst into the house after a particularly long stretch of contemptuous silence, in which he’d spent most of his time slamming things around in the garage or bent over under the hood of his truck. He stomped in, covered in grease and sweat, and stopped in the middle of the living room, where I was sitting on the sofa with one of our little guys in my lap. When he spoke, I was actually startled by his voice, because he hadn’t said a word to me in about a week, but it was what he said that made me feel kind of queasy and light-headed. He gestured down the street in the direction of my neighborhood Bible study, and he hissed, “You can tell all your little friends to stop praying for me.”
There was an uncomfortable pause, just enough time to peel my eyebrows off the ceiling, and then with a heavy sigh he added, “I’ll go to church with you.”
The thing is? I’d never said one word to him about my hope that he would have some kind of come-to-Jesus moment. Granted, having grown up in church, he probably could have hypothesized that his hyper-Christian wife was out there actively lobbying for his eternal salvation. But even Steve will tell you, he knew someone was praying for him, because God had gone and softened his heart or touched his spirit or something mysterious like that.
I’d been anticipating this moment for ages, but it wasn’t like he was pleased to tell me the news. He sounded furious. The words tumbled out in an angry snarl, and then he stormed away without waiting for a response. Which was good, because I didn’t have one. I just sat there unmoving, eyes huge and unblinking, mouth hanging open like, What the hell just happened? For a long time I waited for him to come back inside and say he was just messing with me or, better yet, explain exactly how he knew I’d enlisted my entire Christian lady gang to pray for him, but he didn’t return.
In the days that followed, neither of us brought up his announcement. The whole thing sort of hovered in the back of my mind like a dream, like maybe it hadn’t actually happened. But a stack of pornographic magazines and a can of chew that mysteriously appeared in the outside garbage bin reassured me our brief interaction hadn’t just been a figment of my imagination. Whether it was God’s divine intervention or Steve’s gut reaction I guess we’ll never know, but that day something prompted him to get his shit together.
I like to think it was God.
* * *
When I met Jesus as an adult, I slipped into his arms with all the fight of a newborn baby. I needed to be carried. I needed to be nourished. I needed to be protected. And like a newborn in her mother’s arms, I completely trusted God to care for me. But Steve met Jesus when he was little. He was introduced to Jesus through Sunday-school scare tactics: shown a picture book of heaven and hell, told that his parents were going to the nice place called heaven, and asked where he wanted to end up. Naturally, because he was like six, he wanted to go wherever his mama was going, so he chose to follow her to heaven by inviting Jesus into his itty-bitty heart that very day. So in a way he already knew Jesus was with him, years later, as his life spiraled down into the shadows of his own brokenness. And Jesus hadn’t helped.
He’d been hurt and disappointed, so I could completely understand why Steve turned away from church as a young man, and yet I had a hard time understanding why this new prodding from God seemed to make him so angry. But then I’d never been let down by God, the way Steve felt he had. I’d never begged God for freedom from my personal demons only to have them come back at me, time and again, stronger and more overwhelming than ever. I hadn’t lived with years of spiritual shame over a perceived lack of faith, or carried around a quiet belief that maybe God was releasing everyone else from the darkness trying to swallow them whole while He let me drown.
I came to the foot of the cross with a tremendous sense of relief, rescued from the scars and insults of a broken world, and I honestly thought that’s how it was for everyone. I thought Steve needed only to lay down his burdens—whatever that means. It never occurred to me that, for Steve, Jesus might actually be part of the problem. In order for the two of them to ever be okay, my husband would have to wrestle the image of God out of the distorted picture painted by his early church experience.
All that is to say, no wonder he was pissed that my friends and I were praying for him.
When Steve told me he would go to church, it wasn’t in anticipation of a happy reunion with the gracious God of his youth. He was merely relenting to the pestering of a Holy Spirit he wasn’t glad to hear from. He’d been miserable and depressed for so long, living a life overrun by deceit, guilt, and shame, and when he finally gave in to the idea of going to church, I don’t think his plan was to walk in and hand over his junk. He was just trying to get God off his goddamn back.
* * *
For a time, life was good and God felt near.
We settled happily into the satisfying order of suburbia, letting the rhythm of the school year set the pace for our lives, taking low-key summer vacations, shopping in bulk, and buying our clothes on sale at Old Navy. We weren’t wealthy, but we were comfortable, and best of all, with Steve on board, we were becoming a family who was devoted to the service of God in pursuit of faith, hope, and love.
I know that shit sounds corny, but it was blissfully true. We’d taken vastly different paths to get there, but Steve and I had finally landed on the same page in a big way, and it changed everything. Okay, maybe not everything. But it changed a lot of things.
The tension in our home gave way to a new dynamic, one of grace and mutual support. We were finally moving in the same direction and we wanted the same things in life. For once, we were actually partners. I had been on this journey for a couple of years when Steve joined me, and it was so exciting to be able to talk with him about Christianity and Jesus and spiritual growth and all the questions that had been growing in the back of my mind. I finally had a safe place to say out loud all the things I’d been thinking, and I was anxious for Steve’s input. I’d found a place to belong and, though it was propped up against a ridiculously simplified version of a complicated God, I had a sense of purpose.
For a handful of years, Steve and I had plenty of friends, plenty of rest, and plenty to do, and our lives felt meaningful and good. We took that balance to heart, and to this day we use it as a litmus test for our mental health and spiritual well-being: Are we connected to others? Is our home a place of respite? Does our work matter?
Looking back over that period, I feel a deep longing tinged with bitterness—a longing to return to the grossly self-centered but oh-so-easy faith I once enjoyed, and bitterness because, if not for those years of plenty, I would never have felt such heartbreaking scarcity later on.
In the beginning it was simple. I
t was easy. It was pleasant and rewarding. It was following the rules and obeying the laws and asking only rhetorical questions. It was just believe in your heart. Just pray. Just forgive. Just show up. It was “because the Bible says.” (And the Bible? It was clear.) It was a country club. It was a soul spa. It was a light show. It was come as you are…as long you are approved. And in the beginning, I was. I wore the uniform and I spoke the language and I followed all of the rules.
Until I didn’t.
Actually, my years in “good Christian” standing were relatively short-lived. It simply wasn’t in my nature to conform as heartily and completely to the ways of the church ladies as was required to stay aboveboard in their circles, and I can still clearly recall the first time I got a proper “bad Christian” finger wagging.
It was at one of those meetings for tired moms to drop their sticky-faced crap factories in child care for two whole hours so we could indulge in adult conversation and sip coffee while it was still hot. I went every week, and when I walked into the room I knew without a doubt I was surrounded by my people—women with spit-up stains on their shoulders and chicken nugget chunks in their hair. Like me, they carried saggy postbaby bellies, dark circles under their eyes, and purses littered with half-eaten granola bars, loose gummy bears, and tattered tampons. Over many months of Tuesday mornings together, we grew into a pretty close group, shouldering one another’s burdens while we passed our tightly wrapped newborns around like joints.
We laughed and cried, talked and prayed. We shared good recipes and bad weight-loss advice, and we never lacked for butter or carbs or caffeine, because someone always showed up with a pile of muffins and the coffee flowed freely. It was the land of breast milk and honey, a small break from the daily grind of laundry and diapers and little runny noses.