My Deceitful Heart

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9 KJV

Sit down kids. Let me tell you a story.

Kirsten and Michael were madly in love.

They had grown up together from infancy and had it bad for each other and only each other from the time boys and girls first start to notice those things.

When they reached an age that their parents deemed them old enough and mature enough to date they started dating.

They were best friends who went everywhere and did everything together, and now, approaching the end of their senior year, they were planning their ascent into adulthood together.

Bible College. Marriage.  Kids. In that order.

As is expected from a couple that has been together for several years, they had a physical relationship, but that relationship fell well within contemporary Christian standards. Hand holding, hugging, kissing. Done.

Kirsten and Michael. They were expected, accepted, and predictable. No one could imagine anything different.

And then Mary got involved. Mary was their youth leader and had a son in the youth group. One night at a girl’s youth retreat, Mary pulled Kirsten aside for a very serious conversation. She told her that she had had a vision from God, and in the vision God showed her every detail of Kirsten and Michael’s physical relationship and told Mary that He didn’t want them together.

Mary told Kirsten that she was on a path God did not intend. She said that Michael was her idol and she needed to repent. She told her that if she did not break up with Michael, she would tell Kirsten’s parents all about her vision and let them handle it as they saw fit.

When Kirsten defended herself Mary told her “but my sweet friend, you KNOW the heart is deceitful. We don’t know what’s good for us, only God. Our plans are destined to come to ruin and pain. God is giving you a chance to turn back now”.

Kirsten was a good Christian. She knew she was a wicked human and wanted desperately to please God and her leaders.

With a broken heart, Kirsten broke up with Michael. She cut off her childhood playmate, best friend and first love. She threw their plans away, trusted in the wisdom and spoken word of her Christian leadership and waited for the pain to go away and life to get better.

With no girlfriend and no plans, Michael elected to move up north after graduation and start over. New city, new friends, new future.  A year later he was backing out of his apartment when he was sideswiped by a drunk driver.

Michael is dead and Kirsten suffers from PTSD and anxiety. 

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I in no way blame Mary for Michael’s death. Life can take tragic and unexpected turns and there is no way of knowing the consequences of all of your actions.

But sometimes I wonder if things might have turned out differently. Would they still be together and graduating from college this spring?  Would they have broken up on their own terms and not because some woman knew God’s plans better than they did? Maybe they would have both passed away on the way home from the movies.

The possibilities are endless. But it still bothers me.

It bothers me because the lives of two bright people that I’d known since nursery school were ruined and ended.

It bothers me because Kirsten didn’t really have a choice. Leadership had spoken. God wanted them to break up. Her options were to break up with him and have a shred of dignity or to become a social pariah and let her parents force the break up when they were contacted by Mary.

It bothers me that in the Christian church the leadership’s opinion of a teenager counts for more than any behavior they could possibly display.

And it bothers me because this could have just as easily been my story.

I met and started dating my husband in high school. About a year and a half into our relationship I got a call from a youth leader that I hadn’t spoken to for at least year. She asked if I knew why she was calling. I told her I had no clue.

She told me that God had “put me on her heart” and she had been interceding on my behalf for days. She then said that I was the object of an ongoing spiritual war and that God was “fighting for my heart” but Satan had put a big chocolate cake in front of me to lead me away from my calling to be a missionary and increase the kingdom of heaven. That chocolate cake was otherwise known as my then boyfriend.

She thought my life was on a path away from God’s calling and that “moving away from distractions” *cough* boyfriend *cough* would allow me to seek God and get back on the right path.

I listened politely, ended the conversation on a cordial note, and then I panicked.

That little voice in my head that had been planted in me from infancy told me that she was right. Leadership knew what God wanted for me. My heart was black. My flesh could not be trusted. I had no control over my own life. Why hadn’t I noticed it sooner? Of COURSE anything that made me so happy must be sinful.

I cried and I agonized and I raged at God. But mostly I mourned. I knew that anything that was against God’s will would fall apart eventually, so I mourned the inevitable loss of the best thing in my life. The thing that had pulled me from the brink of suicide multiple times. I mourned the hugs and the late night conversations. I mourned the laughter and the love and I broke inside.

And finally I got angry. I got angry at the system that had turned every happy part of my childhood into an idol. I got angry at the people that called innocent questions defiance and I got angry at a God that would tell someone else about His plans for my life before me. 

And then, for the first time in my life, I told the little voice to fuck off. And I called my boyfriend.

Of course I wanted to please God. Of course I wanted to further the kingdom. But more than any of that I just wanted him, and if that made my heart weak and deceitful and rebellious, I guess Hell would just have to save me a good spot. For once I was choosing happiness.

Occasionally I lay in bed next to my best friend, listening to my son babble in his sleep and I think about that woman and I wonder if she knows. I wonder if she realizes how many lives she almost ruined, and how many lives wouldn’t exist if I had listened to her.

I love how my life turned out. I have a great job, a near perfect marriage and beautiful kids. I almost lost it all because of my pre-conditioned blind faith in someone I hadn’t spoken to in a year. Someone that, at best, saw me for two hours a week among 50 other teens.

Today I am so grateful for my life. I’m grateful for my husband and the wonderful dating relationship we had. But mostly I’m grateful for my deceitful heart. I was a really bad Christian, and it saved my life.

Your Sinful Baby

Growing up in the conservative Christian church, there was one doctrine that always stood out to me and struck me as odd, however I grew up and it became less and less relevant and was forgotten completely upon my leaving Christianity.

And then I had kids, and occasionally it would creep up to haunt me, cast a show of doubt on my decisions, but still I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then recently, while perusing Facebook I came upon an update from a friend of mine who has a son about the same age as my youngest. This friend is an incredible, loving mother and also an extremely conservative Christian. She was writing excitedly about her son turning one, and stuck in between praise and bragging was this little paragraph:

“But I also need to remember that he is a sinful little human just like me. He chooses to disobey my orders, chucks anything in his hand and throws tantrums on the regular.”

All at once years of indoctrination came flooding back and I was floored. I lay in my bed and thought “sinful? A one year old? Surely that’s not right”. I obsessed over it the rest of the week. I recalled sermons, bible studies, even nursery school classes on the nature of man after the fall.

As a teenager, it had always made sense to me. “My selfishness and angry outbursts are the result of my sinful nature, why wouldn’t it be the same for toddlers? They just wouldn’t have the social skills to conceal it”.

I was taught that babies were just raw, innocent versions of an adult sin nature. They didn’t know what they were doing, but they behaved the way they did because they were fallen. They were selfish, disobedient, demanding, and destructive because thus is human nature, and they were human.

This was all well and good… Until I had tiny lunatics of my own to disobey me, break my things and wail at unimaginable decibels. Then I realized that the entire idea of “sin nature” in babies and toddlers is, to put it nicely, completely ludicrous.

When trying to wrap my head around a belief that I just can’t get behind, I often try to run through a scenario from the opposing point of view.

And so I sat.

I sat and I imagined what babies would be like in an unfallen world. If Eve had triple snapped at that serpent, or whatever the appropriate pre-historical diss would be, how would parenting play out?

I think about the issue of disobedience. Saying “No” is not inherently sinful. If anything it is a necessary life skill. So in order to be disobedient, you have to not only understand who the asker is as a person, but also that they are in a position of authority over you. So for a toddler to be disobedient, they would have to grasp that mommy and daddy are of different importance to them than everyone else socially. They would also have to possess enough self awareness to understand mommy and daddy’s authority over them, as the child.

I think about the things in my home that have broken upon being tossed by tiny humans with incredible arm strength and I remember being 4 years old. My cousin and I were playing barber shop with our stuffed animals and had taken my mom’s sewing scissors. My favorite possession in all the world was a stuffed Simba from The Lion King. I took the scissors and thought “I’ll give him a pretend haircut, the scissors won’t really cut his hair because I don’t want them to.” Imagine my shock and horror when not only did the scissors cut his mane off, but it also didn’t grow back within a few weeks like my hair. In order to not be destructive, babies would have to be born with a fairly complete understanding of gravity, force and fragility.

But the most challenging and in-your-face part of this doctrine revolves around tantrums and the incredible selfishness of toddlers.

Look, any parent will admit it: toddlers can be turds. They call it the terrible twos for a reason. 

However, it doesn’t take a whole lot of hard thought to realize that this stage makes perfect sense.

Of course they’re selfish! They just realized that they HAVE selves! Imagine sitting around, doing something that you enjoy and then being yanked away from it, and for the first time realizing “Hey! I don’t WANT to leave that thing! What’s going on?”

Having wants and desires isn’t inherently sinful, and small children don’t have the higher brain function to realize what goes into fulfilling their desires, or to empathize with someone else’s desires.

They don’t have enough of a grasp of time to understand patience.

Emotions are not inherently sinful, and they don’t have the practice and mental capacity to restrain their feelings or the social understanding to express them appropriately.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect more of our children. My all means TEACH your kids these things! For the good of the world please expect empathy and patience and self control from your children as they grow.

But also please understand that the behavior of your one year old has nothing to do with fallen nature. It has nothing to do with sin. 

By that logic, in an unfallen world, we wouldn’t have babies. We would have little adults that were born with self awareness and an advanced understanding of authority, gravity, time, empathy and social etiquette. Why would children like that even need parents?

The most important thing about this though, the thing that keeps me up at night isn’t the logical fallacy of sinful nature in toddlers, it’s how incredibly harmful this doctrine is to children and the loving parents responsible for them.

If your one year old looks at you and says “No” as a result of not understanding the pressing need to put his shoes on, it is your job as a parent to teach him proper etiquette and the importance of deadlines.

But if your one year old looks at you and says “No” because their very nature is a raw look at man’s fallenness and they are being disobedient, it now becomes your job to quell that disobedience and to set them back on the straight and narrow or risk their souls later.

It is not healthy to see your child’s nature as inherently broken. It isn’t healthy to see your child’s soul on the line during every hard encounter. As a loving parent, this pits you against your child’s emotions, desires and needs and nobody wins that war.

This attitude can only lead to stressed out parents and emotionally repressed, anxiety ridden little people.

And there, right there is the whole problem. Fallen Nature doctrine is bad for kids. You are raising your children with the idea that they are inherently flawed, inherently “black hearted” and that it’s their fault that the man on the cross is bleeding and has a scary hole in his side.

 Kids do not understand the subtleties of phrases like “Jesus died for you”. They don’t realize you say that to everyone. To them, that guy is literally dead because of them. Because of how bad they are. He is DEAD because his blood had to wash away the dirt from YOUR heart. Yes you, Annie!

I’m sure you think that you’re a balanced, normal Christian. You don’t make your kids memorize Leviticus or wear head coverings. It’s not like you’re abusive.

But you know what? Neither were my parents. But it’s not exaggerating to say that I spent most nights of my childhood sobbing and saying the Sinners Prayer again and again and again. Just to make sure it stuck, because I never felt different the next day. I never felt cleaner, less sinful or more content. I still wanted to sleep in, and cheat on my chores, and eat an extra cookie, so it must not have worked.

I must have done it wrong.

Years after leaving the church, this attitude still follows me into my adult life. I can’t roll my eyes at my husband without being overwhelmed by guilt. I can’t make simple, innocent mistakes without abusing myself because I know that I am basically bad and every misstep proves it. Anything good I do is a fluke, a breach of character.

I won’t do that to my kids.

If you wish to subscribe to original sin doctrine as an adult, in the company of other adults, please do. You have the right to express your faith the way you see fit.

But please don’t raise your children as though their very selves were something to strive against. Maybe if we teach kids that they’re basically good, basically kind and loving and that bad things are mistakes to be overcome, they’ll behave like it. Maybe they’ll rise to the expectations.

And maybe they won’t become adults that sit in the laundry room sobbing because they shrunk a load of T-shirts. 

Of The World, Not Just In It

     I am 8 years old and I’m sitting on the couch between my brothers. The younger of my two older brothers is jiggling his leg nervously. It’s his fault we’re here and he knows it. That morning my parents had found a Kiss album under his bed and at 7 pm that evening, here we were, watching a movie titled “The Dangers of Secular Music”. Bloody women stuffed into car trunks and scantily dressed teens dry humping flash across the screen. The host, an ageing gentlemen in a three piece suit, explains that secular music encourages murder, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and blasphemy. He plays several songs backwards to demonstrate how clearly they chant to Satan himself. My oldest sister is crying, extremely bothered by the images. I would have nightmares for weeks after. The video ends with a short bible reading and then the host says “Remember, as Christians, we are to live IN the world, not OF the world, and secular music is definitely of the world”. I knew then, in my heart of hearts, that the world was a horrible, immoral place and I never wanted to be anything like it.

              
 I grew, and as I grew my knowledge and fear of the world grew, and as my fear grew the line I was walking became impossibly narrow, until every second of every day felt like a tight rope that would throw you off and into the immoral wasteland below at any moment. ‘You must be modest, but not so much that you put off potential converts’, ‘You must look nice and give a good account to the world, but you must not be vain’ ‘You must be set apart without appearing stuck up’. Under all of the contradictions, the impossible standards ran one overwhelming current: YOU MUST NOT BE LIKE THE WORLD.

The world is evil
The world is dark
The world has no standards
The world hates you
The world hates Jesus
The world wants to steal your rights
The world will sleep with anyone
The world is full of witchcraft

On and on and on. The threats, the fear mongering, the stories of demons and premarital pregnancy, those were nothing. Those were nothing compared to the biggest lie of all: Christians are the light of the world. That one cliché, that one line uttered in prayer, shouted from pulpits and sung from stages, is what held me and countless others like me in a prison of terror for most of our young lives. I remember sitting in a group full of kids that called me “fat and worthless” more often than my real name, nursing a bruise given to me that afternoon by a boy in that group who thought requests for gender equality justified assault, listening to a sermon preached by a man who thought nothing of comparing homosexuals to pedophiles.  He was teaching on the topic of “fruit”: as in “they will know us by our fruit”. That fruit being love. And I thought to myself “if this is the loving part of the world, the light part, the rest of it must be unspeakably horrifying”.  And my fear grew even more.      

              
 And then came college. My parents had nothing else left in my homeschool curriculum, so out into the masses I went. I was a battle hardened warrior. I was prepared for disdain, bullying, and personal attacks on my faith. I was determined to spread the gospel, to save all the promiscuous, sad, lost souls of the world with the light of Christianity, to show people a happier, moral way to live...But it wasn’t long before I realized that maybe they weren’t the ones that needed saving.  Where I expected whores and players, I found Atheist and Agnostic couples in healthy, long term relationships. Where I expected liars and cheats, I found people who were moral because it was the right thing to do, not because they feared hell. I anticipated music that served no purpose but to incite violence, and instead found love songs, rally cries, stories and heartbreak. I was ready to be self sufficient and lonely, and instead found friends that would spend their weekend moving my apartment for no reward. I found professors that would spend their lunch hour pleasantly debating belief systems and co-workers that didn’t question taking on some extra work when I was swamped. Everywhere I looked I found beauty and kindness and humor. The world was incredible. People with opposite belief systems could value each other’s friendship. Nobody noticed if your shirt fell four fingers below the collar instead of 3.

Art was valued even if it had nothing to do with God.     

I’m not saying that life is a fairy tale. People cut you off in traffic. They cuss out busy cashiers and leave broken beer bottles in the street, but I’ve found that most fellow humans are going through the day to day doing their best to be good people. They love, and have family and friends that love them. Muslims have favorite colors and hold open doors too. ‘Pagan’ isn’t a derogatory term. The world is beautiful and diverse and unique. There is darkness everywhere, but the older I get the more I believe that you’ll find most of it within the shadow of a church steeple rather than out in the sun.