This week I’ve been staying with a close friend. Analise and I have known each other since she was 25 and I was 18. The first time I saw Analise, she was singing on the stage in church. Our church was part of the 90’s contemporary Christian music movement.
Analise was the most amazing singer I had ever seen in real life. When she sang I remember thinking of angels and she had clearly been listening to Celine Dion to pick up the vocal skills she had. She didn’t know little old me, but once she walked into a chemist (drug store) I was working in. Starstruck, I was unable to introduce myself. Oblivious, she said thank you very much and sauntered out the door.
A few years later, I joined the worship team and we became friends, but what none of us knew during that time was the fact she had been raped by a close family member. This rape triggered wounds from numerous accounts of sexual abuse she had experienced as a child which included the loss of her virginity at 5 years old. Even though she received great healing the day she surrendered her life to Jesus, the understandable roots of bitterness that hadn’t been fully removed, began to grow.
For years she kept all this to herself and bound up in her secret trauma, she gained much weight and turned to alcohol for solace.
When I left the church to venture off on my own prodigal journey, we lost contact, but after 20 years, a chance meeting brought us back together and we became closer than we had ever been. The thing is though, now she was the shell of the beautiful singing Diva I once knew. Although she was still incredibly sweet and loving, the alcohol addiction had taken hold. Her marriage was in tatters and she was all but estranged from her children. At the time we reconnected, she had been done for drunk driving for the second time and the courts had stepped in to get her the help she needed. Finally, my dear friend began her twisted and challenging road to recovery.
Several years later, Analise has been empowered for her own reasons to face the next chapter of her life alone, and this week she asked me to help her move. She pulled out some old photo albums from those church days and as I was flicking through the pages., my eyes rested on a photo of some old familiar faces. A group of Christian women. Their arms all linked together, smiling from ear to ear. Analise was smack bang in the middle. Her smile bigger than any of them.
I knew they were all still local, going to church and living nice lives. I asked what had become of these friendships. “Well…I fell out with this one, which I don’t want to talk about. This one kept promising to visit but never did and we lost touch. This one got all focused on her job and we just stopped talking. This one, well she tries not to have anything to do with me. ” It was a family member.
Gosh, that made me sad. It was pretty telling these friends had given up on her. Knowing what Analise could be like, from a worldly perspective, I understood their reasons. Analise was caught up in a world of appearances with these women. They wore nice clothes, drove nice cars, and lived in the best suburbs. Young upper-middle-class, predominantly white housewives who showed up to church on Sundays and didn’t swear. By politely and gradually removing themselves from her embarrassing and at times, offensive drunk behaviour, they didn’t have to exert the energy it would require to bring her back from the edge. Instead, her husband was left to clean up their pain, alone.
This in my opinion is the dark side of church. It was the look-good pressure from such a community that drove me into a hole, not wanting anything to do with God or his church. I had been a part of that culture and was as caught up as the rest of them judging the least of these. Until one day, I fell from the church’s view of ‘grace’ and became the least. I ran far from these people and I lumped Jesus in with the rest of them. Analise did the same only her prodigal journey was inside a bottle of wine.
But 20-plus years later, broken and with nothing left, I realised I had two options in this time of desperation. Either continue to blame or actually humble myself and press into God. I needed to seek forgiveness for the judgments I bestowed on anyone else, including those white upper-middle-class Christian women, and from now on stand up and face head on the ugliness that exists in any church and be guided by a loving God who holds all the power to turn everything around.
Analise’s toxic marriage which she claims much responsibility for creating is becoming her past. It’s unclear if they will find their way back to each other but in all the weariness, with no real and honest Christian support, her husband struggled too.
But now, She says she hasn’t belly laughed in “I don’t know how long”. She says “I’ve never been closer to Jesus in all my life and she says “I’m finally free”
Perhaps God’s actual Grace, which isn’t bound up in pharisaical type judgment, will look at the entirety of their situation and provide a common sense that one day, sets them both free.
I Am The Woman At The Well 