Lessons in Falling Backward and Being Broken - Romans 3:9-19

Romans 3:9-19

All People Are Sinners
Well then, are we Jews better than others? No, not at all, for we have already shown that all people, whether Jews or Gentiles, are under the power of sin. As the Scriptures say,

"No one is good — not even one. No one has real understanding;no one is seeking God. All have turned away from God;all have gone wrong. No one does good,not even one."

"Their talk is foul, like the stench from an open grave. Their speech is
filled with lies."

"The poison of a deadly snake drips from their lips."

"Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness."

"They are quick to commit murder. Wherever they go, destruction and misery follow them. They do not know what true peace is."

"They have no fear of God to restrain them."

Obviously, the law applies to those to whom it was given, for its purpose is to keep people from having excuses and to bring the entire world into judgment before God. For no one can ever be made right in God's sight by doing what his law commands. For the more we know God's law, the clearer it becomes that we aren't obeying it. NLT

Where to begin? Everything bites so badly that I almost dare not speak it outloud lest it get worse. Suffice it to say that I’m tired, hurting, and tragically depressed. I dragged my butt to my Bible study today in spite of every single nerve ending telling me to bail. I wish I’d listened to those anguished signals.

One of my old group leaders came up to me afterward to give her condolences over Anne; she’d “just heard” and wanted to express her sympathy.

I looked at her with a cockeyed look that said, “and how on earth did you just hear, cuz I didn’t tell anyone at my Bible study that I was even pg, let alone that the baby had died.”

She realized by my look that she needed to explain how she’d “just heard,” and so she hummed, hawed, and tried to get her gossip straight.

I was so hurt when she finally told me who it was that had told her. I wasn’t hurt that the information was told, but rather it was the person who did the telling that broke my heart. I love how this woman could find it in herself to talk about me to mutual acquaintences, but she’s not actually spoken TO ME since Abigail died. She was one of my "best" friends and yet she stopped answering my calls, my emails, and my cards. I sent her a pkg for her birthday; I never heard a word. All I know is that we had gone out to dinner the week after Abigail’s funeral, and I’ve not gotten her to speak to me since.

Of course, this poor gal who approached me today had no idea that I’ve spent the better part of three years asking myself what I did or said to make this other gal shun me and drop our friendship like a scalding hot potato. I accepted her condolences & caring, and we chit chatted a bit about where Anne was buried (since she had been to her nephew's funeral there the months shortly after Abigail was interred). It just hurt me so badly to hear my "friends" name mentioned in the gossiped context of my dead child.

Of course over the last three years I’ve often wondered what I did or said to a whole phethora of "friends" who completely vanished from my life once death hit my fan. It’s no small understatement when I exclaim that I’ve learned the total hard way what it means to have “fair weather friends.” In fact, I've learned the very hard way just how heavy a relationship can be when it's one-sided and you're left carrying it by yourself. The relationship ends up getting dropped cuz you just can't carry it anymore (and then if that wasn't rich enough, then you get the blame for doing the dropping).

Yes, the storms of my life have been drastic, to say the least. To be certain, my life has been rough. But these experiences in baby death have stripped the last of life’s veneer clean away and left only the raw, fragile underbelly.

I’ve never been any good at friendships; I don’t typically fit in with the classic mall crowd--it comes from being too fat, too poor, too awkward, too forthright, too eeeww. Over the course of my growing up years, I had multiple versions of “Barbie” & “Ken” do their best to be quite mean to me over the years. Walking down the halls of my high school, I had things thrown at me, spit at me and yelled at me. I got sneered at, mocked and ridiculed.

Needless to say, it’s hard to tell whether I have bigger scars from the objects that got thrown at me or from insults that got hurled. One asshole football jock threw his carton chocolate milk at me once as I sat in the patio looking at my new yearbook. It exploded all over me, and I was drenched in sticky milk for the rest of the day. My brand new yearbook was ruined. He and his letter-jacketed friends had a grand hurrah over my humiliation. The memory of their guffaws and high fives will never be erased from my memory. I struggle to forgive them as the tenets of my faith require. They hurt me badly for no other reason than they could; for no other reason than because I was fat and awkward--someone to make sport of.

I suppose that’s better than recommending me for termination, except I did in fact have a guy once take his BB gun out and shoot me in the butt--simply because he was repulsed by my fat ass and it needed to be used as target practice. I won’t even elaborate on all the food and rocks that I’ve had hit my person over the years. I didn't own my first car until I hooked up with Brian at 23--waiting at bus stops will yield a plethora of things thrown & yelled.

But I’ve worked hard to overcome the depths of such rejection and shame. I’ve always tried to be very generous. I’ve always tried to be edifying uplifting. The Bible says to esteem others above myself, and I’ve certainly tried to do that to make up for the fact that I bring very little to most of my relationships. By “little” I mean that I don’t bring money or fame or privilege. I bring the embarrassment of obesity, hirsuitism, poverty, and disabled awkwardness. I knew a gal once at church who wouldn’t accept a ride from me because my car was too old and grungy. It was a toss up as to which of us was more embarrassed. I, of course, was embarrassed by my ugly car. She was embarrassed by how plainly her snobbery came out and what a difficult time she had wiping the stuck-up egg off her face. I’d rather drive a clunky POS than be that sort of person. I guess my perspective on snobbery is yet that’s another thing that keeps me from fitting in.

A few years ago, I tried to do a “girls’ night out” with a church that we’ve since left. It was horrible. I figured it was just me & my pathetic outlook, so I did my best to hang in there and try to stay involved. Nevertheless, it soon became drastically clear that I just didn’t fit in with the classic middle class female. We looked around and found a different church a little less bling oriented.

To my dismay, the folks at the new church asked me to facilitate one of the women’s groups for the large women’s ministry. Somebody, somewhere had recommended me even though leadership didn't know me from Adam. I was so honored. Gals like me don’t get asked to do such projects cuz it’s too visual and in the limelight. The leadership told me they were skeptical as to whether I could pull it off being as heavy and "different" as I am.

But I assured them that I'd do my best, and for three years I gave them everything & more, just so I could prove to them that it’s not just the Barbie girls that can do such a job. I doted on my groups like none of the other leaders, and soon had people clamoring each semester to be in my group. To be certain, it boosted my ego & self worth, and I loved on them as best as I could with cards, trinkets, bookmarks, embroidered hankies, special prayer plaqards--lots of doting things to carry them through their semester and weekly homework.

But then I lost Abigail and lost all of them too. Not a single meal; only a handful of cards; lots of whispers and gossip. Sadly, we came to learn that even this church was very steeped in its bling.

So relationships---what are they? What’s it like to have a regular girlfriend? Or a sleepover? I don’t know; I’ve never been a “regular” girl with regular friends. The friends I thought I had at the height of my friendship “career” were really only in it for what presents I gave. Once my life crumbled and I wasn’t there to do the cards, trinkets and edifying then they moved on to new groups and new lives. I never saw myself as “buying” their affections, but in the end that’s what my leadership doting proved to be. When it came to rubber meeting the road, none of those “friends” were there for me as I grieved my most horrific loss; only a handful were there as we laid Abigail to rest, and they fell off the pages as soon as they drove away. I remember vividly the evening of Abigail's funeral--the three of us sitting home alone looking blankly at the TV; none of us watching it; each of us wondering why we had been so abandoned. We bought her casket piece, my estranged sister brought a bouquet, and one of the home school moms brought the Christmas cactus that’s fixin’ to bloom again for Abigail’s birthday. No one else brought flowers. No one offered meals. Many of them even cut me off their regular Christmas card list. It was all so very very weird. It seemed to go right along with all my other experiences--like the guy who threw his milk all over me or the creep who shot me with his BB gun.

Add in the abandoment of my father and the crap from my mother & sisters and you can be certain that I’ve learned to keep people at arms distance.

So my million dollar question is, how do you move forward with new relationships with an overwhelming history of such gruesome betrayal & abandonment clogging up the future? Such emotional baggage is not easily resolved. I’ve done a lot of work in previous years with various counselors & mental health workers to overcome & unpack such baggage. I know the answer lays in forgiveness. Jesus Himself illustrates this principle in how He forgave all His own friends who betrayed & abandoned Him.

I guess it’s just that I’d accomplished a lot of spiritual & emotional overcoming in years prior to losing Abigail. I had learned to do a lot with my life in spite of my handicaps, limitations, and awkwardness for fitting in. Then Abigail died and my failing her to death touched at the deepest core of every self-esteem issue I’ve had my entire life. Even though I’d done a great deal of work toward prevailing against self-loathing, Abigail’s death dredged a lot of it back up simply because there was a whole other group of people (church people) who came along and kicked me to the friendship curb much the same as the kid with the chocolate milk.

Today’s little encounter at Bible study brought back floods of that abandoned betrayal.