Untangling our Knotted-Up Lives with Beth Moore

Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Beth Moore on untangling our knotted up lives. It’s really exciting to be back. This is actually my first time back after four months of sabbatical, and just excited to get to do this with all of you. And I’ve been so excited and encouraged to see the close to 2000 registrants we’ve had for today’s online conversation, and just really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. I’d like to send a special welcome, and thanks to the nearly 300 1st time registrants who are joining us today, as well as our international guests from all over the globe, we know we have at least 20 different countries represented, from Germany to Ghana and from Malaysia to Montserrat. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones. And if you haven’t already done so, drop us a note in the chat box and let us know where you’re joining from. It’s always fun for us to get to see just the wide range of people who are tuning in from around the globe. If you are one of those first time guests or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and offer programs, like this online conversation, to do so, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers.

And we hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. Our guest today is someone who I have looked forward to talking with for a long time. In many ways Beth Moore needs no introduction, but we’ll give her one anyway. Beth is an author and a Bible teacher, the founder of Living Proof Ministries, which aims to encourage women to know and love Jesus through the study of Scripture. She’s written numerous bestselling books and many dozens of Bible studies, including Chasing Vines, Breaking Free, To Live as Christ, Living Beyond Yourself, and Now That Faith Has Come, as well as many, many more. She’s also a woman with an extraordinary and colorful story. Her most recent work, All My Knotted Up Life, which we’ve invited her here today to discuss, is perhaps her most personal work a deeply thoughtful memoir which wrestles with what it means to know, love, and forgive. It’s been described as a beautifully crafted portrait of resilience, a poignant reminder of God’s enduring faithfulness and proof positive that if we ever truly took the time to hear people’s stories, we’d all walk around slack jawed. Beth, welcome! I’m so excited to get to talk with you today.

Cherie. I could not be more pleased, and I have to tell you that my heart just sped up a moment ago when we were just about to go on the air and I was seeing the names come up that is what really makes the experience for me. I’m really not an entertainer. I love the interaction with people, so this is a delight. Thank you so much.

Well, we’re really delighted to be able to host you and talk with you. And so I have to ask, just when I read this book and even looking at the title of the titular description of your life story as knotted up and you wrote in the introduction that really, you were no hurry to write your life memoir. You said at one point you were waiting for God to work everything else. And then it didn’t happen in that particular way. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on what brought you to the point where you considered the knottiness and the tangle of it all, rather than, say, a miraculous, Godly resolution into smoothness and clarity to be what you chose for the titular metaphor of your life. What did you learn about your life as well as your creator? As you excavated and mapped those knots and tangles.

You know, it was one of those times when I had an obvious, you know, that grasp of the absolutely obvious that maybe it wasn’t all going to work out the way I wanted it to or had foreseen it. I thought, you know, I really planned to turn out so much better than this. I did, I did in my teens, you know, I thought to myself that I’d be so much more able to handle the things of life in my 20s. And then in my 20s, I thought, no, my 30s, that’s going to be my decade. That’s really going to be it. And then my 40s. And it just kept going on from there where you think, no, I’m going to get all this worked out and I’m going to get it sorted, and, Cherie, I have a need, and I wonder how many of those joining us also feel the same thing, where you just have this need to get things sorted out, where you can understand, where you can have some kind of order to what feels so chaotic. And it just finally occurred to me that maybe if you’re paying attention, it doesn’t all sort out like that. Maybe people are a whole lot more complicated than you’re able to simply divide up into. These are the people who are essentially good. These are the people who are essentially bad. I couldn’t even figure it out about my own self. Was I in the bad category or was I in the good category? So many things that were so knotted up. And I think coming to the point of going, I don’t know if I have ever had this element less figured out. And so this has got to be the perfect time to write a memoir. Someone said, once you know, if you are the hero of your own story, don’t ever write it. And so I had never less been the hero of my own story. I thought, okay, this is a really good time.

Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting. You mentioned just how complicated people are, including people that we really love. And, you know, you give many examples and we’ll try to go into a few of them. But, you know, just thinking even about your grandmother, your nana and you, you know, she was there, which counted for a lot. She was attentive.

Counts for a lot.

You know, she was loving. You also describe her as someone who’s just racism ran in her bones. And at one point you described, I think it was like standing knee, ankle deep in water, trying to pan through her legacy and separate the gravel from the gold. And, you know, in reading that, I thought, oh, that it’s a beautiful metaphor for something we all have to do at some point and would love to hear your thoughts on how does one do that wisely and faithfully to pan through the complications of the people we love when there’s undeniable ugliness, you know, alongside real virtue and beauty?

Absolutely. Where you want so desperately to simplify it to bring it down to its most basic story and see if you can find that person that you somehow want to emulate. This is what I want to be. This is what I’m going to point at. This is what I’m going to strive for. And coming to the place where you realize that we are all in such desperate need of grace and that as descendants, and I mean that beyond our blood families and our descendants, even as descendants of those that have gone before us in the family of faith that when we pick out different people. I don’t care if it is Martin Luther, if it’s Charles Spurgeon, if it’s Amy Carmichael, whoever it may be, these that we consider the true greats of our faith, Augustine, whomever we could choose, we want it somehow to be so clear that it was just this. It was just this. And the truth of it is we’re all paupers to grace. We have to have it. And but what we do get to do as descendants and as the children and grandchildren and the nieces and nephews of those that we have had in our very complicated and colorful families, we do get to decide if we look at it honestly, what we want to carry on and what we don’t.

But I’m going to tell you, I’m a firm believer that if we don’t want to carry it on, we’d have to be deliberate, that what will come naturally to us is to carry on what has been woven into the fabric of who we are. Like my grandmother, there would have been no reasoning that we could say to her nanny, that is so racist, but it would not even be able to. She would have argued with us to the death, and she would have still continued to tell us that she was warning us. That she knew what was true. And there comes a time when you realize you’re not going to be able to get a person to see what it is you are so frustrated with, or the thing that you find so astonishing. At times you’re just going to have to go. This is complicated. We can’t see things in the mirror and near as well as we can see them out the window, and we’re going to have to work on ourselves and not think we can fix anyone else because we, you know, we can hardly fix ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. One of the — Well, you talked about how fear fueled so much of your grandmother’s racism. And, you know, fear of the other, fear of the unknown, and of course, the sort of dark irony at the time is that she was a very afraid of the outsider. And there was so much darkness going on. Very close at home.

Yes. I’d love to paint this picture for our listeners and viewers, because we lived across the street from the high school in my small Arkansas town. So she would look out the window and she would see some of these young African-American men on the stairs up to the school and I need you to understand, Cherie, she did not know a single one of their names. I don’t know if she knew anyone’s name who was African American. So any time you do that, you know, you don’t personalize it at all. She would look out the window at times, and if she would see those young men, they were just waiting for the bell to ring. You know, she would warn my sister and me about, you know, just, you know, just walk straight up the stairs or maybe you could find some other ones. But the strangest part of it at one point I was old enough to be able to even think this rationally, that I was leaving a home where I was unsafe and I was being told, be careful because you’re going to be unsafe across the street. No, I was unsafe on this side of the street. I was safe on that side of the street. It was the paradox of it. Wasn’t even lost on me at 14.

Yeah. Yeah. There is something that it somehow it seems easier to kind of displace the fear onto a person or a group that’s more easily marginalized than what’s right there you know with us.

Yes. It was unthinkable. You know, there were some things going on in our home that were too much to consider. It was something that she couldn’t have wrapped her mind around at that time.

Yeah. Well, you were very candid about some of the things without being explicit, but candid about some of the things that happened in your home and just the darkness and the horror of it all. Your churchy, religious father who was very against any consumption of alcohol. You know, nevertheless was a sexual predator, was an abuser of children, had affairs, and tried to gaslight your mom into thinking that she was crazy. And one of the things that just really, I thought was so poignant and compelling in your memoir is you’re wrestling through how to, you know, how to see that clearly. What forgiveness means and all that. And I’d love to ask you about that and that one of the things that was so striking is with all that your mom went through, you know, with sexual abuse within the family, within his multiple affairs, with him gaslighting her to think she was crazy. She never left him. And you mentioned that your own first prayer journal when you were just 18 makes no mention at all of what was happening within your, household. You know, that perhaps you found forgiveness.

Yes, quite the contrary. It sounded like we were as happy a family as you could ever find. And that we had — I mean, that we were just the poster family. It was astonishing to me. I’d love for our participants to know that I — this was something that I looked at just some years ago and stared at because I knew how recent some of the madness had been. I mean, I’m talking about the the peak of the madness had been so recent, but what had happened was that my parents had recommitted themselves to church in that little era of time. Now, there were several years in there that my mother refused to go with my dad because she felt like it was so much performance. But, when they went back, I think that what I did that my way of processing, because there’s no other way to see it unless I was in like a full denial, which is in part true, but I could not have forgotten what all we had been through. I was too close to it. It had happened too recently, and there was too much havoc that was still in play. But what I saw in that prayer journal, because remember, Cherie, I’m talking to God in it.

So I’m writing to him, thanking him for my family, thanking him for, you know, all he’s done for us and which I do thank him for. But I think in my, especially in my mind that young, that the way I understood Christian growth and Christian maturity was that this is the essence of forgiveness. It is as if it never happened. And so it was like, go onward, do not look back. And that would go with me for years. It would be until — I would not deal with it, until it dealt with me, until it dealt with me fully. But it was the most astonishing thing because I stared at it and thought, I am not just being dishonest with myself. I am full on being dishonest with the Lord because there’s only the two of us in the journal. It was me and him. Yeah, it was one of the most eye opening things. And I thought this was the essence of forgiveness to me. This was grace. It never like it, it never happened. There’s never mind that he’d never dealt with it. And what dealt with it would have meant in that day. I don’t even know what that would have looked like, Cherie.

But I do want to say one thing, because this I look back on, this would have been when I was a little girl. The first time I can process that I was assaulted by him. I knew somehow that that particular thing was not just an anomaly. I want to try to explain this well. It’s an interesting paradox that there are many times when we know that our parent or our good friend or our child is really sort of departing who they are and acting out of a out of temptation, acting out of an influence outside themselves, whatever it may be. That’s not really them. Somehow, when it came to sexual abuse inside the home, incest, I had no name to call it. I would not have known how to frame it, but I knew that it made him somehow unsafe entirely. That thing, it was not a departure. It was pervasive and invasive. And I still would tell you that I believe that that was true, that there was even my child mind. I knew, oh, no, that’s not an aside, that something is wrong with him. Something is wrong with him. And truly it was.

You know, part of your memoir describes the whole journey from that 18 year old, you know, not even confiding in her prayer journal what happened to ,you know, to taking a very courageous stand where there was blowback and consequences and opposition not long ago, in terms of opposing sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist denomination. And, you know, I’m curious how, you know, how you think about your own background, you know, affecting your decision to ultimately leave your denominational home, but also kind of how your understanding of what it means to untangle those knots, to offer forgiveness, to understand other sinners kind of change from that, you know, ardent but, that 18 year old in denial. To, to the mature leader you are now.

By the time I was in my older 20s, I had already come to grips with something, and that was that I was going to have to find a way to articulate carefully to the groups that I was serving. Because by that time, by the time I was 25, I was very much doing what we would have called back then, Cherie, I would have been doing Christian motivational speaking. So I was very much out there in our large city of Houston, where we had moved by then, in surrounding towns where I could just drive back and forth to luncheons or dinners, whatever it might be. I was already beginning to teach a Sunday school class, and I had come to the conclusion by that time that if I couldn’t find a way to tell my groups that I had this element in my background, I felt that I couldn’t then be myself. So I would have to find a way. And I’m intrigued by that, because this would have been the difference between 18 years old and then let’s just say 28. So in those ten years, I remember being told when I was a little closer to 25 by a very seasoned speaker. She knew I entrusted it to her. And she said, Beth, I would caution you not to tell that.

She said, audiences can’t take that. She said they will find that. She said it won’t be that they don’t have compassion for you. It’s that they just can’t handle it. So I went against her counsel. You need to know. But because I felt like that I couldn’t even be honest in why I had pursued Christ and some semblance of I couldn’t have said these words, but a renewed mind. Why I went after him with such vigor, I felt like I couldn’t explain that when someone would say, you know, you seem older than your years. Well, in a lot of ways I was I had experienced things that I’d experienced a lifetime of things by the time I was in my mid-twenties. So I did that against counsel, and I did it carefully because I knew I knew I was going to lose my mother’s favor, that if she ever knew and I didn’t tell until the memoir, I did not identify that it was my father. So I just said it was someone that my family should have been able to trust. That was basically the way I put it. But I from the very beginning, I had to tell the very first thing I ever wrote. I made reference to it because I thought, I don’t know.

It was such a big part of shaping my life and explaining some of the journey that I took into the darkness and into the light. So by the time I was already having to exercise some amount of tenacity and will even at that point to start telling it, when I knew I was going to get in trouble with my family and I knew that I had been cautioned by another speaker not to do it. So all that to say, when I got more and more involved in ministry particularly, you understand that my ministry has been to women and so I spend so much time with them, so much. And so I begin to minister out of it and come to realize how many of them have experienced such a thing. So by the time we’re in the crisis the sexual abuse coming out in a number of these churches and in a number of figures that people knew, names that people knew, and pastors and student ministers and the crisis that we were in, there was no way I’ve gone back over and over, particularly with all the repercussions that it brought. But there would have been no way not to react to it and not to react publicly. I don’t think I don’t think you do. Ministry to women for that many years that and you advocate and then you’re going to get to that point and remain silent.

I don’t, I just don’t think that it. I don’t think I could have done it. By that time it was too much. Too much the norm of what I was practicing in ministry away from social media. So all that to say, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t cataclysmic and that the repercussions were not real. And extremely, extremely painful, extremely painful. That process of departing my lifelong denomination was not only like a death, but like a death in the family. In the immediate family. It was my family. I did not have the same bond with my family growing up in a lot of ways, because of the dysfunction in our home and the instability in our home. But my church life and this would continue throughout my adolescence and my 20s and even my 30s and on from there my church communities were safe, not perfect by any stretch, but safe. And so they were my family. And so to lose that anchor was, it was almost beyond my ability to put words with it. It was deep. It was to the bone. It was to the bone.

No, I can imagine. You know, when I was reading your memoir, one of the things that occurred to me just, you know, going through it is kind of a recurring theme of wanting to see, seeing clearly, you know, or hiding one’s eyes. And you were just sort of talking about that. I mean, just actually the counsel that you got is don’t tell that. You know, conceal this huge thing that’s happened in your life. They can’t handle looking at it in a sense. And, you know, even just in reading about when you were a teenager and eager to be seen, you know, you were a straight-A student who suddenly started getting D’s. You know, fast forward years later, you see what’s right there, just the the clear the implications of unchecked, in many ways, sexual abuse within a denomination and pointing at it and others don’t want to see it. There are many people, I think, who might read your book and would say, like, I want to be the kind of person who sees the hurting young person I want to see rightly, you know? And we all see through a glass darkly now. But there’s still wanting to see and know and perceive and discern. And I would just be curious about how do we learn to see more clearly, more wisely, more faithfully? Hopefully without going through the kind of trauma that you’ve been through. But how do we learn to see with the eyes of God when there’s so much suffering around us, as opposed to not only looking away, but telling others, you know, don’t show us that, and if you do, you’re the problem.

Don’t you think it’s fascinating that in the New Testament and in so much of the old, but that blindness is far more often associated with spiritual blindness and being unable to see what is right before you, then it is physical that over and over. Of course, Jesus was healing the sight of the literally blind, the physically blind. But over and over when he’d go, you blind guides. And he would talk then, in a theological sense, and saying, you have eyes, but you cannot see. You have ears, but you cannot hear. I think coming to the realization that we’re not seeing clear, that we’re not given naturally to it. Let me say there. So today, for instance, with all of us gathered for these few moments as we’re on this particular theme. What if we were able to begin praying? Lord, give me eyes to see. Give me the spirit of wisdom and revelation. Enlighten the eyes of my heart, as Paul said in Ephesians chapter one, what if we said, instead of looking at others and going, they can’t see? So because we can’t heal anyone else’s vision, but we can go before the Lord and go help me to see what is right in front of me, and help me to see it clearly, and to understand that sometimes for that fog to clear, it’s going to be something dramatic. For me, when I began to see, and let me tell you what I where this happened because what I had believed. And please understand with me I want to point out I love the denomination of my heritage, I love it.

And if you talk to many people who simply attend their community church, they might not have known anything about this. So this was but this was a very, very public thing. And so being a woman in ministry and in a man’s world, because I was on a platform sometimes on a platform with a lot of brothers, because I just, I was kind of in that early wave of women beginning to do this kind of speaking. And I just I had to reason in my mind that the reason why there was so much belittling or mocking and even some of it that was just meant to be in fun because, listen, I’m — I love to make fun of myself. That’s one of my love languages, so I’m pretty hard to offend by the time I’m taking it really personally. It’s pretty big because I’m going to tease, too, and I’m going to tease you too. But when you know, okay, that you’re being looked down on and — but I reason to myself is because of Scripture. It’s because of Scripture. It’s because of the order, how it’s supposed to be. And so I knew that it didn’t feel right in my heart. And this I want to come back to. Because one of the things I’ve struggled with all my life is can I trust my gut? And as it turned out, I could, but I thought, you know, you know what? Your guts too messed up to trust.

So when all of this happened and the fog cleared and for me in this particular subset that I was dealing with at the time in a very public way. When I say that, suddenly I went, oh my gosh, this is not about Scripture. This is about power. And I had entrusted myself to that world as a person who was safe there and esteemed as a woman. And it was I would have done anything to have gathered the fog back up. Have you ever known have you ever had a moment where you saw something so suddenly and you thought, this is not going to be good, this is not going to be good, and the repercussions of this are going to be enormous. And if I could have reached my arms out and gathered that fog back in, I would have. I would have, because there was no way to, as they say now, there was no unseeing it. And so it became — It hit the dominoes. It would have an effect where ultimately I would know that I was going to be unable to stay, and not because of the churches and individuals, but because of something that I saw in leadership that I thought, I can no longer I can no longer represent this, and I can no longer let this be what young women see when they look at an older woman in the faith and wondered if she can be bullied into silence.

Yeah, yeah, well, we’re glad you spoke up, Beth, and there’s so much more I would love to ask you, but I also know that we have a lot of questions from our viewers that are already piling up. So just a reminder, if you are one of our viewers, you can put your question in the Q&A box. And you can also like a question as well as asking a question. And that gives us some sense of what some of the questions with a lot more interest are. So our first question comes from Mariel Davenport, and Mariel asks. She says, I can relate to the need to forgive a parent. What practical steps did you take to begin walking in forgiveness? I’d love a practical step or verse to renew my mind with help to move forward in true forgiveness.

I think to be able to be honest is the first step. You cannot forgive something that you cannot face. And I say this with tenderness because I’m talking about these things as if they are not really, really profound and require careful, careful thought and Godly people and oftentimes professionals to walk you through what some of these elements even mean when you’ve been through, especially if you’ve been through abuse and there are various kinds of abuse, all of them, all of them dramatically empowering in ways that are destructive to the life. But I think to be able to be honest about it and then to come to grips with the fact that you are not having to bring yourself to an emotion, but you are walking in a truth that you’re coming to grips with the fact that what Christ is saying is that if you let that if you hang on to it, you will completely smother your own life. And by hanging on to it, I mean just the destruction of it, that it will so smother the abundant life out of you, that it will not free you to be the person that you’ve been called to be. So to come to the place where we’re able to say, okay, this is what has happened. This is the complexities. This is the complexity involved. And to know that something is hurt inside there that helped me. I think compassion is one of the strongest elements in forgiveness. Coming to a place where I could see what destruction he had done to his own life, that even after I make reference to him having written us this autobiography that he had had done for all of his children, and giving it to us, but not one of us read it until many years later.

I make that point because, look what happened. Did he not? Could we say he didn’t suffer from what he had done? We can’t possibly say that he lost the respect of his children, lost the respect of his wife. So coming to that point of compassion for a person that is clearly broken, and then knowing that it does not have to feel it doesn’t have to feel good. That what you’re after is being free. Free from the bondage of unforgiveness and free from bitterness. And for me, part of that I would want to say to her is coming to a place where it has lost its poison, but found some sense of caring and empathizing with another person that has been through something similar that has been — when I say that I use that element whether or not I’m thinking of the abuse, which normally I’m not. Still what was unearthed through working through all of that and having experienced something so harmful, I minister out of that. That’s how I can lean across a table and go, I’m going to tell you something. God will be faithful to you. You let him in, you let him in. And I’m going to tell you, God will be faithful to you.

Yeah. So our next question comes from Carlene Curley, and Carlene asked about a part of your memoir that we did not get to. She says that it was a long time reader and even leader of your Bible studies I felt I knew a great deal of your story. The part of your story that impacted me the most was your husband Keith’s bipolar diagnosis. My own husband of 35 years and father of our two children was diagnosed decades ago with bipolar. What has most helped you navigate the extraordinary complexities of your marriage relationship. And how did you get to the point where it was okay to write about this aspect of your life?

Well, okay, I have to tell you something. I hope this is meaningful to our participants. You talk about this was the big part. This was the part that I was going to tell that I was going to do several things. I knew that I was ready to tell who my perpetrator was, and that was my father. I knew that the time had come, and I had reasons for thinking that that time was right. But you talk about a conversation that was had not once, but several times with my husband about whether or not we were ready to do this and that we had all of our, our married life. Now he’s not someone who wants out front, but he serves out of his childhood pain continually. When we came together with such a brokenness and such, oh, such self-destruction on both of our parts. I had come from a background of tremendous instability and sexual abuse. He had come from a background of trauma and deep, deep grief that began with he and his brother being in a fire and his brother losing his life, and he himself being greatly harmed by it. And the struggle that that put in his family. So you bring that together and you have got yourself a very complex situation. But what we had done is all of this time we had served out of that. He often across the table in one way or another. He was very open with his story and what he had been through in his life because of that, those tragedies and I more publicly.

But when we came to this point, it was like, okay, this is when I’m about to tell the real story, and I don’t know how to tell the real story and make no reference to this. And so I sat down with him and said, you know what do we do here? What, are we willing to share and what we said he said, can I say, he said, I’m ready. He said, because we both felt like, okay, we’ve done we’ve used all of this all of this time. Will we withhold this? And that’s why I told certainly he wasn’t the only one I told on. I told on, of course, on myself and some things that I had never shared. But we were like, no, what would we withhold from them at this point if it would help? And so he said, can I be the one to say how much? Absolutely. You can say we’re the stopping point is. And so that’s why you see that we’re quite general about it. But I will tell you that, to this day, what it means to Keith and me and Carlene. What it means, I’m sure, to you. Is that every day is a new day. I mean, I am. You talk about fighting, having to fight off fear of what does this look like? Whatever this happens to be at the time. And I may be talking about this from ten years ago, but at that point of like, what does this look like in five years and not giving way to that kind of fear? Does this just — are we just going to decline from here, or is there any up from here? What happens from here? The inability to plan some of the normal things that other people might do. Our lives are just different. We don’t live that way. We might not know if we were going to be able to go out with friends on such and such a night. We don’t know how might we be doing that day? So it was something, it was so big that we felt like to leave it out would be a mistake. But I want to tell you guys something, because I will never, ever get over my wonder of this. It was the very first thing I heard from a reader, and it was from a guy, and he’s a pastor and in the Midwest. And he responded, he must have gotten that book early that morning and either listened to it or read it during the course of the day because before the night was over, he said, can you thank your husband for me? Or he got at least to that point and tell him what it means to me that he was willing to let you share it? To this day, it is the number one thing I hear from readers. That to deal with mental illness within the home, whatever kind it may be, whatever form it may take can make you feel so isolated.

And the thing about it, Cherie, is that it is not rare. And so we’re trapped in thinking, this is the one thing we can’t tell anyone, because there’ll be so much shame associated with it. And the thing about it is many, many families you have — I don’t — I can’t give you statistics, but you show me a large extended family and I’m going to tell you they are dealing. I mean, they’re either dealing with it or they’re it’s still in their midst and they’re not dealing with it. So we’re so thankful it was the scariest thing about it. It was so terrifying the day before when I knew it goes out tomorrow and there’s no way to take it back. Now this is done. No matter how we revise it. If we decide. I even said to the reader, it’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like this. I said to him, you know, at what point is it fair to say, could you deal gently with us on what I’m about to say? And, you know, I have to say, I don’t know if that was fair or not, but they did. They did. I have had very other people have said other things about other parts, but people have dealt gently with us about that and given him his dignity, and he deserves dignity. This is a fabulous guy that has been through a lot.

Yeah. Just a quick note to our viewers. There’s so many questions which we expected we will not be able to get to them all, but the next question I’ll ask is from Mary Cotman. And a number of viewers asked something sort of related to this. So she just says, how do you explain your call to be a Bible teacher, and how do you cope with criticism as a woman, you shouldn’t be teaching. I have a feeling you’ve gotten this question a lot, but it’s still been asked a lot.

I’ve gotten that question a lot. I love to say because I want someone to be encouraged about this. If no one’s going to be encouraged, there’s no reason to be on here because I, you know, I could just talk to the wall. But what I’m hoping for and what I prayed before we got on is that we would truly serve people today and people would find hope and encouragement. And I want to say that the grit of God, his determination to call and make sure someone fulfills their calling it often, let’s say, always exceeds our own commitment to it. And by that I’m saying that he was committed to me seeing through to my calling. So much so that I’m telling you, I had a compelling when I was a young woman and took my first Bible Doctrine class, and so came alive in the scriptures, which I look back on now and know that that was of the Lord. There’s no way to explain why a fire is lit in a heart that does not go out. Now that fire will go down. It doesn’t stay at full flame all the time. But what I am going to tell you is that I could not have stopped. I don’t know. The more I studied and the more I would see something that I thought was just brilliant and wonderful, or it would strike wonder in my heart. Or it would. I’d come to a point where I thought, oh, oh my goodness, I see this. I get what Jesus is doing here, whatever it might be. I had this compelling to share it, and I have throughout my whole adult life. It’d be like if I discovered something wonderful about him, or if I discovered something that was freeing about him.

I was just like, I mean, nothing could stop me. I would have gone into a coffee shop. So, you know, just really it saved other people that didn’t want to be any part of it from having to hear it because I was going to do it. And so I say that because I think that is the strength of the calling. I think the call of God is just like, it’s hard to resist it because, I mean, it is the Holy Spirit in you. And if you are paying attention and by that I mean reading Scripture and you have a prayer life, it’s going to be really hard to resist it. And so that I’ve said so many times, by the time all of this happened and I got, well, I don’t, for lack of a better word, because it’s just common now to call it that by the time I got canceled and I’m not near as canceled as I used to be. It wasn’t as by that I mean ten years ago, it wasn’t as permanent as I think they meant it to be. But by the time I got canceled there, it was too late. I was going to serve the Lord to the death. Whether it was going to be, I pray to God willing, whether it was going to be public or whether it was going to be private. I thought sometimes about not being in the public eye, but I never, ever considered quitting ministry because I was too compelled. I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t stop. So that’s a beautiful thing about it. Is that just it’s got a strength to it in itself.

Absolutely. So a fun question from Autumn Hamline. Autumn says, through all the hard things you’ve walked through. How is it that you’ve ensured that no root of bitterness has overtaken you, she writes you seem to be able to point towards Jesus in the hard places. What are the practices, spiritual or otherwise, that have helped you with that?

Okay, now this is going to sound like I’m coming up with a pat answer and the anticipated answer, and that I’m going to really spiritualize this, but I don’t have another answer. This truly is it is that maintaining that relationship with Christ in my own personal life was the protectant against the things that would have built up if I had just shut that door? And I say that because just as a habit, as a rule, just as a spiritual practice, to have a prayer life. To think to myself I don’t want to hear from anyone else before I’ve heard from the Lord. And that would have been this morning. And it would have been yesterday morning. I want to hear from him first. I want to go to Scripture first. And again, y’all please do not get any kind of elevated idea. No one has been in a deeper or darker place of despair and destruction and self destruction than I have been in. So this is strictly the grace of God. But I do want to say that when you have an active relationship with him, so let’s say daily or almost daily relationship with him, then as that comes up, did I have moments where I felt overwhelmed? Did I know that I had the capacity to get a better spirit and for it to poison everything around me? Oh, I knew it, I knew it, I knew that the wound was so deep.

I knew — it was like going through a very public dramatic divorce with all sorts of shrapnel everywhere. And did I know that the capability of that, the capability of not being able to trust again and getting just cynical. Oh, absolutely. I was not guarded from any of those temptations, but to keep going before the Lord. And then I get, you know, back in the Scripture and it would delight me again and I think, no, this is everything in life to me. And he’s everything in life to me. And I just I give it to that, I give it to that. Just staying in there because you have conviction of the Holy Spirit. And so when I start to give way or I start to feel really, really ugly towards somebody, I mean, where you think I cannot bear them, I cannot stand them. Well, then you’re meeting with the Lord and you’re having to bring that to him and go, I have hated my heart towards word someone and you know, so that just staying in a very honest, authentic relationship with Jesus, where you’re bringing it over and over and you’re saying to him, rescue me from this. This is not this is not what I want to turn into, and this is not who I want to be, and it’s not how I want to be.

Yeah. So, Beth, we only have a few more minutes and there’s — this is a really poor summation of a lot of different questions, but along the general theme of where do we, the church, go from here? And, you know, amidst all of the abuse allegations, the poor handling of them, uh, challenges within the church, whether it’s Christian nationalism, challenges outside the church, a growing secularism. There’s a lot to contend with. We think about, like G.K. Chesterton saying that at one point there were several different points in history where it seemed like the church was going to the dogs. In each case, it was the dogs who died. I mean, obviously we serve a risen savior who has overcome all through history, but just kind of, you know, very expertly pull together a lot of these sort of disparate questions. Where do you think about where does the church go from here?

Well, the church is going where Jesus is taking it. And that to me is the most wonderful feeling. So we’re headed to the marriage supper of the lamb. We absolutely are. We absolutely are. But we are also in an era of time and have been ever since the birth of the church, of him refining his people. And one of the things I want to say to you guys and this, this helps me stay in tuned and in relationship to what God is doing locally. Be very, very careful not to set your definition of what is happening in the church according to social media and news outlets and all sorts of articles that are just there. There are lots of lots and lots of good media, but I don’t mean that. What I do mean is that if it’s all about who’s failed and who’s fallen and what all the divisiveness is, and there are things that we have strong values about and that we disagree about. But there are a lot of wonderful things happening out there. So stay in tune, particularly to what is happening in the local community. I do want to say that, but I want to make mention, and I wanted so much to say this if I got opportunity to a conversation I had last night on the airplane coming back from a work trip in Portland, a woman was sitting beside me and she was a dog breeder and I’m a dog lover.

And so we got into all sorts of conversation about her profession. And so somewhere along the way, she asked mine. I told her I was an author, and I sort of went on past it. So we just continued to talk about what she was doing and how cool her profession was. And later in the conversation, she said, so there’s a good 15 minutes went by before she said this. What kinds of things do you write? And of course, that’s when I said that. I, you know, I’m a Christian author and primarily write to a Christian audience or people who are considering Christ. And so she said to me immediately, and I loved this about her. She was looking for a way to relate. And she said, you know, she said for many years I was a school teacher. And she said, I taught at a school that was, it was a private school. And she said they were really, really Christian. And I didn’t ask her, but I wanted to so badly. And I realized later that the question was not for her at all. It was for me. And it was for us in this conversation today. What do you mean by really, Christian? Did that mean really separatists? Really dogmatic?

Really rigid? Or really humble, really loving, really joyful, really strong about their values? But also determined that you have value even though you may differ. It was like, what is really Christian? And so I’m assuming that most of us on here Cherie have faith in Christ in common. And I want us to think of that as we narrow this down to a close. What does it mean to be really Christian? If somebody called us that boy, she really was. He really, really was a Christian. What does that look like? Does it look like Christ? Because to the degree that it doesn’t. And this is to me, some of what we’re seeing is a failure of discipleship. How did we how did we depart? How did pro-Christian come to mean something that in some respects does not look like Christ in the Gospels. And so I think this is the question that we get to grapple with. What does it look like? Does it look like the fruit of the spirit, or does it mean that we believe we are right and everyone else is wrong, and that makes us superior to them? I don’t know. I don’t know, but I think she caused the question. Not for me to ask her, but for me to ask myself.

That’s lovely. Well, Beth, thank you so much. And in just a moment or two, I wanted to give you the last word. But before that a few things to share with all of you watching. First, immediately after we conclude we will be sending around an online feedback form. We’d love for you to fill this out. We always read all of these. It’s really helpful to us in terms of refining our programs, and as a small token of appreciation for if you do fill it out, we will send you a free online version of a Trinity Forum reading. And there’s particular readings that we would suggest that touch on some of the things we’ve talked about today might be a way to go further in your own reading, including A Spiritual Pilgrimage by Malcolm Muggeridge, The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, Confessions by Saint Augustine, or The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness by Reinhold Niebuhr. In addition, for everybody who registered, we will be sending around tomorrow an email with a link to a video, lightly edited video of today’s conversation. We very much encourage you to share this with others. Start a conversation about some of the themes and topics that have been addressed today. In addition, we would love to invite you to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help advance Trinity Forms mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought.

There are many benefits to joining the Trinity Forum society, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, but we also want to offer a special inducement and gift of appreciation for anyone who joins the Trinity Forum Society, or with your gift of $150 or more. We will send you a signed copy of Beth Moore’s wonderful memoir, All My Knotted Up Live. So I hope that you will join the society and we will be seeing more of you. In addition, in terms of next online conversations, our next one is on August 1st with Karen Swallow Prior. On the topic of you have a calling and also wanted to just notify everybody about our summer podcast series Beside Still Waters, which focuses on the places where creativity brings life to a world consumed with fatigue and division. So we will be dropping those new podcast series every other Tuesday, and you can also get them by simply subscribing to Trinity Forum Conversations podcast. I’d also like to send a quick thank you to my crackerjack team at the Trinity Forum Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Anne Morris, McCrae Hanke, and Francis Owen who put the mission of the Trinity Forum into action. So thank you very much. And, Beth, thank you. It has just been a real delight to talk with you and want to give you the last word.

I am so grateful for the privilege. And I thank you guys so much for participating in it. Okay, so this particular quote is by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and it is painted on the wall of my office. So I could throw something at it right now from where I sit. So I will read you this. This is because, you know, I have to wonder, especially after being teased about it so many times, is the kind of joy that some of us have that we have a hard time keeping to ourselves? Is it silliness or is it something that is to be treasured? If that is sort of the way your personality articulates it? So this was a blessing to me, he says this “faith is not the clinging to a shrine, but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts and impulse, overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind. These are all a drive towards serving him who rings our hearts like a bell.”

It’s beautiful. Beth, thank you so much.

My pleasure.

Thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.