Read an Excerpt
What Women Tell Me
Finding Freedom From The Secrets We Keep
By Anita Lustrea
ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2010 Anita Lustrea
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-32664-9
Chapter One
IT'S LONELY AT CHURCH
What Women Tell Me:
When I enter my church I feel lonely. I sometimes feel like I should go somewhere else.
I saw the crumpled piece of paper out of the corner of my eye as I stood talking to an acquaintance at the end of choir rehearsal. I didn't think much of it, but my compulsivity kicked in and I couldn't leave it there on the floor. I finished my conversation, bent over, and picked up the paper to toss it in the wastebasket. At the last second I decided to uncrumple and read it. I saw my handwriting, and my heart sank.
I headed into the choir room as usual that Wednesday night anticipating an evening of worshiping God through music. You see, I love to sing. I spent the greater part of my life singing with my family in concerts or in the car, traveling with choirs or small contemporary singing groups, or performing solo concerts. In my midtwenties through my early thirties, I pursued a career in music, but with the birth of my son I pulled back the reins on my singing and settled into full-time employment with Moody Radio. Singing in the choir fed my soul. So the choir room was a sacred space to me. Lifting my voice with the fifty other voices in the choir was something I'd do five nights a week if everyone else would show up.
Our choir director usually started us off with vocal warm-ups and then had us rehearse a few anthems before taking a break for a devotional time. We always exchanged prayer requests at the end of that break. We wrote them down and put them in a basket as it passed, then took one from the basket as it made its way back around.
This evening was different. Our choir director asked us to write down a personal prayer request, something that was really weighing on our hearts that we might not otherwise share publicly. Then he challenged us to sign our names if we felt we could. It didn't take long to write my request. I was surprised at how easily the words flowed from my pen. I'd written a very personal request but couldn't decide if I would sign my name. I sat there fondling my piece of paper, waiting, watching the basket get closer. With palms sweating, at the last second, I signed my name, folded the piece of paper, and tossed it in the passing basket. I had taken a huge risk that night in deciding to bare my soul. I remember thinking, "Anita, you are really desperate to do this." I was.
Now as I was leaving to go home, I picked up that crumpled piece of paper to discover my own handwriting. I smoothed out the piece of paper and read it again. "I am very lonely. Please pray for me." That was my prayer request, discarded and tossed on the floor. I had taken such a risk in being vulnerable, and then to find my request crumpled up on the floor-I was devastated. I put the smoothed-out piece of paper in my Bible. I thought, "I'll take this home and throw it out myself! I'll make sure no one else can find my confession." A little piece of my heart was inked onto that piece of paper. And a little piece of me withered and died that night.
How could someone read my request and decide to throw it away? I felt like I had been discarded along with the crumpled piece of paper. Then my mind went into overdrive. "How many people saw this same piece of paper, picked it up, read it, and dropped it back on the floor?" You know how a mind works. Yours works the same way. End result: I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I wanted to leave the choir and the church and never come back.
If you worked with me, went to church with me, lived next door to me, you had no idea the depth of my loneliness. I don't think I fully did. I was a worship leader at church, in a leadership role at work, but I was dying on the inside. I had plenty of acquaintances, but no deep experience of friendship. From what Midday listeners tell me, many share the same experience. I was desperately lonely in a very lonely marriage.
A few weeks later the woman who had picked my prayer request out of the basket privately identified herself and apologized. She had intended to bring a friend and come visit me, but just hadn't been able to find the time. Which is to say she'd never stopped by-or called. As she was telling me this, I remember screaming inside my head, "I can't believe you didn't hear the desperation in those words. I can't believe you are standing there telling me that you almost came to visit me; that you almost brought a friend with you, but that you didn't have time. I'm dying here. I was desperate enough to write this request and sign my name to it; can you honestly not see how lonely I am right now?" Of course that's not what I said. I kept a demure smile on my face and politely nodded assent as if I understood her intention.
When the brief conversation ended, my questions turned toward God: "Lord, where are you? Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do you care about me? Could you not send one person in this church to meet me in my loneliness? Didn't I take a risk and do my part?"
When I was in the middle of my deepest time of loneliness, I didn't have the capacity to ask some important questions. I didn't see how isolated my life had become, or how and why it had become that way.
LIVING IN ISOLATION
There are many reasons people live in isolation. About forty-four million Americans move in any given year; that's roughly 17 percent of the population. Most disorders treated by therapists are relational, and many have to do with the fact that people have lost their relational networks. Sometimes that's due to moving, sometimes due to divorce or widowhood, sometimes both. It's not unusual to have families like mine. I live in Illinois. One of my brothers lives in Maine, and one in West Virginia, with my parents residing in Florida most of the year. Many people no longer live near nuclear family. Running across the street or down the block to visit grandparents or aunts and uncles has long been a dream of mine, but never a reality. Today, we have to create family another way.
For some women the isolation is imposed on them; for many it is self-imposed. Many people want relationships and don't know how to open themselves to real community. As one Midday Connection listener said, "I'm so lonesome for a deep friendship with other women, but I don't know where to start."
I sense that loneliness is epidemic among women, especially Christian women, even those who go to church every Sunday. As another woman wrote, "I feel an excruciating loneliness in the midst of other Christians at church and during the home Bible study I attend."
BORN FOR RELATIONSHIP
There is a good reason why we desire relationship-because we are born to live in community. In the Genesis account of creation, we read all about God creating the heavens and the earth. We read about God creating light and separating the light from darkness, and creating sea and sky and all kinds of living creatures. But in Genesis 1:26 we are introduced to a new thought. We hear God use the pronoun us. "Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness" (TNIV). It is our first clue that God exists in community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We were made in the image of a Trinitarian God. We are created for, born for, relationship.
Unfortunately, by chapter 4 of the Bible things had gone horribly awry. Cain killed Abel. The small community that existed at that time was diminished by one. Cain felt pain, and whether he knew it or not, he sent himself into isolation by the death of his brother. How often have we reduced the size of our community by emotionally injuring someone to move them out of our lives or to create distance?
Fast-forward to the New Testament. God plans to deal with his sinful creation. The plan is Jesus. Jesus came to earth to be among us: Emmanuel, "God with us." Jesus could have lived on this earth, kept his distance from people, and done everything himself, but that's not what he chose to do or how he chose to live. He modeled community by choosing disciples who walked with him. A group of bumbling fishermen, tax collectors, and women followed him everywhere during his earthly ministry. Over the course of time and as relationships developed and deepened, three of the disciples became an inner circle to Jesus. These three saw him at his glory, the Transfiguration, and in his despair, Gethsemane.
We read in 1 Corinthians 12 how we, as the church, are mysteriously the body of Christ, members of each other: "A body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body.... God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it" (vv. 12, 24-27 TNIV). Simply put, we need each other; that's how God designed it!
Sometimes we think it's just us; we're the weak one. Only we need community. Once Jesus ascended to the Father, the apostles themselves realized they needed community. Surely if Jesus didn't go it alone, neither could the apostles. In Acts 12:12, once Peter had escaped from prison with the help of an angel, he headed straight to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where many people had gathered to pray. He didn't go hide out somewhere; he headed toward a home where he knew the church community would be gathering. He needed the body of Christ.
The apostle Paul, in Acts 16, headed to Philippi. On the Sabbath he and his companions "went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer" (v. 13 TNIV). Paul headed to the location where he knew he would find a community of believers, or at least the possibility of finding a group. There he spoke to the gathered women, including Lydia, "a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message" (v. 14 TNIV). She invited Paul and his companions to her house to stay after she and the members of her household were baptized. Paul and Silas continued ministering in the area and were thrown into jail after Paul cast an evil spirit out of a woman. You know the story. The short version of the story is they were released from prison-by an earthquake. Did they just continue on their way? No. They headed back to Lydia's, where a growing group of believers was meeting. They benefited from that community, and they in turn encouraged the gathered believers before they left town.
Some of these biblical examples are truly what we want the church to look like today: where we gather regularly to meet in community, can't live without one another, and are always looking to encourage each other. Sometimes, though, we have a naive view of community. On one hand, we envision it as folks standing around a campfire holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." But on the other hand, there is the reality of Judas's betrayal of Jesus and the three disciples falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, not to mention Peter's infamous triple denial of Christ before the rooster crowed. And then there is my story. There is the excruciating reality of my loneliness even in the midst of a fifty-voice choir that met together and prayed together week in and week out. In my life the church was not functioning as true community.
One day on Midday Connection our guest Dannah Gresh focused on authenticity and how to support each other in healthy Christian community. Dannah wrote The Secret of the Lord, a book that isn't fully explained by its title. Gresh explains that "the secret of the Lord" is a rich phrase taken from Psalm 25:14 that you can't fully understand until you delve into the Hebrew text. "Its most literal translation would be the people of God who are friends." The kind of friendship Dannah is talking about is "a tight-knit group of intimate friends with unconditional trust; a circle of friends among whom weaknesses, strengths, successes, and failures are shared. Within this circle, our sins are confessed and forgiven. Our masks of perfection are removed. We aren't afraid to tell our stories, and we are truly known. The secret of the Lord is the intimate friendship that exists between believers."
In that hour-long program, we offered ten books each to ten different women who would commit to forming a small group to go through the book. The book contains an interactive experience at the end of each chapter called "It's Your Turn," which lends itself to group discussion. Our goal was to help women start forming community. We wanted the leaders of the groups to report back to us about how things were going, and we hoped winning the ten books would make it easier for a woman to make phone calls and be intentional about inviting other women into community.
We got our ten volunteers. But the email response-from hundreds of women- revealed deeper issues. After I'd read the first ten or so, I saw the pattern. Almost without fail the emails read, "I am very lonely. I want to be in a small group, or find community, but I'm afraid to risk it." Some went on to say they'd been burned in the past and were hesitant to try again.
I think we need to take a look at why building community is so difficult. I believe sometimes the issue is related to spiritual warfare. We are in a spiritual battle, but we forget that we are.
SPIRITUAL WARFARE
One year I taught an adult Sunday school class during the Christmas season. And the more I studied the Incarnation, the more I thought about spiritual warfare. In the lesson I taught, I called Jesus' coming to earth an act of war. Think about it. As soon as Christ arrived on the scene, Satan tried to snuff him out. We are in a battle, and Satan desperately wants to keep us from building relationships that will fortify our faith and strengthen us spiritually. If he can keep community from being built, he will have succeeded.
J. R. R. Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings trilogy is full of spiritual truths. My husband, son, and I watch the film version of it annually. In the first movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, all of the representatives of the different people groups of Middle Earth gather to discuss the fate of the ring, an evil, magical gold band that possesses whoever owns it. The Middle Earth Council decides that the ring must be destroyed by being thrown into the fires of Orodruin, the fiery mountain. All of the warriors are yelling and fighting over who will carry the ring, how dangerous the mission is, and how impossible it is.
In the middle of the din, a small voice says, "I will do it. I will carry the ring." He repeats it, trying to be heard above the others. "I will do it. I will carry the ring." Little Frodo Baggins, half the size of all but the dwarf Gimli, steps forward to volunteer for the perilous task.
Here's the important point: Frodo doesn't head out alone carrying the ring. He is surrounded, not by masses of people, but by some select friends who essentially commit to three things: to walk with him, to watch his back, and to fight off the enemy. That's what I'm talking about when I say community. I think that's the support we're lonely for.
Since the Garden of Eden the enemy has relied on one strategy. His goal is to divide and conquer. His plan is to isolate us and take us out of commission. If we are sidelined, we are of no value to the kingdom of God. I've been a pastor's wife for about five years now. One thing I've noticed is that the well of relational difficulties never runs dry. Satan has a huge bag of tricks, and he is not afraid of attacking any of God's people.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Women Tell Me by Anita Lustrea Copyright © 2010 by Anita Lustrea. Excerpted by permission.
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