The Red Boot Diaries

For my birthday recently a friend from work gave me, as a joke—at least I think it was a joke (I mean, I’m not really that kind of girl), a copy of the National Enquirer. The cover story was “John Edwards caught cheating again!” Also on the cover, in smaller type, was a teaser about a follow-up on Tiger Woods’latest indiscretions. I read the articles, of course—I couldn’t resist—and along with a huge portion of the American public, wondered again how these guys could be so stupid, such jerks. Couldn’t restrain themselves.

I grew up going to a church where sexual sin got top billing. It’s funny because in the Bible, Jesus speaks about sexual sin only 4 times. And he talked about money a lot. I read somewhere that 11 of his 39 parables and 1 of every 7 verses in Luke talk about money. We didn’t get a lot of Sunday morning sermons or youth group bonfire chats about our relationship with money, I must say.

I was a good kid, growing up. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, sang in our little Baptist church youth choir, tutored underprivileged kids, didn’t have sex with boys, didn’t lie, cheat, steal.  Or even gossip. OK, well, I did have one big gossiping moment. My best friend Sharon and I were walking out of high school at the end of the day, in a crush of people. I’d heard a juicy bit of smack that day and I started telling Sharon about it, about this popular girl in school we knew—smart, beautiful, rich, a regular in the Presbyterian youth group, and could you believe it? I’d heard she was pregnant! In the midst of telling this I saw Sharon’s face change into a cringey kind of whacked-out- monkey-on-LSD look.  I glanced back. Right behind us was the girl. The nice, smart, well-off Presbyterian pregnant girl. When I turned, she looked me in the eye. I was 16 years old and I don’t think I’d ever felt so bad in my life.

I felt like I’d just committed a sin.

The John Edwards article and this lovely memory brought to mind the encounter in John’s gospel, between Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. The guys in this story brought this woman to Jesus, hoping to have their own National Enquirer kind of moment. Look at the scandal we’ve uncovered. Let’s all take a moment to preen ourselves on the moral high ground.

Jesus wasn’t that interested.  He seemed more interested in doodling in the dirt. If he’d had a cell phone he’d have been texting or checking his friends’ Facebook updates on their sheep in Farmville. But when these guys pushed him, he didn’t play into their whole high drama around this woman’s sexual sin. He basically invited them all to do what, in 12-Step Recovery circles, would be equivalent to a 4^th Step, to start a “searching and fearless moral inventory” right on the spot. Anyone without sin, any kind of sin, he tells them, cast the first stone.

Sin is sin, Jesus essentially says. And we’re all missing the mark. I like how Rob Bell, in his book Velvet Elvis, puts it: Our job is the relentless pursuit of who God made us to be. Everything else is sin.

So when Jesus asks us to do our 4^th Step, what he’s asking is: are we relentlessly pursuing who God made us to be…in every area of our lives? Am I relentless pursuing who God made me to be in my work life? In my family life? In my (gulp) sexual life?

Of course if I start asking those kind of questions, I end up asking another one: what did God really intend for me as a sexual person?

When I try to answer that, I find a lot of mixed messages out there. Society tells me sex is the answer to everything, the way to feel worthwhile, how to feel powerful.  Or that sex is a commodity, something good to get, equivalent to a Big Mac and fries, or a new BMW. Of course, growing up in family and a church known for its strong and abiding belief in piling on the sexual guilt and in piling on seconds at pot lucks, I’m not sure I got a very good answer there either.

All I know for sure is that a lot of people are broken in this area, maybe all of us are. Some of us, more obviously than others. John Edwards, Tiger Woods—their brokenness shows up on the cover of the National Enquirer. Mine, not so much. At least not yet. But it doesn’t change the fact that if I’m searching and fearless in my moral inventory I have to say I have fallen short of what God made me to be sexually. I have sinned and fallen short of the glory of sex as God created it to be

As a person who’s dealt with a huge nasty eating disorder all my life, who’s been fat more than thin, who’s envied the anorexics, it took me a long time to get the truth—that anorexia and bulimia are the same disease.  When you’re the fattest person in the room or when you’re John Edwards, it’s clear you’ve got a problem. It’s clear you’re not being everything God had in mind when you were imagined.

But here’s the truth. Whether you’re the woman caught in adultery, or the woman caught sneaking fistfuls of cake in the middle of the night, or if you’re a person who runs screaming from Bavarian cream donuts or one who primly and quietly, and possibly with a headache, avoids exuberant physical intimacy–bulimic or anorexic, it’s all the same disease. In the church too often it seems we’ve been so busy figuring out who’s been overindulging sexually and throwing the rocks, that we’ve failed to look at what it might mean to take Jesus seriously when he said that he came that we might have life more abundant, a life which, last time I checked, includes our sexual lives.

Some churches, to be fair, have started talking more about sexuality and trying to discover what it might mean to have a sexual life that is all that God meant it to be. Not long ago a church in Tampa challenged the married couples in their church to have sex every day for a month. And the singles to abstain from sex for 30 days, even if the singles were in committed relationships. It was refreshing to me that this church said, “We need to examine this together as a community.” And their challenge acknowledged two things. One, that married couples have frequently put sex way too far down the list of priorities in their lives, somewhere south of working a kazillion hours a week, getting the laundry done, carting the kids around, watching TV, serving on the Elder Board and flossing. The second thing it acknowledged was that singles in the church have sexual lives. Some are in committed relationships and sleeping with their partners. Some are in committed relationships and trying to remain celibate. Some are navigating the river rapids of dating today, and either having loads of great sex, loads of crappy sex or no sex. Depending on the week. Or who you talk to. And through whatever they’re doing, wondering if there is a place of sexual grace for them, if there is something other than anorexia or bulimia available to unmarried Christians, is there something other than being eternally celibate or abjectly promiscuous.

The good thing about this 30-day challenge, it seems to me, is that it was designed to make everyone uncomfortable, destined to expose the cracks, to reveal the hidden bruises, to pull our wounds and easy answers and silent sorrows out into the open. So who knows, a 30- day challenge might be good for all of us.

Of course, as someone who has been on plenty of diets throughout my life, a 30-day challenge does feel like it could just become another version of Atkins, South Beach or the Zone. All of which you can lose weight on. If I’ve learned anything through the years, I have learned that you can change the weight of your body without actually learning to love your body. The poet Galway Kinnell once wrote, “Sometimes it’s necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.” Ah… yes it is. And sometimes, for some of us, there’s not even “reteaching” involved. It’s all about teaching the loveliness for the first time. It’s all about learning that our bodies and food can be about pleasure and nourishment and exuberance and delight and health. And that sex can be too.

On the night of my recent birthday, my husband booked us a suite at a nice hotel downtown. King-sized bed, Jacuzzi tub, a nice place for a night of exuberance and delight, if you know what I mean. For the beginning of the evening, however, we invited some close, long-time friends, another couple, to join us for dinner at the shi-shi hotel restaurant. Before we went to dinner we were showing off our equally shi-shi hotel suite to these friends and sharing a glass of champagne. I had dressed up a little for the evening. A nice shirt, my nicer jeans—and over those jeans, a pair of tall, high-heeled, pointy-toed, very red boots. As the four of us sat together in the suite, looking out over the lights of the city, sipping champagne, the man of the couple sighed at one point and said, loudly and with feeling, “Lenora, I just have to say. You, in those red boots—Wow. Sexy.”

Now I know my husband thinks I look good in those red boots. But when my friend said that, I was flooded with a mad vortex of emotions. Happiness. Shame. Joy. Guilt. Adrenaline. Fear. I felt sexy, I felt alive, I felt valued, I felt…you know…HOT. And I also felt like I shouldn’t be feeling any of those things. I was being inappropriate, I was flaunting it, I was being a temptress, I was calling way too much attention to myself. I was being BAD.  My good Christian mother certainly never owned a pair of sexy red boots, much less wore them in public.  What was I thinking? What was I doing? And I found myself asking myself, what would Jesus do?

Would Jesus wear the red boots?

Hard to say for sure. Jesus was nothing, if not surprising. And I sometimes wonder what would have happened that day if the guys who were ready to stone the woman caught in adultery had stayed to chat, rather than walking away. What if they had been willing to open themselves up to this crazy rabbi, to reveal their desires and their shame, their screw ups and their longings, what if they had asked Jesus to help them make sense of it all?

Here’s what I believe, or at least, I’m coming to believe: Jesus calls us to a searching and fearless moral inventory, not because he wants us to feel bad, but because he wants us to actually start to learn how to feel good. He wants us to let go of our bulimia and our anorexia, let go of our sexual overeating and our sexual starvation, to let go of our limited, shut down lives and our “take whatever you can get” lives and begin to relentlessly pursue another way, relentlessly pursue who God made us to be, so that we can discover, every day, an abundant life and all kinds of tastes of heaven.

A nice piece of heaven…I could go for that, I’ll tell you. I suspect John Edwards, in his heart of hearts, could too.