With Mercy for the Greedy

I resurrected an old blog entry from 2016 because it's freshly relevant, and a testimony of God's goodness is always in order.

I’m a recovering control freak. This, of course, is painfully obvious to most of you already, but I’m told there’s power in confession, so there you have it. I prefer things and people I can predict and manage. In my mind, disappointment and rejection are much easier to handle when you can see them coming down the pike.

I especially liked my religion this way- concrete doctrine, black, white, form, function, reverence, awe, obedience- everything in a neat little box, including God. I had a ready answer for every doctrinal dilemma. I could even explain to you which verses of which hymns were deemed appropriate for hand raising, and yes, I would silently judge the inferior critical thinking skills of the congregants who got it wrong. A staunch cessationist, I looked disdainfully upon those who claimed to hear directly from God or who danced around at the front of church making a spectacle of themselves. Who did they think they were that God would reveal Himself to them individually? The gumption!

Eager to win God’s approval and favor, I became something of a legalist and a performance junkie. I kept the commandments and memorized the catechism. I made a show of abstaining from parties unlike my heathen friends. I led the high school girls’ Bible study, was nominated captain of my college basketball team, served as a feature columnist for the school paper, sang the solos in the choir concerts, and even found the time to volunteer on weekends. I did everything right- or so I thought.

This seemed to be working out quite nicely with the exception of two minor problems: 1. I was absolutely miserable. 2. Apparently God missed the memo about operating within the confines of my boxes. He wanted a relationship, not a robot. But that required trust and vulnerability. I was interested in neither. They always cost too much.

But then I faceplanted. Hard. Shortly after college, everything came to a head. I began to deal (for the first time in my life) with my history of sexual trauma and the reality that the one man who had ever told me he loved me was actually a predator. Then the man I thought I was going to marry called off the wedding two weeks before it was slated to take place. I started drinking like a fish and sleeping around to numb the pain, and I found myself unemployed, pregnant, and marked with the Scarlet “A” I had so enjoyed assigning to other women.

Covered in shame, I ran from God and took solace in literature. Hemingway, Plath, Steinbeck-anything full of angst and absent of hope. I remember clinging to one poem by Anne Sexton called “With Mercy for the Greedy.” In the poem, she talks about a cross she received in the mail from her Catholic friend who urged her to pray and seek God. Anne desperately wanted to try and deeply wished she could force herself to consider it but ultimately concluded, “Need is not quite belief.” That line clung to me and echoed my own disappointment. None of my good deeds had amounted to anything. Everyone I loved still suffered. My heart was bleeding profusely, and God did not seem to care. Nothing I did was ever good enough to win his favor or blessing. I wanted to believe in God’s love for me. I needed to believe in God’s love for me. But my need could never seem to cross the brain-heart barrier into belief.

Twelve hundred layers of shame and abandonment blurred my focus, and I resigned myself to the fact that while I believed God existed, He was too busy to see or care about me personally. I stayed in this place until complete and utter desperation catapulted me out of it:

Shortly after my son was born, I returned to work at the Y. I was making $800 a month, $500 of which went to cover the rent in my tiny apartment. I remember the pit in my stomach the moment I realized I would not have enough money to cover my rent payment, which was due the next day. I had been trying so hard to budget and be responsible. I sold what I could on Craigslist, but I still came up short. I felt so embarrassed, so defeated. I was too proud to ask for help. So I sat on the bathroom floor of my apartment and cried. I remember calling out desperately toward heaven, “God, I know I don’t deserve any help from you and that you probably don’t even hear me, but I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?”

The next day, I received a call from my college basketball coach, to whom I had not spoken in several years. “Kaeley,” she said, “I’m coming through Tacoma and would like to speak with you.” When she arrived at my apartment, she did not even want to come in. She just extended her hand, handed me an envelope, looked embarrassed, and said, “This is probably going to sound weird to you, but I really think God told me to give this to you.” I opened it up. Inside was $500 cash- the exact amount that was due for my rent payment that day.

I have six or seven stories almost exactly like this. Shortly after my daughter was born, my husband left me for another woman. I still remember the excruciating, almost physical pain I experienced when I opened a text message from his new girlfriend. The text was a picture of this woman holding my newborn daughter dressed in a Playboy onesie. The pain was almost unbearable. A few days later, while driving down a dusty gravel road, my daughter started crying. I turned to see what was wrong and promptly crashed my car into a telephone pole, totaling the vehicle. At this time, I could not afford collision insurance, and I did not have any decent savings with which to purchase a new vehicle. I went home and, once again, found myself on the floor of the bathroom crying out to God. I was so desperate, so broken, so afraid. “Loaves and fish,” I remember praying. “God, you’re gonna have to help me here. I can’t do this,” I remember begging.

When I showed up at work the next day, a strange lady knocked on my office door. “Are you Kaeley?” she asked. “You don’t know me, but you’re supposed to have this.” She handed me an envelope and disappeared. I opened it. Inside was a note with a Bible verse about God’s provision. And $1200 cash.

Another time, I really wanted to go to this three day workshop for adult survivors of childhood sexual trauma, but again—single mom budget. I didn’t tell anyone about it, but that week I received two unexpected checks in the mail from friends I hadn’t seen in literal years. “God told me to give this to you,” they both said. God provided a way for me to go to the conference.

Interestingly enough, it was my experience at that conference that inspired my first blog, which I randomly decided to post as a Facebook note one night. A friend said, “Kaeley, you should submit this to The Federalist for publication, so I did. They published it, and it went viral. It became the most widely read piece they ran that year, and it launched me out of my desk job and into God’s true calling for my life as an advocate for women and children. God used that conference and that blog to change my life. He was guiding, providing, and masterfully orchestrating every step of the way.

And of course He didn’t stop there. He even resurrected dreams and goals I had long abandoned. I dropped out of college after four years of attendance, 17 credits shy of a degree in English because I ran out of basketball scholarship money and life just got hard. I didn’t talk about it much, but there was always a sense of shame that followed me, knowing I had attended college for four years with no degree to show for it. Single moms working full time don’t usually have a lot of extra funding to pursue scholastic achievements. But God.

I got invited with my friend Miriam to speak at the Q conference in Tennessee. After, my speech, a college English professor and his students approached me to thank me for my message. It turns out that he taught in the same small Christian college I had attended many years prior. He promised to go home and tell the school’s president about my situation. He kept his word and pulled some strings, and I was invited to finish my degree via night school at no charge to me. I finally graduated with my B.A. fully seventeen years after I had begun it.

I could share several more of these stories, and maybe some day I will, but the point is this: As long as I tried to keep God in my perfect little boxes, I was operating with an inverted sense of reality: I was desperately trying to earn the salvation Christ’s blood had already secured for me. And as long as I was busy trying to control God, I was not open to the idea that He could rock my world or radically bless me. I wanted a God I could predict, not one I could adore.

I remember looking disdainfully at the Christians who needed to hear from God all the time, and I stroked my own ego with verses like, “Blessed are they who do not see and still believe” as though it were some great sign of holiness to kill the God-given desire for actual intimacy with Himself. But intimacy requires trust, and trust requires faith, and faith means I don’t get to drive. And no matter how many times He’s proven Himself faithful, this is still not easy for me.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. When He led the Israelites out of Egypt, He gave them daily bread. They weren’t allowed to stock up or save some of it for later. They had to trust that each and every day, when they were hungry, the food would be provided. He’s led me faithfully out of my own personal Egypt. He’s restored my locust-eaten years and set my feet upon the Rock of His goodness.

He hasn’t failed me yet. With mercy for the greedy, He sees my imperfection and loves me anyway. It’s liberating in that sense- and wildly adventurous. There’s joy in this, even though it’s not always comfortable. My need is now belief.