Step 3: believe love transforms

(In 2019, Janelle enlisted her husband Brandon to write a post for her. It’s a great fit for today’s reading as well.)
Suffering from a severe case of writer’s block, I asked my wise husband if he would write the insights for me. I would normally apologize to you for this. However, after you read his message below, you’ll understand why I feel the need to say, “You’re welcome.”

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I’m admittedly not big on social media, but I do follow Twitter quite closely. Why? Because I’ve followed a lot of people I look up to. One of the people I follow is a woman who is a web developer for a large tech company—but that’s not where she started. She was originally a high school dropout who got hooked on drugs and fell in with, shall we say, the wrong crowd. She found herself pregnant, single, and homeless. Using online resources and free wifi, she taught herself how to code and got her first job in tech years ago, and has steadily moved up since. Inspiring story, right? We all have our heroes, and they live as heroes in our brains. But our heroes are regular people too.

This woman I look up to witnessed and experienced discrimination in her big tech industry job. Rather than keep quiet about it, she went public, inspiring other victims of this tech company to do the same. And it caused some waves—big ones. They didn’t fire her, but they had other ways of ending her career there, and she she ended up resigning rather than deal with the daily blows to her mental health. Jobless again, she fell back on old habits. Though she had been sober for more than a decade, she fell back into drug use, overdosed, and almost died. She told the story on Twitter so that other people who struggled with addiction would know that there are people out there who still relapse from time to time.

As a collective church, Christianity has its doors open to everyone. But I’ve been to a lot of churches and talked to a lot of Christians for whom that door doesn’t stay open for everyone. Everyone gets a chance to come in, yes—but unless they change their lives to the satisfaction of the people holding the doors, those doors might slam in their faces the next time they try to come in. I’ve seen friends talk with a heavy heart about their friends who are “backsliding” and living the wrong way, and I’ve sadly seen some of my friends have those doors shut for them as they tried to figure things out.

We welcome stories of former drug addicts because they’re powerful stories. People who overcome that and find God are, rightly, heroes. But what happens when our heroes relapse and overdose? What happens when our heroes struggle with depression and check themselves into a psych ward to protect themselves from suicide? For many of us, people are only heroes as long as they live up to the hero name and expectations.

When Paul wrote about God no longer judging people by human standards or counting their sins against them, he wasn’t writing that as someone holy who had never struggled with anything real in his life. Quite the opposite of a drug addict, but more problematic, Paul was someone who had weaponized his faith and used it to persecute others. He didn’t write from a place of accepting others who changed their lives to his satisfaction; he wrote as someone who needed forgiveness and mercy more than many of the people he was writing to, and, in some sense, as an outsider still hoping for a place in the new Christian church.

Powerful conversion stories can be a really healthy part of our faith. But if we find ourselves playing the gatekeepers, holding the door for these sinners as long as they keep their lives together, ask yourself what happens when these sinners are still sinners. I’ve seen what happens to church-goers when the doors are closed to them. There have been times when I’ve been the sinner and have been worried about losing my place in the church too. Remember: we’re all the sinner sometimes. My heroes remain my heroes because of their struggle, not in spite of it.