I stand in the aisle, off to the side, in view of the pulpit so Keith can see that I’m here, ready and waiting. I both do and don’t want to do this. In this exact moment, I mostly don’t. I am terrified. I don’t think my hands have ever shaken this much. I’ve been to the bathroom three times since I arrived 45 minutes ago. My mind whirls.
Why am I doing this? There are so many people here. Is it too late to run out? No, that would be humiliating. People came from all over to hear me do this. Don’t let them down. Don’t let Keith down. There’s a reason. A reason I was asked to do this. A reason I need to share this story. It will help someone. I know that. That’s what telling stories does. It will help someone. It will help… me.
Keith introduces me. He uses words like “courageous.” I don’t catch much of it, other than my name. This is it. I’m walking up the carpeted stairs. I am standing at the pulpit. I am squinting in the lights that feel too bright. I want to take my shoes off. Two hundred pairs of eyes stare at me, waiting for me to do what it is I’m here to do.
I hear my voice over the speaker.
“Good morning.” I sound calm, collected, assured–things I do not actually feel.
“Good morning,” the congregation responds.
In the back of my mind, my Brene-Brown-inspired, vulnerability-as-strength training takes over. Embrace the fear, I think. Use it as fuel. Allow yourself to be seen here. You can do this… God, please help me do this.
In the next breath, I am peaceful. Present. Single-minded. I am here to tell a story. I am here to be authentic. I am here in service of people who might need to hear what I have to say.
For the next fifteen, very surreal minutes, I tell the assembled congregation of my church the single hardest story I’ve ever shared in public: what it’s like to love–and lose–a sex addict.
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When I first walked through the doors of this building a year ago, I had no idea why I was here. I had not been to church in so long that I didn’t even know how to do it. I had no idea where to sit, when to stand, what to say to people about myself.
All I knew was I was desperate. I was betrayed and devastated. I was very, very sad. The trauma of betrayal had triggered old, deep-seated fears and negative body image obsessions. I was spiraling into major depression and teetering on the brink of destructive eating and exercise patterns. At times, I was suicidal. I felt like I was coming undone.
In the midst of that chaos, I began dreaming about the church I grew up in. I dreamed about wandering through its halls, sitting in its sanctuary, and doing craft projects in its Sunday School rooms. Night after night, I re-visited the place where I first learned about God.
One morning, after perhaps my dozenth dream like this, I turned my eyes skyward and said, “Okay, God. I can take a hint.”
And so I went. For the first time in 16 years, I attended a church service. And a few weeks later, I went back. And I kept going back. And a few months later, I became a member. Since then, I’ve gone on the annual church retreat to the woods and stayed up way too late laughing and playing games; I’ve gone to karaoke at smoky bars with church friends; I’ve established a monthly church dinner group that’s a highlight of every month.
No one is more surprised than I am that I wake up every Sunday morning eager to go to church. When I left church at 18, personally wounded by a youth pastor’s admonitions and angry on behalf of my LGBTQ friends, I never expected to go back. And yet, here I am, one year after that first service, standing in front of total strangers and people I’ve come to think of as family, telling a story I’ve never shared before.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in public. I’ve taught yoga to 300 people at once, testified in front of the state legislature, and appeared on national television… and this is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done with an audience.
I struggled to make peace with this moment, in part because it’s not just my story. The ways I was affected are mine to tell, but the story itself belongs to someone else, someone who doesn’t see the same value in being radically vulnerable in public as I do, someone who’s made it abundantly clear he wants nothing to do with me, despite my attempts at some sort of loving resolution. I questioned time and again whether it was ethical of me to speak these words in public, words that will be recorded and shared with others outside this room.
And in the end, with the support and encouragement of people I’ve come to trust, I believe that this is what God wants me to do. So, here I am, telling the hardest story of my life.
I feel like I’m both closer to and farther away from knowing where God is, compared to where I was a year ago. Closer, because there’s more of God in my life: more books to read about Him, more conversations about Him, more places to seek Him. Yet farther away because I realize that I may not have known as much as I thought I did when I first walked through the red doors of my church; there is still so much to learn about God, and the only way to get there is to lean into a confusing, messy mystery.
I do know that whatever and wherever God is, He shows up.
As I stand in that pulpit, sharing the darkness of my story, I think back over the memories I’ve made here in the last year: The first time I sat in Senior Pastor Keith Thompson’s office and told my story, crying shaky tears, hoping I might be accepted. The first time I sat in a small group discussion and examined the cultural commodity of virginity as a way to understand the story of Mary and Jesus’ birth, feeling confident that it was okay to be my authentically feminist self. The way Lisa quietly slipped up beside me the day I became a member to ask if she could stand with me, so I wouldn’t have to stand in front of the congregation alone. The way my stomach muscles hurt from laughing while playing camp games with new friends I made on the church retreat at Camp Sumatanga. And the day during service when I sat next to a homeless woman who was floridly psychotic and rambling about the End Times, and rather than judge or reject her, I opened my hymnal and invited her to sing with me, which she did, and I felt the love for all that Christ preached about course through my veins and gave thanks that she and I might be able to share that moment together.
I think about the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus tells His disciples to go out and love the world in the way they themselves have been loved. I can only stand here and share this story because I have already been radically loved and accepted, because authenticity and vulnerability have been modeled for me in this place. God is here, right here in the courage it takes to share the very hardest parts of our lives. God is in the faces of the strangers and friends who will approach me today and for weeks to come, eyes filled with tears, saying thank you, that was amazing, you helped me. God is the electric energy of community and genuine connection. God is the resonance of deep Truth that allows us to say to one another, “I’ve been there, where you are now, I know what that feels like.” God is in the tenderness we feel when someone says, “I’ve never shared this with anyone before.”
And to my continued surprise, God is still meeting me here, week after week, in this beautiful old building with the red door. And the thrill of that meeting continues to get me out of bed every Sunday morning, eager to see how He’ll greet me this time.
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I read the last few sentences from the paper in front of me. Words of hope, offerings of gratitude, assurances that recovery is possible to those who are struggling.
“For me,” I finish, “that’s the good news. Thanks be to God.”
Before I can turn my face from the microphone, the congregation bursts into applause. In my momentary sensitivity, it sounds too loud, like crashing. It feels like more than I deserve.
I make brief eye contact with Keith. He smiles. I did it, I think. You did it, his smile says.
The clapping continues as I walk down the steps. It continues as I walk, head down, up the side aisle. It continues as I push open the door at the back of the sanctuary.
It continues as I dissolve into tears and crumple on the steps in the Narthex.
Great, primal sobs heave from my gut. My face twists as raw emotion tries to escape out of the muscles in my cheeks. My body shakes like I just ran a marathon at altitude. I did it, I did it, I did it. Tears pour down my face, a release from the adrenaline of the moment. A release of the build up of so many months of emotion, some of which I can’t name.
I am relieved. As the sobs subside and clarity returns, I realize that I didn’t just do it, I did it as well as could have possibly hoped, not because of my own greatness, but through the grace of That Which is Bigger Than Me. I pause to pray, for the hundredth time that day: God, please let the words I spoke help someone, somewhere. I sit here for a while and pray that prayer, until it vibrates in my head like a mantra.
Eventually, puffy-eyed and red-faced, I will slip back into the sanctuary, back to the army of friends who came to hear me speak today, back to the peaceful familiarity of closing hymns and blessings and benedictions. After the service, I will be bombarded by hugs. People will tell me how grateful they are, how they related to parts of my story, how deeply they were touched. Part of me will shrink away from the attention even as I lean into the support of my community. I feel lighter, freer, and yet also very raw. My church family will linger around me well into the lunch hour, talking about what I said and the response and how I’m feeling about all of it.
It will not occur to me until later that the armored suit of shame I’d been wearing about this story was left in the pulpit. I will envision myself walking away from it, leaving it standing there, like a hollow, Melissa-shaped shell that will dissolve and puddle to the floor. Shame can only thrive in secrecy, and shame disintegrates in the light, and pouring out my story in front of my church family has shed the brightest, most cleansing light on what used to feel dark and toxic.
In the weeks following my talk, I will listen to a recording of it a dozen times or more. There is something validating about hearing my own voice sharing wisdom that is most definitely not my own. And as I listen, I will relive the feeling of support, that day and in the days that followed. I will picture the faces of people who smiled and cried with me as I spoke. I will remember the kind, earnest words friends said to me and the messages I received in the days after. I will remember the deep, lingering hugs that spoke volumes without words. I will remember the cathartic feeling of crumpling in the Narthex to shed buckets of tears, only to rise again with a courage I didn’t expect to feel. And remembering all of that will reinforce the knowledge that I am free.
Maybe this is the transformation God promises, if only we are willing to trust.
I am no longer afraid to tell the story. I loved a sex addict. I was betrayed over and over. It was painful. I tried really, really hard to stay with him despite it all. Ultimately, it was all too much, and I had to walk away. My heart will bear the scars of having been betrayed by him forever. But all of it made me stronger. It taught me things that I can use to help other people. It brought me here, to this place where I am loved and accepted more than I ever imagined was possible.
I’m still working on exactly where God is, and I hope to be in that search for the rest of my life. For now, God is in the faces of the people who heard my story, who supported me in telling it, and who benefitted from hearing it. God is in the connection we experience in true vulnerability, even though being vulnerable is scary. God is that feeling when we overcome the fear and look others in the eye and say, “Here is my truth” and when those people reply, “I hear you and accept you.”
And if that is where God is, then God is showing up in my life more and more by the day. As I step deeper into community, with my full truth on display, I have ever more moments in which God is present in the words and eyes and hearts of others. Grace in action. Divinity in flesh. Love upon love upon holy, righteous Love.
Praise be to the One who shows up right where we are, when we are willing to be ourselves in the presence of others.
Hallelujah.
Amen.
