"Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding." Proverbs 3:5
Former President Gerald Ford said this was one of his favorite Bible verses. It's a verse I loathe.
It was used as a weapon against me when I was a young church girl. Now, whenever I encounter it, I can scarcely breathe.
As a kid, I loved God with all my heart and wanted only to do whatever God called me to do. My faith was pure, true and absolute. God was as real to me as any flesh-and-blood person.
So when my minister told me God had called me for a special role, I believed him and listened. Doesn't every kid want to believe they're somehow special?
Week after week, he wore me down telling me how I was called to serve as his helpmate. It was "God's will."
I didn't understand. But he said men in the Bible sometimes had more than one wife and even had concubines.
He also admonished me that I wasn't supposed to try to understand. "Lean not unto thine own understanding."
Dozens of times, that verse rang in my ears. God wanted me to "live by faith," he said.
So that's what I tried to do. I guess you could say that, sip by sip, I drank the Kool-aid.
As the abuse escalated, I would sometimes balk. But he would invariably chastise me with "Oh ye of little faith." And he would remind me of how it wasn't my place to try to understand.
So, like the good Baptist girl I was, I deferred to male pastoral authority. Of course, he was also older, bigger, and stronger.
He said God was testing me, and I wanted God to see that I was willing to go the distance in matters of faith. I was a girl who would have laid down on that altar without so much as a whimper and let Abraham plunge in a knife.
In fact, that was another thing he often said. "Think of Abraham - think of Moses - think of Noah. Do you think what God wanted made sense to them?" He pointed out how God was able to use these men in great ways because they had the faith to do whatever God wanted even when they couldn't understand it.
He threw in Mary, too. "Where would we all be if Mary hadn't trusted God even when her special role was something she couldn't understand?"
I remember thinking about that one quite a lot. I wanted to serve God, and it's certainly true that faith is the very essence of things not understood. So over and over again, I relinquished my own attempts at understanding.
Christa Brown is the national outreach director for SNAP-Baptist and maintains the StopBaptistPredators.org website. She is a wife, mother, attorney, jazz-lover, slow-runner, and a Southern Baptist abuse survivor.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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