The Red Boot Diaries

By Lenora Rand,
February 2010 Recovery Worship

"The religion scholars and Pharisees led in a woman who had been caught in an act of adultery. They stood her in plain sight of everyone and said, "Teacher, this woman was caught red-handed in the act of adultery. Moses, in the Law, gives orders to stone such persons. What do you say?"" From John 8:1-11, The Message translation


For my birthday recently a friend from work gave me as a joke—at least I think it was a joke—a copy of the National Enquirer. Not a magazine I buy for myself, I must say. Sure, I occasionally glance through it in the grocery store line, but that doesn’t count, you know, like how the bites you eat while cooking don’t really count in your total caloric intake for the day.

The cover story was “John Edwards caught cheating again!” Also on the cover in smaller type was a follow up on Tiger Woods latest indiscretions and also, in a totally unrelated story, a before and after photo of Cher promoting an article on how she got to look so much better in the after photo. I’ll just say right now, the Cher article wasn’t that helpful or enlightening. But I read it. Of course first I read the John Edwards article and the thing about Tiger Woods and I, along with a huge portion of the American public, wondered again how these guys could be so stupid. Could be such jerks. Couldn’t restrain themselves.

And all in all, it was a very entertaining read. I got the dirt and I got to enjoy my perch on the moral high ground.

I don’t know about you, but I grew up going to a church where sexual sin got top billing. Like if you’d asked me or anyone in my youth group to name the seven deadly sins, we could have easily named lust. And we would have named it first. The other six…I don’t think any of us were quite so clear on those. Greed? Maybe, murder? Was sloth on that list, whatever the heck sloth is? Oh yeah and gluttony made the list, right? Of course, gluttony was never preached against in my church—hard to preach on that with the kind of pot lucks we threw. The desserts at those things…gotta say. Sinfully good.

It’s funny because Jesus speaks about sexual sin only 4 times. And he talked about money more than anything else except the Kingdom of God. I read somewhere that 11 of his 39 parables talk about money. 1 of every 7 verses in the Gospel of Luke talk about money. We didn’t get a lot of Sunday morning sermons or youth group bonfire chats about our relationship with money either. Go figure.

I was one of the regulars in that little Southern Baptist church youth group, growing up. A good kid. Didn’t complain about having to go to church every time the doors were open. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, except for the occasional cheap cigars my best friend Sharon and I would smoke to be “wild and crazy teens,” driving around town in her car, dateless on a Friday night. I sang in the choir. Tutored underprivileged kids in a bad neighborhood after school. I didn’t have sex with boys. Or go too far with boys, even. The dateless part helped a lot with that.

I didn’t lie, cheat, steal or even gossip. Not that much, at least. I did have one big gossiping moment however, which didn’t go well for me. Sharon and I were walking out of our high school at the end of the day, in a crush of people all flooding toward the exit. I had heard a juicy bit of smack that day, and even though I really wasn’t someone who gossiped that often, I was excited about this, for some reason and wanted to pass it on. So I started telling Sharon about it. Started telling her 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 from interest into something else, something more akin to panic. She started making faces at me, cringey kind of faces and shooting her eyes around like a monkey on LSD…until finally I got it. I glanced back. Right behind us in the swirl of people, I mean right behind us, well within hearing, was the girl. The nice, smart, well off Presbyterian pregnant girl. When I turned I saw her. I saw her eyes. 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.

Which of the seven deadly sins was I committing in that little moment? All I know for sure is that pregnant girl was popular and cool and beautiful and rich and clearly was a person who guys were interested in and I wasn’t and I was glad that she was having troubles because in my mean little heart I was jealous of her, jealous of how easily everything seemed to come her way.

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, these big time scholars, 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. And see if we can expose Jesus for a fraud or an idiot in the process.

Jesus wasn’t that interested. He seemed to be more interested in doodling in the dirt. I suspect if he’d had a cell phone at the time he’d have been texting or checking his friends’ Facebook status updates. Or possibly doing something with his sheep in Farmville. But when these guys pushed him and he finally engaged with them, he didn’t really 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 4th 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.

Any kind of sin. It’s all the same. Sin is sin, Jesus essentially says. And we’re all missing the mark.

All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, it tells us in Romans 3:23. Our lives are meant to be lived to the glory of God, but we’re not doing that, we’re doing the opposite of that, which is sin. 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 fourth 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 creative life? In my (gulp) sexual life?

Of course if I start asking myself questions like that, I end up asking another question: what did God really intend me to be as a sexual person?

When I try to answer that, I find a lot of mixed messages out there. Chick movies and Glamour magazine portrays sex as the answer to everything, the way you feel worthwhile and of value, where sexual encounters are all in soft focus and your outfit can take the moment from ho-hum to a humdinger. From the nightly news to internet porn sites, to video games, sex is seen as an act of power, manipulation, and violence. If our advertising community is to be believed, sex is a commodity, a status symbol, 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 big pot lucks, I’m not sure I got a very good answer to that question 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. Not so far. 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 that you’re not being who God made you to be, you’re not being everything God had in mind when you were imagined, It’s easy to get fingers pointed at you. It’s easy to point fingers at yourself.

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 a lot 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. Their stated goal was to help couples reconnect with each other not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually. And maybe underneath all that was also the desire to make some noise, to not let people outside the church own all the conversation around sexuality. You gotta love the billboard they planned for it, which by the way, didn’t pass the billboard company censors. Posting the 30-Day Sex Challenge Web site was fine. The message, "Are you up for it?" wasn't.

I applaud the efforts of those who are starting to talk about sex more openly in church. “We’re only as sick as our secrets” is something that I have found to be true, time and again in recovery. Too often in the church we’ve had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to our sexuality. It was refreshing to me that this church said, “We need to have a conversation about this.” “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, watching TV, serving on the Elder Board at church and flossing. The second thing this challenge 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 (as one of my single friends put it) either 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, the 30-day challenge approach, 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 chi-chi hotel restaurant. Before we went to dinner we were showing off our equally chi-chi 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 that 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?

In Overeaters Anonymous, you learn that abstinence with food is not something that someone else can define for you. One of the other lessons I’m learning in healing from my eating disorder, slowly, with halting moments of progress and nothing near perfection, is that denying myself food, starving myself, is not the way to keep from overeating. Dieting and starving or stuffing everything in sight into my mouth are both ways of going numb. Of not feeling. Not being present in my body. And alive to God.

If you go into the candy department at Macy’s you’ll find row after row of amazing looking and expensive little bits of sweetness and joy. However, give me a bag of Hershey’s chocolate kisses and I’ll be happy. In fact, sometimes, just one Hershey’s chocolate kiss, can make me happy. If I pay attention to it. If I am actually present when I eat it, if I savor it, instead of gulping it down. If I tell myself it’s OK to enjoy it rather than beat myself up for wanting it. One Hershey’s kiss, or even two, if you really take your time, if you really let yourself revel in it, can taste like heaven.

Jesus calls us to a searching and fearless moral inventory, not, I believe, 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, not only the deep and sustaining bread and wine of communion, but also those sweet, sweet kisses, chocolate and otherwise.