This is long, and somewhat of a rabbit trail, but here goes:
And just like that, from seemingly out of nowhere, another major step in the healing journey!
In the wake of the JS / FBC scandal, anger washed over me like a tidal wave that nearly consumed me.
Working through that anger has taken years, and healing for me could not be accomplished while still at First Baptist Church. The issues were too deep and healing was not happening there.
Little by little, God is helping me understand the anger and every time I understand a piece of my anger, it dissipates.
I?d actually thought it had all dissipated, but when recently someone posted something kind and sympathetic about Cindy Schaap in one of these threads, I typed a vitriolic response that showed not an ounce of sympathy. I refrained from posting that response but I pondered my reaction. Ever since the scandal broke, Cindy has evoked that angry response in me, and the strength of my anger toward her surprised me. I didn?t understand it so I put it off to the side.
Yesterday, through an absolutely unrelated event, I had cause to pray for someone who was experiencing an angry response to something and I prayed for God to open their eyes to the source of their anger and help them through it. Of course our dear God works in mysterious ways, and within several hours of that prayer, not only did the party for whom I?d prayed experience a dissipation of their anger, but I started to experience a personal episode of enlightenment that has caused me to understand my anger toward Cindy Schaap.
God made it clear to me that in the past I had used Cindy Hyles Schaap as the embodiment of the fruitless quest for perfection that was taught and preached at First Baptist Church.
On one thread about things that we miss about FBC, someone said they miss the sense of ?rightness?. Someone else said they miss their naivet?. Both of those ? a strong sense that all things FBC were absolutely right and my own naivet? as a new Christian when I arrived at FBC -- contributed to me buying into the Quest for Personal Perfection as a legitimate way of trying to be pleasing to God.
I came to Christ in my early twenties, and in my young ardent zeal for Him I was willing to throw aside everything I?d ever thought, hoped for, dreamed about, and accomplished in order to follow Him. So far, so good. I believe that is the response of a true follower. But?the message got mixed up because I landed as a new Christian straight into what I now view as a rabbit hole a la ?Alice in Wonderland?.
I entered immediately into the world of Independent Fundamental Baptist Standards for Living. Someone who kept the most and the best standards was someone who was really, really pleasing to God. Someone who didn?t keep his or her standards very well needed to keep trying, and maybe one day they could get better at standard-keeping and thus become more pleasing to God.
Jack Hyles held his daughter and the inner-circle core of First Baptist Girls up as quite the standard of feminine Christian perfection. It didn?t take me very long as a new Christian to realize it was really actually too late for me?after all, I was in my early twenties. I?d lived a ?before? life. I?d missed the boat for perfection. These girls, these personifications of perfection ? they?d never known a day where they weren?t living a life of standards that pleased God very, very much. They had the privilege of being in God?s Perfect Will. I learned at First Baptist Church, from Jack Hyles, that God has a Perfect Will for each of us. And as quickly as I learned that, I also learned that I?d of course missed it by not getting saved until I was 23 and by making some very wrong decisions prior to getting saved.
How defeated I felt, and how I admired and even envied those girls who by virtue of the strong fortress of separation surrounding them & guiding them & protecting them since birth had made all the right decisions and kept themselves smack dab in the Perfect Will of God.
*sigh*
Well, I learned there IS a consolation prize: the Acceptable Will of God. Basically what I understood was this: If you missed out on the Perfect Will of God, but you still wanted to try to please Him, you could latch on to his Acceptable Will at whatever point you were at, trying your level best at all times to be as close to perfect as possible, and He will accept you.
So, I tried. I watched these women, these paragons of First Baptist virtue. I thought of them as Baptist Princesses, kind of in the same way that there are Disney Princesses. It?s a type. I wanted to be a Baptist Princess, but of course I was no Cinderella. I was more like one of the stepsisters, although not evil. Simply, not princess material.
Chief among princesses was Cindy Hyles Schaap. She was perfection personified. She was quick to tell you she was just a normal person, but the aura around her was definitely palpable. It had started with her father building her to us in his preaching and it carried on over to her husband extolling her virtues to us in his own preaching. Her mother had been a queen. She was a princess.
I admit what now seems so incomprehensible and sad to me ? I knew from all they told of her that she was far, far better than I. I knew she had an inroad to pleasing God that I could never, ever experience. I saw the showers of blessing she experienced non-stop. I thought if I could just be around her, rub shoulders with her in the smallest way every once in a while, be noticed by her ? maybe I could start to count for something a little more. Maybe because she walked in God?s sunlight at all times, I could catch a ray here or there by being like her as much as possible.
Some of you reading this will be thinking judgmental thoughts such as: Well, see? The Bible is true when it tells us how unwise it is to compare ourselves?or, Wow, she was jealous and envious of Cindy Schaap and we all know jealousy & envy are wrong.
Yes, and I knew that too! So that was just one more tool the Enemy used to beat me up. Not only could I never ever know the Perfect Will of God because I didn?t have the privilege of princess status from birth, but every shred of resentment, questioning, jealousy and envy I felt toward the Privileged Ones was wrong and came from a bad place in my heart and I knew it. So I channeled the jealousy and envy into submission ? since I accepted that she and her ilk were cut from a finer cloth of Christianity than I was, I accepted her as my liege and submitted myself to following her, Christian Womanhood-style.
I tried so hard to fit into the mold. My husband never expected me to try to ?be like them? and he would try to make it clear to me that I should just be myself?but I had learned that ?myself? was a deeply flawed and imperfect and non-blessed person who was out of the Perfect Will of God. I wanted not to be myself. I wanted to be like them. And I secretly thought my quest was a pretty holy one that my husband wasn?t quite holy enough to be on.
This warped view of things is where I lived for a long, long time. So many wasted years, so much incorrect thinking, so strange a trip down the rabbit hole. In the wake of the scandal, as my eyes were opened to how imperfect these people were and how rotten the whole system really was, I got so angry at all the wasted time and all the embarrassingly wrong things I?d thought and been taught. My anger at Cindy was, I think, the last vestige of anger that needed to be understood and eliminated. I now understand where it came from and I believe it has evaporated.
God is healing me piece by piece, and I simply praise Him for showing me that I am in His perfect will because I am His and He is mine.
