All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

You want to know how to love me? Love my children. You want to be good to me? Be good to my children.

Even of marriage, the Lord said the two shall become one flesh. He did not say we’d become one heart. He did not say we’d become one mind.

The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do it's good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.

Jesus is the only outsider who truly knows the insider our skin keeps veiled.

I looked at his hand, my insides wrenched and wrestling with wanting and not wanting to hold it. I'd held the dying hands of perfect strangers. But only strangers are perfect. It's the known ones that muddle.

has been my observation that racism and sexism have an uncanny way of showing up together, like two fists on one body. The common denominator was clear as a bell from where I sat. It was superiority. I spoke out specifically to my own Southern Baptist world because I believed

If God is love, then nothing is more blasphemous than hate.

Once you've broken to pieces, the luxury of imagining yourself unbreakable evaporates.

A teenager doesn't know she's still a child. A teenager feels like an adult, I suppose primarily because her outside, her flesh and her face, her body, her size, her width and height, look like - and can function like, get pregnant like, can party like, get arrested like, and die just like - an adult. She thinks she's making decisions as a grown-up with a fully developed brain and, in a case like mine, a fully developed faith. She's wrong about both of those beliefs. But chances are, she will not realize what a child she was until, as a full-grown adult, she knows and loves a teenager.

The thing about life is that, for most folks, it hurts from the start.

Our lives together have never for ten minutes been drama-free. Amanda and Melissa could have had-_-deserved to have far better parents. They deserved stability. We didn't have it to give. But we gave them what we had. When we had more, we did not withhold it. When we had less, they were not unscathed. You can't have a father and mother with the kinds of issues Keith and I had and not ride a relentless roller coaster. When we had on seat belts, it was good. It was fun. When we didn't, it was scary. It was sad.

Sometimes you wake up when you don’t even want to. But maybe God keeps you waking up till one day, many days later, you grow a little gladder that you did.

All this time, I'd accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture. What I was watching in the wake of the report, however, did not appear to be a whit about Scripture, nor did it evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit, as far as I could discern. In my estimation, this thing playing out in front of the world was about power. This was about control. This was about the boys’ club.

We're too flawed and too challenged by history, circumstance, and chemistry to hoard grace for long.

No other human can climb down our throats like a spelunker and hack through our trachea and try on our hearts and see how they feel. One mortal cannot fully comprehend how another operates from within.

All my knotted-up life I've longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who's good and who's bad. I've wanted to know this about myself as much as anyone. I needed God to clean up the mess, divide the room, sort the mail so all of us can just get on with it and be who we are. Go where we're bent.

The eight most spectacular words falling on the ear of a lonely kid clutching a tray: “You can sit with us if you want.

I was about to get to start over. Mind you, for those who have lived past third grade, there’s no real starting over from scratch. There’s just starting over scratched—and if the hurts clawed deep enough, scarred. But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had. Our family had been reduced to so few in a community of so many, even once we settled into a house and a neighborhood, that we no longer had any notion of who we were.

The downside of human closeness is that, to the degree you have loved their presence, you grieve their loss. Amanda,

The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do its good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.

Gethsemane is all the things we fear most except one. We fear we are unheard. We're sure of it, but it is not true. It was in that original Gethsemane that Jesus, in the words of Hebrews 5:7, "offered prayers and appeals with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard...And we are heard.

But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had.

God could do what he wanted with eternity. I was just trying to make it here in the meantime,

Keith’s fractures came at the hand of such savage instruments that he steps on shards nearly every step he takes. He told me once, “Lizabeth, life is harder for some people than others.” I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say how everyone had the same opportunity to be happy in Jesus. I wanted to ask him why the blessings of the present couldn’t make up for the curses of the past. I wanted to ask him why I wasn’t enough to make him too glad to be sad, but I knew I’d be talking like a fool. Life is harder for some people than others. Shadows follow me often enough, but not incessantly. Not everywhere I go. I’ve not spent a single night’s sleep in a burning garage. I deal with bouts of anxiety and depression, but they don’t chase me down constantly like ravenous wolves after a bleating sheep. I wondered sometimes, as most kids do, if my parents really loved me, but never once was I faced with circumstances wooing me to wonder if my parents wished their other child had been the one to survive.

We have gone through agonizing situations of our own makings. Our own foolishness, selfishness and sinfulness. The most relentless winds that have battered our four walls for decades on end; beaten our windowpanes with frozen rain; whistled through cracks in our door and threatened to blow our house down, however, are outside of our doing. Outside our causing. Outside our fixing.

love means finding some measure of safety with one another in a world that couldn’t be less safe.

There are some things all the sitting in the world in someone else’s seat can’t tell you. You’d have to sit in the same skin.

You’re the only person I’d marry in the peak of deer season

A man's boldness with the gospel was seen as godly passion. A woman's boldness with the very same gospel was ungodly impertinence. It was masculine. And what you knew in my world without a shred of doubt was that nothing was more off-putting to the men at the helm than a masculine woman.

As long as you have a male covering," were words I'd heard over and over again, and I believed them to my bones. A male covering was the key to a woman being blessed by God in ministry.