Back When I Really Didn’t Care if My Mother Went to Hell

I usually share bits and pieces of my testimony whenever I speak at women’s retreats and conferences. (If you’re curious, you can hear my testimony, a Christmas keynote on “Peace at the Holidays,” and a bunch of other teachings for free on this “FREE AUDIO DOWNLOADS” page of my website.) And afterwards, I am almost always asked the same question:

How did you ever START to build a real relationship with your (mentally ill, addict/drunk) mother who (sometimes intentionally but more often than not inadvertently) treated you so neglectfully / abusively / just downright terribly for so many years?

I have thought and prayed for YEARS about a blog series on this topic because a three-minute response in a Q&A or a drive-by chat in a hallway after a session just never really gets there re: my mother’s and my real story. So I began this year to think hard about what it REALLY took to motivate me to move towards my mother in love and mercy, and I’ve tried to summarize a “big-picture” story arc with the three words that I also used in my 2013 PCA Women’s Leadership Conference and 2013 Peacemaker Conference keynotes:

Duty – God made me.https://youtu.be/qz3nxoSYXpA
Depravity – Compared to Jesus, I was just as big a wretch as she was. So who was I to judge her?
Destiny – I knew I deserved Hell, but instead God gave me Himself in Heaven! And deep down. I really really didn’t want my mother to go to Hell.

(I don’t think my PCA keynote is available online, but you can see my Peacemaker Keynote here:

I took a stab at the first subtopic, duty, in this post last month:

How to Love a Mentally Ill Addict

(Subtitled: How to Love Your Mother, Who Did the Very Best She Could, but Who, Like You, Has Many Weaknesses in Addition to Her Many Strengths and Who, Like You, Sometimes Turned to Not-the-Healthiest (Physically and Spiritually) Substances and Means to Deal with Her Suffering and Temptations and Fallenness, Including Self-Medicating with Scotch for Many Years and How to Love Your Mother Who Had Exactly the Same Amount of Neediness for the Savior as You, and How to Get Off of Your High Horse and Stop Judging Her and Instead See Yourself as Being More Like Her than Unlike Her So That You Can Enjoy the Best, Most Real, Most Intimate Relationship that Your Sin and Fallenness and Her Sin and Fallenness Will Possibly Allow)

If you want to begin at the beginning, you may want to click on over and read that post first. But I don’t think that’s 100% necessary or anything because today I’m jumping OUT of sequence to talk about subcategory 3: Destiny. Yes. Yes. Merry Christmas. I want to talk with you about HELL.

Some of you might not be all that happy with a blog post about torment and utter darkness (to use the words of the Westminster Confession) during this season of jolly and merry. But this morning I woke up remembering what it was like to have a hard heart that wasn’t interested AT ALL in moving towards someone who had habitually, repeatedly and routinely disdained, disrespected, attacked, abused, maligned, mistreated, criticized, judged … well, pretty much hated me even while CLAIMING to love me.

And that’s when it hit me: That’s the key. The linchpin, I think, for why I am so prone to be such a FRAUD scam-of-a-Christian in these difficult relationships when people treat me so wickedly and hurt me so deeply. Over and over again. The truth is, just like way back in 1985 when God saved my soul and (in response to this eternal kindness and love) all I wanted to do was stay as FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE from my mother, there was really only ONE reason why:

I didn’t care one whit about her soul.

Oh. Sure. I prayed for her salvation and tried to pull her along to Luis Palau stadium events so she would “get saved” and then “get the heck as far away from me as possible” because all I REALLY wanted to do was to fulfill some sort of religious duty towards her, get her eternal fire insurance fully in place, and then RUN because my life was easier and more pleasant whenever I didn’t have to deal with all of her drama and neediness and lies; her financial mismanagement, unemployment, homelessness, hospitalizations, and creepy relationships; her sappy pathos-laden, overly-intimate, inappropriate-for-a-child words when she had some sort of nostalgic wave of “love,” and her ice-cold, bitter, jarringly-cutting, inappropriate-for-a-child words when she was riding the wave down into the cesspool of ugly, lashing-out, hatred. You know, HER. The truth was:

I cared about my mother’s soul in the ABSTRACT. But I didn’t care about her.

I did not genuinely love my mother (or have any interest in loving my mother) because all I cared about, deep down, for real, was ME. My happiness. My comfort. How I was spoken to. How I was treated. I don’t like being told over and over again what a terrible (person, Christian, daughter, mother, wife, sister, friend) I am. It gets really really old to be constantly compared to (my sister, “good little girls,” loving people, kind people, gentle and caring people who aren’t worldly and materialistic and who actually try to feed the hungry and clothe the poor) only to be found lacking because I am such a selfish, materialistic, worldly pig. Maybe I am! But then, it seems to me, what I really need is prayerful, loving, Galatians 6:1 rescue and Matthew 18 redemptive, relational rescue — not just a constant verbal onslaught listing over and over again all of the many ways I just don’t measure up.

It gets so old. It wears me down. I just want to run away and hide away and stop being a verbal punching bag for mean people who think they are the only NOT-mean people in the world. (Grrrr!) I’m hurt. I’m tired. And all I can think to myself is:

I don’t deserve this.

Ah. Therein lies the rub. The eternal rub that pierces even a tired, stony, self-centered heart like my own and begins to soften me towards the truths that really matter.

Do I deserve to be maltreated? No. Probably not. Definitely not like this.

It is unjust to be constantly on the receiving end of another person’s meanness—all the more so when it is a parent treating a child in this way.

It is not beautiful. It is not good. And we should definitely be prayerful and intentional about looking for ways to try to help people when they are caught in these habitual sins and destructive relational patterns.

But HOW we go about helping them matters. Our attitude matters.

And please listen! This is important. If we are not careful, we will treat THEM with the same gracelessness and disdain with which they treat US.

Isn’t that all of our temptation? Someone is so AWFUL to me, so I will be awful to her in response. He treats me TERRIBLY! (So watch me treat him terribly.) Or, if I’m feeling particularly godly, watch me just AVOID HIM and think mean thoughts about him but not say them, of course, because I wouldn’t want to be caught revealing the graceless jerk that I am.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Who will rescue us from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ. We do not have to remain stuck in this terrible pattern of cruel judgment and merciless, arrogant pride. We don’t have to treat people as they treat us. We can repent! We can turn away from SELF and turn towards the One Who knows what it is like to be maltreated by people close to Him. To be spoken to in unjust, wicked, mean ways by people who should have not only loved and protected Him, they should have WORSHIPED Him.

You see … Jesus is the Only Person Who didn’t deserve the shameful and painful death of the Cross—yet He endured it. Jesus is the Only Person Who didn’t deserve to be separated from the Father—yet He endured it. Whatever the injustice in our lives? It doesn’t come close to the injustice that Jesus suffered and it doesn’t come close to the justice that we deserve: Hell.

And this is how we repent. It’s how I began to repent and move towards my mother in mercy when I was a teenager. It’s how I (try to) repent and move with mercy towards people who currently are hurting me. I think about Hell. I think about how much I deserve Hell. I think about how much I don’t want anyone to go to Hell—especially not the people hurting me. (Because the truth is, they are only hurting me SO MUCH because I ACTUALLY CARE about them. If I didn’t care about them, it wouldn’t hurt so much.)

And then I think about Jesus. The Second Person of the Trinity. Eternal. Uncreated. Perfect in Glory. Great. Good. Being mocked and spat upon. Cold and thirsty. Neglected, betrayed, and abandoned by those who should have loved Him best. Including me.

He could have called down legions of angels to (rightfully) defend Him. (How often have I created conversations in my own mind wherein I—wrongly—defend myself and “WIN” the argument.) But He answered not.

He didn’t deserve the accusations. (All accusations against me, even graceless ones, usually have multiple elements of truth. Blech! My heart!) He bore them all. For you. For me.

There is no suffering in this life that He cannot understand—and He has experienced suffering that I will never experience.

This leads me to worship Him. To adore Him. To fall down and kiss His feet and wash His feet with my hair.

Forgiven so much! Who am I to gracelessly refuse to forgive others?

May God help us all.

With love from your friend who is smack-dab right in the battle with you yet again—
Tara B.

[A re-post from 2013.]