One Sunday at a church I served as pastor, a woman named Ann showed up. From the start, it was clear that her life had been shredded up by hard living. Ann explained to our greeters that she was in recovery from a heroin addiction, to which the needle streaks and scars on her arms gave witness. She was barely thirty-days sober. The people at the rehab center had encouraged her to “add religion” to her life because religious involvement tends to decrease the odds of a relapse.
On her way into the worship service, Ann dropped her two boys off at the nursery. When she returned after the service, a woman named Jane broke some bad news to her. During the service, Ann’s two boys had picked fights with several of the other children and broke several of the toys. Humbly, Jane said to Ann, “I’m so sorry to tell you all this, but I thought that as the boys’ mother, you would want to know.”
Impulsively, Ann responded by screaming, “SH*T!” in front of a hundred or so children and parents.
What happened next caused my heart to sink. First, silence. Next, an embarrassed, burning blush rising to Ann’s face. Then, Ann taking the “walk of shame” from the nursery and out the door, forlorn and beaten down—no doubt for the umpteenth time in her life—by the shame and regret and the familiar feeling of failure.
It would be easy for our church to recover from this nursery incident with Ann’s boys. But would Ann recover? Could Ann recover from the shame that she carried out the door—the shame of a junkie-mom who took a risk, went to church, and screamed an obscenity in front of all the children? Sadly, probably not.
But Jane had an idea. What if she could reassure Ann in the same way that the angel of the risen Jesus reassured the demoniac-prostitute Mary Magdalene and the coward-betrayer Peter? What if, roughly two thousand years after the fact, the resurrection story could be re-enacted with life-giving, shame-reversing, community-forming words delivered not by an angel, but this time by Jane, the nursery worker?
Jane sent a letter to Ann that read something like this:
Dear Ann,
It’s me, Jane, from the nursery at church on Sunday.
I’m writing first to let you know that all is well at church. No harm done! And the broken toys? No problem! We needed to replace so many of them anyway.
But what I really want to do, Ann, is thank you. Thank you for the way that you wore your heart on your sleeve on Sunday. That meant a lot to me, because I am often tempted to hide the messy things that agitate my heart. Thank you for being willing to be honest. Your courage to be honest got me thinking—what better place to be honest than church?! You reminded me that Jesus invites us all to come to him raw and real—and to do that together and never alone.
I hope to see you again. More than this, I hope we can become friends.
Sincerely,
Jane
The next Sunday, Ann returned to church. Having limped out the door the previous Sunday, she returned with a spring in her step that said, “These are my people, and I want their God to be my God, too.”