People in Glass Houses Read online

  3 July 1987

  Tomorrow is independence day and 6 months since I got my freedom. I am fasting from 4 today till tomorrow sometime. With independence comes turmoil, and I’ve been through turmoil but I thank God (regardless of the doubts that filter thru my dusty mind) for my freedom. I don’t have doubts actually—I have ripples and blank feelings that can’t be placed. I don’t know what God is doing to me but I will see it through.

  22 July 1987

  You know I look around at everyone getting on with their lives and I stay at home. I am nearly 16 and I’m not living!! God won’t talk to me. He’s letting Satan attack me like never before with doubts and fears.

  Commit your way to the Lord

  Trust in Him and He will do this:

  He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn

  The justice of your cause like the noonday sun

  Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.

  Sat, 14 November 1987

  I thought I’d write so that I can look back and say remember when? Satan has been whispering things to me for a year that cause seeds of doubt to grow. He hurts me and tells me Jesus isn’t real and I’m not going to heaven. Well I don’t believe him and I won’t believe him but it’s been hell.

  I was talking to Geoff Bullock and I said how I used to love the concerts and he said ‘I used to play in the concerts’ and I said I’d always stayed away from heavy metal because I was afraid. He said, ‘You have more power than the devil.’ How true, through Jesus I have more power than the devil.

  Sun, 15 November 1987

  Thank God for my church. Today we started multiple services in the morning. We went to the 8.30 one. Then at 6 church started and we sang and Brian spoke on meeting Jesus face to face and Satan was upsetting me telling me I wouldn’t be there. About 15 or 20 people came forward and Brian said, ‘This woman lost 2 sons in an accident 2 weeks ago.’ I started to cry a little. Then he said, ‘There are some people here who are under condemnation and the devil is telling them that they aren’t good enough etc. and it’s not true,’ so they went forward and he said ‘Anyone out there lift up your hands and receive from the Holy Spirit,’ and my hands shot up and I started crying and crying. There was so much hurt in me and I feel so much lighter now. I didn’t cry loudly then I was talking to Egan and she asked me what was wrong and then I really started and Evelyn came up to hug me and Julia and Jodie even talked nicely to me. R came up and said, do you know the Lord loves you? I don’t know if he knew I was crying but they’re so nice. He said, ‘I think of this one as a daughter.’ I love these people so much I can’t tell you.

  Brian even said, I’ve seen people still around the church weeping and it’s so beautiful so beautiful is this part of the body of Christ that I can’t put it down on paper.

  17 July 1987

  Jodie asked to come to church and Nicole was coming so I prayed and fasted heaps, like huge amounts, they backed out!

  Church was perfect for them. Pat preached, Darlene sang. Anyway, they’ll come next week. Pat wanted to pray for people and he named those 4 and then he was calling out for people who need to realise God’s grace and then people who don’t like themselves and I was crying because they would have got saved for sure and Pat sees and says, ‘Tanya, I want you out here.’ He prayed that God would see me through his eyes or something and that God would grant me the desires of my heart.

  John King came up and prayed that the mantle of healing and the anointing of God would fall on me and held my hands and said to receive healing in my hands and said that God had not created me without a purpose and that healing would not fall short of me and I just worshipped God for ages at the front. Life is incredible. I don’t understand some of the things God does but I accept them.

  Chapter 5

  REASON TO BELIEVE

  It was, for a long time, in spite of—or, not inconceivably, because of—the shabbiness of my motives, my only sustenance, my meat and drink. I rushed home from school, to the church, to the altar, to be alone there, to commune with Jesus, my dearest Friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain that was struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me fi nd out.

  He failed His bargain. He was a much better Man than I took Him for.

  —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

  Believing is beautiful. To know that every mountain range, every sunset, every laugh from a child, every moment of peace was created by the God that you know as your personal Saviour is everything beautiful wrapped into one. Daunting, sure, but beautiful. The world is the Lord’s and everything in it. Jesus, his only Son, is my best friend.

  To know that, regardless of your standard of work, the boss will never sack you is an ultimate relief. That he has cast your sins into the seas of his forgetfulness, as it says in Isaiah. That whatever took place during the day, or during your life, as long as you are repentant, God will forgive you. The best father in the world, and the closest person to your heart.

  It’s nice to know you’re clean in an unclean world. That you are on the side of light and not darkness, heaven and not hell, and you’re someone who isn’t diseased with their sin, but cleansed and purified, old man dead, brand-new man comes alive. I knew it was gory that Jesus had already sacrificed his blood to get me cleaned up, but I figured it was a one-off event, and he had already been sitting at the right hand of God for around 2000 years, so it wasn’t all my fault he got hurt.

  It never occurred to me then that I hadn’t asked anyone to go through all that for me. I was just relieved that I was on the winning team.

  It’s comforting to know that every morning when you wake up, God knows what’s in store and that he has already worked out his perfect plan for your redeemed life. To know that as long as you do your best, and do it according to how you think he would want you to, you can’t fail.

  I’d always liked Jesus. He talked in riddles but kept it simple. The challenge of the message to me was the anti-bourgeois paradoxes. Put yourself last, and you get to be first. Pray for your enemy. Repay evil with good. Give when people ask. Imagine if we did these things. What would happen if we all just kept giving to each other and worked diligently never to exploit each other or let another be hurt? I never got over the homeless I had seen sitting on the subway grates on Fifth Avenue when I was ten, and couldn’t figure out why we had starving people when we had plenty of planes and food.

  Plus, there was all that drama. With the backdrop of lepers, and adulteresses, and demons, and women who wouldn’t stop bleeding, it was a compelling way of thinking, speaking and acting. We didn’t need soap operas. We had the bible.

  And with Pentecostalism, there is so much more drama. You never knew when someone might have an explosive gift of the Spirit, a Word from the Lord, a moment, an insight, a healing. We were drama junkies, and deep down we knew it. The bigger the performance, the more God must be here right now.

  For me, the signs and wonders didn’t cause or help my faith. The demon expulsions, the tongues, the healings, the great ‘coincidences’ generally had little impact on my belief in God. Much later, I clung to them for longer than anything else, hoping that nothing would explain them away and I could then prove God’s existence by default. They were terrifying, of course, for where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Sometimes, a little too much. It is a celebration for the saints when an evil spirit leaves, or when a brother or sister receives the baptism of tongues. To see God move in such ways, if falling and shouting and writhing on the floor was moving, can be horrifying and sobering. Not that which you can relay on Monday morning when people ask about your weekend. Just enough to scare you into believing whatever it was you were doubting.

  Believing is beautiful in so many ways. I remember it clearly, so personally, intimately, privately that no one else could ever imagine.

  No, none of those miracles or revelations y
ou hear about matter in the end. In the places we don’t talk about, for me, it was the moments that me and Jesus created together. It was the secret times that I loved the most. When everything in my world was quiet and I could be alone with God.

  It was in solitude that I sought God. When there was no other influence, no distraction, no contamination, then I knew I would find him. Whether or not I indeed found God is nobody’s business. Whatever I discovered, the understanding, the deals, the pleas, the questions and the answers in whatever forms they revealed themselves, were as close to it as I would ever, and may well ever, get.

  Believing is lovely. It is gentle and warm, and strong and fearless, and exciting and hopeful. It is reassuring and healing. It is rhyme and reason. It is family and faith. Loving your neighbour is a fantastic postmodern plan for peace. It was about helping the poor because we can and generally being nice to people and not getting upset if they aren’t nice back. It was licence to do good, and if people rip you off, well, you were doing what Jesus would have you do. If they killed you for it, then so be it. It was a life worth dying for. And one to be grateful for every day.

  I loved believing. I wondered, as we all did, how other people lived without God. Imagine having the chance to believe and not believing!

  We were proud to belong to Jesus. In any case, you have to be. Jesus said not to be like Peter, who denied his teacher quicker than you can say Mel Gibson. ‘If you deny me in front of men,’ Jesus said, ‘I will deny you in front of the Father.’ This is why fundamentalist Christians tell everyone they can, as often as they can, just to be on the safe side.

  So I floated around high school, knowing that nothing really mattered. Nothing. Why be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul? Rather be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. I was not ashamed of the gospel of his name, and since through Christ all things are possible, let my opinions fl ow loudly.

  You see, as long as you are doing the right thing, as long as you are seeking first the kingdom of God, then all these things will be added unto you. Why would I care whether stupid, unsaved boys liked me—after all, I couldn’t be unequally yoked with those unbelievers. For what does light have in common with darkness? It would mean only misery and heartache and immorality, and that would take me further away from Jesus, the one who loved me, died for me, and would have died for me even if I’d been the only person on the planet.

  Pagans, pagans everywhere, and some of them really hot, but pagans nonetheless.

  So mainly I walked around doctrinally convinced that I was going to heaven whenever this exercise called life was over, which was undoubtedly soon. The nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 had poisoned thousands of Ukrainians and since, as Brian explained, Chernobyl means wormwood (it actually means black grass or stalks), Revelation 8 was coming true before our eyes.

  ‘A great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.’ We were in the end times. Jesus was coming back by 2000, if we even had that long.

  Testimonies of the old life from new Christians were always fun. The more depraved the story, the sweeter the salvation. It was the only time we got to hear about the big bad world with its sex and drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle. Demon manifestations always got a good response.

  There was a guy who Jewels and I used to call ‘Rats in his Eyes’ because his testimony was so full of filth and debauchery that we were sure he’d told one part where rats were coming out of his eyes.

  While the others turned away from stories of perversity with good middle-class horror, I wanted to know more. Why did I feel so sad for their stories? Why did the recounting of the horror of sin make me empathise and envy all at once?

  I was more interested in what led them to the Before, rather than the After. Everyone else was celebrating the happily-ever-after scene, when the prince and the princess get married. I wanted to hear more about what they were doing before they met. But I knew that was wrong so I suppressed the questions. I would help make the world a better place, once and for all. While I was alive, I was going to improve the world for Jesus.

  My weekdays were spent undermining the system in whatever small ways I could justify, because I was never able to have any respect for authority. Not unless it was Christian authority and could be backed by the bible. Romans says that all authority has been established by God. So I might obey school rules, but it doesn’t mean I respect them. I know the God who put you there in the first place, you unrepentant heathen.

  I would pray every morning. In my last two years of high school I did what I had been taught to do, à la the Word of Faith movement. The backbone of Pentecostalism: select a bible verse and make it your own. Name it and claim it. I selected a verse, Proverbs 16:3: ‘Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.’ I had been taught that if you follow the formula, the outcome has to follow.

  I had the final two years of school to achieve university entrance. I would be diligent, faithful and obedient. Couldn’t lose.

  So I committed to God every morning—my life, my day and ‘whatever I did’—and I knew this, combined with my rigorous study, of course, would cause my ‘plans to succeed’. I would be the lawyer I had wanted to be since I was eleven.

  I worked hard at school and, because of my parents’ focus on my education from an early age along with a relatively peaceful home life and a drive to succeed, it wasn’t too painful. I would come home from school and get on with study. I had to keep my part of the formula.

  Believing is beautiful, but it can also be painful. I spent hours reading the bible and praying. Sometimes it was good, and sometimes traumatic. I know what it’s like to ache for someone’s salvation, to beg the Lord to show them the light. There were so many kids in school around me whose problems I didn’t understand. How could I? I lived in a sheltered Christian world. But I could see their pain. And when they befriended me, they told me about it. And I had no idea. I had no idea what to say or do.

  All I knew was that if they found Jesus they too could forget their worries, be healed and have a hope and a future like I did. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. And I did what Pastor Brian said and I invited them to church. And I prayed and prayed, I prayed in English and I prayed in tongues, for them, not for me, I had it all, I had the joy of the Lord as my strength, I had salvation, redemption, forgiveness and baptism in the Holy Ghost. The only way I could do anything for the kids around me was to pray for them, talk with them if they asked me and dare them to come to church.

  Some of them did. And some of them got saved. Some of them said no, though I’d fasted, I’d prayed in secret, I had asked the Lord, I had bound the devil, and Jesus said whatever is bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and I had asked God to get them to go with me and they had said they would and then sometimes they suddenly said no.

  Believing hurts. When Christians cry for their unsaved friends and family, I remember their pain. I remember it, like watching someone dying in front of you; you know that they are going to the flames of hell and there’s nothing you can do.

  Christians are not condescending, not the genuine ones. They just want you to have what they have, the free gift of salvation.

  They don’t mean to treat most of the world like they’re the minority, it’s just the way it is, in their Truth. In fact, if it were true that fundamentalist Christianity was the only way to heaven, around eighty per cent of the world is going to hell, as have the majority of people who ever lived. But, as my mother used to say, he’s God, he can do what he likes.

  Not believing is horrible. They say no one wakes up one morning and decides to be an alcoholic. No Christian chooses to be an unbeliever.

  Not believing eats away at you like a long, slow death. A crumbling erosion that starts subtly like a change in the weather and it ends like an ava
lanche before the mountain falls down as well.

  Maybe it’s like finding out you’re adopted. Only Satan is your birthmother. Maybe it’s like waking up to a loveless marriage. I don’t know. All I know is that no one, no one, no one was there, when I prayed and I pleaded and I beseeched the Lord to hear my cry and make me feel like I could believe.

  It’s degenerative and, in Christian terms, it’s eternally fatal. But it starts with just a twitch.

  One morning in church when I was sixteen, I looked around and saw a young man with his arms outstretched, singing in tongues to the Lord. Before I knew it, I thought, ‘He’s talking rubbish.’ (I had noticed this before. Sometimes tongues consists of ‘ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba’.)

  ‘Leave me alone, Satan,’ I thought to the devil. Quickly putting on the helmet of salvation from the full armour of God, I instantly defended my mind. I looked around and saw a room of pretenders. Oh God, help me, he’s in, get him out of my head. But he didn’t budge.

  There I was in a room full of the most beautiful people in the world, my family, my church, the individuals, the groups who loved me, pastored me, watched over me and protected me from Evil, and there I was inviting the devil in with Doubt.

  I went home and the agony began.

  Not believing is psychotic. To lose Jesus is to lose everything.

  To think about losing Jesus is terrifying. To have your mind overtaking what your entire world has been about is a fate I thought would be way worse than death. They had warned us about it, and here it was happening to me.

  Not believing is like going into your bedroom and looking in your mirror, only it’s a funny mirror now. It’s warped and you can’t see what you’re supposed to, what everybody else is still seeing. So you look in other mirrors and they’re all the same. No turning back.

  There’s no telling anyone. What? Tell a church leader you doubt God, but that you didn’t ask for any of this? Tell your parents you’re worried that it’s slipping, slipping, that the room full of funny mirrors is spinning and you can’t stop it whatever you do? Not a chance.