Faith Archives - Page 6 of 15 - Kristen Anne Glover

Take Me Instead

All of my children shook their heads and looked at me innocently. “I didn’t do it, Mom,” they each said.

“Do you know who did?”

They looked at each other and shook their heads again. “No, Mom.”

Someone was lying. I held the uprooted seedlings in my hand and stretched them out for the kids to see. “One of you pulled these little plants out of the dirt. Which one of you did it?”

Again, all five children claimed innocence.

I had my suspicions, given the nature of the crime, but I could not tell for certain. The only thing I knew for certain was that one of my children was holding onto a lie and betting on the protection of the pack to keep it hidden.

“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them. “One of you is lying to me. Until that person decides to tell the truth, you will go up to your beds and stay there. No books, no toys, no lunch. If it takes until the afternoon, you will also miss gym class.”

Ten saucer-eyes stared at me. They adore gym class. I felt sorry that all five might miss it at the expense of the one. But what could be done? I couldn’t let that child get away with hiding a sin behind his siblings.

The children trudged upstairs. I could hear them talking. The Grand Inquisition was going on across the two rooms, but no one was budging. A chorus of, “Well, it wasn’t me,” echoed through the living room.

Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Lunchtime came and went. I ate my leftover salmon and salad in silence so I could hear the second-guessing in my head.

Parenting stinks sometimes.

Finally, I called each one of the children to me. I held each one’s hands and asked him or her to be honest. Four of them were. One of them wasn’t.

“One of you is being very selfish,” I said. “You are letting your brothers and sisters be punished along with you because you love yourself and your lie more than them.”

“Maybe it was the kitten,” Paul whispered sadly.

Obligingly, I inspected the little seedlings for evidence of feline foul play. There wasn’t any: no bite marks, no cat hairs, no spilled dirt. Each seedling had been extracted carefully and placed across the dirt like a little corpse. I could only wish our kitten would be so considerate.

I sent Paul back upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom to cry.

I heard a gentle knock on the door. “Mom?”

It was Kya.

“Mom, what would happen if someone who didn’t do it said they did so the others wouldn’t have to be punished?”

I gulped. “Well, Kya, that would be a very hard thing, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. But would you let me, if I decided to do that?”

I thought for a second. “Yes, I would,” I said slowly, fresh tears springing up in my eyes. I didn’t want to let her. I wasn’t sure I should let her.

“Okay,” she said. “I was kind of thinking that’s what Jesus did.”

“It is.”

She nodded slowly, fear swimming in her eyes. “So I think that’s what I should do.”

Sweet, gentle Kya, who loves her siblings with a loyalty that surprises me sometimes, was willing to take the punishment she did not deserve in order to spare the others. She was even willing to suffer for the betrayer, the one who did not care enough to spare her from the same thing.

It was so unfair, so agonizing, so beautiful.

It was the gospel lived out in the curly-haired visage of my middle child.

“I think,” said Jonathan, when he heard of her plan, “that Kya is a lot like Jesus.”

It’s not that she is saintly or without faults. She suffers from the same humanity as the rest of us. She did not want to take a punishment she did not deserve. I could see her wrestling with the weight of it. She would be the guilty party. She would be the one who uprooted her mother’s plants. She would be the one who would suffer while the real offender got away with it.

It was not just.

It was not right.

But in her mind, it was worth it to suffer for a sin she did not commit in order to free her siblings from punishment.

That’s what made it so beautiful. She chose pain in order to grant freedom.

And oh, how the gospel filled our home the moment that blotchy-faced little girl looked up at me and said, “Take me instead.”

Some people like to think that Jesus did not suffer when he took the punishment for us, or that his sacrifice did not come with the agonizing submission of his own will to something he was not naturally inclined to do. They think, perhaps, that Jesus felt less than the rest of us, that his sense of justice was toned down by an extra-human dose of empathy.

We looked at Kya’s tears and we knew that wasn’t true. Jesus actually, truly suffered for us. He agonized over his sacrifice. He wrestled with his flesh before he laid it down.

We rob him of the sacrifice when we allow ourselves to think Christ’s holiness anesthetized his humanity. We steal away the awful beauty of the cross when we believe that it didn’t cost him as much as it would us, that somehow, his sacrifice did not come with the same ripping of the soul that it would have if we had offered ourselves.

He suffered under flesh and with flesh and he of all people knew the disparity in the sacrifice. He felt it.

The miracle is, he did it anyway.

He chose pain in order to grant freedom when he stretched out his arms, looked up into his Father’s face and whispered, “Take me instead.”

I looked at my child and felt a great uprooting in me, the kind that should come in light of that kind of sacrifice. Someone stood in for me, and crushed him.

I have forgotten.

I have been indifferent.

But by His grace, I have been reminded in the curly-haired visage of a little girl who said, “Take me instead.”

Hidden Victims of the Sex Trade

Recently, a celebrity visited a brothel in South America. According to reports, it was the kind of place where women are kept. Their bodies are sold for another’s gain, and he went there, this man, and paid to have sex with a prisoner.

It astonished me, even though I am not a fan of this young man and do not have any illusions about his lifestyle. Still, I could not fathom how a man who had been raised by a woman in this world could grow up to do something like that. I could not understand how a celebrity, who had women throwing their underwear at him and volunteering to birth his babies, could seek out sex from a woman who cannot say no.

A woman who has no choice.

How can a man—any man—sink so low? How can so many men do such a thing? How can there be such a demand for that kind of illicit sex that children must be stolen to meet the demand and women must be beaten, threatened, and raped into obedience to fill the need?

My head spins. What has happened to our men to make them think that this is okay?

I am the mama of boys, you see, boys who will stretch out and grow up into men. I see the world their eyes drink in and it makes me weep inside because I know what it is to shield their eyes and guard their bodies and pray with all hope that they’ll make it to adulthood without any collateral damage. I want to grab them and hold them close and look for the signs of brokenness that makes a man abuse those he was made to protect.

I am the wife of a man who grew up in this sex-saturated culture, a man who, when he was just a boy, went to a sleepover and was introduced to the Playboy channel. He is inundated with sexual advances every time he watches a movie or walks past a checkout aisle in the grocery store. Everywhere, women who are not his wife are tempting him to lust, daring him to think of them as nothing but bodies, and willing him to purchase their sexuality with his time, attention, and finances.

I am a friend to a man whose father struggled with pornography, who left magazines under the same nightstand that held his Bible. This grown-up man showed his boy what really mattered to him without ever saying a word.

I am the neighbor to the man whose parents kept their bedroom door locked, and for good reason. But that boy found the key and opened a door he could never shut again. Even as a grown man, he would struggle to block out the violent and degenerate view of sex he found behind those four walls.

I am the advocate of the man who was once a boy who did not know how to stop another man from using him, a mere child, for his own sexual pleasure. Forever, that child would view sex through his pedophile’s eyes.

I am a citizen in a country where the rights of adults are valued over the welfare of children. Freedom of speech is sacred; we’ll gladly sacrifice the innocence of children in its place. We teach boys to look up to men who make babies with multiple women, cheat on their spouses, hire prostitutes, and produce media that sells sex for profit. We call them athletes, actors, and entertainers, and that makes it okay.

I am a woman surrounded by boys who will grow to be men, and by men who were once boys. In their manhood, they have choices, but in their boyhood, they were victims too.

From a very early age, perhaps before they could understand what was happening, their minds were inscribed with words and images, attitudes and actions that contorted the truth. Natural feelings were awakened far too early by those who did not care to train and nurture them correctly. Boys, young boys, were left to find ways to gratify desires they were not mature enough to handle in ways they were not wise enough to avoid.

They were told that their sexuality was not valuable. They were told they weren’t worth waiting for, that their sexual desires could be filled in any base way by any base woman and it wouldn’t matter at all. They were taught that they could pay for sex, whether on the internet or in some brothel, and it would only prove their masculinity.

They did not understand that they were giving away their manhood for nothing. They were not told that their purity was a gift, that their sexuality was beautiful. In fact, they were taught the opposite. They were told that the proof of their manhood was in how well they spread it around.

How then, could these once-boys grow up to believe that the most intimate part of themselves was worth guarding? How could they believe that their body was so precious, only one woman was worth it? And how could they believe, wait, and hope for the truth that one day, a woman would love, cherish, and guard that gift herself because she knew the importance of it?

How could they understand the evil of the sex trade when comedians joke about hiring hookers as if paying for sex is as innocuous as ordering a pizza? How can they believe that women are worthy of respect when talented, intelligent women use their beauty and their bodies as a commodity? How can they believe that men can wait, that their sexuality is a gift worth receiving, when the world honors the men who think and act like beasts?

They can’t.

If we do not combat the message of male sexuality that the media offers with the truth, we will never raise men who respect women and themselves enough to act any differently than the young celebrity who visited a Brazilian brothel just because he could. Instead, we will raise more men who buy women and degrade themselves because that is what they’ve been taught to do.

We can talk about the evils of sex trafficking. We can work to rescue the women involved. But we will never make real change unless we rescue our boys too.

There are two kinds of victims of the sex trade. Unfortunately, only the girls are making the news.

Confessions of a Football Fan

I love football.

I come from earthy, Midwest stock, so it only stands to reason. My dad’s family is from Ohio, which has two football teams (although most people only claim one and spend all their extra energy hating the other).

My mom’s family is from Wisconsin. That’s Packer county, don’t cha know, and as far as I can tell, the Packers are the only reason anyone still lives in Wisconsin. I think pretty much all of the farmers would have packed things in and headed for California long ago if it wasn’t for the fact that they would never, ever give the 49ers the satisfaction.

They live for football in Wisconsin. People put up with those long, horrid winters just so they can mock the teams who show up in Green Bay wearing long sleeves and worrying about frostbite like a bunch of sissies. Packer people are so proud of that hard, inhospitable football land that if you type “Frozen Tundra” into Google you get a picture of Lambeau Field. No kidding.

I grew up watching football, even though I didn’t really appreciate it until I was married and in grad school and the only thing we could get on the three channels that came in clearly on our 19” TV was football or golf.

So when there’s nothing to watch but football, you kind of grow to like it. It’s basic survival. And it didn’t hurt that in the four years we lived in a sleepy little town just north of Boston, the Patriots won the Super Bowl three times. Three times.

Nothing wakes up a dormant football gene like blatant success. In those four years of sweet football victory, I discovered I am a screaming, raving, sit-down-I’m-trying-to-watch-the-game fan. I love the sport.

But in the last few years, I can count on my right hand the number of games I’ve watched. I still love football, I’m just not a fan of the game, the game that is selling football to the highest bidder even at the cost of morality, saturating the half-time shows and sideline acts with sex so men will watch (don’t men already watch football?), and including commercials that are definitely not approved for all audiences.

Besides, we got rid of our TV.

But last year, I sat in a room full of people while the Super Bowl played. I was there to watch the game. Those who didn’t care about the game were there to watch the commercials, so every single commercial played to a captive audience.

Steamy scenes from R-rated movies flashed up on the screen. Tank-topped Go Daddy models leaned into the camera and said “domain name” in a way that made me embarrassed to be a blogger. In place of witty writing, advertisers showed boobs. They kept things interesting by sprinkling in a little shocking violence, crude humor, and sexually-charged exchanges. I mean, I did not know Axe deodorant could do that.

I turned my face away and shielded my kids’ eyes and asked them how many birds they could see out the window. I stuffed them full of Doritos and relish tray offerings—anything to keep them distracted from the images on the screen. I watched my husband inspect his shoes and his fingernails and our host’s ceiling while other women vied for his attention right in front of me. But it wasn’t supposed to bother me because they were just actresses. It was just a commercial, after all. Just entertainment.

My stomach churned. It had been so long since we’d watched television that I guess I’d forgotten what it was like. I looked at the other faces in the room, searching for the outworkings of the rage I was feeling inside. After all, we were all Christians. We all said we believed the same things and we were all watching the same things so surely, surely, we were all equally disturbed.

I guess I had grown naive.

I saw smirks at the jokes, wide-eyes at the boobs, fathers watching the screen in front of their sons and mothers in front of daughters and no one—no one—said anything. No one changed the channel. It was just a normal Sunday, watching football.

Maybe a few years ago, I might have felt the same way.

But I had forgotten. I had forgotten we were supposed to be on entertainment mode, and in entertainment mode, it doesn’t matter if a media violates my so-called principles because it’s not real.

It only matters if the jokes are funny, the actors are hot, the music is brilliant, and the special effects blow my mind. It doesn’t matter if I don’t approve of the clothing, language, lifestyle, or choices in real life because entertainment is harmless.

Madonna can strip off her clothes during the half-time show and be fondled by a dozen young male dancers while our children watch and we can crunch our chips and say, “I can’t believe she can still dance at her age” because it’s just TV, and we want to be able to talk about it with our friends later.

We should be shocked. We should be outraged. We should not watch.

But we do because it’s so easy to become anesthetized to entertainment. We forget that it’s selling something, and we’re buying.

Only, I can’t do that anymore. Football just isn’t worth it. I want my morality to dictate my entertainment choices. I do not want to give that power to my culture, or to the National Football League, and certainly not to Hollywood.

I can’t keep myself or my family from seeing any kind of filth, nor do I want to live in a bubble, but when things come on the screen that are not consistent with what I say I believe, I want my kids to see me turn away, not drink it in. I want them to know that their mom and dad are willing to change the channel, even if it means we miss something good.

If it comes to the point that a football game is so surrounded by sex, explicit language, and violence that I am unable to avoid it, then even my recently-adopted Seahawks are going to have to play without me.

I love football.

But I’m not willing to play that game.

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