I heard a story the other day that really touched me in a profound way. The story is told by Greg Boyd during a debate with Paul Copan on an episode of Premier Christian Radio’s “Unbelievable?” show. Greg tells a story about a little girl who was taken in at a foster home ministry that specializes in caring for children who have been removed from abusive homes. After the girl’s first night with them, one of the workers walked into her bedroom the next morning to find poop smeared all over the walls.
I want to give hugs to all the people who run this place. They could have scolded the girl. After all, who in their right mind would smear poop on the wall? Why would any ten-year-old girl think this was okay? But instead of shaming the child (telling her she was “bad,” as we often do with children and pets), the workers chose to seek understanding instead. “We don’t know why you did this,” they told her, “but if you feel the need to do this, then can you limit it to this section of this wall? And we’ll come in every morning, and we’ll clean it up for you.”
I was so blown over by this. These people treated the girl with utter acceptance. They were wise enough to know that the poop on the wall wasn’t the real problem and that rebuking the girl for what she had done would not fix what was broken inside of her. What if this was how we parented our kids? What if this was how we treated each other? I know it’s not expedient at all, and it’s not good for the walls. But relationships are not expedient in nature (and they’re not good for walls either!). When we choose relationship, we are choosing inconvenience, for the sake of love. More often, we’re choosing a big poopy mess.
Because at the end of the day, I think acceptance of immaturity is often one of the greatest signs of maturity. I didn’t always think that way. I once measured maturity by what I rejected. I had to reject all the bad things I did and every bad part of me. Whoever had rejected the most for the sake of God was the most mature. And the most mature person of all, the grand ideal, was the one who had rejected their own self. I used to think if I were 100% selfless and always did what others wanted and always helped out and always encouraged people and always carried everybody else’s burdens and always gave away to others first, that I would be the perfect, exemplary Christian. Frankly, that sounds exhausting—probably because it is! I’m not trying to be this ideal role model anymore, because I see now that this thinking does more to alienate ourselves from each other than it does to heal. It causes me to look down on (reject) those who have different ideals than I do (in other words, everybody but the rapidly shrinking home team). It causes me to get uptight with people who smear poop on the walls, trying to get them to change their behavior instead of doing what I truly want to do—seek to understand, go deeper, and see the abused little kid at the heart of the picture. Most significantly, this rejection-based maturity alienates me from my own self—which seems like it should be obvious, but for most of my life I’ve believed my own self-rejection would make me less rejected. And to some extent it was true. It certainly made me feel less rejected. This is in large part because it has spared me from the criticism and rejection of others who are still embroiled in cultural expectations (with chief expectation number one being that we should all be embroiled with them). The supreme irony of self-rejection is that the goal behind it is to find acceptance. We want to be accepted, so we reject. But I have to ask, if we’ve rejected our own selves, what’s left for others to accept?
As I continue to grow and mature, I find so much value in acceptance. Because when we accept people, even in their poopy state, we are inviting them into a relationship instead of scaring them away with rules. When people are loved and accepted, things begin to heal. When we correct people, more often than not they’ll keep smearing poop anyway, probably under the bed or in a corner we won’t see. The human spirit does not respond to correction; it responds to love. Nothing gets resolved through rejection, because nothing gets healed without relationship.
It’s weird, but as I’ve learned to accept myself, I’ve discovered that much of what I once saw as the bad parts of me are actually some of the best parts of me. Yes, really! Even the poopy parts say something about who I am at heart, and I’m learning to take each poopy situation and search and search and search for that heart until I find it hiding somewhere in the mess. I have to wonder, does God do the same thing?
At some point in the far distant past, the human race concluded that God didn’t like poop. (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, since he invented it.) I know some may conclude that the poop on the wall in this story is the equivalent of sin, and that by allowing poop on the wall we’re being “bad” or “naughty” ourselves. Many people would define sin as “the bad things we do,” but I would argue that sin is not the poop on the wall. It’s not the time you lost your temper or the time you lied to someone. It’s the thing that drove you to do those things in the first place. We attack the poop when we should really be attacking the abuse that precious children carry around in their bodies and dump out in smelly ways. We can ask people to stop sinning, but that’s like asking somebody who’s got to go to just hold it in. What if instead we focused on giving people vitamins (love, acceptance, nurturing, fun) that will help cure their condition? Instead, we often ask people to hold in their symptoms. Repression.
So I make a bold proposition—what if God is okay with poop, and not okay with abuse? What if he’s okay being around poop as well? What if he’s okay with cleaning it up every day over and over? And what if … what if … what if he picks through the poop with his own fingers until he finds our heart? What if he redeems the poop itself?
When I was a kid, I believed for a brief time that my imagination was bad in God’s eyes. Poop. I had such a creative mind, and I enjoyed telling stories that were birthed in my imagination and would manifest themselves in handwritten books, homemade movies, and make-believe games I would play with my brother. I loved these stories so much that at some point I began to wonder if I loved them too much. I began to see them as idols—graven images of sorts, that I was way too obsessed with—that were taking the place of God. Because if I was honest, I loved the characters and storylines I had invented way, way more than I loved God. (Which is not a surprise to me now, because the God I believed in at that point in time was pretty awful.) This really scared me, because I didn’t want to be an idolater. So I quit telling those stories that I enjoyed and I resigned myself to more serious matters. Like being a constipated grownup who kills any impulses to “go.” And oddly enough, I felt really good at first, because I didn’t feel ashamed of myself anymore. But a part of me died, and with it a huge part of my relationship with my brother.
The irony is that years later, it was my vivid imagination (that I once thought I loved too much) that kept me from losing faith in God altogether. I think he chose to meet me inside my imagination on purpose, to bring healing to a part of myself I had learned to distrust. He was able to show me that my imagination and the stories and characters in my head and heart were the very place he wanted to engage me most, and that these were the good parts of me, deep reflections of who I am in my heart, at my core. But meeting him in my imagination has been terribly painful. All the shame came back, because I thought I was making God in my own image if I met him there. But I’ve been learning that it’s often the most uncomfortable place, where shame screams the loudest, that he wants to invite me to. He doesn’t live by the same cultural expectations and taboos we do. He lives by acceptance. And he’s been teaching me that the real enemy is not poop. It’s shame. The people most ruled by shame are the ones who never feel it. They never feel it because they always obey it. Shame may still be there, but it doesn’t scream until you cross a line (i.e. do something you’re “not supposed to”). To live free of shame is to feel it, constantly feel it, all the time. It means crossing all the lines—not for the sake of the lines, and not just to spite people, but for the sake of your heart and what it asks of you. And what it asks of you could take you anywhere. Crossing the lines can feel like suicide. It is a cross. But when we live out of our hearts, there’s a deeper voice that calls out to us and empowers us beyond the loud voice of shame that urges us to conform and to hide. It’s a terrible, wonderful way to live, and I would never choose to go back to the old days when I was a “normal” person who didn’t feel both the shame, and the deeper calling of my heart.
I get to feel all of it—the beauty I never realized could be so deep, and the shame I never realized could be so crippling. I get to smell so much more too—but this is the sniffer of the heart we’re talking about. The poop on the wall used to make me want to barf, but it doesn’t anymore. Yet I can smell abuse from a mile away, and it makes me want to barf all the time. Because it stinks!!!
I think that’s what must have happened at some point in the hearts of each of these people charged to take care of the little girl in the story. The smell of abuse was stronger than the smell of poop. They knew they needed to accept the poop, accept the girl, accept the whole mess exactly as it was, and earn the girl’s trust. The key hallmark of abuse is violation of will. By honoring the girl’s messy choices, her caretakers were demonstrating that they valued her will more than their wall. They weren’t going to abuse her.
This is who I want to be too. I want to look past the poop and see to the heart, even when it’s not clear why there’s poop on the wall in the first place. But there’s always a reason, and it’s not that we’re “bad” or “naughty” in the way a simple-minded analysis would presume. Go deeper. There’s always more. Again, sometimes the “bad” parts of us point to the best parts of us.
The girl eventually trusted her caretakers enough to reveal to them why she kept putting poop on the walls. For six years, her drunken father would come into her bedroom at night and sexually abuse her. On one of these occasions, the girl had been so terrified that she pooped her pants, prompting her disgusted father to immediately flee the scene.
I’m shocked by the resiliency and ingenuity of this child. The girl realized that by smearing poop on her walls every night, she could keep her father away. It may have stank to high heaven, but as Greg relates (on the verge of tears), “to this little girl, that was the smell of safety. … And she couldn’t go to sleep without it.”
In other words, this poop, something that most would see as atrocious, was to this young lady a source of rescue! She was not “bad” or “naughty.” She was brilliant and unspeakably abused. And yet so often we assume that because someone has poop on their walls, they have a poopy heart as well. But nothing could have been further from the truth!
What the girl’s caretakers did next was something I totally didn’t see coming, and it about melted my heart. They commended her for being so smart, and agreed to come in every night, put on their rubber gloves, and smear poop on the wall with her!!! What?!
I can’t think of a bigger way to show love to someone. They were choosing to enter into her world and show her love in terms that she would understand. And eventually, this girl found enough security in that love that she no longer needed the poop to go to sleep.
Greg takes an interesting turn with the story here. “What would happen if someone came to the door of that foster home, and found a worker smearing poop on a wall with this young child?” Anybody who saw such a thing, and didn’t know the hearts of the people involved, would understandably freak out and label this as horrendous abuse! But in reality, what unfolds is a great act of love. Greg posits that often God appears the same way to us.
I can draw so many parallels from this to my own life. I used to think God must hate me. He never talked to me, even when I begged him to, so I assumed he was doing silent treatment on me. He supposedly not only created hell, but also appeared to endorse torturing souls in this lake of fire for eternity. And his ego was out of this world, quite literally. He always seemed to be absent when I needed him most. And at this point in time, I was just waking up to the awful stench of abuse, and God reeked of it more than anyone.
And yet slowly—very slowly—as I have sought to engage a different God, a God who loves me and cares about me, I have discovered that there is so much more to these poopy walls than what meets the eye. Even when at first it looks like abuse.
And let me be clear that I don’t believe in rationalizing, making excuses, and justifying abuse. That’s a terrible idea. Abuse is not okay. And this is a huge reason why I struggle with the Bible. There are so many pictures of God in that book that depict him in the most abusive of terms. And I’m not willing to rationalize any of it and make excuses for why, maybe, God’s hand was forced and so he had to incinerate people. I’m sorry, but that trope smells of abuse too.
What I’m trying to say is that God loves and cares about me. Period. And he’ll go to any length to demonstrate that love, even if it means smearing poop on a wall. He doesn’t invalidate my feelings; he honors them. He risks making himself look like crap (literally like crap) to make sure we feel loved. Of course the visitors won’t understand! But you’re not the alarmed visitor in this story. You’re the young woman who is being tended to and cared for as God gets his hands dirty to smear whatever poop is in your life, on the wall with you! Maybe it will even become fun and you can draw a smiley face or a heart with him. Maybe it will become so fun and you’ll become so secure that you’ll be ready to switch to crayons and paper, or other less smelly alternatives, and you’ll be able to turn something that was done in shame into something done for art.
That’s what God has been doing since the beginning. Whether you consider the Garden of Eden story to be fable or fact, it hints at something I love about God’s nature. When we first met our enemy shame, our response was to scurry for the bushes. Adam and Eve made rudimentary garments out of fig leaves to hide something about themselves that they didn’t realize was beautiful. They assumed God wouldn’t accept poop, so no wonder they covered their bottoms!
God could have ripped off their clothes. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of your bodies!” But that would have made them feel violated and exposed. They would have felt even more distant from God.
God could have just left them to their own devices. “Well, I respect your free will, so have fun with the fig leaf thing.”
But instead, God had a better idea. He made them clothes! Good clothes! Yes, man invented clothing, but God invented fashion design. He took something that was a symbol of shame and turned it into something beautiful. I think this beautifully illustrates God’s desire to redeem the poop, not ignore it, not flush it away—redeem it. In doing so, God was foretelling what he has been doing ever since. He actually honors our messed up choices, and turns them into something beautiful. He accepts us.
We’ve been getting that wrong ever since that day in Eden. We’re so blinded by shame that we can’t see him loving us. We ascribe all the worst atrocities to him, just as the little girl may have at first believed that her caretakers would abuse her like her father did. Whether it’s poop on the wall or fig leaves on our genitals, we find ways to hide. Because it smells like safety! And safety actually is a valid, important concern if you don’t trust the other people in the room.
And it’s not wrong to distrust people! Again, we do it instinctively, for safety. God doesn’t expect you to trust him. A lot of people, sadly, do expect that, and anybody who does, I would suggest you stay away from! But you don’t have to trust God at all. He wants to win your trust instead. And he wants to smear poop on the wall with you, when you’re ready! He accepts you!
The debate itself was very long and I probably wouldn’t recommend it to most folks unless they’re really into that sort of thing. I can’t say I agree with all (or even most) of the conclusions made. But you may want to give the small excerpt with Greg’s story a listen. He tells it with great emotion and I can sense that this tale strikes somewhere very near to his heart. It starts at 28:45 and ends roughly around 33:57. I don’t know yet if Greg will ever read this, but thank you for taking the courage to bear your heart in such a vulnerable way. We need more theologians who are willing to do that.
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