dear ms. debbie,

letters to the faith that raised me

Dear Ms. Debbie,

It’s been a while, to say the least.

I’m not sure you’ll even remember me. I was likely a flicker in your life while you became a blueprint for mine. You marked the spot where my faith and fear would be indistinguishable, cast from the same mold.

I was only eight when our paths crossed. You said something to me that solidified into my spiritual nervous system and defined the way I lived and moved through my life. I don’t expect you to remember something that happened thirty years ago, so I’ll tell you the story.

I was in your Sunday school class and on this day, you told a story about something you did as a child and that story led into a lesson about sin. You were so serious. I straightened up in my chair and hung on to every word you spoke. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time I was learning about sin but it was the first time I understood what it meant. My bad choices didn’t just make my parents mad — they made God mad too.

You started to yell. I’d never had a teacher yell in a class before. Your hands were waving and pointing and you told us that if we didn’t ask God to forgive our sins - every single one of them - we would go to hell.

I started to panic.
My heart started racing.
I knew what hell was.
I raised my hand.

“If I told a lie and then got hit by a car and died before I could ask for forgiveness, would I go to hell?”

You nodded emphatically.

“YES, Kristen. You would go to hell.”

I didn’t hear anything else you said that day and for the next 15 years, I couldn’t hear anything else anyone said about grace, forgiveness, trust, love. It didn’t matter how many messages of God’s love I heard. When fear is your first spiritual language, it drowns out everything else.

After that day, I would lay in bed every night, until a few years into college, listing off all of my “sins” that I’d committed that day. One by one. Every. Single. One. Just like you taught me.

I was a child. What sins did I have to repent of? And yet every night, I shook under my covers, afraid that if I died in my sleep or if Jesus came back, that would be the end for me.

For decades, I didn’t have the spiritual margin in my life to learn about the beautiful things about God’s character because I’d embodied the belief that he was out to get me… and everyone else too, for that matter. Even if I didn’t put it into words, I believed that any tiny mistake I made, left unrepented for, would be the thing that separated me from him forever.

Of course your words aren’t only to blame. There were other messages I absorbed that were equally spiritually egregious, but yours was the first that I remember. You laid the foundation for fear and anxious attachment. In as much time as it took you to answer the sincere question of a little girl, your words caused spiritual malformation in me that took a lifetime to undo.

And I guess I wanted you to know that. But I also wanted you to know that I don’t blame you. If I believed that God would send children to hell for telling a lie, I would live my life doing everything I could to protect them from that. What a horrifying thought… that God would punish children. I hope that as the years have gone by, you’ve found God to be much kinder and softer than that.

I have.

I have my own children now. Five of them. Recently, I took them to a Christian kids event and during the chapel service, the speaker got up and preached about hell. He told all the kids that if they didn’t go to church, they were sinning, and, he said, “If you sin, YOU GO TO HELL!” Your words resurfaced into my chest and it took everything in me not to make a scene. But I knew that my kids would likely remember my reaction more they remembered the preacher’s words. Their dad and I have taught them about God and what they know of God is that He’s really, really, good. Hell is not a looming threat in their lives.

As the chapel service let out and the kids returned to what kids should be doing at a summer event : playing with bubbles and kickballs, I found my daughter. She was eight years old at the time. Just like I was.

“What did you think about what that guy had to say?”

She raised her eyebrows, “It kind of scared me.”

“Do you think what he said was true?”

She looked up at me, confusion and worry all over her little face, and said, “Is it?”

I shook my head. “Definitely not.” Her shoulders relaxed and she ran off to play.

When we got home that day, I was still really worried that when they laid in bed that night, they would think about the preacher’s words. We weren’t going to church at the time. Did my kids think that God would send them to hell because their parents weren’t taking them to church?

So I gathered them all up and we had a conversation and out of that chat, my daughter and son wrote a song.

God is good. God is kind. He’s not chasing you with fire.
God is good. God is love. And he loves you just because you’re you.
Even if you sin, God still loves you.
No matter what you do, no matter what you say. God still loves you.
You can’t make it go away, God loves you. He really loves you.

Ms. Debbie, I’ve long since forgiven the malformation that happened in your life to create a malformation in mine, but I do want you to know that it stopped with me. I didn’t pass down a fear of hell to my children and I introduced them to a God who is so loving that when presented with the idea of a God who is not, it was more confusing to them than scary. They rejected the idea of a god like that the moment they were introduced to him and I cannot tell you how proud I am of them, and of me - for doing the painful work of unraveling a monstrous belief that shaped my life.

Over the years, I’ve found God to be more like a song. He’s breath in my lungs. He’s the laugh at the tip of my tongue. He’s a whisper. He’s the wind. He’s around me and in me and through me and I cannot go anywhere or do anything without being reminded of how big, mysterious, and kind he really is.

I hope that’s the God you’ve come to know. Fearing hell and sin didn’t help me. But God’s love pulled me in and his grace has kept me. And I hope you’ve been kept too.

With hope for a gentler Gospel,
Kristen

** names and details are typically changed in writings like this, but the story itself is very much my true, lived experience **