All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

by Beth Moore

I’ve waited to write a memoir until my reasons to do so finally exceeded my reasons to refrain. Time had to pass. People had to pass. Others had to age enough to no longer care much what people think. I’ve worried about hurting people. I’ve wondered if the kinder thing to do for those who have known my family might be to leave them with better impressions. I lament that telling my story might imply more about the experiences of my family members than either they or I would wish. I’ve asked their permission and received their blessing and tried my best to leave the most vulnerable parts of their stories to them, but I’m not blind to the cost of showing up in someone else’s book. I wince knowing that a story, once told, cannot be untold.

my father drove with both feet, his right sole on the accelerator and his left on the brake, even when he was privileged to be at the wheel of an automatic.

We want to be known but not memorized as if we cannot change. Family has a way of freezing its constituents in time, for better or for worse, confident that what was true twenty years ago is true now and will be true in twenty more.

My whole family—well, for the most part—is like this. Spitting in a can, all spool-headed, one minute. Sleek and lovely and mesmerizing the next.

I tried to sit light on the seat in case it helped.

There are some things all the sitting in the world in someone else’s seat can’t tell you. You’d have to sit in the same skin.

You didn’t get to miss the sermon just because you got baptized. You didn’t even get a snack. You just got a New Testament.

Vindication can be a powerful elixir.

A new beginning can come for us like an intruder breaking into our house—into our very lives as we know them—and drag us kicking and screaming into a place inhospitable to our previous selves. A place where our skin doesn’t even seem to fit the same way around our bones. A place where we stare both out the window and in the mirror, looking for comforts of familiarity.

By the time every direction you could take at a four-way stop—right, left, straight ahead, or reverse—carries the stomach-turning scent of carnage, moving can mean surviving.

there’s no real starting over from scratch. There’s just starting over scratched—and if the hurts clawed deep enough, scarred.

I would decide over those three years who I wanted to be. Mind you, I would not become that person for years, if ever at all. There would be no arriving, just pursuing. It wasn’t so much three steps forward and two steps back as it was ten thousand steps in circles and cycles. I would wonder if it was still considered hypocrisy if the person I pretended to be was the person I deeply wanted to be.

Somehow in the mess of it, Jesus stayed. He kept his commitment to me when I was at a loss to consistently keep what seemed a single commitment to him.

If God is love, then nothing is more blasphemous than hate.

love isn’t always a feeling. We haven’t yet learned it is as often an action when we’re momentarily bankrupt of affection.

Jesus is the only outsider who truly knows the insider our skin keeps veiled.

I’ve found that walking by faith is 50 percent hanging in there until you’re far enough down the road to develop hindsight.

The thing about active mentors who have poured untold energy into you is how famously difficult it is to say no to them.

We can’t always define what we yearn for in Christ. We don’t even know such sacred affections are possible for regular run-of-the-mill humans like us until we see it in someone else.

The downside of human closeness is that, to the degree you have loved their presence, you grieve their loss.

The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do its good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.

Of a myriad of ways to describe my husband, nothing sums him up more aptly than a saltwater fisherman, salty as the sea. When I close my eyes and imagine him most content and at peace with his life, it is always there in the water, by himself, waist-deep, fishing rod in hand.

as is often the case, especially for people in ministry, we were trapped in a secret, unsure who we could trust with the truth.

I believe in the grace of God. I breathe by the grace of God. I have needed the floodgates of forgiveness opened wide all my life. I believe in nothing more passionately than I believe in the power of repentance and the completeness of forgiveness in Christ. But I believe the wheel of repentance cranks by our coming nose to nose with the wrong and owning responsibility and confessing and coming into agreement with God’s opinion on it.

With every step I took, it occurred to me with more startling clarity, that somewhere beyond the clouds all was calendared. Neither my pain nor my path could be reduced to mere consequences. Even the detours on this road were marked by Providence.

“Babe, I’m telling you,” I said over and over, “any one of them is fine. I don’t care. You know I’m not a house snob. I’m in it for the trees. I don’t care what house you put in the middle of that little forest, I’ll be blissful.” “But I want you to care.” “Well, honey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t care. You pick. I’ll be so happy.” And all that was true until the day at our breakfast table when Keith sketched an image on a piece of 8½-by-11-inch printer paper and asked, “What would you think about living in something like that?” “It’s a church!” I exclaimed, taken aback. “Well, yeah, but we’d design it into a home.”

Children who grow up in the same family don’t have identical experiences, nor do they witness all the others’ most life-shaping scenes. And even when they do, they don’t necessarily see those events from the same corner of the room.