The Fall & Redemption of Eve: (Confessions of a Secret Rebel)

(Behind the Enemy’s plot to rob me of my destiny)

(For I.K., because I see so much of myself in you now)

I was a good girl. A very good girl as far as I can remember. Saved as a young person, raised in church, read and memorized Scripture, awarded “Most Well-Behaved in Class.” I had the ribbons and the medals to show.   I obeyed all the rules. God knew His plans for me.  I had a glorious destiny from my Father.

But the enemy— he was sly. He, too, had his own devious intentions. He devised a  plot that was tailor-made for me.  The strategy of  his  attack – an insidious infiltration of  my mind.

The Seduction

From the very beginning, the battle was waged  in my head. The   enemy was cunning in his lies and seduction. 

His lies were woven into those sweet, little lyrics of songs that I listen to everyday, movies and shows that I watched; into those  romantic little lives of the heroines of books that I read, and celebrities that I admired.

Who could fault those  modern-day versions of Romeo & Juliet who  battle all the odds for this so-called love?

“Risk everything to follow your heart.”

“Love at first sight.” “Love is blind and lovers cannot see.” Love conquers all.”

“To fall hopelessly in love.”

“First love, first kiss…”

They all sounded so innocent, and sentimental. But they were all  cunning lies to make me believe that I will only be valuable if someone would love me; that love is something that you feel about someone, that you are willing to  forsake everything for, including your purity.

Ahh, yes, those romantic scenes in movies and books of  love-struck  couples defying the odds  and in the background  love songs play, with the backdrop of  the sunset… “Ah, love; Ah,me!”

Visions come to mind of boy and girl  rolling in the meadow, or running away in the rain to some secluded spot and making love in the falling light.

The lies are subtle. It calls  sexual promiscuity by another name; and it is beautiful when done in the name of “love”.   Love defies all reason.  Oh, that I could have that kind of misty-eyed love! If only someone would love me!

At puberty I started dreaming of that first love and first kiss instead of filling my mind with “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable (Philippians 4:8) and “Taking  my thoughts captive to make them obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

At this point in my life when my young mind was most vulnerable was when I most needed a mentor and found none. At this point in my life when someone needed to live with me the truths of the God who fashioned me and loves me, nobody took my hand.

My Christianity was only in the head, not the heart. While it seemed the house was  secure,  the back door was open. The adversary had infiltrated. The line had been breached.

Remember Ally Mcbeal? She became the alter-ego of me,  in my twenties. I loved the theme song of that show so much! I didn’t realize it was the hissing   of the snake, and  I sang  and jiggled because it sounded so good, so catchy… So Me.  The fumbling,  love-sick Ally Mcbeal “searching her soul tonight, there’s so much more to life” was me, in my own words at age twenty five…”wanting to make my own  choices…to blaze my own trail, to be me and only me hurling mud pies in the face of hypocrisy. ”  I sounded so much like  Eve listening to the snake…”You shall be like God, able to know good and evil.”

I devoured the enemy’s lies posed as “feel-good” (humanistic) literature…essays, poems, books  that celebrated the glory of womanhood and the secular perspective on love,  choice and destiny. The enemy exploited my love for words and books by beguiling me with the wisdom of the world instead of the very wisdom of God.  Could there be anything wrong in reading George Orwell, Eudora Welty, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Gail Sheehy, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan…? But they were all subtle lies of the snake…”Did God really say…?”

The Rebellion

…Ahh, sin to the  melody of the Ally Mcbeal theme song with  Ally and the whole promiscuous gang in the background cheering me on…

Sin disguised in nice-sounding prose from Joan Didion and poetry from Zara Neale Hurston or Maya Angelou.  

To glory in sin disguised as “the human experience”! A fornicator in the words of the snake is a “fool for love.” A liar and deceiver and exploiter is  dubbed a “Casanova”.  In the language of the snake,  sin is the norm and good is the aberration.  Sexual promiscuity is celebrated and sexual purity is anathema.  (Or weird).

I was, in my own words,

“Woman and child, holy and wild…

Her eyes hid the secrets of the waning sunset…

Woman and child, holy and wild; Breathlessly riding the breezes of summer…

Woman and child, holy and wild;  Half-clothed, half-naked, black hair streaming…

Woman and child; holy and wild, Treading through life with her bowl of flowers, spilling  her fragrance like the breaking of showers…”

A rebel was born. Eve had bitten the apple.

The Secrets

In nature, the predator knows the best way to catch a  prey is to isolate it from the pack. In war,  the  best way to gain advantage of the enemy  is to obtain  an intimate knowledge of  how they operate; how they tick. My adversary knew that having infiltrated my mind, it need only keep me isolated. My own innate propensity for being secretive, and the lack of a  mentor or parent or group of godly friends to show   accountability to  propelled me down the slippery slope of sin. I suffered in silence, through the cycles of  my secret rebellions.

The Fall

I was the secret rebel  until   I was finally exposed and when I was laid bare, in my  nakedness, I covered myself in leaves.

Those who knew me from the outside might have been caught off guard. Those of my own family who thought so highly of me and bet their dreams and hopes on me were probably the most devastated by my fall.

I was not in the least surprised. For all the esteem that my family and the public held for me, the enemy’s twisted lies had convinced me that there was no intrinsic value in being good.  All the lies that were subliminally fed into my brain from puberty on was that love was all that mattered, that womanhood should be exciting, that there is no value in purity; that there is glory in being a woman of the world. The enemy had blinded me to the truth  that I am “highly valuable and accepted in the Beloved”, that  only Jesus can satisfy the deepest longings of my heart.

The apple was bitter to the taste.  I had settled for the counterfeit.

Two decades ago I penned a proclamation of my so-called emancipation,

My 25-year-old self did boast that

“From my handful of friends, none share my secrets. I don’t need the pity and advice that go with their revelation. Pity only makes dung; advice only muddles.”

My 25-year-old self

“ was screaming for upheavals…to do things I’ve never tried before, to war with conventions, to break out from the mob.“

My 25-year-old self did say  that

“I am propelled by a need to orchestrate  my life, to feel in control, to blaze my own trail…”

My 25-year-old self that wanted

“To be me and only me, hurling mud pies in the face of hypocrisy”:  the one that believed the lie  that to be good is to be hypocritical, that to give in to my passions was to be authentic and real.

My 25-year-old self did proclaim that

“I want to live passionately, to laugh and cry; to exercise choice. To be Eve in the garden with Adam.”

Even back then,  I thought myself to be Eve, and how Eve, indeed, had fallen!

I did not know then, in my blindness, that I had actually attempted to emancipate myself from God.

Eden Lost

So I stood outside the garden, in shame, all covered in leaves, counting my losses and the blessings of obedience that I had forfeited as the  consequence of my fall…While  God, who is infinite Love and infinite Mercy, whom I had displeased and disobeyed, Himself had  already  a plan to redeem me.

The Redemption

At the very heart of my fall was a lack of trust in God, His Word and  promises, and  an inability to believe what He said is true.  The snake will make you question God. “Did God really say…?”

At the heart of my fall was a head-knowledge of,  without a heart-relationship with God. Memorizing His Word but never really understanding its truths.

Beware the secrets. A lot of our young people in our churches are like me as a young person…left to fend for ourselves thinking that it is enough for us  to go to church and Sunday School. It is not enough. I was not discipled in the Word.  It is one thing to know the word and another to live it in the world. Relationships are crucial: a godly person to mentor you, a person or group of people to whom you will become accountable to. And beware the choice of your friends for where their steps might lead you to.

Beware the lies.  At the core of my fall was a failure to  guard my heart. Every sin is born, first, in the mind. Parents of young people need to understand that the seduction of our children begins early. Beware the songs  they listen to, the books  they read, the people they idolize, the shows and movies they watch. They are the enemy’s pernicious way of grooming them to sin.  The adversary has a plan customized to every person, every child  that plays to every specific weakness and vulnerability.

Counter the lies of the devil with the truths of God’s Word; the wisdom of God versus the foolishness of the world. To be transformed by the renewing of our minds. To be transformed by the Word of God. The Sword of the Spirit is our weapon to do battle.

Had I been steeped in the reality of the relevance of God’s Word in my life and discerned the lies of the devil; Had I been steeped in prayer and surrounded by loving and godly counsel; had I a friend or mentor who confronted me in love and given me truth; had I pledged to be regularly accountable to a wise and loving Christian…

Two decades later, I am seeing my redemption unfold before my  eyes: glimpses of my God-given destiny in the  rubble of my fall. He has given me a second chance.

I am sharing my story as a warning to the young, those who have young ones, and mentors of young people. The price of disobedience is costly. I am grateful for my  second chance (knowing that not everyone is given such) at the same time that I regret having lost the blessings that could’ve been mine had I obeyed.

I stand here today, after two decades of wandering in my own wilderness, still a flawed individual, but redeemed.

My now-45-year-old self -- the one whose real destiny has been redeemed by a gracious Father-- could only look back and see how deceived I was. What pride! To exercise my choice apart from the Lord! To think me wise in my own eyes!

After two decades I now submit that I was wrong and You, my Father, had been right all along. Your rebel daughter has come home.