A Poor Testimony
I was nineteen, staying with a friend's family for the rest of the summer because home had become too painful to stay inside of. The minister who oversaw the campus ministry called to check in, and partway through the call he asked a question that had nothing to do with checking in. He wanted to know if the family I was staying with was white. Then he wanted to know if they were saved. When I told him no, he said that was a poor testimony.
He explained it slowly, like a man used to being understood on the first try. Leaving the home of a believer to find refuge in the home of an unbeliever suggested the unbeliever had something to offer that God did not. How was I supposed to witness to anyone if my own life looked that unsettled. If anything, he said, it should be the reverse. I sat there listening and crying on the inside, asking him silently how exactly I was supposed to fix a home I had not broken, and why the fixing fell to me alone. He never answered that question. He only told me I needed to go home.
I didn't go home. I stayed, finished the summer, and went back to school carrying a quiet distance from him that never closed. What stayed with me longer than the conversation itself was the request underneath it. He was not really asking me to return to my mother's house. He was asking me to protect an image, to make my pain small enough and quiet enough that it would not embarrass what a Christian household was supposed to look like from the outside.
That request did not end with him. Years later, married with children, I found myself keeping the same kind of image intact without anyone having to ask me to. My husband and I had agreed, the way a lot of couples in church do, to always present a unified front in front of our kids. Whatever we disagreed on got worked out behind closed doors, and then we came out of that room in agreement, no matter what. For a long time I followed that rule exactly as it was given to me.
The trouble was that behind those closed doors, nothing actually changed. My husband would say and do things to our children that went against everything I believed was right, and I would tell him so, calmly, repeatedly. He would nod, we would come out united, and he would do the same thing again the next week.
One morning I woke up with a single, unbearable thought. If I had not woken up, my children would have grown up believing this was simply what family looked like. I was not okay with that, so I stopped keeping the agreement behind closed doors and started correcting things the moment they happened, in front of everyone, which enraged him and which I have since said was the beginning of the end of our marriage. I had gotten tired of masking, and I no longer wanted to do it.
There is a pattern running underneath both of these memories that is bigger than either one on its own. It is not only about what a person learns to hide because they are afraid of being judged for it. It is about what gets asked of someone when their pain, if shown honestly, would threaten an image that someone else needs protected. The minister needed the image of a believer choosing faith over comfort. My marriage needed the image of a unified home. Neither request was really about me. Both were about maintaining something that looked like care from the outside while asking me to carry the actual cost of it alone.
That pattern showed up one more time, after the divorce, at a dinner with a family member I had not spoken to in years. I tried to explain, with real examples, what our marriage had actually been like. Midway through, they stopped me and asked about the ministry we had built our image on. Both of us virgins at the marriage. A husband who could provide well enough that I stayed home with our children for years. A love story people had leaned on for their own inspiration. Why not keep protecting that story, they asked, when so many people were counting on it being true.
I remember thinking, clearly, for the first time in that conversation, that I mattered too. Not as a rebuttal. As a fact I had been leaving out of the equation for years. I had tried counseling in the church and outside of it. I had talked, submitted, stayed patient, stayed quiet. None of it changed the thing that actually needed to change. I was not willing to spend the rest of my life living one truth privately while performing another one publicly so other people could keep feeling good about a story that was no longer true.
The minister told me, decades ago, that leaving was a poor testimony. I believed, for a long time, that the shame in that sentence belonged to me. It does not. The only poor testimony was the years spent making sure no one could tell the difference between what was real and what had been arranged to look acceptable. I matter too. I am still learning what it means to live like that is true.
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