The Truth About Virginia

    I remember the yellow sun and cloudless sky.  I was near my car outside the food co-op.  Perhaps Jared (my first husband, father of my children) had just been espousing his rigid religious views.  Perhaps I was there alone to do the shopping.  Maybe I was already a mother, maybe not.

    Virginia, my mother-in-law whom I dearly loved, had journeyed from Colorado to Missouri to visit us.  As always, there had been moments I wished I could erase:  the moments when Jared sternly preached the gospel to her.  Not just any gospel, but the Restoration gospel with its superior Book of Mormon truths and confidence in being the only chosen of God.  Such  preaching from her son always unnerved her.  I could feel her fear, her fluttering self retreating and shutting down, the near tears, the wounding of shame.

    As a dutifully submissive wife with fears from my own past, I kept silent.  Sometimes, later, when we were alone, I tried to point out to Jared that his mom had the simple faith of a child.  Wasn’t that enough? 

    Alone with Virginia, I mostly listened.  She had survived so much, though the horrors she had endured left her irrevocably wounded.  I understood her inability to think of God as Father and saw it as a great grace that she could love and pray to Jesus as Friend.  She really didn’t get the finer points of doctrine.  Anything save the gentlest love frightened her.  Sometimes I chastised myself for my silence when I could have been setting her straight as my husband did.  There must be something wrong with me and my faith to simply want to love her.

    In the co-op parking lot, the truth about Virginia opened up in a second of spiritual insight.  The truth was that God loved her with the perfect tenderness of a father’s love she had never experienced and could not understand.  How He longed for her to shed her fears and shame and how infinitely patient He was with her, knowing well the concrete horrors that kept her imprisoned.  In a moment I knew that God wanted me to continue to love her just as she was.  Only love can reach beyond fear.