I posted yesterday but ended up deleting it at 4AM. I had written about some buzzing I’d heard on Instagram about a controversial movie coming out called Redeeming Love. It’s based on a popular Christian fiction book by Francine Rivers. There are dissenting options about the book and whether or not it’s appropriate for Christian women to read. From some women the book comes highly recommended, with them saying it’s an amazing story of God’s redemption and healing. Others say it is the equivalent of an erotic romance novel, but with a Christian disguise. They say that the book was damaging because of the way it opened the door to sexual temptation, body insecurities, and/or caused relational discontent because they were not being so wildly loved and pursued like Angel was by Michael Hosea.

I haven’t read the book so I don’t feel like I can comment on the content. It did make me curious about the book and the movie. I haven’t read Redeeming Love, which is supposed to be a retelling of the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer, but I do vaguely remember reading parts of another Francine Rivers book called A Lineage of Grace. That book is a collection of stories about each of the women mentioned in the family line of Jesus. At some point the book was passed along to me as being one of those books I needed to read. In adulthood I haven’t been much of a fiction reader, so I wasn’t particularly interested in it. But I must have at least looked through it at one point, because I do remember thinking that the writing had probably become a bit much when describing Bathsheba’s apparent feelings for David.

Not that I need to keep explaining all this, but I deleted the post because I felt like I had brought up a potentially sensitive topic without giving much thought to what it was I was saying. I don’t want to do that with sensitive topics. These are issues that I think need to be talked about, and are being talked about well in many places I’ve seen. The church is receiving a lot of criticism these days, much of it being, sadly, warranted. But while “the church” is quickly becoming another one of those loosely thrown around terms that I do think needs to be better defined, I still consider myself part of the church. As I’m sitting here thinking about it, being a part of the church has to be one of the greatest, if not the absolute greatest joys of my life. I used to think joy was the key marker of a Christian. Now I would say that Jesus is.