God Bless This Mess(58)

Great? Sure, I’d had sex, but it wasn’t a casual thing. It wasn’t something I had peace about—especially right at that moment! I wasn’t nearly as confident about it as the show was making it look, and I knew it was going to make a lot of people really upset. I was glad it might be freeing for a lot of women to see me handle things this way on TV, but privately, I wrestled with it.

I knew that Jesus really did still love me. He forgives us our sins. That doesn’t mean we should feel free to go out and “sin” all the time. But it also isn’t for anyone else to publicly judge me or tell me what’s a “sin” or not. It’s between me and God.

The way I see it, the Lord is not telling me in a big angry voice, “Don’t have sex before marriage because I want it to be that way!” It’s more like a caution, because He doesn’t want me to ever hurt. And the more I open myself up to another person in an emotional, physical way before we’ve committed to each other, the more I’m potentially allowing hurt to come into my life through somebody who’s not ready to really love me.

In my own attempt to make sense of it all, to feel okay about it, I turned to my old, tattered Bible, and I looked at the story of a woman who committed adultery. She was about to be stoned by the people of her town when Jesus showed up and said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Of course, everybody looked around, and there wasn’t a one of them who was without sin. So they set their rocks down.

I believe what that passage is trying to tell us is it’s not our place to judge others—and that includes the judging of ourselves. Jesus was there for her, and He told her He did not condemn her. “Go now and leave your life of sin,” He said. He gave her another chance, to do better; and for those who were about to condemn her to do better, too.

Here’s the thing: I want to be a sex-positive person. I believe that sex is something that is good, natural, and healthy. But I struggle with intimacy, for all kinds of reasons. And for me, choosing to have sex with people without love and commitment can hurt. I was realizing the hurt of it, and the repercussions of it, all over again. And the shame that was being laid upon me made it even worse.

If people could have seen my heart before that episode of television ever aired, they would have seen that it was already damaged. There was a bruise here, and a gash here, and a stitch over there. And I had only slept with four people in my whole life. I just knew that my heart had been hurt by relationships and men so much, in so many different ways. And the hurt didn’t seem to go away.

I was on the journey of making sense of all of that when the Luke episode aired on TV—and it seemed like the whole Christian community turned against me.

I had thirteen thousand comments on my Instagram that night, and almost all of them were slut-shaming me.

By the next day, I had people all over the media shaming me, too. There were some who came out strong on the other side, saying I was a strong, sex-positive woman, just as some people had predicted would happen. But I wasn’t either of those things! I was just me! Standing up for myself was good. But I wasn’t shouting, “Yeah! I had sex. This is how I live my life!” either.

Still, people in the church shamed me, comment after comment, blog after blog: “Hannah, you’ve let us all down,” “You’ve been corrupted,” “You don’t know what your relationship is with the Lord and how important your body is.”

Yes, I did.

The show aired clips of me being silly before the overnight dates, joking around in front of the camera, saying, “We’re gonna get down!” I was dancing and goofing, and making sexual innuendos. It was meant to be funny coming out of my mouth. Maybe it would have been funny if the reality of everything that happened hadn’t been thrust in front of the audience. Now? It just made me look like somebody I’m not.

And then one of my favorite Christian podcasts, a podcast I’d listened to growing up, talked about me and invited me to come to their church—not because they saw me as a positive public role model but because they questioned my faith.

“Does she really love Jesus with her whole heart?” they asked.

It was so upsetting to me. How in the world could people be saying I was a poor example of Christianity, that I should be ashamed of myself, after witnessing a few minutes of reality TV? I was fighting for my rights and my place as a woman in those moments, and fighting to uphold the strength of my personal relationship with Jesus! Where was the forgiveness? The acceptance?

Because of the whole Jed-breakup situation, I had stopped doing midseason press. So while other people were out there talking about the most personal details of my life, I couldn’t comment.

My anxiety was through the roof. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t go outside and take a walk in a public place for fear that somebody might stop me and talk to me about everything, or scorn me for what I’d done.

I felt like I was in a cage.

*

I flew home to Alabama to try to escape it all and clear my head.

I slept in every day. I cried a whole lot. My mom tried to comfort me, but I didn’t want to hear it.

I couldn’t understand why God had let me go on these shows and get my heart broken in front of the whole world. What was the purpose of that? And why would He let me be scorned by thousands upon thousands of other believers of my own faith?

I wondered if maybe I had let Him down.