I ordered DIARY OF A BELIEVER (by Sheila Gibson) about a week after I first heard about it on Al Maxey’s site. He did a complimentary review of her book back in July of 2008. He titled his review “A Quest to Break Free from Religious Mediocrity.” After reading her book I think a better word than “mediocrity” might be “slavery.”
In posts to come I will comment on content from various chapters of her Diary, but this initial post will serve basically as an introduction to material that will be covered later.
Sheila is a real person. She even answers email when you send it, once she rescues it from her SPAM folder! But even before we traded a few emails I had the sense that the book was written by a “real” person, with real issues, as opposed to having been written by someone who wanted to make a little (a lot of?) money by publishing a book. Much of that “realness” came from realizing that her story overlapped mine in several areas. I discovered from her book that we were even at some of the same places, at the same times! But more than that, I identify with her real frustration and hurt caused by real events in a church where we are called to love one another.
I was also impressed by what seems to be her motive in writing the book. While she names specific names, events, and places, she does not come across at all as vindictive, or as seeking revenge or redress. Rather the tone of the book is, “While there were horrible things that happened to me, I want to share them with you so that if your life is the same place mine was you can know that there is a way out and that you do not continue to live in fear!” She documents how, through all of what she experienced, she found what she calls “Radical Love.” (It is a commentary on our times that love which is full and unconditional must be called “radical” in order to distinguish it from “normal” love!)
From Maxey: “Her name is Sheila G. Gibson, and she was raised within an extremely legalistic wing of the Churches of Christ, an experience that truly challenged her personal well-being repeatedly and on a great many levels. In some ways it is a love story, and in other ways almost a horror story. Yet, ultimately, it is the journal of a courageous young woman whose faith would not be shackled or shattered by the rigid religiosity of the sect within which she was raised. It is a tale of triumph.”
And from the back cover of the book: “The Diary of a Believer is the story of one believer’s quest to break free from spiritual mediocrity in order to discover, know, and love the Lord described within the Holy Scriptures. It chronicles the journey that Sheila Gibson began as a young girl inside a common, traditional, Christian organization known as the Church of Christ. It explores the blueprints of religious patterns often used to seek Christ within that group of believers. It also reveals the disturbing lengths that some brethren will go to to protect those traditional formulas and doctrinal boundaries within the brotherhood.”
You can order a copy of the book from Amazon. (AmazonLink)