“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.” (1 Peter 3:15)
My recent column about my daughter’s plight with anorexia angered one of my readers, enough so that she wrote a rather vitriolic letter to its editor.
This was not your everyday run-of-the-mill reader either. She introduced herself as a “provisionally licensed psychologist” and could not believe that I would use this newspaper to publicize my daughter’s eating disorder. “I don’t know Mr. Ruffin’s daughter personally, but I can’t help but wonder about Mr. Ruffin’s decision to broadcast his daughter’s illness in the local paper.”
She makes a good point, one with which I realized a lot of other readers may agree. The problem is I don’t live in Rocky Mount where she read that column and neither does my daughter. In fact, she doesn’t even live with me. She lives with her mother near Charlotte, NC, hundreds of miles away from any newspaper in which my column is featured.
I won’t share the entire letter with you. Suffice it to say she wasn’t very pleased with my decision to go public with what my daughter and our entire family are going through. In fact, she went so far as to say that I probably didn’t stop to think how much “family dynamics often correlate with a child’s anorexia, as with most other such illnesses.” How could she know that? The truth is I’m all too familiar with just how much family issues have to do with her problem.
Sadly, she missed the whole point of my column. I teach through my columns and do my best through personal experiences to illustrate just how much we should all count on God. I wish she could have managed her disappointment long enough to give me a little more credit and realize that maybe what I had to say wasn’t as much about anorexia as it was about putting our pride aside and reaching out to other Christians for prayer. It’s called sharing our burdens with one another.
The irony of it is she labeled me in her letter as “arrogant” and said I should “develop some introspection”, and “seek humility”. I thought that was what I was doing.
Frankly though it was something else she wrote in that letter that really got to me. “I can’t help,” she said, “but be perplexed at the arrogance with which Mr. Ruffin ascribes the problem to his daughter spiritual condition and to Satan. “I don’t believe that any of us has a direct line to either God or the devil.”
I grieve for her because all of her anger and condemnation was explained when she confessed that she does not “believe that any of us has a direct line to God.” I haven’t forgotten how empty I once felt when I believed that. Perhaps God will light her path long enough for her to see how helpless she really is. At least that’s my prayer for her.
My daughter’s problem involves mind, body and spirit. If she is to have any hope of a full and complete recovery, then all three must be treated. The truth is I would never place her in the care of anyone who wasn’t enlightened enough to know that there are some things that man can do and then there are some things that only God can do. To believe otherwise is to believe in humanism, just another way of saying that man has all the answers and doesn’t need God. Personally, I can’t think of a better example of arrogance.
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