Wonder Worker Woman

Her story is the story of religious exhaustion.  Born a Lutheran, baptized as a baby, Wonder Worker Woman thought all was well with her soul because they told her later she became a child of God at that baptism.  Over the years, she heard “grace” over and over again, but funny thing, nobody ever told her what it meant.  To Wonder Worker Woman, “saved by grace” may as well have been a term in a foreign language.

When Wonder Worker Woman was 23, she got married, and because she’d married a Roman Catholic military man, she left her Lutheran ecclesiastical lodgings and entered the organization the founder of her church had railed against and changed the world.  Religious irony.

Once in “the system” as she called it, she started to try hard because the system was telling her that “Good works + Christ = Salvation.”  The system explained to her that grace was something she would receive based on her performance in confession and in the receiving of the “literal body and blood of Christ at the Mass.”

The system instructed her that more grace was available, a lot more, if she would become a volunteer and that’s when she became Wonder Worker Woman.  She organized the nursery and worked in it.  The system showed her the way to get more grace through money—Wonder Worker Woman and her husband began to give to the system and to missions.  She heard that good parents get more grace, so Wonder Worker Woman started parenting in earnest.

The system began to pile it on: more points of grace were there for the earning if she practiced “sacrificial love” and “imitated Jesus.”  Wonder Worker Woman said that she was “concentrating on being good enough to get into heaven.”

In her mind, the system had inculcated a picture of God as “A guy who had a huge scale on which He measured my good and bad deeds, and my job was to stay busy trying to get my good deeds to outweigh my bad deeds.”

Wonder Worker Woman worried about her kids and started pushing them to start earning the grace they needed by attending church every week (she’d already had them baptized) so that they could start climbing the religious ladder toward the goal of getting into heaven.

Wonder Worker Woman started to earn more grace through her job—she was an R. N. and nurses can earn grace by being compassionate.  She was a very nice person and she knew it.  God was noticing, she thought, and He knew it too.

Wonder Worker Woman loved pretty Catholic churches, the nice statues, and admired the organization of the parochial schools.  She taught religion to 5th graders, getting them into the system that would wear her out.  She and her husband became Eucharistic ministers who helped serve communion.  A plaque proves that they donated large sums of money to build their church.  Then came Cub Scouts, working in Catholic hospitals, and by all of these wonderful works, Wonder Worker Woman spent 15 years piling up grace.

But after 15 years of producing grace point, she began to think and she came to the conclusion that she was a snob, filled with pride and bloated with her own self-righteousness.  Wonder Worker Woman started to question the system, and in the process, her husband became annoyed.  The system was above questions.

She hauled out a Bible and began to read; she had a vague idea that whatever it was that she needed, it was in those pages.  She found it confusing and kept thinking that something was missing. So, she organized a Bible study with some people involved in the system and that turned into a disaster.

She started to wonder about all the good she was doing—how much was enough for God, anyway?  When she taught the 5th grade boys in the religion class, she wondered how in the world she could teach them because, as she said, “I don’t know anything worthwhile about God.”

Becoming bolder in her quest spurred on by her restless soul, she had more questions. She wondered why the priest called the Mass a “sacrifice” and why he put the large communion wafer into a shiny gold case, “the monstrance”, and carried it around the church for her and others to worship.  It didn’t make sense to Wonder Worker Woman to worship a piece of bread, since she now believed that Christ was not actually present in it.

She kept her questions and doubts to herself.  And as she wondered about the system, she knew one thing now, for sure: she had been busy for 15 years trying to act good, but she knew, down deep inside that she wasn’t satisfied with her performance.  Religious exhaustion had set in.

She and her husband moved from the west coast to the northern mid-west.  Once again, as a military wife, she had no friends and didn’t know anybody.  They began to visit the Catholic churches in the area and found themselves bored to tears by the “exceedingly dull and lifeless” services.

God always intervenes into the lives of those who want to know Him (Acts 10).  Her church, the system, had exhausted Wonder Worker Woman, but God was on the move.  Her new neighbors were friendly and when she started walking around the environs, some walked with her and they talked to her.  They talked about cabbages and kings and sometimes about God, religion, heaven and hell.  She found such conversations interesting.

One of those who walked with her kept inviting her to a home Bible study, and finally she went.  She’d been to some Bible studies before—some led by priests, one led by Campus Crusade for Christ, but she had never been to one like this one.  In her previous Bible studies, whether in the Lutheran or Catholic churches, whenever the Bible was read, immediately after that, the leader would go to moralizing and the boredom would begin.  But at this Bible study, Wonder Worker Woman sat on the edge of her seat, hearing from the Bible about salvation.

Wonder Worker Woman asked, “Why hasn’t anybody told me this before; I haven’t heard any of this, ever.”  She’d never heard that she was a sinner, a bad one destined for hell.  If she’d ever thought she was a sinner, she thought she wasn’t bad enough to go to hell.  (Romans 3:23)

She heard that Christ had taken care of her punishment by dying on the cross and taking her place.  When the leader read Acts 16, she learned, for the first time, that to be saved, she needed to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.  The teacher explained that “to believe” is “to trust, rely on, or depend on.”  Christ’s work on the cross was to save her from the penalty of hell.  She learned something else, that Christ’s work was finished and that a belief in the finished work of the risen Christ was the only requirement for salvation, a fact stated by the Bible over 100 times.  She said, “I was hit between the eyes.”

The teacher took the group to Ephesians 2:8-9 and for the first time, someone explained grace to her.  She’d read the verses many times, but had no idea that grace meant the unmerited, undeserved kindness or favor from God.  Now, for the first time, she saw that heaven wasn’t a reward for good people; it was a gift to sinners and she was one.

She now knew that when she was Wonder Worker Woman she was insulting Christ with the filthy rags of her good works because each of those works was saying that His work on the cross was insufficient.  On that day, Wonder Worker Woman, the self-righteous snob, exhausted by religion, was born again.  It was September 1998, when her everlasting life began.

She began to study her Bible, especially John 5:24; John 10:28-29 and the former hard-working snob found the peace and rest all her good had never brought her.

After that home Bible study, she told her husband, “I used to have one foot on my good works and one foot on Jesus, but now I’ve taken that one foot off all my good works and both feet are on Christ.”  Her husband thought she was nuts.

That was 1998.  Today, her husband has both feet on Jesus as do their sons.  Does she serve the Lord today?  Yes she does, but now it’s not to earn grace, but because she’s received it freely and her service is her “thank-you” to God for saving her.

Wonder Worker Woman is dead.  Long live the born-again serving sinner! 

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