You can hardly imagine how I about hollered with delight when I heard that Beth Moore, a beloved Bible study teacher and accomplished author, was writing her memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life. There’s no one like her, and she loves large in private, tender places even more powerfully than she earnestly proclaims Jesus on the largest public stages — she’s a woman of courage and conviction, and Mrs. Beth has reached out and held on to me on some pretty heart-shattering days, and I could weep for how she’s loved me when I wasn’t sure how to take the next step. And in her disarmingly funny and vulnerable life story, she delivers in All My Knotted-Up Life — offering us a beautifully rendered and compelling self-portrait, taking her reader on a journey with unexpected twists and turns, the final destination being God’s enduring faithfulness. In this gripping memoir, Beth demonstrates, through her life, that the road to redemption can be a tumultuous journey, but it’s both possible and life-giving. It’s an unspeakable grace to welcome my cherished friend Beth Moore to the farm’s table today. . . 

Guest Post by Beth Moore
Adapted from All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore

A life-altering moment occurred during my college years that is automatically underwhelming by the sheer telling of it, but everything afterward hinges on it.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years I threw myself into church at Spring Woods Baptist. Within a few weeks, talk was circulating among the women.

“The sixth-grade girls don’t have anyone to go with them to GA camp as a sponsor.” GA stood for Girls’ Auxiliary, a program in Southern Baptist churches that trained young girls to love missions and pray for missionaries. 

“I don’t know if y’all need someone older,” I said with a drawl thick as corn-bread batter, “but if an eighteen-year-old can qualify as a sponsor and y’all would trust me with them, I’d—”

A van was packed to the gills with girls, pillows, bedrolls, and bags, gassed up and in drive practically before they knew my last name. 

The facilities were simple and standard. My six girls and I shared the space with a couple of other small groups and their sponsors.

Mornings we’d hear from missionaries, then we’d break into small groups for guided discussions. Afternoons were for swimming (one-pieces only) and games. Evenings were for a more formal service, hymn-singing included.

I’ve got no proof, of course, and really only one thing that testifies to the authenticity of it, and that’s the permanence of the effects.

Each night before lights-out, I’d gather my girls around my bottom bunk and give them a bedtime devotional and discuss whatever was on their minds. I shared what I knew about God and taught them how to make use of every hot roller in a jumbo tray. They couldn’t get that from just anybody. It took considerable hair.

Come the fourth day of camp, I got up before dawn to jump into the shower before anyone else stirred. I was standing at the sink about to brush my teeth when it happened. Nothing was the least remarkable about the surroundings. They were, in fact, camp-level crude. The bathroom had a couple of commode stalls with typical industrial green metal doors, most of which had relaxed from the hinges so that the sliding bar to lock the door was no longer parallel to the hole. Beside the stalls were several slender showers, each with a plastic cloudy-white curtain hanging from rings and mildewed at the bottom. The floor was painted concrete, cracked and peeling. 

On a lifetime roller coaster of failures and successes, losses and gains, revivals, restructures, and reversals, whatever happened that early morning has never let me go or, in the same way, ever been repeated.

It was right there at the sink I sensed the Lord’s presence.

I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything. No thunder, no heat, no light, no still, small voice. No finger writing in the steam of the mirror facing me. My toothbrush didn’t levitate. The hair on my head didn’t stand on end. I did not see a vision. I didn’t manifest a sudden spiritual gifting or, as I recall, say a word. So bereft was the moment of any tangible sign, I’ve wished over and over to go back to the time and place and experience it again so I could relive it as a grown-up and put it under a theological microscope. All I have to go on is the conviction of an eighteen-year-old to whom the sense of God’s presence was intense enough to make her grip both sides of the sink until the moment passed.

I could have imagined it, but such things were not in my realm of thinking. I’d never heard of anyone having a remotely mystical experience. I’ve got no proof, of course, and really only one thing that testifies to the authenticity of it, and that’s the permanence of the effects. In a lifetime of second-guesses, I’ve never doubted something holy and unique to my experience took place in that most unholy surrounding. Something big enough to become the before and after on my timeline.

On a lifetime roller coaster of failures and successes, losses and gains, revivals, restructures, and reversals, whatever happened that early morning has never let me go or, in the same way, ever been repeated.

The funny thing about having what you think might have been an encounter with God is how you just go on doing all the earthy things, like getting acid indigestion.

I brushed my teeth. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s why I’d come to the sink in the first place. The bathroom didn’t look or smell any better than it had. The locks on the bathroom stalls still didn’t work. I stared for a few seconds into the mirror, tilting my head this way and that. I didn’t look any different. I bent down and gathered up my damp towel and my toiletry bag and stepped out of the bathroom, not one whit wiser or better that I could tell. Nothing at all was different . . . yet everything had changed.

I attended the morning session with my girls like usual, but once I got them settled into their small groups, I made a beeline to the woman overseeing the camp. 

“Something weird happened to me this morning.”

“I’m all ears,” she replied.

The funny thing about having what you think might have been an encounter with God is how you just go on doing all the earthy things...

I’ve thought a thousand times how this scenario could have gone.

These were days of sharp divides between the charismatic and non-charismatic traditions in Christianity. The woman sitting across from me didn’t know me from Eve, and this was a Southern Baptist encampment. How easily she could have discounted my story or feared I was under charismatic influence and discouraged me from ever giving credence to anything vaguely experiential. I’m amazed that, even if she believed what had happened to me was real, she didn’t feel duty-bound to discourage me from making too much out of it.

When I finished, she said slowly and directly, “I believe, Beth, that you have received what we Baptists would term a call to vocational Christian service. Now, this coming Sunday, at the end of the service, when your pastor gives the invitation for people who are making a decision regarding Jesus, I want you to walk straight to your pastor and tell him you believe you have received a call to vocational Christian service. He will help steer you from there.”

That’s exactly what I did and, thanks be to God, what my pastor did. Brother Burke warmly received me, invited me to stand alongside several others who’d come forward to join the church, and after introducing them, he shared with the congregation my decision to follow Jesus into vocational service. 

I couldn’t articulate it then, but in retrospect, I know that I’d surrendered to full-time ministry. I had no idea what the ministry was. I envied the boys who could confidently say, “God called me to preach!” What on earth was less credible in my world than a girl obsessed with mascara, lip gloss, and hot rollers saying she’d received a vocational calling from God and no clue what to?

I hadn’t the least notion what a woman in my denomination could do. I supposed I would become a missionary, but even that seemed so far-fetched at the time, I couldn’t picture it.

From where I sit, my story looks like a shirt too long left in the bottom of a clothes hamper.

Were I to bleach and launder it, starch and iron it to stand up properly, crisp and straight, it would look a whole lot better, but I am certain of this—

It would no longer fit.

Adapted from All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.  All rights reserved.

[ Our humble thanks to Tyndale House Publishers for their partnership in today’s devotional. ]