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When I initially ran across the advertisement for Virginia Smith’s book Just As I Am has been highly recommended on multiple Christian Goth and Christian Punk rock groups’ websites It recounts the tender story of Mayla Strong, who comes to accept Christ whilst fighting to retaining her sense of self in Christian Culture.
I pounced on the opportunity to find out more about this work and the woman behind it. I immediately emailed the publishing company, Kregel Publications, in an attempt to contact the author directly. Expecting the usual suspicion and arms length approach, I was pleasantly surprised with the encounter. Virginia Smith greeted me warmly and we conversed on the subject of her first published novel at length. To follow is my review of this rather touching and lovely story written with great care by the very talented Virginia Smith.
Just As I Am is the story of a young girl named Mayla Strong struggling with her newfound acceptance of Christ, while trying to retain her sense of self in Christian culture. The novel opens during a baptismal service in small church in Kentucky. Here we meet Mayla, a young girl whose influences span a number of different subcultures. She sits uncomfortably there, in a church were she had often felt judged and outcast. This struck me immediately as something I think everyone visiting a church for the first time can relate to. The altar call strikes a deep chord in her, and tiger striped, pierced Mayla takes her first step forward into a new life and walk with the King of Kings.
After her conversion, Mayla tries to find acceptance both from her newfound church family, who find her appearance alien, and with her friends, who find her faith stifling at best and frightening at worst. This conflict is one of the hardest walks of her Christian life. Many of us who were not raised in the church all too often forget what it means to be a Christian in a world that finds Christianity reprehensible, and where Christians find alternative cultures threatening and subverse.
The Character of Mayla Strong is difficult to categorize. She is neither Goth, nor Punk, nor Raver. She has, rather, become inured into a subculture of sorts, where people seek to constantly recreate themselves.
The basis of Christian Faith is allowing God to change one’s heart from the inside out. Modern-day Christian culture seems to have diverged from this, preferring instead for one’s “Church Family” to change her from the outside in. This dilemma of faith is epitomized in the story of Mayla.
This book further develops the assertion that it is not the culture we live in as a faith that changes our lives; it is the application of God’s word into our everyday lives. I was rather enchanted by this quote, found on page 27, by Mayla’s mother: “And I know That jewelry and That hair went under the water this morning along with the rest of her. So we don’t know, maybe the Lord has plans for those things, just like he has plans for Mayla.”
Mainstream Christian culture teaches that immediately upon accepting Christ, we reject any image of self to become what others feel is the image of pure Christianity. We drop our old lives to become indoctrinated. Many of us in the subcultures we call home have a different term for this – brainwashing.
During her crisis of faith, Mayla prays for God’s guidance in how He wishes for her to serve his kingdom. In so doing, she answers the call to visit a gay man dying of HIV in the hospital. As the story evolves, she helps reconnect him to his family. Along the way, Mayla helps her best friend to reconcile her troubled past and come to Faith. At no point in time is the notion presented that these acts of love and faith could only be accomplished by an immediate outfit and jewelry change. Rather, it’s the change of heart Christ enacts within Mayla that changes her actions from selfish desire to selfless love and offering.
Mayla continues to strive for, and with, those among her friends, her own family, and her church family who either support her choices or decry and sometimes go out of their way to hinder her own faith. Her decision to follow Christ is no light decision to make. It puts her at odds with her close friends who reject the very idea of Christianity, and her church family who find her personal image to be too outlandish to accept. Her story is the story of every new Christian, from every walk of life, entering into faith for the first time.
Whether you are a Punk, a Goth, a Raver, a Hipster or a button-down suit, coming to faith is the ability to come from the outside, a pariah of sorts, into something new. It is a revolution founded on the change of heart and not the change of politics or culture.
At the heart of this very real-to-life story is the notion of belonging and acceptance in a place many of us outsiders find to be very unaccommodating. People - real people both inside and outside the Church - find the notion of absolute love and acceptance to be oftentimes a pipe dream. Without the true love of Christ that looks at the heart, it is nothing short of a joke or absolute hypocrisy.
In this story of victory, however, we find that one can find grace, love, and acceptance no matter your outside appearance with the true Love of God. After all, nowhere is it written that facial piercing or tiger stripe prints are unforgivable sins. Any God who is too petty to forgive something so simple is too petty to forgive the very real sins that separate us from him in the first place, and the cross becomes truly meaningless.
We in the Gothic Rock subculture find ourselves as outcasts because we see the world through Coffin Colored Glasses. We believe the world is a dark and foreboding place filled with people hiding behind masks ready to pounce and strike. As Christian Goths, we find this supported in the doctrine of original sin, proving that this world is fallen.
Like Mayla, our hope is found in the Saving Grace paid for us all on a splintered cross, in a crown of sharp thorns, and the blood striped back ripped open by a Roman Centurion’s whip. It is that payment that settled our long lost account, regardless of what culture we came; Greek or Hebrew, Goth or Punk or even businessman, it was all paid for us over two thousand years ago.
I truly hope that this book becomes a bestseller recommendation for all people wishing to understand what it means to love as God loves -to love those just as they are, Just As I Am.
Dza Devlesa
Dr. Raven |
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