A few days ago, I was sorting through some old stuff and found a short play I'd written a few years back. An acquaintance of mine was hosting a women’s event at the megachurch she attended and asked me to write a skit to be presented at a banquet on the final night. It was meant to be a lighthearted “roast,” poking fun at some of the favorite leaders at the church. So I wrote a short play satirizing their women's prayer meetings, exaggerating the foibles of the women in question.
As I reread it the other night, I thought, “Hey, this is pretty good!” (in my unbiased opinion, of course!) I could easily rework it into a short story, and I thought it would be something fun to share on Author's Den. So I spent a few hours on it, tweaking it and re-tweaking it (I'm a Type A personality), and was proud of the finished result.
I try to make a habit of praying over my work before putting anything on the internet; I've heard the horror stories about the internet, how once something is out there, there's no taking it back. I want to make sure that anything I do will bring glory to God, at least to the best of my ability. Partly for selfish reasons, I admit - I don’t want anything I write to come back to bite me, in this life or in eternity. This time, though, I assumed that since I'd already prayed over it years ago, and it had been well received at a Christian event, that everything was a “go.”
As I gave it a final read-over before logging in to Authors Den, though, I started to get uneasy. When the skit was done at the banquet, the majority of the audience were already Christians, the women represented in the play were well-liked, and it was understood that it was a satire. The laughter was good natured, not mean-spirited at all, and no one went away believing that the prayer meetings were anything like what I'd written. And maybe, just maybe, a few of the women were convicted into being more diligent about the prayer requests handed to them.
Yes, it was funny, but what would someone who wasn't a Christian think after reading it? Even though I put my work in the “Religion” section, I know from some of the comments I've received that non-Christians look at my stuff, too. To someone who didn't understand the background or who didn't recognize it as irony, it would probably put Christians, prayer ministries in particular, in a negative light. And that is totally against everything I'm trying to do with the gift God has given me.
I tried re-working it, but then there was no point to the story. Then I considered putting a disclaimer at the beginning explaining the context, but who reads disclaimers? No matter what I did, I couldn’t justify putting it up.
So I hit “delete.”
My stomach clenched when I did it, and I'm sad that it's gone, but I have peace that I did what God wanted me to do. And I believe He'll give me other stories to share, stories that leave no negative ideas in the readers' minds about God or His people. We Christians sometimes do enough of that without resorting to the written word!
“But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgement. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."
Matthew 12:36-37 (NKJV)
