But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
1 PETER 2:9 –10
As an actor, I must confess that of all the roles I’ve played in my lifetime, the role of wife is undoubtedly the greatest challenge I’ve ever taken on. (A less honest book might have said joy rather than challenge!) But be that as it may, I am a very grateful woman, because within a few months of my dramatic deliverance from bulimia, our understanding of love leaped to whole new levels, and David proposed. My faith was growing; my hopes for our future together were soaring; and a deeper love for God and for David truly took hold in my heart.
To this day, I am beyond amazed and grateful that God chose David to be my partner in the discovery of the power of love. We were soon to discover that love—like faith—is strengthened when it is stretched to its very edges, and it grows the most when we choose to step just beyond what seems to be our own love limits—something David and I have come to know from lots of personal experience.
When, on July 20, 2003, we stepped into our roles as wife and husband, I had complete confidence in God as the perfect Casting Director. But in all transparency, almost immediately I began to suspect that God had either accidently handed us the wrong script or had cast the wrong people.
Now, years later, I can testify that God knew exactly what he was doing. The problem wasn’t God’s script or casting; it was just that the actors he had chosen were going to need some highly intensive direction. Let’s just say we weren’t exactly naturals at this marriage thing.
The same is true, I am still discovering, for us as believers. God knows who he is calling, the roles we are created to play, the challenges we will be called to face, and the contributions we will make in his eternal kingdom. But we must grow into our roles—big-time! In my case, I see now that God was absolutely brilliant to cast David as my husband and Ethan, Ocean, and Everson as our children, for within the White family that God has been building, God has taught me more about growing up in my faith and growing into my place in his kingdom than I’ve learned through any other source. Small wonder that God uses the imagery of family throughout Scripture.
A GARDEN WEDDING
Our wedding day was magical—everything I had ever hoped it would be and more. We held the ceremony in the lovely brick courtyard garden of a restaurant. Rose petals covered the center aisle, which was flanked by white chairs filled with loved ones and friends. One of the most precious moments of the day, for me, was when David and his brother played their violins during the ceremony. My dad gave me away—as tender a moment as I had dreamed. My mom, as beautiful as ever, simply glowed in joy for me from her honored position in the front row alongside my stepdad at the time, and Grandma and Grandpa Bahr looked on lovingly from just behind her. My brothers Jason and Josh, to whom by now I’d grown close, were impeccably handsome as ushers, and having them play a part in my special day meant the world to me. And seeing aunts and uncles and cousins who had traveled to join the celebration assured me that my childhood perceptions of teasing and bullying were long buried in my distant past.
Mom had flown out a few months prior to look at wedding venues with us. I’d been rushing around doing wedding preparations, so David had volunteered to pick Mom up at the airport. He still says he could have recognized her in an instant, even without their agreed-on spot to meet curbside outside of baggage claim.
“She looks so much like you,” he told me later that day. “She’s lovely. And she has the same kind of gentle sweetness about her that you do.” He went on tell me how she surprised him by being so open during the ride. “She began telling me how happy she was for you,” he said, “and then she started to cry. She said she felt terrible about not being a better mother to you and that she is filled with regrets. But most of all, she is so happy for us now and wants the very best for us. I hadn’t been sure what to expect, but this was awesome. I couldn’t have hoped for a better first meeting.”
And sure enough, Mom’s genuine love for me shined on my wedding day. It meant a lot simply to enjoy the present moments with her.
We stepped out of the 108-degree July heat into the cool of the restaurant for the reception, where, during the first dance of bride and groom, David glided me across the dance floor so that I felt I was floating. Then Dad extended his arm for me to join him in the traditional father-daughter dance. Everything about that day was far lovelier than I had even dared to dream.
BEING BUILT INTO A SPIRITUAL HOUSE
The apostle Peter could have been describing my spiritual journey when he wrote in 1 Peter 2:2–3, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Yes! That’s a perfect description of my baby steps right through my courtship with David and my deliverance from bulimia. From my stoplight encounter with God at the intersection in 2000 through our wedding day, I’d had experienced only three years as a Christian. That’s a fairly short time for so many major life changes as I was growing up in my salvation.
But the verses that come after that—how can I say this with all due respect to Peter?—let’s just say that what they describe sounds a whole lot easier than it really is: “As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:4–5).
I’m just going to say it: Being built is hard. Life is hard. Marriage is hard. Especially when, as living stones, David and I were both so hardheaded! But I wasn’t expecting hard. I thought I’d been doing hard all my life, and that this was my time for easy. After all, my childhood and home life had been hard, and when I’d broken away from those and chosen my own way, I’d brought all kinds of hard on myself. I thought that the time had come for the happily-ever-after part, and those words about “being built into a spiritual house” sounded wonderfully, well, spiritual.
So, excitedly anticipating such bliss, I moved into David’s little two-bedroom duplex in the Hollywood Hills that he owned with his good friend Brad. He lived above us, which might have been fine. In short, he and David had lived more like roommates than neighbors, and roommates and newlyweds don’t necessarily blend well. Thankfully (for Brad as well, I’m sure), that situation lasted only about four months. We loved Brad (and still do), but as a brand-new couple, we wanted our home to be different from college dorm living.
In November 2003, David sold his part of the duplex, and we put a down payment on our first house in the Los Angeles suburb of Eagle Rock, between Glendale and Pasadena. It was a beautiful place—a brand-new, three-level house built into a hill. I was thrilled to call it home. Now I was ready for marital bliss!
And then, the unexpected. It was as if my body, feeling safe for the first time in my life, decided that now was a good time to crash. Utter exhaustion overcame me. The six months of bulimia had drained my stamina too much for me to continue personal training, and even though another six months had passed between my deliverance and our wedding, my adrenal glands were shot.
Without the personal training income, I took a part-time job at a makeup counter at a nearby mall, making $11.50 an hour at the Chanel makeup counter to help pay the bills and the mortgage. I quickly discovered I didn’t like the job, intensified by the fact that my boss was a cocaine addict. Too many memories of the life I had left behind. Feeling ill and weak all the time didn’t help. Even though my weakness was nowhere near as severe as it had been during my year in San Diego with anorexia, it was still severe enough that I had no energy to do anything. Before long, I quit my job.
Quitting my personal training at Crunch Fitness hadn’t gone over well with David. Now quitting my part-time job was as welcome news as a bombshell. We had, after all, purchased a home with the assumption that I’d be working.
“You agreed to work,” he said.
“I can’t, David. I’m too sick.”
Though David believed me, he was torn between his sympathy for me, his anger that I wasn’t working, his fear that we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills, and his worry over his new wife feeling sick nearly all the time. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind for marriage. We began to bicker. Guilt, shame, unworthiness, and fear all came washing over me again—and as if that weren’t bad enough, I began to have severe panic attacks. I didn’t want this man I loved to be angry with me. Even though I had little to no energy, once I combined his dashed expectations with my sense of guilt, anxiety, and defensiveness, I did find enough energy for one thing: fighting back. We were spiraling downward together.
This period of my life demonstrated to me some faulty thinking: We think that once we’re living for God and not ourselves, when we’re putting him first, that life will be easier and God will reward us. Yet it seemed to be just the opposite. Though the goodness in my life had grown, the battles had intensified since I had begun to call Jesus my Savior.
David was my best friend. But at that time in our lives, he was not what I wanted him to be as a life mate. Maybe even more frightening, I was not what he wanted me to be either. One doesn’t overcome years of loss, along with the subsequent grasp for control, in just three years of baby steps of faith. Adjusting to married life is hard enough, but add in my past, my health issues, our precarious financial state, and the need for both of us to work at full throttle, and you have a recipe for marital trouble.
On the bright side (and yes, there was one), we still knew we loved each other. We still laughed at times and played and prayed together, and we still shared our passion for building a Christian movie ministry. So somewhere in the midst of all of that, we made our second film together, The Moment After 2: The Awakening.
A DOUBLE PUNCH
In January, I learned that the spiritual weight-loss program I had used when I lived alone a few years before was having a weekend event in Tennessee. I decided to attend. I had been delivered from bulimia for a year by then, with no recurrence, and I wanted help for my ongoing issues with food, fatigue, nutrition, and fitness—ever-present struggles. I arrived at the event filled with expectations and was touched by the many sweet people attending from all over the country. But I soon felt a disturbing uneasiness with the messages. The presenters were teaching that if we didn’t completely overcome sin in our lives, sacrifices for our sins were no longer available and we would lose our salvation, and that living without sinning was fully possible for us to achieve. I felt confused and condemned for not being perfect. The Bible, I knew, teaches that Jesus died once for all our sins. Every one of our sins is covered by his blood—past, present, and future. I also understood that our sin nature is still at war within us and that God’s grace covers that sin as he is at work to transform us until the day we meet him. As I sat listening to the messages, guilt, heaviness, and confusion descended on me. I returned home feeling even more lost and alone, imperfect and harshly judged by the harshest judge of all—myself.
David and I approached February 2004 with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. My mom and grandparents were coming for a visit after the holidays. David had grown up in such a wonderful family, and he and I truly wanted our Christian marriage to have positive relationships with each of my parents. My relationships with my dad and brothers had continued to flourish, and my mom and I felt we had resolved as much as we could, considering the past.
This visit went well—no drama. But as much as I loved and wanted to see them, I found that their visit stirred many unresolved issues. I especially wrestled anew with my old sense of deep sadness over loss and abandonment, no doubt intensified by my fears over the tensions between David and me and my fears over God’s judgment of me. Because of the ugly emotions already eating away at me, the line between present and past blurred. Memories swirled around my mother like a tornado, sucking me into the vortex again and again. I wasn’t the hostess or “cookie-cutter Christian.” I was so grateful for the visit, yet it surfaced so much sadness from my past. And I missed them so much when they left. Will this pain never end? I wondered. I thought God’s forgiveness had healed it all, but here it is again.
The conference followed quickly by the visit with my mom delivered an intense double punch to my spirit that was already limping from my anxieties and the tensions with David. That old desire for release reared its ugly head, and I fell back into bulimia—I fell hard. I told David immediately, and he was supportive once again, with his “we can beat this” optimism, but as my bulimia dragged on from weeks to months, his sense of helplessness turned to frustration and then anger, which only deepened my destructive cycle. I cried out to God day and night, and to David as well, for help and deliverance, but finding no help and no answers, a deep spiritual isolation—from David and God—took hold.
When I opened my Bible, all I could see was God’s wrath on me and that I would be punished. I could not find God’s unconditional love, freedom, or peace. I just wept, believing I had failed not only once but now again—and this time, after God had delivered me. I feared I was too deep in the pit to ever make my way out.
I began seeing a Christian therapist, and it helped. For brief periods, I was able to stop the binging and purging. But oddly, during those times, I would become very angry. David couldn’t understand why I was so kind and sweet to him when I was in the depths of bulimia, but an angry, temperamental woman when I wasn’t. When I brought this up to the therapist, she said, “You’re binging up and purging your pain and anger into the toilet—but your voice is going into the toilet too. You need to find your voice outside of bulimia. You need to learn to express your anger and pain openly.”
But how could I, a perfectionist, willingly express the very anger and pain I saw as imperfect? Over the years, I had stuffed them so deep inside that, although submerged, they were all still there and had nowhere to go. As an avoider, I couldn’t face the things that had happened to me, the choices made by others that had profoundly affected me, or the consequences of my own choices. It was too hard, too devastating, to face all these things, so I kept trying to rid myself of this burden by purging.
GETTING WORSE
Over the next year, I got steadily worse rather than better.
One evening, while David and I were arguing, he said, “I’m paying the grocery bill of a four-hundred-pound man!” His words humiliated me, and I became furious. I grabbed my boots from the floor next to my chair and threw them, along with a few choice words, and stormed out of the room, filled with shame and shocked by the truth in his words.
But as much as those words had hurt, he had a point. We had a twofold problem. I needed to stop binging and purging, and we needed me to earn some income. I took a job as a barista at a nearby coffee shop. It was a busy place, with a line frequently out the door, and though the pay was barely a drop in a bucket, my husband appreciated every drop I could contribute. But my bulimia went everywhere I did. I remember doing shots of espresso for energy after opening the café at 5:00 a.m., but being tired and wired on caffeine was a dangerous combination that induced crazy anxiety. Bulimia had already left me drastically dehydrated, and caffeine dehydrates too. I compensated for the dehydration with Gatorade and Emergen-C vitamin packets to replace my electrolytes so that I wouldn’t die of a heart attack.
The boss was a controlling, driven man who once yanked my arm and yelled at me for not putting the straw on top of someone’s iced tea. I wanted to fight back and spew my anger toward him—and I found that place where? In the toilet.
As unbelievable as it sounds, by now I was purging up to twenty-five times a day, hating myself more with every purge. When I wasn’t purging, I would open God’s Word, fall to my knees, and weep because I felt condemned. Certainly I was a sinner going to hell. After all, if I was saved, then why was I helpless to stop sinning? Why couldn’t I stop this destructive pattern of self-abuse? I hated the fact that I was eager for David to leave for work so I could binge and purge as much as I wanted in privacy. Not that I wouldn’t still feel the shame in private; it would just be lessened by his absence.
I expected to die from the health complications of my eating disorder, because I could not break the cycle. And I very easily could have died—anorexia and bulimia have frightening health implications.
I was living the reality of Paul’s words.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do . . .
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
ROMANS 7:15, 21–24
And who would rescue me? I clearly couldn’t rescue myself. My counselor couldn’t. I tried Overeaters Anonymous but found no rescue there, and I finally realized that David could not rescue me either.
Paul provides the answer: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25).
I wasn’t delivered yet from bulimia. Not even close. But I knew that God and only God could save me, and so I continued to plead with God for rescue.
AN UNEXPECTED GIFT
September 2005 arrived, marking my eighteenth month straight with bulimia. It was a typical month of dreading the days, as I felt continually bound by destruction and torment. I prayed, but received no answer, no peace, no freedom—and most nights, I cried myself to sleep.
Then, I realized that I was a few days late in my cycle. I wondered at first if it was because my body had been through hell and back because of the abuse of bulimia. I didn’t suspect I was pregnant, because one of the unfortunate consequences of my long-ago relationships was precancerous cells on my cervix. In my early twenties, I had needed several surgeries, including the removal of part of my cervix, to eliminate those cells and had been told by my doctor that my chances of conceiving were greatly diminished. So why was I late?
Another week went by until one day, I bought a pregnancy test and raced home.
The world seemed to stop spinning when I stared at that little + sign on the stick. A breathtaking sense of awe settled over me. I placed my hand on my abdomen. There was a brand-new life in there. A tiny, vulnerable, precious little life. Part me and part David. A 100 percent unexpected, undeserved gift from God. Instantaneously, I felt an indescribable love for this tiny being.
My stomach lurched. I ran to the bathroom and threw up my lunch, and then the urge was gone. Completely gone. I knew it as certainly as I had known it in Janet’s office when I was supernaturally delivered. God had heard my prayer and intervened with his power.
God had a role for me in his kingdom, and that role was not going to be taken away because of my weakness. His compassion for me was not diminished by my own inclination toward sin. God didn’t hate me; he loved me. Not only did he have a plan to pull me out of the pit of hell in the midst of sin and brokenness; he also blessed me. Such a good, good Father. I could have died, as anorexics or bulimics sometimes do, of a heart attack due to electrolyte imbalance and malnourishment. But instead of my sin resulting in death, God was giving me life—a new life inside of me to nurture and love.
I walked through the house, astounded and filled with fear, uncertainty, and joy, and when I shared the news with David that evening, he too was overcome by God’s gift to us.
Through the eyes of a mother-to-be, my entire world looked different. As the pregnancy progressed, I realized that although my life had for many years been characterized by self-destructive, self-hating, abusive patterns, this child growing inside me didn’t deserve to suffer from those choices. I had not been able to overcome bulimia for my own sake, but for the love of the child within me, I was done with bulimia. My child needed a safe womb and every nutrient I could supply. I had never expected to conceive, and now that I had, I needed to do whatever it took to protect my child. That sense of awe of having a life inside me never faded.
God did not put me to shame. Instead, he was coaxing me out of my darkness into his wonderful light. David and I felt God encouraging us, pouring himself into us in ways that convinced us that our marriage—as well as our dream to make films that impact the culture for Christ—was on a path directed by him. Jesus, in ways like never before, became the Cornerstone of our lives. He had work for David and me to do. He poured out his mercy to us so we would shine the light of that mercy to others.
By December 2005, while we were expecting our child—through a marvelous series of God events that David tells about in his book Between Heaven and Hollywood—David joined with Russell Wolfe and Michael Scott to launch Pure Flix, which includes both a movie company to create films that reach our culture for Christ and a video-streaming source that strives to be the most trusted family-friendly source on the web. As David and our partners planned for our new venture, David and I recommitted to work hard on our marriage so that we could bring our new child into a healthy, God-honoring family.
Hidden Secrets was Pure Flix’s first movie. Filming began in January 2006. There was a part I could have played, except that when the filming began, I was five months pregnant. For once, I didn’t mind missing out on a role one bit. In 2006, Pure Flix released not only Hidden Secrets, but The Visitation as well.
Our biggest release of the year, however, came on June 8, 2006, with the birth of Ethan Cooper Roy.
Isn’t hindsight great? As I look back on that time from our wedding day in 2003 through the watershed year of 2006, I see that, despite all our flaws and floundering, despite my own past sin and my addiction, brokenness, and helplessness, God sustained my faith in him. Though my understanding of God’s love and character and ways was still very small, God did not see me as a burdensome disappointment who deserved his wrath. He saw me as I saw Ethan: a precious, beloved child in need of nurture, protection, and wise parenting—a child who needed to, as it says in 1 Peter 2:2, “grow up in [my] salvation.”