My USP had failed to sell Jesus and had failed to buy me friends, but most of all it troubled me that the Good News didn’t really seem like good news at all. I tried to push aside this potentially blasphemous conclusion with more prayer and quell the fear that my bad PR was setting back the cause of Christ. So when, in those weeks of half-hearted prayer times and Bible studies with Jane, some actual good news landed on my radar, I was ready to be distracted.
I had had braces for the past three years and now my orthodontist, Mr Cooke, was trying a new tactic to train my lower jaw into a more normal position. This time two pieces of thick clear plastic were set onto wire which fixed around my teeth and dovetailed together like a jigsaw puzzle to hold my lower jaw forward. If evangelism had felt hard it was going to be nothing compared to the challenge of forming words with what was effectively two bricks of Duplo in the way. Under the glare of the examination light, I lay with my eyes closed, day-dreaming, while Mr Cooke wrestled my teeth into the wire frames. Finally he managed to snap the last awkward stretch of wire over my back tooth and sat back thumping his palms on his lap in satisfaction. I was busy running my tongue around the edges of this new oral furniture when Mum made her enquiry. “How long are we looking at this being in place then?”
“Well, if she’s diligent and keeps it on every day then we could be looking at a year.”
He brushed his hand through the sweep of hair that had fallen across the frame of his glasses, and peered at me.
“That’s the thing though … You’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to wear it.”
Mum eyed me, trying to work out if I’d taken the seriousness of this instruction on board or whether she was going to have to add her own encouragement.
“Guiii gouwm mmtttooo.”
I tried to insist I would, but the neat arrangement of the jigsaw collapsed as I opened my mouth and I immediately leant forward to spit out the apparatus.
Mr Cooke had seen it all before. Reaching firmly for my chin and pulling me upright he brought the mirror down so that it was in front of my face.
“Now look in here.” He deftly replaced the wayward lower brace.
“Take a look at that. Do you see what’s going on? You’ve got to stay upright so that this upper brace can get purchase on the lower one.”
I stared at my open mouth. The plastic might have been clear but there would be no hiding it from anyone. My lips framed a salivary jumble of teeth, wire and plastic and I began trying to reassemble it with my tongue.
“What happens after a year? Won’t the bones begin to move back again?” Mum probed, her face still watching the orchestrations reflected in the mirror.
“It is going to be a temporary solution”, Mr Cooke replied, his eyebrows raised in concession to Mum’s thoughts.
“Ultimately we will be looking at a surgical reconstruction in her late teens, once the bones have fully stopped growing.”
“Surgery?”
I spat the lower brace out again and swung round to face him.
He wasn’t immediately sure whether I was about to dissolve into tears, the way I had when he told me at the age of eleven that I had to wear a head-brace.
But I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to hug him.
All these braces were just salvaging the best from a bad situation. They were essentially rearranging the furniture inside a badly proportioned house. A house that I assumed I was stuck in. And here was Mr Cooke saying that one day they would be able to knock down that house and rebuild it properly. It didn’t matter that I was going to have to wait two years for preparatory surgery and another two years after that for the main series of operations.
I stared at my face in the mirror, replaying Mr Cooke’s words over and over; “surgical reconstruction”. This was hope. It was a tangible alteration; a date in the diary. A goal which Mr Cooke and I would begin working towards. It wasn’t like prayer, where I tried so hard to manufacture faith while all the time dreading the moment at which I would open my eyes and find that nothing had changed and God hadn’t shown up. These operations I really could believe in.
When I got back to school later that morning, I sat at my desk daydreaming about the new squarer jaw Mr Cooke had promised. At lunchtime I wanted to tell Julia and Louise but found the task of eating sandwiches whilst holding onto the plastic blocks demanded all my concentration. My diligence lasted all of two mouthfuls before I grabbed a napkin and, leaning forward to click the wire out with my tongue, I abandoned my lunch.
“I’ve got something else to tell you …”
Julia took a quick swig of juice and then set the bottle down on the desk in front of her expectantly.
“I’m going to have surgery! To put my teeth and jaw bones straight.”
This might have been the kind of moment when adolescent girlfriends disingenuously pretend that there’s nothing wrong with you, that you’re fine, that you don’t need surgery. But neither of them did.
“Seriously?” Louise said in quiet astonishment.
Before I could answer, Julia burst in, “What do you mean? What are they going to do?”
“Well, I have to wait a few years … but basically they’re going to cut a strip of bone out of my top jaw and then break all the way along my lower jaw and slide half of it forward, pin it together … and then build me a chin.”
It was the end of this sentence that caught nearby Victoria and Lizzie’s attention and produced a half-smiling incredulity from them both. “Build you a chin?” Victoria swung herself around from the chair she’d been sitting in and leant over the desk to await full details.
“I’ve just been to the orthodontist … it looks like they can sort out my jaw problem with surgery. When I’ve stopped growing.”
“So how long do you have to wait for that then?” Lizzie asked.
“I think it’s going to be when I’m nineteen or maybe even twenty.”
“Oh my god, Joanna, that’s years!”
“Won’t it be very painful? It sounds horrendous.”
“Are you going to have braces until then?”
The questions were raining down now.
“What about your religion?” Louise’s question caught me. “Are you allowed to do that sort of thing?”
It was funny how she had thought of it before me. Following God’s no-show at the National Exhibition Centre youth rally last year I had taken the matter out of God’s inbox and no longer saw it as His jurisdiction. Now that Mr Cooke had taken charge and was making some tangible progress, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to resubmit it for a divine veto.
Over supper that evening Mum and I relayed Mr Cooke’s prognosis to Dad, Ali and Rosalind.
“Goodness me, darling,” Dad exclaimed, turning from Mum to me, “we’re talking about major surgery here.”
I sat waiting, trying to second guess what my parents’ response was actually going to be.
“It is major, John. It’s going to mean a spell in intensive care, at least two weeks in hospital and several weeks with her jaws wired together.”
“Oh darling.” Dad winced and rubbed his hand across his jaw.
“Do you really want to go through all that?” Rosalind questioned matter-of-factly. “Why don’t you just stick with braces?”
“The braces aren’t going to straighten everything out really … not my bones anyway.”
She put down her knife as the potential implications of my situation began to dawn on her. “Am I going to have to have surgery too, Mum?”
“No, I think you’re going to be OK with just a brace for a little while.”
“I don’t want brace!” said Alastair, taking his place in the family discussion.
“I thought you wanted braces like me, Ali?” I protested, nudging him.
“No! I’m not. I don’t want it! Urgh!” He shuddered to underline his reluctance.
Rosalind looked across the table to me: “Why do you have to have an operation then?”
“Because I can’t close my mouth properly without it …”
“Have you really thought about whether it’s worth all that pain just to be able to close your mouth?” Dad was almost pleading with me now.
“Urgh! Urgh! I don’t want it! Urghhhhh!” Ali was now working his dislike of braces into a full drama of hammed-up distress. His outstretched hands, shaking in mock disgust, knocked my knife onto the floor, splattering food as it fell.
This kind of dinnertime fracas was typical, but that evening I was on edge; all the tabletop antics were encumbered with the weight of the bigger matter of surgery. The subject was allowed to drift for the remainder of the meal until Rosalind and Ali had left the table and there was peace enough to talk.
“Have you thought it through, sweetheart?”
“John, she only found out about it this morning … she’s got years to go before anything happens.”
“Well I think I should come to your next appointment and hear what Mr Cooke has to say.”
“But what about what I have to say?”
“Well, tell me … what do you think about it?”
“I want to have the operation. I definitely do.”
“You’ve got time to think about it”, Mum interjected, trying to pace me.
“Why? Don’t you think I should go through with it?” I hadn’t altogether managed to work out what Mum thought.
“I do. But it’s OK for you to change your mind.”
“Didi! Do you really want her to go through that? With all your nursing, you know better than anyone what it will entail …” Dad was dismayed.
“But Dad, why don’t you want me to do it?”
“Because I don’t want to see you suffer.”
There was a pause. I wasn’t thinking of what to say, I was just trying to hold the words back as long as I could.
Then I said it, very quietly. “But I’m suffering now.”
It was the closest I had come to letting them know what things were like for me because of my face, and I didn’t want to let them get any closer, so I got up and walked towards the hallway.
“Joey,” Mum called after me, “why don’t you spend some time praying about it?”
Afterwards, I didn’t pray about it.
I lived in a home where everything we owned was considered a blessing from the Lord; where God was brought into every decision and everything we did was submitted to the Lordship of Christ. When it came to choosing subjects at school things like sociology and psychology were off-limits, considered too liberal for a girl raised to know that Jesus was the Way, the Truth and the Life. When I asked to do something, like having my ears pierced, Mum and Dad would tell me to ask the Lord whether I should, which was really just them giving me a chance to hear God’s No, before theirs; because generally God seemed to be against stuff.
Top of the Pops, swearing, fornication, make-up, wizards, shopping on Sundays and taking too much interest in material things: they were all frowned upon if not entirely ruled out. Which meant Rosalind and I didn’t really need to pray about things because we got a sixth sense about the things God was going to be OK with. Things like tithing, spending time at church or youth group or any other Christian gathering, and television programmes like Highway to Heaven and Songs of Praise. And pierced ears; in the end God didn’t mind too much about that either.
Now here was an epic, life-changing, life-giving possibility on which there was no clear biblical guidance. And it was mine. It wasn’t a parental edict that I had to obey; it wasn’t money that could be tithed; it wasn’t virginity that I was compelled to pledge to some far-off ideal of a husband. Mr Cooke had given me a choice and it was my decision to make. I couldn’t now risk offering this up in prayer only for God to come and lash through my hope with His No. It didn’t belong to Him.
Perhaps it wasn’t strange that this promise of cutting and splicing, of breaking and remoulding, felt so whole. Its presence way ahead in the unlived days of 1995 became a shelter from the assaults as I journeyed through the rest of 1991 … 92 … 93 … 94 … What I couldn’t yet acknowledge were the splits and denials that my half-beliefs in God were causing. The thought of my attempts to convert people, the image of Louise’s tears and my inability to make the Good News good, curdled in my memory. The fear of God and what His wrath would do to me if I failed to live up to this good Christian life: these were the distorted untruths that fractured me. To give them voice would be like knowing the answer is 7 but admitting to the teacher that somehow you keep calculating 3.9. All I’d ever been told was that God is love and God is good, but all I now heard and absorbed were threats of where we’d end up if we didn’t mirror that goodness in our lives. So I lingered, silently, with the wounds of fear and confusion that these jagged edges of half-truth and twisted dogma had left, not realizing that, unacknowledged, they would soon become infected.
Out of all the games of “Hot or Not” going on in my world, Christianity operated the least attractive one. Who thought that threats of eternity spent in outer darkness would be the message of love to compel unbelievers to believe? How did our Christian leaders not see that it would simply plant the seeds of cynicism and unbelief in our own young minds? We were burdened with The Truth and told to take it to the nations in the Name of Jesus, but nobody stopped to tell us that judgement of mortal souls was never ours to make. And so we carried on doing our best to slap the sticking-plasters of truth onto the cuts our words of proclamation had inflicted. “So it says in the Bible that I’m going to go to hell unless I believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life?” my prey would ask. “Yes, but Jesus has died and risen to save you from that destiny … as long as you accept him.”
I wonder if Eve, having taken and eaten the forbidden fruit, suddenly found herself trying to appropriate the complexities of all her newly acquired knowledge. Did she struggle to handle these frightening new layers of good and evil, which could only ever be held by the wise omnipotent God? Standing on the sidelines of the Genesis story I hear myself shouting at her, “Turn around! Turn around! Stop hiding; stop trying to manage it all by yourself … You can tell God … Don’t be afraid … Remember the love and just tell Him!”
Love is, after all, what we want.
But she didn’t return to that love because, overtaken by confusion, she tried to find her salvation in knowledge, instead of letting love hold and remind her.
Such fear and confusion had also overtaken me. Fear that I wasn’t really saved, and that I had irrevocably flouted God’s love by not demonstrating enough faith for Him to minister through me. But, if someone was shouting from the sidelines at me, “Turn around! You don’t have to hold all this together … Just tell God … He understands … He loves you! Don’t be afraid!”, I didn’t hear them and battled on trying to prove to God that I could handle what I mistakenly thought He required of me.
Like Adam and Eve, trying to digest the kind of knowledge that was only truly safe in God’s hands, I messily regurgitated the dogmatic truths that I wasn’t big enough to contain.