After the Fiasco: Restoring Fallen Christians
Dean Merrill
One reason we and our congregations feel uneasy about the ministry of restoration is that we have not talked very much about its possibility.
Dean Merrill
By the time 22-year-old Eva Eber showed up in the pastor's office, her life story was already book length. Born into a nominal Catholic family in Los Angeles, she had begun to respond spiritually in junior high when a school friend invited her to a Baptist camp. Soon she was singing in the church's teen music group and even doing street witnessing. Her parents, however, scorned her "turning Protestant," and during her senior year, Eva moved out of the house.
By age 19 she had landed a teacher's aide job two hundred miles away, and at church there she met a young Air Force sergeant who gave her the acceptance she craved. The very first intimacy resulted in pregnancy, and only then did the news come out that her lover was already married. They lived together until six weeks after Ryan was born; by then the sergeant had tired of Eva and was off to arrange his divorce and take up with someone else.
Eva drifted from job to job, and from bed to bed, over the next two years. "I just went crazy — all I wanted were arms to hold me through the night," she later admitted. "As long as a man was taking me out and supplying the cocaine, keeping me from loneliness, I was OK."
She eventually moved in with a mid-thirties divorced father of three. Occasionally she would drop in at church, faintly clutching for the anchor of her teen years. But then, suddenly, she decided to start anew in Chicago, where a friend would help her get settled, find a job. Things would be different there.
Within a month, she found herself in bed one night with her friend's former boyfriend. "God — just give up on ...
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