Sin and Repentance

Through some weird fluke, my blog about being kidnapped, raped, tortured and nearly sold into human trafficking has become a hugely popular post on Pinterest.  It's everywhere, earmarked with the same $20 you see here.  Almost anywhere you see this scan on Pinterest, it will point you straight back to my blog.  

That story is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.  It's also NOT SAFE FOR CHILDREN OR CHURCH.

It's a dark story about a horrible past filled with hideous monsters and forgotten children.  If you're interested, I'll post a link at the bottom.  Be warned, it's not for the weak.

The standard description I've found from people blindly sharing this blog on Pinterest like mindless sheep is as follows:

Such a good object lesson about repentance and sin - 20 dollar bill still has the same value even when wrinkled or marked on...our value never changes in the eyes of our Heavenly Father. The atonement allows us to repair damage and become clean. We must trust in the Lord and see ourselves as our Heavenly Father does.

My own standard response is simple enough:

I was glad to have readers, but I felt it was severely false advertising. Now that I know you had not read it before hand it makes more sense. I believe the original pin-er used the $20 from part one as the object lesson somehow but I was entirely lost on that idea. The $20 was not symbolic, it was just a catalyst. Try reading the story. It's about rape and human trafficking.

But I got this in response.

I pinned this days before reading it, as I do with a lot of things. I thought there were some significance between the $20 bill and forgiveness. I had absolutely no idea it would be a story of rape and torture. So therefore you are wrong! I am not part of the problem. Ignorance is what I'm thinking you are part of.

Now, I'm fairly new to Pinterest.  In fact, I only joined the site in order to try to stop the spread of this particular story before too many children got their hands on it.  I'm left with two HUGE questions...

• #1.  Is it standard practice for people to post things WITHOUT reading them or even looking at them first?  I put a disclaimer on that particular blog in order to END the trend.
• #2.  Is she blind, or did she not see that mirror standing in front of her face when she started pointing fingers at me?  I'm the ignorant one, while she's perfectly innocent as she sends children and church attendees to a blog post about rape, having them believe it's about sin and repentance?

So, as is my usual fashion, I responded.

Point one finger at me, you have three pointed back at you. You actually share stuff without even bothering to LOOK at it. You point KIDS to a story of rape and torture and human trafficking. And call me what you will. If I can live through that, I promise your words will have ZERO impact on me.

It's MY blog. I enjoy having readers. What I do NOT enjoy is having THOUSANDS of hateful emails sent to me over the course of a couple DAYS because someone (like you) thinks this is a CHURCH story. I've gotten more hate mail than Merle Dixon! That's far more of a pain than you pretending to NOT point in the mirror.

And since it's finally down (6:05pm on 11-12-14) I'd say this blog post was a success.  Thank you!

To read the original story,  Visit This Link