E15 | What Watching The Testaments Taught Me About the Character of God

I was sitting on the couch with my mom, three episodes deep into The Testaments on Hulu, when something came out of me before I knew I was going to say it.

That is not the God I know.

And I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

In this episode, I am getting into all of it. Margaret Atwood and why her storytelling stopped me cold in The Handmaid's Tale and pulled me straight into The Testaments. 

I watched The Handmaid's Tale the first time as a woman who knew of God. I am watching The Testaments as a woman who has actually met Him. 

And the difference between those two watches is the difference between recognizing a counterfeit and not knowing what was missing.

If you believe in God but are still figuring out what He is actually like, this one is for you. If you have watched The Testaments and felt something you could not name, this one is for you. 

If you have ever been in a room where someone used the Bible to keep a woman in her place, and something in you said that is not right, this one is especially for you.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Okay, I need to tell you what happened. My mom and I have been binging the Testaments together, the new Hulu series. Margaret Atwood, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. And listen, if you have not started it yet, first of all. What are you doing? And second of all, this episode is still for you, so stay right here. We are three episodes in three, and I'm already undone already turning things over in my mind, already having conversations in my head that I cannot stop because this show, this world that Atwood built. It does something to you, it gets under your skin and it stays there. And we are sitting there, my mom, right next to me on the couch and something happens on screen. And I mean something women berating another woman in public, not quietly, loudly with everything they had. And the thing is, this is the part that at would want you to understand. They are not doing it because they are cruel. They are doing it because in Gilead, if you do not berate her, it means you agree with her. So you perform, you cheer, you make sure everyone in the room knows exactly which side you're on, and then someone's hand gets cut off and the room erupts. Like it is a gift. And I heard myself say it before I even knew it was coming. That is not the God I know. That is not the God I know. My mom looked at me, I looked at her, and I just sat there in what had just come out of me, Because here's the thing, a few years ago, I watched a Hyn Meets Tale and I didn't say that. I felt disturbed. I felt unsettled. I lit. I literally could not stop watching because the storytelling was so compelling, so precise, so layered that even when it was hard to sit with, I could not look away. But I did not have that response, the immediate gut level. My spirit already knew the answer before my brain finishes the sentence response. The show had not changed. I had changed, and that is what today's episode is really about. Let me start here because this is important and I do not wanna skip past it. I am a storyteller. I love story. I study it, I teach it. I have built everything I do around the belief that story is one of the most powerful things a human being can offer, another human being. So when I tell you that Margaret Atwood is one of the most precise. and compelling storytellers I have ever encountered. I mean that as someone who takes story very seriously. I watched a Handmaid's Tale, and I was hooked immediately. Not comfortably hooked, uncomfortably hooked. I felt disturbed watching it. I felt unsettled. There were moments I had to pause and just sit there, but I could not stop. I could not walk away because the story was so compelling, so carefully constructed, so layered with truth about power and control and what systems do to people that even when it was hard to watch. I had to keep going. That is what a master storyteller does. She does not let you look away. She makes you stay in the room with something uncomfortable until you understand it. And what Atwood does better than almost anyone I have read is this, she takes every single character and she gives you their full humanity. She excavates them. She hands you a woman in a red cloak or a gray uniform, and then slowly, carefully, She shows you everything that existed before the system got to her, who she was before she was assigned a role what she carried into Gilead that Gilead tried to take from her. she does not simply write villains. She writes people, people who made impossible choices in sight systems designed to replace their identity with a function. And that is so much harder to write and so much harder to read, and so much closer to the truth of how the world actually works. That is what hooked me. The hand's tale, and that is what pulled me straight into the testaments. Same discomfort, same inability to look away, same feeling of watching something that is fictional and also deeply uncomfortably real. So there I am. My mom and I binging the testaments together. Three episodes in already deep inside the world, And something happens on screen that I cannot fully describe to you without you having seen it. Women, not men, women berating another woman in public loudly with the kind of ferocity that only makes sense when you understand that In Gilead, your survival depends on how loudly you perform your agreement with the system. If you do not berate her, it means you agree with her, so you berate her. Loudly and then the cheering, someone's hand being cut off and the room erupting like it was a gift, like it was righteous. Like God himself was pleased. And I just said it out loud before I even realized I was going to, this is not the God I know this is not the God I know. I just sat there with what had just come out of me. Because here is what hit me in that moment. A few years ago, I watched a Handmaid's Tale, and I did not say that I felt disturbed. I felt unsettled. I talked about it, but I did not have that response, The show had not changed. I had changed. so I'm going to be honest with you. Because this is the living story and honesty is what we do here. I did not grow up in the church. I want to be clear about that because it matters for everything I'm about to tell you. I grew up in a home where God was mentioned. God was talked about where Jesus was a name. where the 10 Commandments played on TV and we watched it Where my little crush on Ramseys.'cause I don't know, I thought he was cute. Regardless. Now I see the issue. Um, Charlton Heston with his powerful and dynamic representation of Moses, the whole production. So that was our thing. That was our family thing. And I would go to Sunday school, sometimes I attended church, occasionally. It wasn't something I did every Sunday. I've always had questions and wonderings. I had that low hum of something that I could not quite name, but couldn't ignore either. But I did not have a relationship. I would talk to God. I knew of God the way, you know of a historical figure. Present in the record. Real in the story, but not personal, not mine. Maybe you know exactly what I mean. Maybe that is where you are right now, and if it is, I just want you to know that that is not failing. That is the beginning, because that was me. So when I watched The Handmaid's Tale for the first time, I was watching it as a woman who believed God was real, but did not yet know what he was actually like. I did not have the foundation yet to look at Gilead's God and save with certainty that is a counterfeit. I just knew something felt wrong, that the way they behaved and conducted themselves completely wrong. I could feel it, but I could not name it. And then life happened and God happened, and I had an encounter I did not see coming and. Could not have manufactured it a season that broke me open in ways I did not ask for and healed me in ways I didn't know that I needed. And on the other side of it, I found a God who looked nothing like what I had been handed and everything, like what I had always somewhere underneath everything. Been hoping he was, I found out how he loves. Not as a concept, not as a practice. Up close, personal specific. I found out how he sees people, especially the people the room had already decided are not worth seeing. And once you know that about him, once it stops being something You heard about and become something you have actually lived, you cannot unsee it. You cannot watch a system operate in his name and not know immediately that something is wrong. That is what happened on that couch. My spirit recognized the counterfeit before my brain finished processing what I had just watched. Now. I wanna take you inside Gilead for a moment because I think it matters to understand what Atwood is actually showing us before we get to Jesus. Gilead assigned every woman a role, and I want you to hear that word assigned, not chosen, discerned not prayed over a sign. based on what the men in power decided God wanted from them. the handmades wear red. These were the women that were able to produce children so they were sacred. And therefore they needed to be controlled. They are not permitted to read, not permitted to own anything, including their own names off. Fred is not a name. It is a designation of Fred belonging to, she's a function before. She's a person, and if you haven't watched him, meets Tale. That is the character of June. She belongs to Fred. The wives, they were blue status and households and not one ounce of real freedom. Their role is to be the respectable face of the home, of the system that degrades other women in their own living rooms while they sit upstairs and look the other way. The Marthas were gray. They cook, they clean, they maintain Their labor is essential. Their presence is invisible. That is exactly the combination Gilead needs from them. And then there are the aunts. This is the one that disturbs me the most, and fascinates me the most because the aunts are women who have been given a form of power in Gilead. And Aunt Lydia, especially in the Testament, is one of the most complex characters I have sat with in a long time. Before Gilead, aunt Lydia was a judge. She had authority, she had independence, she had a career built on order and structure and the application of law. And here's the detail that stopped me completely. She was also a teacher. Think about that for a moment. A woman who spent her life teaching, pouring into others, building structure, creating order, using her knowledge to shape the people in front of her, and then Gilead came and everything she, she was got stripped away. And she was given a choice that was not really a choice, become useful to the system or be destroyed by it. And so she took everything. She knew her love of order, her understanding of structure, her skill as a teacher, and she turned it toward the only lane Gilead would allow her to operate in training the Handmaids, enforcing the rules, becoming the voice that told women what they were. She became the thing the system needed her to be using the same gifts she was given for something entirely different than what they were meant for. And Outwood lets us see all of it. She does not let Aunt Lydia be a simple villain. She shows you the judge. She shows you the teacher. she shows you the woman who made an impossible choice and has been living inside that choice ever since. That is not simple. That is human. That is what great storytelling does. It refuses to let you settle for easy answers. So I am sitting there watching the cheering, watching the women perform their agreement, watching someone's hand being cut off in the name of God. And I keep asking myself this same question over and over. What would Jesus do in that room? What would he say about it later? Not what would he post about it on social media? What would he actually do in that specific room, in that specific moment with that specific woman at the center of it? And I know the answer because he already showed us, He already walked into that exact room. Not Gilead specifically, but the spirit of it, the room full of people performing their righteousness loud enough that no one could question which side they were on. There is a story in the book of John chapter eight. A woman was caught doing something she should not have been doing. And a crowd dragged her out into the open in public. They made her a spectacle, a test. They were using her to trap Jesus to see what he would do, but to her, it probably just felt like the end of everything, the whole crowd was ready, stones in hand, and Jesus knelt in the dirt. He wrote something in the ground. Nobody knows exactly what and nobody ever will. And then he stood up and he looked at the crowd and he said, whoever here has not done anything wrong, be the first, throw the stone. You go first. And one by one they left. Every single person who had been loud and ready and certain, a minute ago they all left and he looked at her, just her, And he said, and loosely based, I'm not coming after you either. So go. And sin no more live differently. So there was no cheering, no performance, no punishment in the name of Holiness, just her seen, not destroyed, given a chance to start again. That is the God I know. And then there's the woman in Luke chapter eight. Who had been sick for 12 years in that culture, her sickness made her someone people were not supposed to touch. She was not supposed to be in the crowd where Jesus was walking. She broke the rules just by being there, but she pressed through anyway. She just wanted to touch the edge of his clothing. She was hoping that no one would notice. He noticed. He stopped everything, the whole crowd pressing in around him and he stopped and said Someone touched me and she came forward shaking, expecting to be corrected, to be sent back to her place, but he did something that no one expected. He called her daughter. He said her faith had made her whole and he sent her out. Healed, not corrected. Healed. Called daughter And the woman at the well in John chapter four, a Samaritan woman already on the wrong side of every social boundary that existed. She had been through five relationships. She came to the well alone in the middle of the day because she had probably stopped expecting to be welcomed anywhere people gathered. And I think honestly. She was avoiding people because who would go to the well at that time of the day, and Jesus sat down and started a conversation with her, a real one about life and water and worship and truth. His own disciples came back and were shocked just to find him talking to her, not to a specific kind of woman, just to a woman. and Mary Magdalene at the tomb. First one there. First one to see. First one he spoke to after the resurrection. In a world where a woman's word was not taken seriously in a court of law, Jesus chose a woman to carry the most important news that has ever existed. That was not accidents, that was character. So here is what I keep sitting with. Gilead uses the Bible, real scripture, real language, real stories, twisted and pointed at women to keep them assigned manageable, useful, and quiet. And I understand why people look at that and look at Christianity and see no difference. I understand why a woman who has been hurt by a church or by someone who uses God's name to control her looks at Gilead and says, yes, I recognize that I've been in a version of that room. I hear that. I do not dismiss it, but I need to say something clearly as a woman who has had to hold both things at the same time. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the one who built that room. He is the one who kept walking into those rooms and doing the thing. Nobody expected, stopping, kneeling, clearing, the crowd calling her by name, seeing the person underneath the role the world had given her. in the Handmaid's Tale. Alfred is not a name. But before Gilead, she was June. Jesus would've called her June. Every woman in Gilead had a name before she had a role. Every woman in the gospels. She had a story before. She had a reputation, and Jesus, every single time, looked past that role, past the reputation, past the assignment, and spoke directly to that person. That is not a faith that builds Gilead. That is a faith that Gilead was afraid of. So I want to pause here for a moment. This is your cellah. One word, one breath. One moment to let what we just walked through actually land somewhere in you. Before we close. The word today is seen, not assigned. Not managed, not defined by what you can produce or how quiet you can stay, or how well you perform your agreement with whatever room you're in seen. Take that word with you today, and if you have ever been handed a role in a relationship, in a church, in a family, in a system, and told that was all you were, I want you to sit with this. He knew your name. Before they gave you that designation and he has never once called you by anything other than what you actually are seeing. So I'm still watching. My mom and I are gonna be watching Episode four together tonight, And I'm grateful for the discomfort. I'm grateful for. The conversations and thoughts that this is bringing up because the discomfort is doing something in me. Every scene that shows me what he is not makes me more certain of who he actually is. Every woman in Gilead who has been reduced to her role reminds me that he has never, not once seen me that way. I might've seen myself that way, but he has not. He has always seen the woman underneath the assignment, the name underneath the title, the story underneath the season. That is not the God of Gilead. That is a God of the gospels, and once you know the difference, once you have actually sat with him long enough to recognize him, you cannot be in a room where a counterfeit is operating and stay quiet, even if it is just out loud on the couch next to your mom. if this episode stirred something in you, I want to hear about it, Come find me on Substack at the middle of the story. The essay that goes with this episode is live right now, and it goes even deeper into everything we walked through today. And before you leave, I want you to know that you are seen, you are loved, and the author of your story is not finished yet, not even close. Grace and peace.