with your mother. I know you know this, and you work at it. But you hang on to a piece of pride that is a danger spot for you. You wrap around the axle about how she says it or when she says it or what she says it about, and rationalize that you don’t understand why.
I know you know that your mother loves you dearly and watches for your soul. I am so thankful that you are comfortable speaking your mind and heart to me, and never want that to go away. But it would be such a disservice to you if I didn’t tell you from a few steps back that your ever-so-intense God-given-talented sweet self, you kick against the prick of your mother’s words of instruction and direction. She is the boss of you, Megan, and always will be. If you can’t submit yourself to her, you can’t submit yourself to this body, plain and simple. Sometimes some humble, quiet submission is the order of the hour. And you must work at seeing that and getting to that spot.
You have such a spirit of joy and rejoicing and exuberance about serving God, but when you get in that little corner of rebellion with your mom, you are like a completely different person. You are tense, tight, hard, and preoccupied. It’s Satan messing with you, little love. And you must resist him, and you have the promise of your Creator that he will flee.
Obedience and submission are such sweet comfort to our soul, and such a strong antidote against the enemy we face daily called our flesh. I love you, Megan, and I hope most fervently that these words are right and help your soul.
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.
* * *
In the middle of our second decade of daily protests, change came to Westboro. To say that we had already cultivated an atmosphere of unbelievable hostility would be an understatement of epic proportions—and yet I was blind to it for many years, rationalizing it for many more. Whether it came to me from Margie or my mother, my uncle Tim at a picket or Gramps from the pulpit, there was always a well-articulated justification for each extreme measure we took. By my late teens, I had begun to describe Westboro as “aggressively defensive”: we were only responding to the malice that had been unfairly heaped upon us. We had not started this fight, but America, “Land of the Sodomite Damned.” Steeped in a church culture that demanded we disregard, dismiss, and disdain “unacceptable” feelings of every kind—both within the church itself and among the community without—we became desensitized to the reality of the havoc we were wreaking on the lives of our targets. The only pain that mattered was ours.
Fourteen years after we began at Gage Park, this injurious spirit prompted an expansion of our preaching. Our country had declared war on God by granting its imprimatur to the sins of fornication, divorce, remarriage, homosexuality, and the “God loves everyone” lie—and in punishment for those sins, God had dragged America into two wars, the casualties of which were being mourned and their lives celebrated on the news almost daily. In response, we would develop a new campaign that would bring the masses face-to-face with an aspect of our ministry that had previously been reserved for well-known figures and locals who had wronged us: our sinister celebrations of death via protests at funerals. The impact of this shift was seismic, culminating in a five-year battle that would land Westboro before the nine justices of the nation’s highest court—and in the beginning, I was filled with consternation.
“Mom!” I urged, “Can you please slow down a little?”
It was the summer of 2005, and the War Room was overrun by children of all ages. Westboro kids from around the neighborhood had gathered here the way they did most mornings when school was out, waiting to collect their assignments. The older ones of us would stain the fences or mow the lawns or fill up holes in the yard with topsoil, while the younger ones might pick up trash, pull weeds, or chop vegetables from the garden. When my mom’s almost-celestial salsa was ready, the kids would take the fruits of their labor home with them in mason jars. My mother coordinated the program like a day camp for the righteous, another task she had assumed when she realized how pointless and unedifying it was for