Despite the pain she describes, her writing style is compelling and unflinching. At one point, shorty after sentencing she describes an event that was supposed to be a celebration of justice done and she recalls some of her friends’ reactions to the news with this poignant line, “Horror can be such a delicacy in sample size.” How true!
As many things unravel, Everhart must wrestle with the God of her upbringing, shaped by the subculture in which she was churched and schooled. She writes, “…I was unable to reconcile God’s sovereign power and the image of God in humans…On the one side, God is all-powerful and loving, and God’s will prevails. On the other side, humans are made in God’s image and can exercise their own will to make choices that matter, which God allows….”
“The way these two will intersect--divine and human—is what creates the human story. I experienced the push and pull between God’s will and my own, a push and pull that created energy as often as it created friction. Hadn’t God and I together kept racial hatred from lodging in my soul? Hadn’t God’s Spirit led me to enter seminary, a path I had been willing to follow? In preparing for ministry, weren’t we together choosing to walk in the way of love rather than bitterness and fear? Weren’t we together bringing a new life into the world?....I told myself that even John Calvin’s systematic theology, written five centuries earlier, hadn’t solved every conundrum. Instead of avoiding contradictions, I called them “’divine mysteries.’”
Everhart ends the book with a letter to her two daughters whose coming of age was a motivation of sorts to write the book. She has so many good things to say about our messed up ideas of sexual purity and the often accompanying shame. We need to think and talk about this. “Since when has a woman’s sexual purity been of more value than the breath in her body?” But I know the answer: since recorded history, and perhaps before that. The sad fact is that a woman’s sexual purity has long been the measure of her worth. As a culture, we need to bury this worthless belief. A girl’s or a woman’s value is not equal to her supposed sexual purity. That fallacy must die.” The title, Ruined, at first glance seems like the wrong choice and then the perfect choice.
I could write more about this important book but I’ll end by saying, that this might not be the kind of book that men pick up and read but I suggest that it is very important that they do.