Marilyn Meberg - The Zippered Heart

Praise for The Zippered Heart

Step into liberty through the rapscallion brilliance of Marilyn Meberg.

PATSY CLAIRMONT
Author of Mending Your Heart
in a Broken World

I am always amazed at the combination of humor and theological depth in Marilyns writing. She has done it again in The Zippered Heart. This book addresses the tough issues that need to be brought to the light for healing rather than hidden in darkness and shame. These are bold words from a brave lady.

STEPHEN ARTERBURN
Creator of Women of Faith conferences
and Founder of New Life Clinics

This is one of the most honest, transparent books I have ever read. It comes from one of the most honest, transparent friends Ive ever had. Marilyn drags our secret thoughts and fears out of dusty closets and brings them into the liberty of the light of Christ. I love it!

SHEILA WALSH
Artist, Author, Speaker

For thirty years Marilyns compassionate exploration of the human heart has amazed me. Now, with skill and tenderness she opens that heart for all of us to see how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. This is her finest bookdeeply felt and beautifully written.

LUCI SWINDOLL
Author, Speaker

The Zippered Heart is classic Marilyn. With wit and wisdom, she focuses Gods love on issues other writers are afraid to address, guiding readers to understand how Jesus healing grace can mend broken hearts and restore fractured lives.

BARBARA JOHNSON
Author, Speaker

I read Marilyn Mebergs new book with an excitement I have seldom encountered in myself. This book will change thousands of lives, because it requires that we look so precisely at both the dark and the light sides of ourselves. Then it brings a kind of overflowing grace and forgiveness. As a psychologist with thirty-five years of clinical experience, I can say that this is one of the best books that I have read.

NEIL CLARK WARREN
Author of Finding the Love of Your Life

We lost the experience of perfection but well never lose the expectation of it, says Marilyn Meberg. This is the essence of this colorful, literary, amusing, outrageous, revealing, delightful book. Marilyn causes us to look inside the recesses of our hearts and sift out the plunder and pretense that makes us fall short of being our best. Youre invited to unzip your heart and repair the contents.

THELMA WELLS
Speaker/Author, Women of Faith

The Zippered Heart is a perceptive and sensitive examination of the war within between our two natures. Using many humorous personal illustrations and drawing on her own courage to confront her dark side, Marilyn Meberg points us to the place of victory that is both practical and biblical.

ARCHIBALD D. HART, PH.D.
Professor of Psychology, Graduate School of
Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary

The
Zippered
Heart

Marilyn Meberg

Copyright 2001 W Publishing Group.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by W Publishing Group, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc., P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee 37214.

Scripture quotations not otherwise noted are from The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

Other Scripture quotations are from the following sources:

The Message (MSG), copyright 1993. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

New American Standard Bible (NASB), copyright 1960, 1977 by the Lockman Foundation.

The Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT), copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meberg, Marilyn.
The zippered heart / Marilyn Meberg.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8499-3702-7
1. Self-disclosureReligious aspectsChristianity. 2. Christian life. 3. Sin. I. Title.
BV4597.53.S44 M43 2001
248.4dc21

2001046969

Printed in the United States of America

04 05 06 07 08 PHX 17 16 15 14 13

To Pat Wenger... the wind beneath my wings

W ithout the loving and consistent prodding of Pat Wenger this book would never have been completed. Thank you, Pat for your unflagging faith in the value of this project. Not only did you cheer me on, you insisted you could decipher my illegible handwriting, magically transfer it to the mysteries of your computer, and send it on its way to my editor. You are one in a million and my gratitude for your loyal support and friendship knows no bounds.

Contents

Part 1
The Divided Heart

Good Girl, Bad Girl

DISCOVERING OUR DARK
AND LIGHT SIDES

T he venerable Mother Goose writes about one troublesome aspect of the human condition in her well-known little ditty:

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good
She was very, very good
But when she was bad, she was horrid.

As a child I heard that verse with a disquieting sense that there was a personal truth in it just for meno one else. I had excessively curly hair and worried that if one misplaced curl in the middle of the forehead could bring on behavioral disaster for the poems child, what in the world would happen as a result of the wild, myriad curls flung around my entire head? Was I doomed to a life of moral turpitude?

With the passing of time, my slightly neurotic child mind realized there was no link whatsoever between bad behavior and curly hair. Actually, it was Darlene Blington who verified that truth for me.

Darlene came from a very troubled home with a violently alcoholic father and a depressed, ineffectual mother. Although I was not allowed to go to her house to play (my parents were concerned for my safety), I watched her with the other kids at school. Not only did she use obscene language, but she was also aggressive, meanspirited, and unable to engage in even an hour of play without erupting in angry outbursts of hitting people.

Of greatest interest to me in my observations of Darlene was not her behavior, but her hair. I was delighted to note that it was straight as a flagpole. That settled for me the issue of straight hair versus curly hair as a moral predictor.

In spite of the comfort of settling the hair question, I was further relieved to learn at the age of five that the disquieting instincts I sometimes felt prompting me to do the wrong thing instead of the right thing were what the Bible calls sin and that there was a cure for sin, named Jesus. Also of comfort to me was my mothers assurance that I was not the only one troubled with a sin nature; every human being in the world is afflicted with that malady. I liked that I wasnt alone! (However, I was quite certain at that stage in my life that neither of my parents fell into the sin category. I simply could not imagine either of them deriving the pleasure I did from an occasional convincingly creative lie.)