All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

“All my knotted-up life I’ve longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who’s good and who’s bad.”

Moore uses “knotted up” to describe the tangled strands of her life: her abusive childhood and wild adolescence, her call to ministry, her marriage and parenthood—including fostering a difficult child she ultimately gives up—and her rejection by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In most parts of her life, nothing is simple, and it is often hard to tell good from bad. In particular, she suffers abuse at the hands of her father, the person who was most tasked with protecting her, and harsh criticism and ostracism by the church whose tenets she professed in her ministry.

“God has remained aloof on this uncomplicated request.”

One of the hard life lessons Moore learns include The Limitations of Moral Absolutism. No one person is entirely good or entirely bad. Some of the supposedly pious individuals who were most important to Moore, like her loving yet racist grandmother, were deeply flawed. In addition, Jesus taught forgiveness and offered redemption from sin, and Moore wants to be “Jesus-like […] following him wherever he led” (245).

“Arkansas, generally speaking, was a bit slow-footed.”

Moore is speaking ironically here about long it took Arkansas to fully integrate after segregation. It had been ten years since the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional; that case, Brown v. Board of Education, was decided in 1954. Ten years later, the public movie theater in Moore’s small town was still segregated.

“There are some things all the sitting in the world in someone else’s seat can’t tell you. You’d have to sit in the same skin.”

Moore describes a time when she encountered one of her Black classmates at the theater and, because of segregation, both girls looked away. Feeling ashamed, she sneaked upstairs to the balcony where the Black patrons had to sit to see what it felt like and realized that she couldn’t possibly understand what the experience was like. She will circle back to the image of living inside another person’s skin to describe her husband’s struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the wake of a childhood tragedy.

“My church believed in doing stuff in front of people.”

Moore introduces the theme of The Dangers of Performative Religious Behaviors by describing some of the things the congregants of her church did to show off their piety. They include using “five-dollar words” (47), memorizing all the verses of hymns, and putting a check into the offertory plate face-up. “Doing stuff in front of people” also encompasses making public declarations of faith, as Moore did when she was baptized at the age of nine. Ironically, when she finally left the SBC, she did so publicly.

“Maybe a dad can do a lot of things and a child can think he’s still okay in other ways, but not the kind of things my dad did to me.”

Moore doesn’t provide graphic details of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It can only be understood that it probably happened more than once due to the image of the shadowy phantom she dreaded at night, who looked like her father. Her pain and shame, however, are clear, and the repercussions were devastating.

“Somehow in the mess of it, Jesus stayed. He kept his commitment to me when I was at a loss to consistently keep what seemed a single commitment to him.”

At every point in Moore’s life when she seemed to be emotionally drowning or tossed about in a storm, God proved stronger than her personal trials. This is true of her high school years in Houston, when Moore constantly berated herself for not being perfect and for making choices she describes as stupid over and over. She doesn’t describe her behavior in detail but hints at promiscuity when she says she was married in “an appropriately off-white wedding dress” (127). It wasn’t until she survived an emotional crisis at age 34 and then began writing Bible studies for women that she reclaimed a sense of wholeness.

“I managed to create a new narrative so entirely self-convincing, it showed up with inexplicable sincerity in my prayers.”

In her late teens, Moore kept a journal that represented a whitewashed version of her family life. She thanked God for a “stable” home and a “wonderful” and “godly” family and berated herself for wholly abiding by Christian tenets. She would not discover The Limitations of Moral Absolutism until much later in her life, through which she would learn that God did not expect perfection from her. What mattered instead is that she tried to be better despite her failures.

“I’d not just shut the trauma in. I’d shut it out.”

Typical of many survivors of childhood sexual abuse, Moore tried to repress memories of her abuse by her father. She often uses the metaphor of a closed door to show the lengths to which she would go to keep the memories at bay. When an encounter with another childhood sexual abuse survivor triggered the memories, she describes it as the door bursting open.

“In a lifetime of second-guesses, I’ve never doubted something holy and unique to my experience took place in that most unholy surrounding.”

At age 18, Moore sensed the presence of God while chaperoning sixth-grade girls on a church camping trip. The experience changed her life by pointing her toward a vocation in Christian ministry. The Southern Baptists did not support the concept of mystical encounters, yet Moore received the support of two important people—the camp director and her home pastor—in interpreting the incident as a call.

“All come to Jesus by faith. No one comes by formula.”

This quotation is at the heart of Moore’s acknowledgement of The Limitations of Moral Absolutism. There is no one way to “come to Jesus” because everyone’s path in life is different. Moore learned this through her Bible study, where figures from Abram to Isaiah to Jesus’s disciples were all called by God in different ways. She realizes that her own life, too, exemplifies the theme. At the end of Chapter 9, she compares her story to a dirty, wrinkled shirt that could be laundered and ironed. It would look better but would no longer fit her.

“I wonder if God has had his way in this untamable whirlwind and storm.”

Moore describes the baggage both she and Keith brought to their marriage. In addition to being opposites in temperament, upbringing, and interests, Moore still struggled with her childhood sex abuse and Keith had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from surviving a childhood fire that killed his brother. As part of her theme that God Is Stronger Than Your Personal Trials, she offers experiences like those within her marriage to show that if people have faith in God’s constancy, they can emerge from trials stronger than before.

“Each heart knows its own bitterness.”

Moore quotes Solomon in Proverbs 14:10 to show that nobody can truly understand another person. Much earlier in the memoir, she describes trying to understand the experience of segregation and concluding that it was impossible. Her marriage to Keith brings her to the same conclusion: Both were emotionally wounded, but the wounds and their individual capacities for dealing with them were completely different. She says that only Jesus can truly know a person’s heart.

“I’ve found that walking by faith is 50 percent hanging in there until you’re far enough down the road to develop hindsight.”

Moore says this about complying with the request to “move her letter,” or transfer her membership, to a bigger Baptist church where she would lead women’s aerobics. She resisted at first, but the new church opened up opportunities for ministry that she could not have imagined. The quotation also applies to her act of writing her memoir. As she considered the various strands of her life experiences, she could see the hand of God in them.

“We can’t always define what we yearn for in Christ. We don’t even know such sacred affections are possible for regular run-of-the-mill humans like us until we see it in someone else.”

Mentorship played an enormous role in developing Moore’s ability to teach the Bible with authority. Here she is speaking of Buddy Walters, who taught the Bible with so much passion that her first class with him moved her to tears. He inspired Moore to a similar love, which she describes as a torch lit in her heart for the Scriptures.

“Within the sturdy triangle they built around me, I would slowly find my own way of being and walking and living and talking with Jesus.”

The “sturdy triangle” was the support of Moore’s three main mentors: Marge Caldwell, Pastor John Bisagno, and Bible teacher Buddy Walters. Under their tutelage, Moore was able to accept the idea that God could use her to do His work as a Bible teacher. She says she owes them a debt she can never repay, not just for their support but because each of them ignored the SBC’s patriarchal and condescending approach to women in ministry to help launch Moore’s career.

“In my life story, this was my perfect storm.”

At age 34, Moore experienced three concurrent crises. Attempting to counsel a woman who also suffered sexual abuse in childhood triggered her own memories of abuse and sent her into a disoriented state that lasted for nearly a year. At the same time, Keith’s health was creating issues for the couple. She also felt the presence of evil around her. She believes God sent her the help she needed in the form of an offer from the SBC’s publications arm to publish her Bible studies. The experience was one that led her to believe that God was stronger than her personal trials.

“I’d been on the receiving end of a miracle Jesus can do with a handful of fragments offered to him by individuals at the end of themselves.”

For Moore, God never deals in absolutes and can use the most “broken” person to do divine work. Her Living Proof Live speaking events were the direct result of surviving the darkest period of her life, her “perfect storm.” She believes the freedom she felt afterwards enabled her to speak and write with conviction and authority in her Call to Minister to Women.

“That may be one of the worst parts of being a religious person with a dark past. The temptation to view persistent hardship as punishment is almost too much to resist.”

Keith Moore’s kidneys nearly failed after a bad reaction to medication for a serious bacterial infection. His health suffered for years afterwards, to the point that Moore and her daughters said he was “gone forever” even though he was still alive. She responded by being angry at God and wondering why God was punishing her, an attitude she attributes to “being a religious person with a dark past.” She never lost her faith, however, and Keith did return to his former self in time.

“When pro-Christian starts to look less and less like Christ, something’s gone off the rails.”

Moore was blindsided by the reaction to her public stand against sexism in the SBC. Evangelical leaders and friends alike accused her of betraying them and siding with the Democratic party to keep abortion legal. She came to the conclusion that the reason men insisted on a patriarchal structure in the church was not because it adhered to Scripture; rather, the structure allowed them to hold on to power over women.

“‘Those are just tears of tenderness, right?’ she followed up. Nodded again. ‘Okay, then. Those are allowed.’”

Moore publicly left the SBC in 2021 and cast about for over a year, searching for a church where she and Keith felt welcome. She found it in the Anglican church and refers to its tradition of the “Via Media,” or middle road between Protestantism and Catholicism. At the first service they attended, both Moore and Keith wept—Keith because the service was so much like the Catholic services of his youth, and Moore because a small group of women surrounded her and welcomed her.

“Through a chain of endless storms, pocked by furious tornadoes, my sanity mocked in the darkest of nights, Jesus had held.”

This is Moore’s central message: Jesus upheld her throughout the darkest moments of her life. She once again uses the metaphor of a tornado to describe her sexual abuse, marital troubles, and the emotional crisis she experienced in her thirties. Looking back on her life, she can see that Jesus has led her through these dark times and has given her the strength to survive them.

“Funny thing is, not once had it occurred to me how little difference exists between a tight knot and a firm tie. Somewhere inside the balled-up, walled-up mass of tangled strands in the life of faith, the inscrutable God of heaven and earth has the loose ends tied.”

The tangled knot introduced in Chapter 1 is a metaphor for the strands that make up Moore’s life. She transforms the metaphor in the Epilogue through two different images, of which the “firm tie” is the first. In this “tie,” God, not humans, securely ties up all the loose ends that exist in a life of faith. This demonstrates how her perception of her life has changed from a series of mistakes and “tangle[s]” to a life ordained and watched over by God.