This story of eventual redemption is profoundly painful to endure

As much as I love stories about troubled people finding peace, purpose and even redemption, as I read Grant Me Vision: A Journey of Family, Faith and Forgiveness, by Sabrina Greenlee, several times I wanted to shout "WFT" in my loudest, most frustrated voice.

Over and over and over I found the author (previously well known for being the mother of DeAndre Hopkins, a star wide receiver in the National Football League) repeating destructive behavioral patterns with men who knew nothing about how to treat women -- except how to do that badly. It was baffling and dangerous. In fact, eventually her willingness to be in a relationship with one brutal, thoughtless man after another cost Greenlee her eyesight and almost her life.

She was, I thought as I read her account of her life (mostly set in and around Clemson University in South Carolina), a slower learner than Wile E. Coyote, whom the Roadrunner made look foolish again and again. And Sabrina Greenlee had, in effect, roadrunners challenging her all over her life.

Ultimately, her explanation for her countless examples of bad judgment had to do with her being raped as a 10-year-old by a pastor and her inability to move beyond that devastating betrayal of her as a child. As an adult, she was attacked and blinded by the girlfriend of a man she thought she loved, but clearly, she, as a child, had been emotionally and morally blinded by the disgusting actions of a man of the cloth. The childhood rape experience sent her life into chaos, into legally and morally indefensible actions as well as into self-destructive and self-defeating behavior.

She puts it this way in the book: "It was like Reverend Lottie took a piece of my soul that I could never really grasp or even identify. Something was now missing, and whatever was gone impacted my decisions and behavior from that day forward. I would not be able to grow into the woman I was truly meant to be. In every relationship I would have with a man over the next few decades, I was that wounded little girl, trapped in an inner world that I lived in all by myself. I now know that I was carrying years and years of shame, and that same shame would fester within me for decades to come."

The original sin of rape in childhood, as terrible as it was, might not have led to such a radically degraded life all by itself, but the problem was that it was coupled with a dysfunctional family pattern of not speaking obvious truths out loud, a susceptibility to racism, destructive patterns of a drug culture and more. As she writes, "I guess all the adults around me then were too busy with their own dramas to engage with me the way any child needs to be engaged. It's no wonder that, deep down, I felt unlovable."

So we find Sabrina in one destructive relationship after another. She sold drugs (but did not use them). She became a popular striptease dancer, though, unlike many of her dancing colleagues, did not have sex with customers. And we find her in a consistently bad relationship with her mother, a crack addict. And on and on.

You may be surprised, as I was, that a book that mentions faith and forgiveness in the subtitle has no mention of God until page 111, when Sabrina, after a car wreck that put her badly injured husband in the hospital, where he died, writes, "I went into the hospital chapel, which was empty, and not even knowing how to pray, I just stood there and talked to God."

Indeed, until closer to the end of the book, God makes only cameo appearances in the book and then mostly in roles in which the author is pleading with a deity with whom she's not very familiar. What little theology the author expresses tends to be transactional in nature and focused on staying out of hell. In the end, the author finds peace and a more wholesome sense of herself, but the path she took to get there seems to have had little or nothing to do with an understanding of theology or a close relationship with God.

Near the end of the book, for instance, she writes that two of her brothers (the stories of their deaths were told earlier) "are in heaven." That causes her to ask this: "(S)o then how can I hate someone on Earth and expect to be with them again? And from what the Bible says (Tammeus note: More about that idea soon), I will literally get a whole new body. I will get brand new eyes. I will have a mansion in heaven, and most of all, I'll be able to laugh and sing and hug my brothers again. This life has been pretty f...ed up, but dying is like starting over."

As one of my pastors used to say, "The Bible doesn't 'say' anything. You have to read and interpret the words you're reading." And, as I've said before here and in other venues, you can take the Bible literally or you can take it seriously, but you can't do both. This book provides little evidence that the author understands that.

Sabrina Greenlee has reached a good place in life. And somehow her willingness to accept simplistic versions of theology hasn't disqualified her from becoming an inspiration to a lot of people to whom she's told her story in public speeches, a story she now tells in print.

In fact, she now has developed something of a relationship with God, she writes, and daily recites a prayer of dependence on God, especially now that the slight, blurry vision she got back after many surgeries and treatments is gone. And she has promised "that I wouldn't hide -- not in my room (where she spent almost three years isolated), not in a bottle of Hennessy, not behind anger or self-pity or excuses."

In the end, we have a story of hope and new beginnings, but as a reader, I found that getting to that point was painful. Several times I was tempted to abandon this story full of people making ridiculously foolish and destructive decisions. As a reader, you will have to decide whether the inspiring ending is worth the soul-crushing path it will take you to get there. Just know that I almost didn't make it.

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ANOTHER NEEDLESS ANTI-LGBTQ+ CHALLENGE

Several months ago, I wrote here about an author's contention, in a new book, that "omnipotent" is not a term that should be used to describe God. Pretty engaging read. The author, a Nazarene, the Rev. Thomas Jay Oord, now is about to face a church trial over what this RNS story calls his advocacy "for LGBTQ affirmation at a time when the denomination is doubling down on its opposition to same-sex relations." What a sorrowful waste of church energy and resources over what is the church's misreading of scripture. Any Christian theology that turns anyone into a second-class, dehumanized citizen is off base and out of harmony with the teachings of Jesus. Maybe Oord can teach his denomination that.