A friend of mine recently was contacted by a journalist to share her story. She has an amazing story, of a life destroyed by an eating disorder, and how meeting with Jesus Christ and learning to forgive helped her to find healing and freedom. A story of triumph and love – one of the best.
But the journalist didn’t seem to think so. Because she took away my friends story, cut out anything to do with God or Jesus or faith, and made up a whole new storyline, based around events that didn’t happen. She changed the story so that the central theme was the eating disorder – instead of the recovery. She changed the source of the eating disorder, to simplify it into “wanting to look thin”, ignoring all the deep hurts and history which had created the eating disorder in the first place. She mangled my friend’s testimony and ‘sexed it up’ so that it would be reader friendly.
How sad. How sad that a triumphant story in which someone trapped by the strategies of the Devil is freed and healed by the ultimate love, that this story is not deemed ‘reader friendly’. Did the journalist think that people wouldn’t be interested in reading a happy story where someone is freed from a devastating lifestyle? Or perhaps she just didn’t like the faith and God part, didn’t think that would be suitable for her intended audience. So she took it upon herself to just make up a new life-story for my friend.
She is naive if she thinks the readers of the world cannot appreciate a good story which revolves around someone of faith, which includes the love of God in it. You only have to look at the book of Jane Eyre – the central character here is a woman of immense faith, who chooses to obey God rather than enter into a bigamous marriage with a man she loves intensely. The power of the story is the power of this woman’s faith to do the right thing, even at great sacrifice. And this is story is as popular, if not more, today, in a society which does not view ‘making the right choice’ as particularly laudable. So popular that it is still being read and studied in schools, still a favourite on many bookshelves, still being transferred to the big screen, with yet another film adaptation released only last year.
This journalist has short changed her audience, and undervalued my friend. She has dumbed down the truth of life, that it is more complicated, more poingnant, and more beautiful than the trite nonsense she published. And that makes me so sad, that her view of the world is so small.
Milly's Scribblings 