If you’ve ever taken a Beth Moore Bible study you’ll know she comes across as confident, articulate, funny, beautiful, and passionate about the Bible. You might imagine she’s lived a charmed and trouble-free life, removed from the cares of us ordinary women. But you’d be wrong.
In her 2023 memoir All My Knotted-up Life, Moore takes us from her troubled childhood in the Arkansas boonies, through the rise of her teaching success in Houston, to the present.
If anything characterizes Moore’s teaching it’s her love of Bible study. One event I found particularly moving was the understated way God planted that love in her. Here’s her description of it. She has just come from attending her first class on Bible doctrine taught by lay-teacher Buddy Walters from her church.
“I’d never seen a person like Buddy. I’d never met anyone who seemed to study the Bible for the sheer delight of it and not simply the discipline. I appreciated the Bible. Respected it. Embraced a way of living and talking that developed from it. But I didn’t love it. Not like that guy loved it.
“The second he closed in prayer, I stood up from my chair, grabbed my purse, and walked straight out the door without a word…. I ran to my car, threw my purse in the passenger seat, got in, shut the door, and burst into tears. ‘I don’t know what that was,’ I cried to God, leaning forward toward the windshield in case he couldn’t see me through the roof, ‘but I want it.’”
All My Knotted-up Life, p. 162
Moore’s writing is full of such vividly told stories. It’s hilarious in places, poignant in others, convicting in still others. There’s no whitewashing over the many challenges she and her family have faced, but never whiny or self-pitying. All in all it’s a very readable account of the hand of God moving in an ordinary life and making it extraordinary.
Violet Nesdoly 