47 pages • 1 hour read
Beth MooreAll My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
Two months after her wedding, 21-year-old Moore discovered she was pregnant. She delivered a healthy baby girl, Amanda, whom Moore loved with a feeling of purity that was new to her. Three years later, Moore had another girl, Melissa. They were very different: Amanda was eager to please and peaceful, while Melissa was argumentative and active. Family life had some ups and downs, but the four members loved each other.
Chapter 13 Summary
Moore began teaching an aerobics class at her church with Christian contemporary music in the background. The class became so popular she decided to move it to Houston’s famous First Baptist Church. The activities director there asked her to also transfer her membership to that church as part of the deal. She agreed, along with Keith, and found that the new church offered her multiple opportunities for leadership.
First, the pastor, John Bisagno, invited her to speak about “Making Fitness Count for Christ” at a women’s retreat. The following keynote speaker was a woman, Marge Caldwell, which was unusual at the time. Marge told her she was “called” to speak. The thought prompted Moore to have a flyer printed up describing herself as a professional Christian speaker, teacher, and motivator. She sent them to local churches with no response.
Moore continued teaching aerobics and, at age 27, received a call from Marge asking if she would serve as a substitute Sunday school teacher for married women for a year. She felt like a failure until she took a class on Bible doctrine from a man named Buddy Walters. Buddy was mesmerizing, moving Moore to tears.
Her present-day self reflects that sometimes we can’t define what we need from Christ but find it in others. Her love of Scripture and teaching Scripture was ignited by Buddy. After continuing her lessons, she went on to teach Sunday school for 23 years, generating endless material for her writing and speaking in the process.
Chapter 14 Summary
The ministry that Moore named Living Proof grew along with her two girls. Moore began traveling to speak two Friday nights each month while Keith watched the children. Her special call was to women, as her mentor Marge’s was.
The two sets of grandparents continued to be presences in the Moore family’s life. Keith worked with his father, and Moore’s mother continued to be a magnet for all her children. The grandchildren, including Gay’s young family, also adored her and called her Nanny. Mom was still married to Dad, but they led separate lives.
When Moore was 30, she and Keith decided to take in Spud, the four-year-old son of Keith’s cousin who was battling drug addiction. The child had emotional needs. He was mischievous but adorable and intelligent.
Chapter 15 Summary
Moore took on a Bible study group for women and began writing curriculum for her students, always just one week ahead of them. She found a deeper knowledge of Jesus through writing. When the class ended, she was bereft. She then received a call from her pastor asking her to counsel a missionary wife who was struggling with past abuse. The experience triggered memories of Moore’s childhood abuse and her own wild behavior as an adolescent. The door she tried to keep closed “swung wide […] beginning to be opened” (182).
Moore lived by rote, continuing to teach Sunday school, and would fall apart each night. Keith awakened to find her talking to herself. She felt three forces colliding: her troubled past, a sense of the presence of evil, and a feeling that God was testing her. During this time, the Southern Baptist Convention offered to publish her women’s Bible study writings. She went on to write four more Bible studies, working with Lifeway Christian Resources. The experience restored her peace of mind.
Chapter 16 Summary
When Moore was 41, Wayne, now married and a music conductor in Vegas, called Moore to say their mother was dying of metastatic breast cancer. Melissa was a junior, and Amanda was about to start college. At 11, Spud had returned to his biological mother, who was now drug-free. Moore believed she herself failed Spud.
The children and grandchildren all gathered around Mom, devastated. She died, and Moore pictured her reuniting with her dead siblings and parents. She continued to believe her mother finally knew for certain that she was loved by Jesus. Her father remarried, and the five children decided that her gravestone would say “Queen of Everything” (195).
Chapter 17 Summary
Some colleagues from Lifeway Christian Resources, Moore’s publisher, took her to lunch and asked if she would like to put on some events with them. They offered her the chance to speak on any topic and reach an interdenominational audience, and they said they would handle all the logistics for a dozen events a year. She accepted, and Living Proof Live was born. Worship would be led by a young man named Travis Cottrell, who became like a son to Moore.
She found success through her video-driven Bible study series, Breaking Free, about breaking yokes of addiction or oppression, and this helped send women to her live events. By her mid-forties, Moore’s events had moved from churches to sold-out arenas populated largely by women.
However, she says, “with visibility comes scrutiny” (207). The advent of the Internet gave voices to her critics through social media. Seminary-trained theologians criticized her lack of formal theological education. Largely self-taught, she believed her wide reading in various denominations made her qualified to teach in a variety of Protestant and nondenominational churches and to many Catholic students. Above all, she believed she could speak freely, outside Southern Baptist traditions, knowing that she would always be a member.
Chapters 12-17 Analysis
These chapters describe some of the high points of Moore’s life, from the birth of her children to the beginning and enormous success of her teaching ministry. She reflects on the outsized presence of three mentors in her life in fulfilling her particular Call to Minister to Women: Brother John Bisagno, Marge Caldwell, and Buddy Walters.
Each of these mentors had to step outside the narrow and often hypocritical bounds of the SBC’s prohibition against women preachers in order to launch Moore’s teaching career. She stresses that Brother John helped “men and women do” what God called them to do (156). As a woman speaker in the conservative church, Marge was “only slightly scarcer than unicorns” (157), so she pressed Moore to develop her own gifts. Buddy went out of his way to give Moore personal lessons, even though he asked Keith to sit with them out of propriety.
The mentors also exemplify Moore’s theme of The Limitations of Moral Absolutism. It was they who led her to accept that God can use “broken” people like herself to do God’s work, and women weren’t incapable of ministry simply because it was atypical within a patriarchal religious structure. She says that people can’t always define what they seek in Christ and don’t know such “sacred affections” are possible for regular people until they see it in someone else. With their help, she was able to “find [her] own way” of being with Jesus (163).
In this section of text, Moore also reveals some of her lowest points, including the death of her mother and her failure with fostering Spud. She was able to forgive herself for the misdeeds of her adolescence, but this adult failure at a time when her ministry was flourishing is a raw spot in the memoir. She also describes her spiraling descent into self-doubt following her attempt to counsel a fellow child sexual abuse survivor. She again uses the metaphor of a door to describe the way her counseling session triggered vivid memories of her past. Now, however, she could not hold the memories at bay. Instead, the door “swung wide on [her] past” (183). As always in Moore’s life, this experience showed her that God Is Stronger Than Your Personal Trials. Through this lens, she continues to show that God did not send her agony or want for her to suffer. Instead, she shows God rescuing her from her shame and self-doubt by giving her a new calling as a teacher.
Chapter 17 continues to develop the theme that All Families Are Complicated by explicitly comparing Moore’s church family to her family of origin. Of her relatives, she said, “I know their jokes. I know their quirks. […] We speak in strange tongues” (13). This language alludes to the individual idiosyncrasies of her family, but it does so through Biblical language; speaking in “tongues” is a religious practice that describes communing with angels. This shows how unique and inarticulable she found the relationships between herself and her family. Meanwhile, she said of the Baptists, “I understood how they talked and prayed and thought and ate” (199). She demonstrates how intimately familiar she was with her denomination by then, transcending a knowledge of their habits to understand how they felt or thought. This contributes to the fact that, at this point, she became aware of the rumbling criticism of her authority to speak on Biblical topics.
Moore is very clear about the fact that she is not a scholar but an autodidact like popular memoirist Tara Westover, who described in Educated how she taught herself everything she needed to know to gain entrance to college. To become a better teacher, Moore read every set of Bible commentaries she could find, taught herself Hebrew and Greek, and read works by “monks, mystics, and early church fathers and desert mothers,” among others (211). In the process, however, she was opening her mind to ideas outside the SBC. She expresses an awareness of this fact at the end of Chapter 17 when she says she thought “venturing out” was fine as long as she knew she belonged in the church; at the end of “every” day, she knew she was a Southern Baptist. Her push-pull between wanting to stay within the bounds of the SBC and understanding ideas outside those bounds foreshadows the conflicts to come in the memoir’s closing chapters.
