Christian singer Amy Grant was criticized for allowing her lesbian niece marry another woman on the farm that she and husband Vince Gill own in Tennessee. She said she struggles with parts of the Bible in a recent interview on the “No Small Endeavor” podcast.
“I’ll be honest,” she said, “it’s hard to read a lot of the other stuff in the Bible for me, I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of the history in the Old Testament. It’s hard for me to trust anything that involves people. Because I know that I’m a mess.”
Some of Jesus’ words are tough, too, she said. She discussed the subject of divorce; she and Gill are in their second marriage.
“Mostly, what I want to hear about is Jesus, and then he says stuff that scares the ever-living daylights out of me,” Grand said. “What I read today was about if a woman’s divorced — and I’m like, ‘Jesus, even you said it. You didn’t talk about very many things. But why did you talk about divorce? People are so ugly to each other. Why did you say divorce?’”
In the late 1990s, Grant sang at a Billy Graham Crusade in Minneapolis when her first marriage was dissolving. She felt the need to tell the famous evangelist about her broken relationship.
“I was married, I had three children, I had fallen in love with a married man,” she said. “And I already had a difficult marriage. And I felt myself just saying, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to wind up. But I think I’m incapable of doing what I have been doing anymore.’ And I couldn’t walk on that stage with the man who held the trust of the whole world.
I just said to him, ‘I know I’ve been a public person of faith. And I still believe in God, and I’m headed for a divorce. I need you to know that.’ And he sat down, and he said, ‘I’ve got a bunch of children.’ And he said, ‘There are a couple of them that are taking the long way home.’ And he said, ‘We’ll all get there. It’s OK.’”
When she looks at the divided culture in America, she says she focuses on John 3:16:
“For God so loved all of us. .. part of my mind every day goes to that.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
