The Plural Truths of July 14
Part of Me Hates that Andrea Gibson and John MacArthur Share Anything
My first husband loved God. We said it that way, my family.
He didn’t have many outside interests. Miniature ship building, but that was more an appreciation for pictures than an interest in model construction. Carved wooden pipes with cherry flavored tobacco, also more of an appreciation than a practice.
He wasn’t much into sports, rarely watched TV, and liked clothes well enough, but could be extremely self-conscious if clothing made too much of a statement.
The first Christmas we were married, I bought him a dress coat, because he wore suits to church. The coat was brown wool, mid-thigh length. I thought it would look handsome with a black scarf tied criss-cross at the neck. I boxed it lovingly with tissue paper secured with a gold sticker, like a seal. I took a class at church to learn how to tie Christmas bows. As the only gift beneath our meager first tree, the box held presence.
Why am I telling you this?
The gift made him angry. Dress coats in the South were pretentious, didn’t I realize that? He’d be too hot. Was I really that stupid?
We’d talked about moving North soon. That’s why I bought the coat. I thought he’d like it.
He didn’t. A few years later, I donated the coat, NWT, to Goodwill.
Gift giving was easier once my family and I realized that what he loved was learning more about God. He read his Bible daily. He poured himself into pages of theological study; turned the volume up in his car to hear the sermons on the AM dial, even over the sound of wind from the open windows when the AC was broken. He only ever had one item on his wish list until he obtained it: the MacArthur Study Bible. After that, he focused on related study guides and biblical commentary books. John MacArthur was his favorite.
I never bought these for him. My family did. They thought it was good that my husband loved God. He was happy to receive their gifts.
So many things can be true at the same time. Take yesterday, for instance. July 14, 2025.
Poet and human vessel of starshine Andrea Gibson died. They’d held on for so long, even after making Come See Me in the Good Light, that I’d begun to bargain.
Look how long one can live with cancer, I thought. Isn’t that what we do now? Live with it, instead of die from it?
I quote Andrea’s work in my new book. Read their words as part of my poetry meditations. They’d held on for so long, I was surprised to see the black squares float down my social media feed.
“Andrea Gibson was a winner today.”
After gaspingbreathingholdingreading I wrote, “Thank you for being so alive that we who’ve never met you could hear your beating heart.” I added two stars and a heart.
One flutter of my thumb and a new moment arrived. Politics. Some joke about a cat. I put my phone down.
Other things were true yesterday.
I wrote a new book proposal yesterday. The kind that pours quickly because the book wants to be here. It’s nonfiction, unplanned. It’s about leaving.
My granddaughter babbled over her curled fist.
The Supreme Court cleared the way for the dismantling of the Department of Education.
MAGA roared over Epstein, but damage control was well underway. I knew that. The GOP is run like a church. “Stop talking about Epstein,” Trump wrote, and when the White House went quiet for a few hours, the phone calls must’ve been underway. One more sleep, and Republicans voted to suppress the files and keep them away from the public.
Sweeping abuse under the rug is the model championed by John MacArthur, the theologian my first husband so loved. The evangelical theocracy responding to abuse claims the same way it's handled in evangelical churches is not a surprise. Still, my body clocked the irony that the announcement should come in the same algorithmic moment as John MacArthur’s death. In a way, he did this. He created the culture that did this.
A villain has passed from the earth.
On the same day as a poet full of life and love. One whose words helped me heal from the villain’s impact.
On the same day as the anniversary of a friend’s passing a year ago yesterday.
Beth experienced a fast cancer, although at the time it didn’t feel that way, because she, too, held on for longer than expected, living with cancer for a time instead of dying from it. It was in her brain, which seemed incredibly unfair for a woman so smart. I read that Andrea’s cancer was in their ovaries. A nonbinary human having cancer in a female body part likewise feels unfair.
Look at me, still thinking about fairness, while I grapple with grief, and cancer and abuse coverups. It takes all of my healing force not to self-abuse with old, internalized insults: Are you really that stupid?
I don’t know what to post about John MacArthur’s unearned death at the end of a long life. I don’t know why James Dobson and Donald Trump are still alive when Beth and Andrea are not.
I know that I spent two brittle hours yesterday, locked up inside about other people’s posts, some of which feigned closeness to Gibson and Rachel Held Evans, because these names were trending. Social media can be gross sometimes. Also, beautiful.
I know I found a crispy cicada attached to my window screen today, and slug lines on the panes of glass in the corner where I read and meditate with poetry.
I came upstairs then, without words, although by the time I’d reached my office door, I knew I’d open this letter with “My first husband loved God.”
Many things can be true at the same time.
It’s true that the same MAGA that cried out over the manipulated film The Sound of Freedom about child rapists and sex trafficking is the same MAGA that will let child rapists and sex traffickers off the hook.
It’s true that John MacArthur isn’t here anymore. And also that his work and legacy live on. The patriarchy loves his version of God.
Impossibly, it’s also true that Andrea Gibson’s soul is no longer in their body. I think they’re still here, though. They said they’d be. Listen to them here. “I am more here than I ever was before.”
It’s even true that on
’s Substack, the logo is an inverted umbrella, welcoming the rain, an older, authoritarian umbrella so promised to shield me from.
“To be human is to be farsighted,” they wrote. Hyperopia means we see distance more clearly. What’s nearer is blurred.
Our bodies spill feelings we were not made to contain.
Back in the distance, my first husband and I had a repetitious argument. The sequence went like this:
He’d call me names
I’d cry and ask him why he didn’t love me
He’d say he did love me, but that I was also these things
I’d cry more and say, “You don’t love me. You love the idea of me.”
John MacArthur offered patriarchal men a distorted version of the divine, like a twist in the kaleidoscope, one that refracts the light we were meant to feel on our faces, removing the warmth and kindness and leaving only fragments and shards. Stained glass that no longer lets in the light.
My first husband loved the idea of God.
The man who fed the idea is dead.
Overshadowed by poetry, by someone else who died but is still here.
Isn’t that what we mean when we say, “Love wins?”
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Oh man I remember asking my ex-husband to "just love us". He was also a big JMac fan. Coincidence? Absolutely not.
Beautiful writing Tia. Thank you for encapsulating the healing balm Gibson gave to us and what McArthur took and distorted. 💙