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A couple of days ago I heard about a woman, claiming to have a tragic situation of being an unmarried mother who chose to carry her disabled child to full term and give birth because of her strong Christian views against abortion. By now you may have heard of her. Her name is Rebeccah Beushausen (often known as "April's Mom"). A couple of months ago, she decided to start journaling this tale on her blog. The problems began when a few of her readers began to get suspicious of the truthfulness of her tale. Now on her blog you can read her apology letter stating that it was all false, and yet she had indeed undergone the loss of a child, and the accompanying pain, in her life previously. There has been a barrage of outrage over this, as her blog had received almost a million hits at the peak of her blog. Understandably people have been hurt, and felt betrayed by this story, that so many could relate to, and empathize with. Many had written her privately, or commented on the blog, expressing emotions and pouring their own souls out. The feeling of betrayal was overwhelming for many. To me, this incident brings up some very large questions. Many people were incredibly encouraged through this blog, until it was exposed as false. Does all of this encouragement dissappear now that it has been shown a fake? What does it mean if someone fictionizes a story in order to help others? She maintains that she began writing it because she was "dealing with unresolved pain that weighs heavy on my heart and which I have been unable to handle alone." Does this somehow make it OK to lie about your circumstances? She also states that the blog resonated with so many, that she kept feeding it, and it kept growing. A lie getting out of hand. There are very huge elements of sincerity in her apology, but there are also elements that many may wonder if are true. Once exposed, most will no longer trust her words. If all of her readers knew her in real life, would this be different? How does the mediation of a blog change our impressions? If what she says (in her apology statement) is true, this woman has an enormous ammount of unresolved hurt in her life. While I don't excuse her lying, I wonder if our response is also much harsher due to the anonymity of the internet. I can't draw any immediate conclusions on this all, but it is a fascinating story to follow. I will be interested to see where it leads in the future. What do you think about it all?
Phil |
Comments
An even more interesting question for Christians called to forgiveness...
I think that if she felt that she had some unresolved issues and she needed a creative outlet to work through those issues, she should have written a novel. I think people probably actually felt empathy for this woman and they trusted her. When one invests their emotions in someone or even something, they open themselves up. In this event, the openness caused pain and the feeling of betrayal. It is not okay to mislead people. I don't feel that this woman did this to help people. Her motives were selfish. She wanted attention and she wanted to feel as if someone cared about her. She possibley thought that the only way to be important was to make something up about herself. She showed zero consideration to others. I think the internet is bad in the sense that it creates false intimacy but this shows that people want to connect with other people. At least it shows that we haven't lost our sense of community. This was a very interesting article. Thank you for blogging!!!
Interesting situation. I don't think it justifies lying to get sympathy or work out your own problems and I don't think we should respond with outrage at someone else's weakness. I doubt if this had been produced as a work of fiction that she would have had much response from her readers. The reason they responded was because they thought that she was actually going through this life situation, making hard choices and exercising her faith in an admirable way. If she were just telling a fictional story about it, they would not have opened the private parts of their own lives to a complete stranger. So much of the betrayal is probably a sense of violation of their own privacy.
That said, if she wants to be forgiven (which apparently she does) the "rule" is seventy times seven (of course this phrase is probably intended to mean that there is no limit to the number of times we should forgive). I would be skeptical if I saw her name on some other blog that seemed to tug at heart strings--which is too bad, since the next one may be genuine.
I don't see how anyone could keep from being discouraged when they discover that something that had previously provided encouragement to them is shown to be a lie.