An Intimate Moment with a Woman Caught in Adultery

This is probably one of my favorite bible stories of them all. It brings back a really great memory that happened at work one day about three years ago.

I was working in our old building with a different engineering team than I work for now. At the time, we had no direct supervisor in charge of the team because they were searching for a new manager so there was just myself and six guys down in the lowest level of the building. We got to be a pretty tight group during the six months that we had no leader because we all had to step up to the plate in order to make sure that our clients' deadlines were getting met and our projects were complete.

Anyway, it was during this time that we had one part-time pastor working for us, one "holy roller" evangelical and one older gentleman who was very faith-based (methodist, if I remember right.) Out of the seven of us, half were going to church weekly and two of us that weren't going to church did at least believe in God. The last young man was my friend, Rebecca's husband, Jeremy, who neither went to church or had ever been an active Christian. Jeremy was going to school at the time and came in one morning and asked us all to take a questionaire that he had to make up for his sociology class and so we all said, "sure."

The questionaire was on the death penalty.

It said on question one, "Do you believe the death penalty should ever be used as a form of punishment?" If you answered, "yes" you needed to fill out all the rest of the questions. If you answered, "no" you stopped the questionaire at question one. (The point of the sociology experiment seemed to be not whether it should be used but where everyone would draw the line at when it should be used.)

I checked the "no" box and looked up to see every one of the men furiously filling out all the other questions.

One of the younger men stopped and looked up at me and said, "Julie, aren't you going to fill out the questionaire?" I smiled and said, "I already did. I'm done." They all stopped and looked up at me then, realizing that that meant I did not believe the death penalty was ever appropriate. That is when the best religious discussion I have ever been involved in (outside of church) got underway.

One by one they batted that ball at me. "What if it was your mother or child that got killed? Huh? What about then?" or "What if someone broke into a school and slaughtered an entire classroom of innocent children?" or "What about for someone like Terry Nichols who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma?" They tried their best to get me to say, "Okay, sure, kill him. That's a good enough reason" but nothing they threw at me was going to break me. Even the part-time pastor was for the death penalty. Even the mild mannered methodist thought it should be used at certain times. Even my favorite holy rolling evangelical guy who you would suspect would never hurt a fly felt there were good enough reasons to kill someone for a crime they had committed.

The discussion went on and on and on and finally I looked at Greg, the part-time pastor, and said "you'd think you of all people would understand the sanctity of life..." but no - Greg felt the world should be based on "an eye for an eye" and not "let him who is without sin cast the first stone." By the time it was all said and done, I don't think I swayed one person's mind but something interesting happened. Those who had never heard this story before heard it for the first time - and it was probably one of the only biblical lessons they'll ever truly get to hear about how Jesus lived and taught. For those who had heard the story, they seemed to come away from the conversation truly thinking about it and the connotations this statement has even now in the 21st century.

In the end, I sat at my desk all day while each man, some alone and some in groups of two or three, came up and asked me about why I felt the way I did and why it was so important to me that the death penalty not be used...ever.

After that day, we often had regular relgious-based discussions in our little group whenever time allowed. It was my only connection to "church" in so many years and I ate it up to have others to talk about such things again. Truth be told, I'd bet money if I had to pinpoint when I first started thinking about the spiritual aspect of my life and how much of it was missing at that point in time, that day and that discussion was probably the beginning of my coming back to Jesus.

I'll just never forget it. It was like someone turned a faucet on or re-lit a burned out lightbulb inside me. I have those men and that conversation engrained in my memory because it was one of the few times in my life that an entire group of men all stopped and listened with total respect to what I had to say. I didn't have to be a b*tch. I didn't have to yell and scream. I didn't have to flirt and fling my hair around like some cheap tramp. Six men. One woman. Me, as far from God as I could be, telling THEM why killing someone was never going to acceptabel for me to have on my hands. I knew if I made it to heaven, it would be the one thing even I wouldn't be able to forgive myself for - so how could I ask God to?

"Let you who are without sin cast the first stone." Yeah, pretty sure that's NOT me. I'll be happy to set my stone down and walk away.

Oh, by the way, I think rotting in a jail cell for fifty or sixty years is a far better punishment for someone who has killed another human being. In my opinion, they should be forced to have pictures of their victims hanging on every wall of their cell and they should be forced to watch home movies of those they killed every year on their birth date, death date, anniversaries, etc. Let those who take another's live live. Let them live all their days inside those walls. Let them start eternity right here, right now, spending every waking moment knowing the hell that is awaiting them.