Permission to Speak Freely is a unique collaboration featuring author Anne Jackson’s essays and poetry, along with artistic renderings of confessions – photos, drawings, postcards, and letters. It is a four-color book throughout, beautiful from the design to the way it feels as one thumbs through it.
The project began in May 2008 when Jackson posed a question on her blog: “What is the one thing you feel you can’t say in the church?” The response was immediate and heartfelt. More than 500 comments poured in with confessions about addiction and adultery, admissions of loneliness and lost faith, and much more.
The purpose of the book is simple, Jackson says: “to share the confessions I’ve received, as well as my own life and experience, to show you that you’re not alone in your battle with fear and secrets. We are not isolated in our brokenness.”
The question came from Jackson’s own experience of being afraid to say something in church or to reveal herself to other Christians. Broken and alone is exactly how she felt for years, a Southern Baptist pastor’s daughter struggling with an addiction to porn, failed relationships, substance abuse, being the victim of sexual abuse by a youth pastor, and coping with depression. Her story is one of “battling fear, hiding from God, hating the church, loving the church, and finding myself on a never-ending quest for more truth and more grace.”
Jackson’s problem with porn began when she was a teenager, typing “sex” into an internet browser that led to an addiction she’d fight for years. Even as the manager of a Christian bookstore, she’d go home after work each night and look at porn on her computer. After confessing everything to God, she threw out her computer and refused to have internet service at home for several years to break the cycle. “The confession about the porn, the men, and a million other shameful things was the beginning of a spiritual reawakening,” she says.
Now Jackson is done with keeping brokenness in the dark. When she found the courage to bring her addictions into the light, she experienced the transformative power of grace and mercy. She calls for more confession, more “speaking freely”: “We will be unified more by our common humanity and need for divine intervention, and we’ll be separated less by darkness and loneliness.”
Jackson’s message to those who feel broken, isolated, and paralyzed by fear is that on the other side of fear is freedom: “Each time we decide to take a step away from fear, we begin to move forward into a life completely energized and rich in the freedom God has for us.”
“Somebody is waiting on you to tell your story. To share how you’re being rescued. To share how scary it is, but how beautiful it is,” she says.