Susan, a Hollywood actor with multiple “failures” in both her career and her relationships, decided she’d had enough of God. So she took Him to couples counseling and chronicled the journey in Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir. It’s funny as all get-out and painfully honest. Her transparency bleeds from the pages, and where most comics use their gift to hide their inadequacies, Susan’s self-deprecating style brings everyone’s guard down to where we know we are like her in so many ways. Consequently, if she can laugh and grow, then, by God, we can too.

On her book tour (before I’d read the book), Susan challenged me to be brutally honest before God. This is something that had never occurred to me before. I feared being “smoten” for my insolent ways.

Then I recalled my experience, just a few months prior, when I yelled at God like I never had before. And felt bad for doing so, because that’s what a “good” Baptist upbringing will do to you.

Yet I quickly got over that feeling, because the felt injustice of my situation was too overwhelming, to the point where words that I would never have thought about using in a prayer starting running away from my mind and out through my lips. The words came in such a flurry of fury that the sentinel at the door didn’t have time to man the battle-stations and stop the tide of vehemence. He was woefully under-prepared for the onslaught of pent-up rage.

When the words stopped, the silence was dreadful. I was sure I was about to be struck down, to be given the chance to meet my Maker right then and there so I could voice my complaint in his very Presence. But instead of instantaneous death, I heard these words:

I know… I know… I know…

…spoken as from a mother heartbroken over her child’s necessary pain.

I sat stunned, drowning in grace. My anger subsided. And while the answers I wanted didn’t come (ever read the end of the book of Job?), it didn’t matter. The fight I’d had with God (which still continues from day to day) changed me, as if from Jacob to Israel.

So thank you Susan, for being honest with yourself, with God, and with us. It’s helped me, immeasurably. I’m not as mad as hell anymore; I’m just mad at hell on earth.