I will never be able to prove to you that there is a God or that Jesus is who He says He is... I have reasons, strong reasons based on a lot of evidence, for what I believe, but they are reasons, not proof. It comes down to...a person chooses to believe. Belief opens a door and a real Person comes in. It is only with the presence of that Person that the "knowing" happens. And even then, at times I KNOW and at other times...I trust.
Here is how I arrive at "God". All I need to do is try to wrap my human mind around the very basics of "what is". I don't get a sense of "smallness" I get a sense of the utter impossibility of it all. Get quiet some time soon and close your eyes and just think about time. What is it? Why are we "in" it?
Imagine time going back....before your birth...stretching into the NEVERENDING past? Just how far back does it go? I want you to get a sense of how it is just as impossible for us to imagine that there WAS a "beginning to time" as that there was "no beginning to time". Try to wrap your mind around either possibility. And time future...going on into "infinity"....no end. You cannot imagine an end of time or NO end to time. There is something about the entire thing that doesn't make sense to us.
It gets worse. Close your eyes again and imagine space. Yes we now have some concept of the hugeness of it all...ridiculous hugeness? But...where does space end? Does it go on "forever"? Infinity is a word we throw around casually now but THINK about it. No end to space? That can't be imagined. On the other hand...what shall we say then? There are edges somewhere...walls? You have now reached the end of reality...this is it? But walls and edges imply something BEYOND the walls and edges. What? Nothing? What is nothing? And how far does it go? And is there time there?
Now simply realize that some "where" in the midst of this incomprehensible sea of space and time there just happens to be a speck called Earth and it is inhabited by an amazingly complex system of life...the birds in the air, the fish in the sea...kittens, penguins, giraffes, pea soup and beings called "you and me" walking around in highly sophisticated bodies using our supposedly highly sophisticated brains to comprehend the very basics of what IS...and feeling completely baffled.
But we do know that we exist...and we both agree and attest that there is something called LOVE...and that something about LOVE feels right...feels like HOME...warms that chill that we feel when our minds are roaming around the "edges" of time and space and feeling alone and lost and vaguely terrified.
LOVE is right...that is something our inner sensors just "know". I believe that LOVE is the origin of it all...holds it all together...and LOVE is the image in which we were created. That is why it feels like home... It is. While other creatures are sustained by this LOVE...we are the only ones made "in His image" which is why we have free will...and minds to try to reason and comprehend it all. We are the creatures MADE to have a relationship with the Source.
So...if you would ever come to a point of concluding with me that there must be a God and that He IS Love... IF you ever came to that point...still I know you would say to me... "Why Christianity instead of any of the other religions that speak of God? Why believe this ridiculous story about Jesus instead of equally ridiculous stories about men who are half elephant?"
Other religions aren't the same. There are a lot of variations but mainly they all boil down to stories about capricious gods and goddesses who do humanlike things that don't make a lot of sense... Or else you have rules and regulations that are supposed to please or appease a god or gods...or just rules that make life easier and more pleasant.
But when you come from a base idea of God being LOVE...Basically that He created reality with care and placed Mankind in it for one reason only...because He wanted to have a loving RELATIONSHIP with us...then Christianity is the only religion that makes any sense at all because...once you truly dig in until you really know the story and the person of Christ and understand what happened and why you come to realize that...Jesus Christ is God's LOVE LETTER to the world.
He is our way of KNOWING God in a way our minds CAN comprehend. Instead of empty confusion at the edges of time and space...He comes to us in a flesh and blood form...a simple man...loving, kind...accepting. Words that reveal the reconciling nature of God... He is constantly telling us not to fear...and that He wasn't sent into the world to condemn it...but to save it. Jesus is our way back HOME.
I'm going to try here to get you to feel a sense of the love God feels for us...and the WHY of Jesus Christ. What I want you to try to recall is an e-greeting you once sent me. I'll never forget it. It quoted that saying, "If you love something set it free. If it comes back to you it is yours...if it doesn't it was never meant to be". The card showed two sets of footprints together, but then one set runs away. The remaining footprints, after a moment, run off after the first footprints and catch up with them...and the card in effect said "Forget that!!! I LOVE YOU!!!!"
Jesus is, in effect, that card to us from God. Yes, in order to love us He had to set us free...or it would be meaningless and not a real relationship at all. So He had to make us with a free will that was capable of walking away. But Jesus IS those footprints running after us, saying "I LOVE YOU!!! And I'm not going to just let you walk away. I will never stop you...but I WILL follow you your entire life... I'm right here with you. I'm your Love Letter from God...and your ticket home."
Jesus is God's attempt to fix a broken love relationship. He will follow us all of our lives with His offer. Yes, God has set you free...allowed you to walk away. But He loves you too much to just shrug and say 'oh well'. So He comes to you in a human form and trudges along behind you. He lived a life on Earth so that we could "get to know" God... He died on Earth to buy our ticket home...and to PROVE once and for all how much God loves us... And now being "Spirit", Jesus can follow each and every one of us every day of our lives holding out that love letter...that offer...
When we accept that offer He stops following us around and makes a home in our hearts...where He gives us an internal source of comfort, peace and love that you have to experience for yourself to believe. We love each other from the outside in. HE loves us from the inside out and it feels right and we have a sense of joy and peace that we can't find anywhere else...the reason being...this is the relationship we were created for in the first place.
You don't have to be anyone special or a "type" to obtain it...just human and broken and selfish and empty and confused and screwed up like all of us... At some point you just make a conscious choice to believe Jesus is God's Love sent in human form...and ask Him to quit following you around and come in and have a relationship with you and show you who God is.
And He does. And He will. And then you WILL know the Truth...and the Truth will set you free. We've been given two gifts. First....the free will to walk away from God. Second...the freedom, in Christ, to run back into His arms voluntarily. This is LOVE and it rings true to me. Whether it comes in the form of an e-greeting from a friend...or a Jesus-greeting from God...it is just RIGHT. True love sets the loved one free...yes...but it cares enough to follow. You will never find that in ANY other "religion" on earth. This is because it isn't a religion. It's a Person...and He's right behind you.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Story "The Thief"
The Thief
In my former life in the shadows I would never have believed that my heart could be destroyed and rebuilt by the look in another man's eyes. I'd always made my way through life sliding from dim street to dark alley, avoiding the eyes of others, counting on going unnoticed as I planned and committed my silent crimes.
Then the often-dreaded day came when I was dragged out into the brilliant, unforgiving sunlight, blinking like a rat rustled out of some dark hole, cringing away from a multitude of eyes turned toward me. There were the curious, excited stares of those who saw the afternoon's proceedings as a sort of morbid entertainment. There was the remorseful, heartbroken gaze of my mother. Many looked upon me with disgust or anger, here and there a look of pity perhaps... But when my eyes met His my whole twitching, bleeding body reacted in shock and confusion because this "lunatic" that I was hanging beside was giving me a look of love so intense and complete that it seemed totally alien to my world. To this world!
I quickly turned away. I'd already heard all about this madman, so why should I expect Him to act normally? The word about Him had been out on the street for some time. Many considered Him dangerous because He had attracted quite a following among the gullible who were always looking for a "Messiah" to come along and solve all of their problems. That rabble followed Him everywhere; never gave the man any rest. They'd probably driven Him over the edge. I'd never bothered to go out to listen to Him. I'd learned early that I had only my own wits to rely on. I wasn't looking for a leader; political, spiritual or otherwise. I was my own man, just looking to survive and, with any luck, to get rich in the process. Later, when the rumors began to reach me that this Jesus was beginning to claim that He was God, well I wasn't surprised. It was clear He was just another mental case after all. It just reaffirmed my belief; if you don't trust anyone then you won't be disappointed.
But of course, all that was before I got caught. One stupid move and my life was over. And it's funny the way the mind works. Now I, who had been well beyond conscience most of my life, was having regrets. I, who had defied God during those times when I was even inclined to believe in Him, was suddenly fearing Him. I was about to die, I knew there was no way out of that. Through a haze of pain I could already feel life slipping away from me, draining downward with the blood and sweat.
What if it were all true after all? Was a God of infinite wrath waiting for me there in the darkness that approached? Would He greet me with a long list of my wrongs and proceed to make me wish that I were back here on this cross? I was scared alright! Why hadn't I listened to the warning voices when I was young? It had all seemed so irrelevant then. Why hadn't I at least tried to keep the Law? Surely I must have broken every one of them!
"Oh, what's the use in worrying about all that now?" I mumbled in self-disgust. "It's much too late to redeem myself. Besides," I made a frail attempt to laugh cynically, "I know myself too well for that. I could never have even begun to keep the Law! I couldn't even make myself want to! I may as well admit it. I'm guilty as sin and I deserve everything I get."
Out of some hopeless curiosity, or perhaps in search of diversion from my thoughts, I turned my head back toward Jesus and the other. Again he met me with that steady gaze of love. It was unsettling. His look contained neither admiration nor pity. It was clear to me that nothing in myself inspired that love, it just seemed to shine forth as though He were its ultimate source; as though He Himself were love. Even so, it was excruciatingly personal. The look took me in and embraced me as though I were a very small, defiant, hurt child in the arms of a strong and loving parent. I'd never spoken to this man, yet I felt He knew all about me, understood me in ways I'd never understood myself.
In a sense He seemed pathetically human dying there on His cross, but in an equal sense He didn't seem human at all. I considered the probability that I was becoming delusional in my pain but, just for a moment, a door in my mind cracked open to an astounding possibility. What if He really were God as He'd claimed? If by some crazy miracle this man was really God then the unthinkable must be true... God could love me. Did love me! For once in my life I risked being made a fool and allowed myself to hope, almost to believe. I felt a tentative melting at the edges of the ice block of my soul.
"If you are the Christ come down off the cross! Save yourself!" The crowd was taunting Him, their harsh, jeering voices grated. I felt amazement at their blindness. How could they miss what even I was plainly seeing? Even the other criminal was challenging Him. Was the man insane? On the brink of death did he dare to despise his only Hope? "Don't you fear God?" I called out to him. "You and I deserve to be here, but this man is innocent!"
I dared to lift my eyes to Jesus. I'd heard that He had spoken of being King of a Kingdom not of this world. Of course I'd considered it all an amusing product of His madness. But He and I were leaving this world today. Was it possible? "Jesus," I called, "Remember me when You come into Your Kingdom!" I flinched for I had spoken boldly, impulsively, but the continued warmth of His gaze reassured me.
He was a picture of weakness, of broken helplessness as He hung there covered with dirt and blood. Then His words rang out, filled with power and authority. "Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." A totally unfamiliar feeling of wonder and joy overcame me on that cross because...I believed Him. He was God. He loved me and He was going to take me into His Kingdom.
I trusted Him completely, and yet as the sky grew darker above us my spirit grew troubled with unanswered questions. Why me? I had never done anything for this Jesus and there was certainly no time left to do anything for Him in the future. Why should He honor me in this way, that I, a common, vulgar criminal, should enter the Kingdom with the King? I had always heard that Jesus' standards were impossibly high. He had even tangled with the religious leaders, telling them that they were not nearly good enough, that God required perfection even of the secret mind and heart! I'd had a good laugh over that, imagining the looks on their pious faces.
I had no doubt that He had decided to have mercy on me, yet I was humbled, embarrassed, my life lay behind me a pathetic waste. I watched Him dying there beside me and I knew somehow that He didn't have to do this. He could easily have stopped it all at any moment. He was deliberately choosing this agony, indignity and death and, though I didn't understand, I felt in my deepest heart that He was doing it all for me.
Yes, I died that day, the day that my life began. There was no darkness in death; only a glorified Jesus escorting me into my new home. Soon everything was made clear. I had experienced the absolute purity of God's grace. In God's unique economy my criminal, wasted life became a priceless thing, a perfect portrait of His completely undeserved love for the whole human race.
In my depravity I'd certainly never done anything to cloud the issue. No one could say, "He was a good man, deserving of mercy. He was responsible, a good picture of what a Christian should be." I was a picture of only one thing, a desperate sinner in the hands of a LOVING God. In my case the glory clearly goes to God alone. My story has given hope to the hopelessly lost through the ages. My story has brought praise to the lips of those with the insight to see just how unworthy we all really are. You could even say I've been instrumental in a great many "deathbed conversions".
Most of you have opportunities that I didn't have. You may live long lives with the Lord at home in your hearts. He may work wonders in and through you. But if you would truly be a reflection of God's glory, be a picture of His grace. Never allow what you do or don't manage to accomplish in your life to distort this picture. Realize that His love for you is a gift, completely undeserved forever. Nothing that you can do will repay Him in the least, for it is your basic helplessness that is the proving ground for the perfection of His love!
When you stand on the jagged edge of the chasm of eternity, all of the issues of life become trivial and fall away. Then you my friend become the thief on the cross, helpless to save yourself, but with a dying Jesus hanging beside you with eternal love in His eyes.
In my former life in the shadows I would never have believed that my heart could be destroyed and rebuilt by the look in another man's eyes. I'd always made my way through life sliding from dim street to dark alley, avoiding the eyes of others, counting on going unnoticed as I planned and committed my silent crimes.
Then the often-dreaded day came when I was dragged out into the brilliant, unforgiving sunlight, blinking like a rat rustled out of some dark hole, cringing away from a multitude of eyes turned toward me. There were the curious, excited stares of those who saw the afternoon's proceedings as a sort of morbid entertainment. There was the remorseful, heartbroken gaze of my mother. Many looked upon me with disgust or anger, here and there a look of pity perhaps... But when my eyes met His my whole twitching, bleeding body reacted in shock and confusion because this "lunatic" that I was hanging beside was giving me a look of love so intense and complete that it seemed totally alien to my world. To this world!
I quickly turned away. I'd already heard all about this madman, so why should I expect Him to act normally? The word about Him had been out on the street for some time. Many considered Him dangerous because He had attracted quite a following among the gullible who were always looking for a "Messiah" to come along and solve all of their problems. That rabble followed Him everywhere; never gave the man any rest. They'd probably driven Him over the edge. I'd never bothered to go out to listen to Him. I'd learned early that I had only my own wits to rely on. I wasn't looking for a leader; political, spiritual or otherwise. I was my own man, just looking to survive and, with any luck, to get rich in the process. Later, when the rumors began to reach me that this Jesus was beginning to claim that He was God, well I wasn't surprised. It was clear He was just another mental case after all. It just reaffirmed my belief; if you don't trust anyone then you won't be disappointed.
But of course, all that was before I got caught. One stupid move and my life was over. And it's funny the way the mind works. Now I, who had been well beyond conscience most of my life, was having regrets. I, who had defied God during those times when I was even inclined to believe in Him, was suddenly fearing Him. I was about to die, I knew there was no way out of that. Through a haze of pain I could already feel life slipping away from me, draining downward with the blood and sweat.
What if it were all true after all? Was a God of infinite wrath waiting for me there in the darkness that approached? Would He greet me with a long list of my wrongs and proceed to make me wish that I were back here on this cross? I was scared alright! Why hadn't I listened to the warning voices when I was young? It had all seemed so irrelevant then. Why hadn't I at least tried to keep the Law? Surely I must have broken every one of them!
"Oh, what's the use in worrying about all that now?" I mumbled in self-disgust. "It's much too late to redeem myself. Besides," I made a frail attempt to laugh cynically, "I know myself too well for that. I could never have even begun to keep the Law! I couldn't even make myself want to! I may as well admit it. I'm guilty as sin and I deserve everything I get."
Out of some hopeless curiosity, or perhaps in search of diversion from my thoughts, I turned my head back toward Jesus and the other. Again he met me with that steady gaze of love. It was unsettling. His look contained neither admiration nor pity. It was clear to me that nothing in myself inspired that love, it just seemed to shine forth as though He were its ultimate source; as though He Himself were love. Even so, it was excruciatingly personal. The look took me in and embraced me as though I were a very small, defiant, hurt child in the arms of a strong and loving parent. I'd never spoken to this man, yet I felt He knew all about me, understood me in ways I'd never understood myself.
In a sense He seemed pathetically human dying there on His cross, but in an equal sense He didn't seem human at all. I considered the probability that I was becoming delusional in my pain but, just for a moment, a door in my mind cracked open to an astounding possibility. What if He really were God as He'd claimed? If by some crazy miracle this man was really God then the unthinkable must be true... God could love me. Did love me! For once in my life I risked being made a fool and allowed myself to hope, almost to believe. I felt a tentative melting at the edges of the ice block of my soul.
"If you are the Christ come down off the cross! Save yourself!" The crowd was taunting Him, their harsh, jeering voices grated. I felt amazement at their blindness. How could they miss what even I was plainly seeing? Even the other criminal was challenging Him. Was the man insane? On the brink of death did he dare to despise his only Hope? "Don't you fear God?" I called out to him. "You and I deserve to be here, but this man is innocent!"
I dared to lift my eyes to Jesus. I'd heard that He had spoken of being King of a Kingdom not of this world. Of course I'd considered it all an amusing product of His madness. But He and I were leaving this world today. Was it possible? "Jesus," I called, "Remember me when You come into Your Kingdom!" I flinched for I had spoken boldly, impulsively, but the continued warmth of His gaze reassured me.
He was a picture of weakness, of broken helplessness as He hung there covered with dirt and blood. Then His words rang out, filled with power and authority. "Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." A totally unfamiliar feeling of wonder and joy overcame me on that cross because...I believed Him. He was God. He loved me and He was going to take me into His Kingdom.
I trusted Him completely, and yet as the sky grew darker above us my spirit grew troubled with unanswered questions. Why me? I had never done anything for this Jesus and there was certainly no time left to do anything for Him in the future. Why should He honor me in this way, that I, a common, vulgar criminal, should enter the Kingdom with the King? I had always heard that Jesus' standards were impossibly high. He had even tangled with the religious leaders, telling them that they were not nearly good enough, that God required perfection even of the secret mind and heart! I'd had a good laugh over that, imagining the looks on their pious faces.
I had no doubt that He had decided to have mercy on me, yet I was humbled, embarrassed, my life lay behind me a pathetic waste. I watched Him dying there beside me and I knew somehow that He didn't have to do this. He could easily have stopped it all at any moment. He was deliberately choosing this agony, indignity and death and, though I didn't understand, I felt in my deepest heart that He was doing it all for me.
Yes, I died that day, the day that my life began. There was no darkness in death; only a glorified Jesus escorting me into my new home. Soon everything was made clear. I had experienced the absolute purity of God's grace. In God's unique economy my criminal, wasted life became a priceless thing, a perfect portrait of His completely undeserved love for the whole human race.
In my depravity I'd certainly never done anything to cloud the issue. No one could say, "He was a good man, deserving of mercy. He was responsible, a good picture of what a Christian should be." I was a picture of only one thing, a desperate sinner in the hands of a LOVING God. In my case the glory clearly goes to God alone. My story has given hope to the hopelessly lost through the ages. My story has brought praise to the lips of those with the insight to see just how unworthy we all really are. You could even say I've been instrumental in a great many "deathbed conversions".
Most of you have opportunities that I didn't have. You may live long lives with the Lord at home in your hearts. He may work wonders in and through you. But if you would truly be a reflection of God's glory, be a picture of His grace. Never allow what you do or don't manage to accomplish in your life to distort this picture. Realize that His love for you is a gift, completely undeserved forever. Nothing that you can do will repay Him in the least, for it is your basic helplessness that is the proving ground for the perfection of His love!
When you stand on the jagged edge of the chasm of eternity, all of the issues of life become trivial and fall away. Then you my friend become the thief on the cross, helpless to save yourself, but with a dying Jesus hanging beside you with eternal love in His eyes.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Rescued (My Psalm)
RESCUED (My Psalm)
When I, in lost confusion, had wandered far from You
When death and destruction came suddenly upon my house
When the enemy of my soul held me dangling
Above a black pit of insanity, agony and despair
When all seemed lost and the enemy roared with laughter
And pierced my soul with a sword of horror
Causing me to cry out like a wounded animal
And all of his minions moved in for the kill
For I, oh Lord, had wandered so far into the wasteland
They were convinced that You had turned Your face from me
They rejoiced that I was utterly alone and helpless
In that moment I did not even think to cry out to You!
The Pit beckoned me
It seemed my natural home
My enemies laughed and prodded me to jump, to fall
I was willing
It seemed right
But You, my Lord, had other plans!
Suddenly, in the midst of my enemies
I felt strong arms encircle me
I struggled then, but You would not let go
You turned me around and hid my eyes against Your chest
I tried to turn back to the Pit, it beckoned
But You would not let me look there again
You gently held my face against Your heart
You whispered in my ear
"I am here!
Even though you wandered so far away,
I have always been with you
Even though you are not even sure you believe in Me,
Yet I am here!
Even though you are too wounded to want my help,
I am here!
For you are Mine
Your need cried out to Me and I flew to rescue
And to restore you, My love"
You amazed and perplexed my enemies
They could not fathom such love
It seemed foolishness to them
Yet it terrified them!
They scattered far away
Darkness dispelled by Beautiful Light
You took me to a lonely place
You gently tended to all of my wounds
You provided for all of my needs
And spoke love words to my broken heart
You overcame my reluctance with Your patient strength
You seduced my heart with Your unchanging beauty
Who am I to deserve such treatment?
Yet, when I try to speak of the past
When, in light of Your great Love,
My past wandering seems ever more terrible to me
You still my lips with a gentle finger
You gently and firmly kiss my forehead and whisper
"Hush My love, it is finished"
And You gently turn my face toward a future
Immersed in You
When I, in lost confusion, had wandered far from You
When death and destruction came suddenly upon my house
When the enemy of my soul held me dangling
Above a black pit of insanity, agony and despair
When all seemed lost and the enemy roared with laughter
And pierced my soul with a sword of horror
Causing me to cry out like a wounded animal
And all of his minions moved in for the kill
For I, oh Lord, had wandered so far into the wasteland
They were convinced that You had turned Your face from me
They rejoiced that I was utterly alone and helpless
In that moment I did not even think to cry out to You!
The Pit beckoned me
It seemed my natural home
My enemies laughed and prodded me to jump, to fall
I was willing
It seemed right
But You, my Lord, had other plans!
Suddenly, in the midst of my enemies
I felt strong arms encircle me
I struggled then, but You would not let go
You turned me around and hid my eyes against Your chest
I tried to turn back to the Pit, it beckoned
But You would not let me look there again
You gently held my face against Your heart
You whispered in my ear
"I am here!
Even though you wandered so far away,
I have always been with you
Even though you are not even sure you believe in Me,
Yet I am here!
Even though you are too wounded to want my help,
I am here!
For you are Mine
Your need cried out to Me and I flew to rescue
And to restore you, My love"
You amazed and perplexed my enemies
They could not fathom such love
It seemed foolishness to them
Yet it terrified them!
They scattered far away
Darkness dispelled by Beautiful Light
You took me to a lonely place
You gently tended to all of my wounds
You provided for all of my needs
And spoke love words to my broken heart
You overcame my reluctance with Your patient strength
You seduced my heart with Your unchanging beauty
Who am I to deserve such treatment?
Yet, when I try to speak of the past
When, in light of Your great Love,
My past wandering seems ever more terrible to me
You still my lips with a gentle finger
You gently and firmly kiss my forehead and whisper
"Hush My love, it is finished"
And You gently turn my face toward a future
Immersed in You
1 John 1:9 and God's Grace
1 John 1:9 and the Christian Experience
To imagine that one COULD keep accurate and effective short accounts with God is, when you really think about it, the height of arrogance. While we live in this world, in this flesh, we are in a constant Romans 7 experience until the day we die. It isn’t just our actions...but our thoughts and our attitudes...our very beings...that are filthy rags in His sight apart from grace. In ourselves we have NO “good enough” moments. Where do we get the idea that He wants us to “do our best” to keep accounts with him...keep our forgiveness up to date...or to work at staying “in fellowship” with Him. When I look at humanity...at myself...with any honesty whatsoever the very thought completely exhausts me. There is no rest or peace in this because sin isn’t something that we “do” in “instances”...it is the very state of our flesh condition.
Certainly this teaching keeps the most honest and self-aware of non-believers away from Christianity as it is typically portrayed. The prospect of a life spent constantly bouncing in and out of fellowship with a disapproving God who will only really be our Friend, Lover and Ally at such rare moments when we have somehow managed to root out, confess, sort out, identify, own up to and completely surrender every speck of our sin, rebellion, fear, selfishness, bad attitude and wrong thinking, is just too much for them. As it should be. Christ promises that if we come to Him He will give us peace with God and REST.
Many Christians try to strike a sort of compromise by imagining that now that Christ has saved us God isn’t nearly so picky as He once was. He’ll be happy enough as long as we try to confess and repent of the “big ones”. Where does that come from? God is still a Holy God and there are NO moments when YOU are good enough to have fellowship with Him. The very moment that you have confessed and “sort-of” surrendered (which is the best that any of us can really do if we are honest) any particular sin or shortcoming to Him you are still completely steeped in sin because you remain in a condition of “flesh” as long as you live in this world. Either God has taken care of the WHOLE sin issue FOR you and you now exist in a constant state of grace and true fellowship with Him no matter what or how you happen to be doing at the moment...or else you are utterly lost and truthfully you can have NO moments of fellowship...no fellowship at all with a Holy God. There is no compromise...no “in-between”. There IS no Christian bar of soap and there is no need for a Christian bar of soap. There is only the blood of Jesus which was shed “once for ALL” to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
There IS no “out of fellowship” for a Christian. We live in a state of His constant love, grace, care and approval in Christ. A Christian who is completely honest with himself will have to admit that there are ALWAYS areas that we are not yet ready to surrender to God. There are things that we are not anywhere near ready to even recognize or face in ourselves...much less change. If we believe we are out of fellowship because of these things...then we must face being forever and always out of fellowship. The whole concept of being out of fellowship with God because of our sins and then confessing and somehow getting “more forgiveness” for them IF we abandon them sincerely and completely enough...and thus getting “back in good” with God is the biggest source of deception in the typical Christian life. It causes a great and constant sense of “unease” with God. This leads to a lack of trust in a God we fear is constantly disapproving of us unless WE manage somehow to change our own hearts and attitudes to bring ourselves back in line with Him... And the emphasis here gets placed squarely back on US and off of Him and the totality and perfection of what He did for us in love and mercy.
It is only walking in the Spirit that gives us the power or even the desire to resist any of that constant negative pull of our flesh. How do we walk in the Spirit? By cleaning ourselves up sufficiently so that the Spirit will come and work in us? No...it says that BY walking in the Spirit we resist the flesh. We’re too often taught to clean up the flesh and “get forgiven enough” to have access to the Spirit. We’ve got it backwards. How DO we walk in the Spirit? Only by recognizing the totality of grace; His great and perfect love for us that is ALWAYS there no matter how or what we are doing. It is firmly believing that He is always there...always in a PERFECT fellowship with us that depends only on Him. This leads to a sense of true peace with God and to TRUST, faith, hope. These are the things that soften our hearts and lead to a sincere and genuine love response to Him that will, in His timing, effect those changes in us that He has in mind.
What then do we do with 1 John 1:9? First of all...I challenge you to find any other verse referring to the New Covenant in Christ that can be taken to mean that we need to somehow obtain, appropriate or apply more forgiveness “each time we sin” and keep short accounts with God. You are welcome to try but I haven’t found any. 1 John 1:9 stands alone and this is why we are constantly confronted with just this one verse. Now if we were meant to be constantly confessing, repenting and getting forgiven so that we can return to fellowship...wouldn’t that be a very, very important, even crucial concept for us all to know and understand? Why then is it only mentioned in one verse in one letter to one church?
It is my belief that this verse has been completely misinterpreted and subsequently used by the enemy to create this constant sense of unease, lack of peace and distrust in the Christian heart. There were those in Paul’s day, some even in the Church, who simply did not believe in the whole concept of sin. Paul was simply saying that you cannot BE saved if you do not believe in the reality of sin because if there is no sin there is no need for a Savior. If you say that you have no sin...you are believing a lie...the Truth is not in you because you cannot trust Him for your salvation apart from an acknowledgement that you are a sinner and need a Savior. But if we confess our sins, are aware that we are sinners unable to save ourselves, He is then faithful to forgive...to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This is a salvation verse! That’s what happens once and for all at the point of salvation...not over and over again moment by moment by moment. When His blood covered our sins...they were ALL in the future. When His sacrifice cleansed us from ALL our unrighteousness it was all in the future. The sin issue between ourselves and Him is over...settled once for all at the moment we accept His sacrifice for our own salvation. It is NOT understanding and believing this that causes us to perceive a distance between ourselves and Him that isn’t really there. It causes lack of trust. Often it causes us to avoid Him, to run and hide from Him when we need Him most. When our hearts are cold, our attitudes are bad, we’re either feeling rebellious and don’t even want to change a thing or we’re feeling afraid and we know we CAN’T change a thing. Only the unfailing embrace of His total grace and love could possibly reach deep enough to touch any of that...but we run...we hide in fear like Adam and Eve in the garden... We go back to square one and act as though Christ never came and died for us at all. Exactly what the enemy wants.
Yes, there will be times when we feel distant from Him because we are obsessed with something else. Perhaps a sin or perhaps just life. But that is our perception...not reality. The cure is to acknowledge the truth that He is totally there...to allow ourselves to experience the love and grace that IS...to trust that we have been given the free gift of peace with God in Christ. There may be times when we tell Him that we miss Him...that we want to feel closer...that we want Him to break the chains that some sins and desires seem to have had us bound in because we have finally been brought to the necessary point of seeing the ugliness of them, feeling hurt, weary and tired of them. There will be times when we do feel sorry, deeply sorry...and there is nothing at all wrong with pouring our hearts out to Him and telling Him so. NOT in order to receive forgiveness or to “get back into fellowship” but to focus on the fact that we ARE already totally forgiven, loved and accepted and to receive His comfort and peace. To reaffirm our belief in total grace. To remind ourselves of who we are in Him and all He is to us. To have our sorrows transformed into genuine gratitude and joy. This is NOT getting back into fellowship...it is recognizing what has been true all along. It is learning to trust in His unshakeable, unchangeable love and grace. It is coming to the deep realization that it doesn’t depend on us apart from our initial recognition of our desperate need of Him and our acceptance, once and for all, of His gift of grace and salvation. Therein lies faith and trust. No trust whatsoever in our own selves, our wayward hearts, mixed motives, unpredictable emotions or our weak, half-hearted efforts...but complete trust in Him.
To imagine that one COULD keep accurate and effective short accounts with God is, when you really think about it, the height of arrogance. While we live in this world, in this flesh, we are in a constant Romans 7 experience until the day we die. It isn’t just our actions...but our thoughts and our attitudes...our very beings...that are filthy rags in His sight apart from grace. In ourselves we have NO “good enough” moments. Where do we get the idea that He wants us to “do our best” to keep accounts with him...keep our forgiveness up to date...or to work at staying “in fellowship” with Him. When I look at humanity...at myself...with any honesty whatsoever the very thought completely exhausts me. There is no rest or peace in this because sin isn’t something that we “do” in “instances”...it is the very state of our flesh condition.
Certainly this teaching keeps the most honest and self-aware of non-believers away from Christianity as it is typically portrayed. The prospect of a life spent constantly bouncing in and out of fellowship with a disapproving God who will only really be our Friend, Lover and Ally at such rare moments when we have somehow managed to root out, confess, sort out, identify, own up to and completely surrender every speck of our sin, rebellion, fear, selfishness, bad attitude and wrong thinking, is just too much for them. As it should be. Christ promises that if we come to Him He will give us peace with God and REST.
Many Christians try to strike a sort of compromise by imagining that now that Christ has saved us God isn’t nearly so picky as He once was. He’ll be happy enough as long as we try to confess and repent of the “big ones”. Where does that come from? God is still a Holy God and there are NO moments when YOU are good enough to have fellowship with Him. The very moment that you have confessed and “sort-of” surrendered (which is the best that any of us can really do if we are honest) any particular sin or shortcoming to Him you are still completely steeped in sin because you remain in a condition of “flesh” as long as you live in this world. Either God has taken care of the WHOLE sin issue FOR you and you now exist in a constant state of grace and true fellowship with Him no matter what or how you happen to be doing at the moment...or else you are utterly lost and truthfully you can have NO moments of fellowship...no fellowship at all with a Holy God. There is no compromise...no “in-between”. There IS no Christian bar of soap and there is no need for a Christian bar of soap. There is only the blood of Jesus which was shed “once for ALL” to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
There IS no “out of fellowship” for a Christian. We live in a state of His constant love, grace, care and approval in Christ. A Christian who is completely honest with himself will have to admit that there are ALWAYS areas that we are not yet ready to surrender to God. There are things that we are not anywhere near ready to even recognize or face in ourselves...much less change. If we believe we are out of fellowship because of these things...then we must face being forever and always out of fellowship. The whole concept of being out of fellowship with God because of our sins and then confessing and somehow getting “more forgiveness” for them IF we abandon them sincerely and completely enough...and thus getting “back in good” with God is the biggest source of deception in the typical Christian life. It causes a great and constant sense of “unease” with God. This leads to a lack of trust in a God we fear is constantly disapproving of us unless WE manage somehow to change our own hearts and attitudes to bring ourselves back in line with Him... And the emphasis here gets placed squarely back on US and off of Him and the totality and perfection of what He did for us in love and mercy.
It is only walking in the Spirit that gives us the power or even the desire to resist any of that constant negative pull of our flesh. How do we walk in the Spirit? By cleaning ourselves up sufficiently so that the Spirit will come and work in us? No...it says that BY walking in the Spirit we resist the flesh. We’re too often taught to clean up the flesh and “get forgiven enough” to have access to the Spirit. We’ve got it backwards. How DO we walk in the Spirit? Only by recognizing the totality of grace; His great and perfect love for us that is ALWAYS there no matter how or what we are doing. It is firmly believing that He is always there...always in a PERFECT fellowship with us that depends only on Him. This leads to a sense of true peace with God and to TRUST, faith, hope. These are the things that soften our hearts and lead to a sincere and genuine love response to Him that will, in His timing, effect those changes in us that He has in mind.
What then do we do with 1 John 1:9? First of all...I challenge you to find any other verse referring to the New Covenant in Christ that can be taken to mean that we need to somehow obtain, appropriate or apply more forgiveness “each time we sin” and keep short accounts with God. You are welcome to try but I haven’t found any. 1 John 1:9 stands alone and this is why we are constantly confronted with just this one verse. Now if we were meant to be constantly confessing, repenting and getting forgiven so that we can return to fellowship...wouldn’t that be a very, very important, even crucial concept for us all to know and understand? Why then is it only mentioned in one verse in one letter to one church?
It is my belief that this verse has been completely misinterpreted and subsequently used by the enemy to create this constant sense of unease, lack of peace and distrust in the Christian heart. There were those in Paul’s day, some even in the Church, who simply did not believe in the whole concept of sin. Paul was simply saying that you cannot BE saved if you do not believe in the reality of sin because if there is no sin there is no need for a Savior. If you say that you have no sin...you are believing a lie...the Truth is not in you because you cannot trust Him for your salvation apart from an acknowledgement that you are a sinner and need a Savior. But if we confess our sins, are aware that we are sinners unable to save ourselves, He is then faithful to forgive...to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This is a salvation verse! That’s what happens once and for all at the point of salvation...not over and over again moment by moment by moment. When His blood covered our sins...they were ALL in the future. When His sacrifice cleansed us from ALL our unrighteousness it was all in the future. The sin issue between ourselves and Him is over...settled once for all at the moment we accept His sacrifice for our own salvation. It is NOT understanding and believing this that causes us to perceive a distance between ourselves and Him that isn’t really there. It causes lack of trust. Often it causes us to avoid Him, to run and hide from Him when we need Him most. When our hearts are cold, our attitudes are bad, we’re either feeling rebellious and don’t even want to change a thing or we’re feeling afraid and we know we CAN’T change a thing. Only the unfailing embrace of His total grace and love could possibly reach deep enough to touch any of that...but we run...we hide in fear like Adam and Eve in the garden... We go back to square one and act as though Christ never came and died for us at all. Exactly what the enemy wants.
Yes, there will be times when we feel distant from Him because we are obsessed with something else. Perhaps a sin or perhaps just life. But that is our perception...not reality. The cure is to acknowledge the truth that He is totally there...to allow ourselves to experience the love and grace that IS...to trust that we have been given the free gift of peace with God in Christ. There may be times when we tell Him that we miss Him...that we want to feel closer...that we want Him to break the chains that some sins and desires seem to have had us bound in because we have finally been brought to the necessary point of seeing the ugliness of them, feeling hurt, weary and tired of them. There will be times when we do feel sorry, deeply sorry...and there is nothing at all wrong with pouring our hearts out to Him and telling Him so. NOT in order to receive forgiveness or to “get back into fellowship” but to focus on the fact that we ARE already totally forgiven, loved and accepted and to receive His comfort and peace. To reaffirm our belief in total grace. To remind ourselves of who we are in Him and all He is to us. To have our sorrows transformed into genuine gratitude and joy. This is NOT getting back into fellowship...it is recognizing what has been true all along. It is learning to trust in His unshakeable, unchangeable love and grace. It is coming to the deep realization that it doesn’t depend on us apart from our initial recognition of our desperate need of Him and our acceptance, once and for all, of His gift of grace and salvation. Therein lies faith and trust. No trust whatsoever in our own selves, our wayward hearts, mixed motives, unpredictable emotions or our weak, half-hearted efforts...but complete trust in Him.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
May 23, 2006
May 23
Spring took a long time coming this year. B's suicide took place in early fall. The winter seemed to go on forever, rainier and gloomier than almost any winter I can remember...but very gradually spring crept in. It aways does.
I haven't written again in a long while. The words just weren't coming to me. And there was so much to do, to learn, to take care of. Nearly nine months have gone by since B died...but somehow it seems a lifetime away to me. I see that as part of God's healing mercy.
The day after B died I had a lot of things to think about and take care of. My sister and I had spent that long, nightmare of a night with me talking and her listening. Morning came and more hours passed. God had crept relentlessly back into my heart, my thoughts, my emotions. Somehow I allowed Him to comfort me knowing full well that I deserved the opposite.
I now believe it was only my former grounding in the fullness of His grace that allowed me to let Him in again without any fear or distance. I clung to Him that morning...as my very Life and my only Hope.
But even at a time like that...one is not allowed the luxury of simply clinging. The day of the suicide had passed... It was already a new day and B's family in another state still didn't know. I knew I owed it to B and to them to be the one to tell them. I don't remember what I said. I know God must have been speaking through me because my sister tells me I handled it as well and as gently as anyone could have. I cared. I was concerned about how the news would effect other people... I was worried about the shockwave that was about to hit them. I'd sealed myself off from others for so long that these feelings were almost alien to me, but they were very real. The Spirit was already building a new me.
Only God kept me going that first day...moving...talking. I had made the decision to send my son to school in the morning. I know that sounds odd but he truly didn't understand any of it and we felt that keeping to his regular routine and being away from the worst of the shock and sadness would be better for him. A bit after noon I got a phonecall from his teachers. He was just back to school for the year and had been in this new classroom for only a few days. The teacher told me that he had had a bad BM all over himself and that they had cleaned him up as best they could but I would have to come get him.
Jesse had been toilet trained four or five times in his life and each time lost the ability again. He seems to have a strange condition when it comes to his bowel movements. He won't go at all for five or six days...and then he will have diarrhea for a day. Generally he somehow manages to save this for weekends. This day it had happened at school which was very unusual. Do I think it had anything to do with the tragedy? No...I honestly don't. It just happened. Somehow this seemed the hardest thing to cope with that first day. It felt like insult added to injury. Why God?
My sister drove me to the school. I remember my face was such a red, puffy mess! I had been crying all night...I was still crying. I had to walk into the the busy classroom and face his new teachers. What were they thinking? "I want you to know I'm not crying about Jesse. Jesse's father committed suicide yesterday." I was that blunt. I'll never forget their faces. They got teary and gave me big hugs but had no idea what to say. We put Jesse in the car and took him back home.
I needed to be alone for a while. I went off by myself into one of the bedrooms and I cried and prayed. I don't remember what I prayed. It was more of an internal, frantic screaming. He held me. I desperately needed to know that B was okay. He was GONE forever. So hard to fathom this. God was there with me, closer than ever before in my life, and I couldn't really wrap my mind around that yet either. I think if I prayed in words at all they were probably akin to "I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." and "Is he okay? Is he okay? Is he okay?" God held me. Exhaustion crept in and I eventually went still and dreamy.
Horror receded and softer images began to well up in my mind. Images of B talking so excitedly about God's grace way back when. More recent images of B defiantly telling me that he still believed in God even if I didn't. Most of all...an image of B putting Jesse to bed night after night after night...even during the worst of his illness, and every night ending his good-night words to Jesse with "and Jesus always loves you, no matter what!"
I remembered just then how I'd often suffered through silent bitterness when B said those words to Jesse. Our marriage was a torturous shambles and perhaps B had spent the entire day either strung out on his meds or frantically worrying and pacing and rubbing his head and sometimes crying or screaming. This good-night phrase on top of all that had often seemed ludicrous to me. Now I silently thanked God for B's beautiful testimony brought back to my mind at this crucial moment.
Finally, for the first time in a long, long while, I picked up a Bible and just opened it randomly and started to read. People may say what they like about that, but God met me right where I was at that moment and gave me an unshakeable soul-deep conviction that B was with Him. The story sprang up from the pages of how a boy child with siezures had been thrown to the ground but Jesus had picked him up, healed him and returned him to his father. In that moment I KNEW that the Lord had been right there with B at the moment of his death, picked him up from the ground and healed him of all his injuries and his illness, all worries and pain, and had returned him to his heavenly Father. Anyone is entitled to doubt and think what they wish, yet it wasn't merely the words read but the absolute conviction He fixed into my heart as I read them. It has never been shaken.
Spring took a long time coming this year. B's suicide took place in early fall. The winter seemed to go on forever, rainier and gloomier than almost any winter I can remember...but very gradually spring crept in. It aways does.
I haven't written again in a long while. The words just weren't coming to me. And there was so much to do, to learn, to take care of. Nearly nine months have gone by since B died...but somehow it seems a lifetime away to me. I see that as part of God's healing mercy.
The day after B died I had a lot of things to think about and take care of. My sister and I had spent that long, nightmare of a night with me talking and her listening. Morning came and more hours passed. God had crept relentlessly back into my heart, my thoughts, my emotions. Somehow I allowed Him to comfort me knowing full well that I deserved the opposite.
I now believe it was only my former grounding in the fullness of His grace that allowed me to let Him in again without any fear or distance. I clung to Him that morning...as my very Life and my only Hope.
But even at a time like that...one is not allowed the luxury of simply clinging. The day of the suicide had passed... It was already a new day and B's family in another state still didn't know. I knew I owed it to B and to them to be the one to tell them. I don't remember what I said. I know God must have been speaking through me because my sister tells me I handled it as well and as gently as anyone could have. I cared. I was concerned about how the news would effect other people... I was worried about the shockwave that was about to hit them. I'd sealed myself off from others for so long that these feelings were almost alien to me, but they were very real. The Spirit was already building a new me.
Only God kept me going that first day...moving...talking. I had made the decision to send my son to school in the morning. I know that sounds odd but he truly didn't understand any of it and we felt that keeping to his regular routine and being away from the worst of the shock and sadness would be better for him. A bit after noon I got a phonecall from his teachers. He was just back to school for the year and had been in this new classroom for only a few days. The teacher told me that he had had a bad BM all over himself and that they had cleaned him up as best they could but I would have to come get him.
Jesse had been toilet trained four or five times in his life and each time lost the ability again. He seems to have a strange condition when it comes to his bowel movements. He won't go at all for five or six days...and then he will have diarrhea for a day. Generally he somehow manages to save this for weekends. This day it had happened at school which was very unusual. Do I think it had anything to do with the tragedy? No...I honestly don't. It just happened. Somehow this seemed the hardest thing to cope with that first day. It felt like insult added to injury. Why God?
My sister drove me to the school. I remember my face was such a red, puffy mess! I had been crying all night...I was still crying. I had to walk into the the busy classroom and face his new teachers. What were they thinking? "I want you to know I'm not crying about Jesse. Jesse's father committed suicide yesterday." I was that blunt. I'll never forget their faces. They got teary and gave me big hugs but had no idea what to say. We put Jesse in the car and took him back home.
I needed to be alone for a while. I went off by myself into one of the bedrooms and I cried and prayed. I don't remember what I prayed. It was more of an internal, frantic screaming. He held me. I desperately needed to know that B was okay. He was GONE forever. So hard to fathom this. God was there with me, closer than ever before in my life, and I couldn't really wrap my mind around that yet either. I think if I prayed in words at all they were probably akin to "I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." and "Is he okay? Is he okay? Is he okay?" God held me. Exhaustion crept in and I eventually went still and dreamy.
Horror receded and softer images began to well up in my mind. Images of B talking so excitedly about God's grace way back when. More recent images of B defiantly telling me that he still believed in God even if I didn't. Most of all...an image of B putting Jesse to bed night after night after night...even during the worst of his illness, and every night ending his good-night words to Jesse with "and Jesus always loves you, no matter what!"
I remembered just then how I'd often suffered through silent bitterness when B said those words to Jesse. Our marriage was a torturous shambles and perhaps B had spent the entire day either strung out on his meds or frantically worrying and pacing and rubbing his head and sometimes crying or screaming. This good-night phrase on top of all that had often seemed ludicrous to me. Now I silently thanked God for B's beautiful testimony brought back to my mind at this crucial moment.
Finally, for the first time in a long, long while, I picked up a Bible and just opened it randomly and started to read. People may say what they like about that, but God met me right where I was at that moment and gave me an unshakeable soul-deep conviction that B was with Him. The story sprang up from the pages of how a boy child with siezures had been thrown to the ground but Jesus had picked him up, healed him and returned him to his father. In that moment I KNEW that the Lord had been right there with B at the moment of his death, picked him up from the ground and healed him of all his injuries and his illness, all worries and pain, and had returned him to his heavenly Father. Anyone is entitled to doubt and think what they wish, yet it wasn't merely the words read but the absolute conviction He fixed into my heart as I read them. It has never been shaken.
February 7, 2006
February 7
I haven't written in several weeks. I'm not sure why, or why the story stalled right where it did. Perhaps I feel within me an inability to ever accurately convey what happened in mere words.
B was not doing well that morning when he went to work. He was in tears. But, that happened a lot. We had argued. I hadn't been very sympathetic that morning. Sometimes when he got into one of his "despair states" he would come at me almost aggressively as though I were supposed to "fix things", but then if I tried to suggest anything he would go negative again and resist. I had gotten to a point where I recognized these moods and didn't know how to cope with them anymore. I was totally burned out, frustrated beyond belief and in a sort of despair myself. We had both been having a few especially bad days, but it was almost becoming routine in a horrible sort of way. When he left in tears I knew that things were escalating somehow, but I didn't know how to stop whatever was coming.
Only a week or two before, at dinner, he had told me that I shouldn't worry about him ever actually committing suicide because he didn't believe he'd ever really have the nerve to do it. I have no idea why I'd let him reassure me with that, but I had. I guess I wanted to believe him. He was terrible at lying and didn't usually manage to decieve me very well about anything. He had seemed very sincere and I was actually feeling better on that score. So perhaps I almost saw "things escalating" in a hopeful sort of light. Something had to give. We needed more help. Somewhere deep down inside I suppose I knew it was all more than B and I could handle and that sooner or later "the world" would catch on to this and perhaps hospitalize B for a while until they could really figure out what was going wrong with him and how it should be treated.
After B left for work, I dried my tears and pulled it together well enough to pay a couple of bills and bring them to the post office. We had just recently purchased my cell phone and I wasn't all that used to it yet. As I was driving to the post office the cell started ringing. It was B. He didn't sound angry at me at all...just sort of scared and anxious. I told him I was driving and didn't feel safe so could I call him back as soon as I got home from the post office and we could talk as much as he wanted. He just said, "Okay....thank you!" in a wavery voice and hung up. That was the last I ever heard from him. When I got home I couldn't seem to get through to him on his cell phone. This wasn't unusual as at times he would be in certain work situations where he couldn't answer, so I left him a couple of voicemails to call me back...but he never did. I think he must have turned off his phone; decided against talking to me again for some reason.
I can't say I was entirely surprised when a police officer showed up at my door in the late afternoon. All he told me was that something had happened with my husband and that I should contact my sister. He said he didn't have any details and he just left. You must understand that I had been through this sort of thing before. I was thinking that B had phoned 911 again or just had a breakdown out there somewhere and behaved oddly enough that someone had gotten involved... I was entirely expecting to have to go down to some hospital emergency room again...and hopefully this time they would at least keep him for long enough to figure him out. My feelings were mixed. I was very upset, but also felt a small stirring of hope. Maybe this would cause something to change for the better.
But then my sister arrived and came into my house...looked me in the eyes and said, "B did it."
This is the part I find so hard to describe. I didn't black out. I didn't even sit down. I just stood there, just inside my front door, and wailed like an animal for about five minutes. It all hit me at once. Incredible pain, unimaginable guilt, sorrow, fear, horror, agony. But something strange happened...something I find it very difficult to put into words.
It was as though I were standing on the edge of a huge, black pit. Call the pit complete despair and insanity. It beckoned. I WANTED it. I wanted to hurl myself into it and lose myself completely and never emerge. It seemed the natural thing to do; the ONLY thing to do. I deserved it in both the positive and negative senses of that word. But something "not me" was holding me back. Another Presence was right there in my mind with me, holding me firmly. I struggled. I didn't want to be held. I wanted to die or go mad; whichever came first. This Presence allowed me to have a very good look into the absolute blackness of that pit, but would simply not allow me to jump in. After a moment or two the force of this Presence actually turned me around and would not then even let me look at this pit again. I tried. I tried to make my mind go where I felt it deserved to go, but I couldn't even find that same place again. He, God, had hidden it from me.
Oh, I wasn't quite ready to admit that God was there. Not yet. That took a couple of hours. Although there is a blurry, unreal quality to my memories of that first evening, I distinctly remember telling my sister, a wonderful Christian, not to talk to me about God because it wouldn't help me since I didn't believe in Him. Nevertheless, He was holding me, gently but firmly, and even this added barb of denial of Him never loosened His grip on me in the slightest.
I think that the Lord was telling my sister not to talk; just to listen. Or else she simply couldn't get a word in edgewise. But she listened, and listened, and listened. She listened all afternoon and nearly all night. She told me later that from her perspective it looked initially as though I were someone who had been run through with a sword...and then all of this poison came gushing out. Hours and hours of poison. I don't remember what I said. I think that probably all of the pain and the hurt, the worry and fear, the guilt and the horror of the last three or four years came pouring out of my mouth in one long, unstoppable stream. My sister said next to nothing. She just listened, and cried with me and cared.
By early morning I had somehow been given an understanding that my husband had committed the sin of taking a life. His own. But the grace that we'd learned together came flooding back in with a new life of it's own. B's sins had been washed away; forgiven two thousand years before he was even born. So, even though B had taken it on himself to make a horrible, desperate, flying leap into God's arms...God had not neglected to catch him. Not only that, He'd caught me too for good measure. It hadn't really mattered that B had worried himself into a frenzy of despair and done the unthinkable, or that I had tried to handle things in my own bitter way and turned my back on God and questioned not only His love but His very existence. Those things didn't cancel out the fact that we simply belonged to Him and nothing could ever change that. It was never actually about us. It was about Him.
I haven't written in several weeks. I'm not sure why, or why the story stalled right where it did. Perhaps I feel within me an inability to ever accurately convey what happened in mere words.
B was not doing well that morning when he went to work. He was in tears. But, that happened a lot. We had argued. I hadn't been very sympathetic that morning. Sometimes when he got into one of his "despair states" he would come at me almost aggressively as though I were supposed to "fix things", but then if I tried to suggest anything he would go negative again and resist. I had gotten to a point where I recognized these moods and didn't know how to cope with them anymore. I was totally burned out, frustrated beyond belief and in a sort of despair myself. We had both been having a few especially bad days, but it was almost becoming routine in a horrible sort of way. When he left in tears I knew that things were escalating somehow, but I didn't know how to stop whatever was coming.
Only a week or two before, at dinner, he had told me that I shouldn't worry about him ever actually committing suicide because he didn't believe he'd ever really have the nerve to do it. I have no idea why I'd let him reassure me with that, but I had. I guess I wanted to believe him. He was terrible at lying and didn't usually manage to decieve me very well about anything. He had seemed very sincere and I was actually feeling better on that score. So perhaps I almost saw "things escalating" in a hopeful sort of light. Something had to give. We needed more help. Somewhere deep down inside I suppose I knew it was all more than B and I could handle and that sooner or later "the world" would catch on to this and perhaps hospitalize B for a while until they could really figure out what was going wrong with him and how it should be treated.
After B left for work, I dried my tears and pulled it together well enough to pay a couple of bills and bring them to the post office. We had just recently purchased my cell phone and I wasn't all that used to it yet. As I was driving to the post office the cell started ringing. It was B. He didn't sound angry at me at all...just sort of scared and anxious. I told him I was driving and didn't feel safe so could I call him back as soon as I got home from the post office and we could talk as much as he wanted. He just said, "Okay....thank you!" in a wavery voice and hung up. That was the last I ever heard from him. When I got home I couldn't seem to get through to him on his cell phone. This wasn't unusual as at times he would be in certain work situations where he couldn't answer, so I left him a couple of voicemails to call me back...but he never did. I think he must have turned off his phone; decided against talking to me again for some reason.
I can't say I was entirely surprised when a police officer showed up at my door in the late afternoon. All he told me was that something had happened with my husband and that I should contact my sister. He said he didn't have any details and he just left. You must understand that I had been through this sort of thing before. I was thinking that B had phoned 911 again or just had a breakdown out there somewhere and behaved oddly enough that someone had gotten involved... I was entirely expecting to have to go down to some hospital emergency room again...and hopefully this time they would at least keep him for long enough to figure him out. My feelings were mixed. I was very upset, but also felt a small stirring of hope. Maybe this would cause something to change for the better.
But then my sister arrived and came into my house...looked me in the eyes and said, "B did it."
This is the part I find so hard to describe. I didn't black out. I didn't even sit down. I just stood there, just inside my front door, and wailed like an animal for about five minutes. It all hit me at once. Incredible pain, unimaginable guilt, sorrow, fear, horror, agony. But something strange happened...something I find it very difficult to put into words.
It was as though I were standing on the edge of a huge, black pit. Call the pit complete despair and insanity. It beckoned. I WANTED it. I wanted to hurl myself into it and lose myself completely and never emerge. It seemed the natural thing to do; the ONLY thing to do. I deserved it in both the positive and negative senses of that word. But something "not me" was holding me back. Another Presence was right there in my mind with me, holding me firmly. I struggled. I didn't want to be held. I wanted to die or go mad; whichever came first. This Presence allowed me to have a very good look into the absolute blackness of that pit, but would simply not allow me to jump in. After a moment or two the force of this Presence actually turned me around and would not then even let me look at this pit again. I tried. I tried to make my mind go where I felt it deserved to go, but I couldn't even find that same place again. He, God, had hidden it from me.
Oh, I wasn't quite ready to admit that God was there. Not yet. That took a couple of hours. Although there is a blurry, unreal quality to my memories of that first evening, I distinctly remember telling my sister, a wonderful Christian, not to talk to me about God because it wouldn't help me since I didn't believe in Him. Nevertheless, He was holding me, gently but firmly, and even this added barb of denial of Him never loosened His grip on me in the slightest.
I think that the Lord was telling my sister not to talk; just to listen. Or else she simply couldn't get a word in edgewise. But she listened, and listened, and listened. She listened all afternoon and nearly all night. She told me later that from her perspective it looked initially as though I were someone who had been run through with a sword...and then all of this poison came gushing out. Hours and hours of poison. I don't remember what I said. I think that probably all of the pain and the hurt, the worry and fear, the guilt and the horror of the last three or four years came pouring out of my mouth in one long, unstoppable stream. My sister said next to nothing. She just listened, and cried with me and cared.
By early morning I had somehow been given an understanding that my husband had committed the sin of taking a life. His own. But the grace that we'd learned together came flooding back in with a new life of it's own. B's sins had been washed away; forgiven two thousand years before he was even born. So, even though B had taken it on himself to make a horrible, desperate, flying leap into God's arms...God had not neglected to catch him. Not only that, He'd caught me too for good measure. It hadn't really mattered that B had worried himself into a frenzy of despair and done the unthinkable, or that I had tried to handle things in my own bitter way and turned my back on God and questioned not only His love but His very existence. Those things didn't cancel out the fact that we simply belonged to Him and nothing could ever change that. It was never actually about us. It was about Him.
January 11, 12, 2006
January 11
I've been going through a difficult time again. Yesterday, even though I got quite a few errands done and business taken care of, my mind kept going over and over the more distressing aspects of the last several years as though I were trying to solve a puzzle or loosen a hopeless tangle.
Although I now know and understand a lot of what went wrong and that it is over and can't be changed, sometimes my mind won't let it rest. While yesterday it felt like my emotions were in overdrive, today they feel blunted and numb. It is all still part of the gradual healing process and I have to be patient with myself even when that isn't my impulse. God is gently helping me over each of the hurdles I am facing each day, to the extent that I am hardly noticing them. But today I didn't try to do too much. My mind just needed rest. I am learning to sense God's presence whether I am emotionally raw or numb...or in that happier stable pattern that sometimes emerges in between.
Tomorrow I have someone coming by to give me an estimate for putting gutters on the roof at the corner where the wall leaked. Well...it's a start. But it is supposed to rain heavily again over this weekend.
January 12
Sharing my "personal testimony" concerning what happened to me immediately following B's suicide is a little risky because it doesn't fit neatly into everyone's theology. But then, God as I have experienced Him doesn't fit neatly into anything and I'm glad of that.
As I mentioned before, I was saved several times over as a child. Actually I'm quite certain I was saved the first time I sincerely asked Him into my heart, but it happened so many times that I can't remember which time came first. I had no concept of being saved "once for all"...of it being an irreversible covenant or contract that God had deliberately made irreversible on His end so that we could rest in the sure knowledge that nothing could ever separate us from His love. His Spirit within us is a deposit guaranteeing our eternal life...in fact it IS our life. But when we don't realize this we tend to ask the Lord for salvation over and over again whenever we have done something particularly sinful (somehow we imagine He'll overlook the little stuff because of what Jesus did but that He still has to draw a line somewhere) or even when we have just drifted away from a certain level of emotion toward God or had our attention and heart captivated by someone or something else for long enough that we have felt distanced from Him. The denomination that I grew up in definitely taught that salvation once owned cannot be lost, but for some reason the point never quite hit home to me until years later when B and I were both listening to the grace teachings of Bob George on the radio.
Sometimes when we've heard something expressed a certain way since before we can even remember, the familiar words can lose their meaning. Someone else can come along and express the same basic ideas in fresh terms and it all comes alive for us again. I believe this is why God likes to use so many different voices from so many very different personalities to tell His story.
If we do grasp that salvation is irreversible another difficulty arises when we are taught, or come up with the idea all on our own, that if we ever come to feel a certain way or get involved in a certain level of sin then it must be because our salvation wasn't valid in the first place. This can lead to a constant anxiety about whether or not we are really saved; whether or not we were sincere enough when we asked Him in; whether or not our faith was strong enough; whether or not we understood right or said the right words. We must have missed something because if we were really saved we couldn't possibly be in this mess!
But as much as our pride might not like it so, a saved person's flesh nature is still capable of anything. The flesh doesn't improve...it just is what it is. There is no good thing in it. The Spirit is our source of new life. This is why the Bible tells us that when we walk in the Spirit we won't be fulfilling the sin desires of the flesh. But just because we are not always walking in the Spirit doesn't mean the Spirit has left us. What "mode" to walk in is a choice that we make continually. We choose to walk in the Spirit in direct proportion to our realization of our new identity in Him and our understanding of and trust in His perfect love and relentless good will toward us. But no amount...NO amount of walking in the flesh can negate our salvation. Naturally it can cause us a real messy heap of other problems to deal with, but it can't take away our security in Christ or make God love us any less or change for one moment His unstoppable determination to ultimately use everything, up to and including our weaknesses and sins, to bring about our highest good.
After about ten years of marriage and a so-so walk together in the Christian faith B and I learned anew about God's grace from Bob George's radio ministry and from a very refreshing local pastor, a Jewish Christian named Jeff Title. These four or five years sandwiched between the stressful years when we learned to cope with and accept our son's autism and the unlivable later years when B's emotional illness escalated were, without doubt, the happiest of our marriage. We had, together, come to a new understanding of the relentless love of God and this created a wonderful bond between us.
Looking back now I see that our newfound understanding of this beautiful truth was perhaps more intellectual than spiritually internalized. Recall that I have told you that B and I were both extremely insecure, shy and introverted in our own ways. While the idea that God loved and accepted us unconditionally and irreversibly in Christ was at once captivating and liberating, somehow as life went on and we continued to "fail" in the ways that we related to the world, other people and each other we became discouraged and disillusioned. Although we accepted the way God loved us in theory, in practice we were still both very much living out the extremely negative self-images we'd acquired from our past hurts and failures, our unusual isolation and the rejections and opinions of the world at large. In our minds we understood how God loved us, but we failed to build up and base our own identities on the Rock of that love. When the rains came, and oh how the rains came, I see that instead of clinging to who we were in Jesus and trusting Him we both attempted, in our own various ways, to handle things, cope with things, fix things ourselves and keep things under our own desperate control.
If one has a history of trying and failing, it is easy enough to imagine that NOT trying, letting go, will bring about an even greater failure. It is like a drowning man in the sea. He knows perfectly well that he can't swim because he's never been able to swim in his life, but that doesn't stop him from trying. Finding himself suddenly in deep water, he thrashes around wildly instead of relaxing and letting the water hold him up. He may even foil a skilled swimmer's attempts to help him because he is too busy fighting the water to trust someone else to take over. When the deluge came and we found ourselves in very deep water, we flailed about madly and quickly began to sink. Then, instead of seeing our failure to save ourselves and our increasing pain as a warning signal to reach out and cling to God, we began to blame.
B's natural tendency was to blame himself and hate himself when things went wrong. I think that much of his obsessive worrying sprang from a deeply ingrained feeling that averting ever-lurking disaster was all his personal, exclusive responsibility; while at the same time he had absolutely no confidence whatsoever in his ability to avert anything. It was as though he believed himself to be his own life raft, knowing full well that this raft was full of holes. This, among other problems in his internal life, led to extreme self-hatred and eventually out-of-control terror and despair.
My own errant response to hurts and disappointment is what led to my bitterness. I blamed everyone and everything else for my pain...all the way up to and including God. When the bottom fell out of my relationship with B, I tried to fix things myself by attempting to become a completely different person. I suppose my instinctive but faulty reasoning told me that if nobody could love the person I really was I would simply force myself into an image they could love. I took this image directly, pre-packaged, from the world and the media. I felt that B wanted this image more than he loved me...so I knocked myself out to the point of exhaustion trying to attain that image, complete with the attitude I felt went along with it. However, as a forty-something woman with a large nose, big feet and a body that could never quite be convinced to bounce back from my previous overweight years...all of this led to great frustration, intense anger and a growing resentment and bitterness.
During that time I lost a great deal of weight, which to the outside observer looked like a healthy, positive thing that was making me happier. But on the inside my impetus and motivations were frustrated rage, intense pain, deep insecurity and a sense of utter betrayal. I understand now that I wanted and NEEDED to be loved and accepted unconditionally and I was both furious and emotionally devastated when all of my fondest illusions about being loved that way in a romantic, human relationship had been ripped away.
As I reaped the shallow rewards of looking better to B and to the world in general, I seethed inwardly and the set-aside, genuine me felt completely betrayed and unloved. But letting go of my "new image" would certainly, to my mind, only lead to feeling even more rejected and unloved, so I began to cling to it more and more obsessively and desperately. Even though it didn't bring me any real peace, it became my everything. Something ugly within me grew and became quite ruthless. During many weaker moments my control would slip and the genuine, needy me would give in and frantically soothe its pain with the deeply entrenched childhood habit of eating to feel better. At these times sheer terror would eventually set in that my image would be destroyed and before long I was slipping farther and farther into the frightening, tug-o-war life of a bulimic.
There was never any lack of communication in our marriage. B knew how I felt and tried to repair the damage He paid my new image a great deal of attention. He was sometimes rather confused when his compliments actually seemed to make me feel worse. I think that his lavish homage to an image that I had purchased at the unacceptable price of the real me further alienated the true self...that crying infant I'd stuffed below decks. B seemed to be saying, "I love this new you... I love you because..." when I needed to hear "I love you forever... I love you regardless... I just love YOU."
But of course he was then struggling with his own worsening problems with paranoia and anxiety and couldn't really seem to comprehend or identify with my pain. Whether he understood it or not, I too had left reality and entered into the realm of a sickness. My obsessive insecurity left me stranded in a no-man's-land where he couldn't reassure me anymore. If he ignored me...I resented it. If he praised me...I resented it. He never really did figure out exactly what it was I wanted and needed. I didn't really understand it myself. It couldn't be gotten from him any more than what he needed at the time could have been gotten from me.
And still we tried. We always tried. To the very end there were parts of each of us that felt deep compassion for the other and wanted only to help. I wanted to relieve his worries and fears and make him feel better just as much as he wanted to make me feel secure again. But our constant failure to fix or help each other only made us both feel more discouraged and angry at ourselves. Over time we began to pull apart and live more and more separate lives because our interactions were so painful. We both turned for comfort more and more to things that deepened the chasm between us.
In the last couple of years of his life, B had a series of breakdowns that revolved around his worries about certain work-related situations and health issues that he had blown completely out of proportion to the extent that it was obvious to everyone but himself that his thinking was paranoid. He had always, since childhood, been a worrier and a micromanager who tended to dream up worst case scenarios about everything and then stew over them. If my insecurity made it difficult for him to live peacefully with me...his constant debilitating worry and relentless negativity and anxiety made it increasingly difficult for me to live with him. Despite my worsening bulimia and my self-image issues I still tended to be someone who could put things on the back-burner and relax for a bit, enjoy a meal or a movie, have a good laugh. Not B. Everyone who knew him had to agree that the man didn't HAVE a back-burner. Lacking the ability to put his fears out of his mind for a time, the only times he could really relax and enjoy anything was when he had nothing at all to worry about...and that happy state became more and more rare as his mind began to create non-existent problems to fill in the gaps. It hurt him...he suffered a great deal. I cried with him many times because as much as he wanted relief he just couldn't stop the worrying and negative thinking and they led him to despair and eventually to suicidal thoughts.
Think of one of your own worst bouts with extreme worry and anxiety over some truly frightening problem. Now imagine that feeling continuing with little or no relief for days, weeks, months. It isn't any wonder that he eventually started to think in terms of escaping his own mind. At times we would have long discussions in which he would try to convince me that suicide could be a reasonable thing for someone to do if they were suffering enough. My answer was always that there had to be a cure, a better solution; that he should hang on and we should look until we found it. But he always forcefully resisted seeking any sort of help or seeing a doctor or therapist about his problems, mainly because his fears had him believing that he would then lose his job. This was always one of his deepest terrors even though his job was actually quite secure and his employers did everything they could to reassure him.
About a year before B's death he seemed to sink into another of his obsessive episodes. It went on for a few weeks and one day at work he dialed 911 and told them that he was suicidal. He was taken to the ER and this brought us into the realm where he was finally forced to seek treatment. Unfortunately, treatment consisted mostly of major drug therapy which did settle out the worst of his extreme agitation and rage behaviors, but wrung him out; stole all of his energy to the point where most of his time not working was spent in a listless stupor or sleeping. Then about the time this effect began to wear off he would feel almost normal for a week or two, creating a short period of false hope before the anxiety inevitably began to creep in again. Whenever the anxiety returned he had a very stubborn tendency to resist seeking any additional help saying that it didn't do any good anyway and that it was obvious no one could really help him. If I waited too long to get him back to the doctor his condition would escalate out of control and he would have frightening episodes of rage or horrible panic attacks that lasted for hours. But when I did somehow coerce him into going back to the doctor and the help obtained didn't last he would then often blame me, saying that I was just prolonging everything and making it all worse. I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place. Whatever I did it seemed to be wrong. I couldn't "get a fix" on him anymore. At times I tried to do what I could to repair what damage there was between us hoping that that would help, but one moment he would seem receptive and the next moment he would be pushing me away and saying that it wasn't about me...that our relationship was only a side issue and that he just "couldn't handle life". His thoughts, opinions and emotions changed so frequently that I never knew who I was dealing with or what the "real B" thought and felt...or if there even existed a "real B" anymore. He felt this confusion himself and his despair grew.
I could tell a million stories about B and I during this last year; of how many times I helped him and how many times I hurt him and made things worse because I couldn't cope with it all either. Our relationship had already had some serious problems. I was dealing with my own sickness, coping with my teen-age son's autism, and now I was helplessly watching my husband slowly lose his mind and there didn't seem to be any stopping it. I still don't know for sure what was wrong with him. He was officially diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder but he had also been diagnosed at one time as possibly Bi-Polar and when I had subsequently read a book about Bi-Polar Disorder he seemed to me, who knew him best, to closely fit the description of someone who had a less common type of Bi-Polar with what was described as "mixed episodes". I do believe that he had a brain chemical imbalance of some sort that got much worse as he got older, but my understanding is limited. I know that wrong attitudes and thinking certainly contributed to his worries and problems, but from what I saw there was also something very much beyond his control taking over and it was extremely frightening to both of us.
Sometimes my own responses were kind and loving and bordered on the heroic; at other times I was selfish, terrified and just wanted to run. While B was considering suicide to escape his reality, we each occasionally brought up divorce as a way to escape the stressful torture chamber our marriage had become. We had come that far. We seemed less and less able to help each other and more and more inclined to feel overwhelmed by and react negatively to each other's pain and to turn away and seek comfort elsewhere.
In those last few years I had isolated myself from most of my friends and family. I didn't want to reveal the strange caving-in of my world to people who seemed to be living normal lives, but I didn't have anything else to talk about with them either. Little anyone said or cared about seemed relevant to me or pertinent to my own waking nightmare. I grew less and less capable of relating to anyone normally. While part of me knew it was I who was withdrawing, another part of me resented the separation, the alienation. Sometimes a diseased part of me even begrudged them their normal, relatively stable lives. I didn't wish them any harm; it just hurt to hear about happiness. I wanted to run, to hide, to escape from what my life had become. I didn't think that anyone would truly understand those feelings, so I generally kept quiet and kept my distance.
If I had been a personality with a suicidal bent of my own, I may well have gone there myself during this period. I won't say that the thought never fleetingly occurred to me. If I hadn't had a helpless, innocent, autistic son to look after I might have simply walked away or disappeared...or tried to. I felt completely trapped in a hellish situation with no viable way out. I continued to ravage my body with starvation diets, bouts of bulimia and on isolated occasions I abused alcohol to escape the emotional pain and loss. A number of times when B and I fell into yet another heartbreaking, no-win argument of some sort I would "flip out" and begin hitting myself in the head and thighs, leaving my legs and hands bruised for days.
For his part, B never hurt our son, myself, or anyone else. Not once. Considering the intensity of the horrible emotions and confusion he was feeling, I recognize this as a tribute to his basic gentleness, his genuine love for us, and to the presence of God beneath his illness. A few times he approached me threateningly; threw, broke or overturned objects and made a horrible mess. He would then proceed to meticulously clean up and fix everything with obvious shame and regret as soon as he'd calmed down.
Many more things happened than I can include in any book. There are some aspects of the story that are either too painful and personal to write about or that are simply not mine alone to tell; but I think I have conveyed a general sense of where each of us lived when the curtain came down and the unthinkable happened.
During those last three years I had bottomed-out spiritually. The sources of my pain seemed relentless and I suppose my expectations of God were that He would take away these sources rather than seeing me through it all in His own way and time. Inasmuch as I isolated myself from almost everyone in my life, I eventually completely turned my back on God. Something inside of me had rather not believe in Him at all than believe that He couldn't or wouldn't stop the craziness and pain. I was never ready to completely rule out the existence of God, but I had, in effect, flung up my hands and admitted that I didn't understand Him anymore and wasn't at all sure He was even there. Or, when I did sense Him there, I guess I saw Him more as Someone who, if acknowledged, would simply want more from me than I had left to give. I was terrified that He would only rip away the coping mechanisms that seemed to be keeping me functioning, leaving me with no comfort at all. Where had my belief in grace gone? Why was I again thinking of God in those terms? I really don't know. With my family I avoided the entire subject as much as possible and with my friends who were not believers I openly labeled myself an agnostic. I'd shut Him out of my life, and for a long while anything to do with God or my previous faith seemed to me only nostalgically painful, vaguely threatening or downright annoying.
And then my husband committed suicide.
I've been going through a difficult time again. Yesterday, even though I got quite a few errands done and business taken care of, my mind kept going over and over the more distressing aspects of the last several years as though I were trying to solve a puzzle or loosen a hopeless tangle.
Although I now know and understand a lot of what went wrong and that it is over and can't be changed, sometimes my mind won't let it rest. While yesterday it felt like my emotions were in overdrive, today they feel blunted and numb. It is all still part of the gradual healing process and I have to be patient with myself even when that isn't my impulse. God is gently helping me over each of the hurdles I am facing each day, to the extent that I am hardly noticing them. But today I didn't try to do too much. My mind just needed rest. I am learning to sense God's presence whether I am emotionally raw or numb...or in that happier stable pattern that sometimes emerges in between.
Tomorrow I have someone coming by to give me an estimate for putting gutters on the roof at the corner where the wall leaked. Well...it's a start. But it is supposed to rain heavily again over this weekend.
January 12
Sharing my "personal testimony" concerning what happened to me immediately following B's suicide is a little risky because it doesn't fit neatly into everyone's theology. But then, God as I have experienced Him doesn't fit neatly into anything and I'm glad of that.
As I mentioned before, I was saved several times over as a child. Actually I'm quite certain I was saved the first time I sincerely asked Him into my heart, but it happened so many times that I can't remember which time came first. I had no concept of being saved "once for all"...of it being an irreversible covenant or contract that God had deliberately made irreversible on His end so that we could rest in the sure knowledge that nothing could ever separate us from His love. His Spirit within us is a deposit guaranteeing our eternal life...in fact it IS our life. But when we don't realize this we tend to ask the Lord for salvation over and over again whenever we have done something particularly sinful (somehow we imagine He'll overlook the little stuff because of what Jesus did but that He still has to draw a line somewhere) or even when we have just drifted away from a certain level of emotion toward God or had our attention and heart captivated by someone or something else for long enough that we have felt distanced from Him. The denomination that I grew up in definitely taught that salvation once owned cannot be lost, but for some reason the point never quite hit home to me until years later when B and I were both listening to the grace teachings of Bob George on the radio.
Sometimes when we've heard something expressed a certain way since before we can even remember, the familiar words can lose their meaning. Someone else can come along and express the same basic ideas in fresh terms and it all comes alive for us again. I believe this is why God likes to use so many different voices from so many very different personalities to tell His story.
If we do grasp that salvation is irreversible another difficulty arises when we are taught, or come up with the idea all on our own, that if we ever come to feel a certain way or get involved in a certain level of sin then it must be because our salvation wasn't valid in the first place. This can lead to a constant anxiety about whether or not we are really saved; whether or not we were sincere enough when we asked Him in; whether or not our faith was strong enough; whether or not we understood right or said the right words. We must have missed something because if we were really saved we couldn't possibly be in this mess!
But as much as our pride might not like it so, a saved person's flesh nature is still capable of anything. The flesh doesn't improve...it just is what it is. There is no good thing in it. The Spirit is our source of new life. This is why the Bible tells us that when we walk in the Spirit we won't be fulfilling the sin desires of the flesh. But just because we are not always walking in the Spirit doesn't mean the Spirit has left us. What "mode" to walk in is a choice that we make continually. We choose to walk in the Spirit in direct proportion to our realization of our new identity in Him and our understanding of and trust in His perfect love and relentless good will toward us. But no amount...NO amount of walking in the flesh can negate our salvation. Naturally it can cause us a real messy heap of other problems to deal with, but it can't take away our security in Christ or make God love us any less or change for one moment His unstoppable determination to ultimately use everything, up to and including our weaknesses and sins, to bring about our highest good.
After about ten years of marriage and a so-so walk together in the Christian faith B and I learned anew about God's grace from Bob George's radio ministry and from a very refreshing local pastor, a Jewish Christian named Jeff Title. These four or five years sandwiched between the stressful years when we learned to cope with and accept our son's autism and the unlivable later years when B's emotional illness escalated were, without doubt, the happiest of our marriage. We had, together, come to a new understanding of the relentless love of God and this created a wonderful bond between us.
Looking back now I see that our newfound understanding of this beautiful truth was perhaps more intellectual than spiritually internalized. Recall that I have told you that B and I were both extremely insecure, shy and introverted in our own ways. While the idea that God loved and accepted us unconditionally and irreversibly in Christ was at once captivating and liberating, somehow as life went on and we continued to "fail" in the ways that we related to the world, other people and each other we became discouraged and disillusioned. Although we accepted the way God loved us in theory, in practice we were still both very much living out the extremely negative self-images we'd acquired from our past hurts and failures, our unusual isolation and the rejections and opinions of the world at large. In our minds we understood how God loved us, but we failed to build up and base our own identities on the Rock of that love. When the rains came, and oh how the rains came, I see that instead of clinging to who we were in Jesus and trusting Him we both attempted, in our own various ways, to handle things, cope with things, fix things ourselves and keep things under our own desperate control.
If one has a history of trying and failing, it is easy enough to imagine that NOT trying, letting go, will bring about an even greater failure. It is like a drowning man in the sea. He knows perfectly well that he can't swim because he's never been able to swim in his life, but that doesn't stop him from trying. Finding himself suddenly in deep water, he thrashes around wildly instead of relaxing and letting the water hold him up. He may even foil a skilled swimmer's attempts to help him because he is too busy fighting the water to trust someone else to take over. When the deluge came and we found ourselves in very deep water, we flailed about madly and quickly began to sink. Then, instead of seeing our failure to save ourselves and our increasing pain as a warning signal to reach out and cling to God, we began to blame.
B's natural tendency was to blame himself and hate himself when things went wrong. I think that much of his obsessive worrying sprang from a deeply ingrained feeling that averting ever-lurking disaster was all his personal, exclusive responsibility; while at the same time he had absolutely no confidence whatsoever in his ability to avert anything. It was as though he believed himself to be his own life raft, knowing full well that this raft was full of holes. This, among other problems in his internal life, led to extreme self-hatred and eventually out-of-control terror and despair.
My own errant response to hurts and disappointment is what led to my bitterness. I blamed everyone and everything else for my pain...all the way up to and including God. When the bottom fell out of my relationship with B, I tried to fix things myself by attempting to become a completely different person. I suppose my instinctive but faulty reasoning told me that if nobody could love the person I really was I would simply force myself into an image they could love. I took this image directly, pre-packaged, from the world and the media. I felt that B wanted this image more than he loved me...so I knocked myself out to the point of exhaustion trying to attain that image, complete with the attitude I felt went along with it. However, as a forty-something woman with a large nose, big feet and a body that could never quite be convinced to bounce back from my previous overweight years...all of this led to great frustration, intense anger and a growing resentment and bitterness.
During that time I lost a great deal of weight, which to the outside observer looked like a healthy, positive thing that was making me happier. But on the inside my impetus and motivations were frustrated rage, intense pain, deep insecurity and a sense of utter betrayal. I understand now that I wanted and NEEDED to be loved and accepted unconditionally and I was both furious and emotionally devastated when all of my fondest illusions about being loved that way in a romantic, human relationship had been ripped away.
As I reaped the shallow rewards of looking better to B and to the world in general, I seethed inwardly and the set-aside, genuine me felt completely betrayed and unloved. But letting go of my "new image" would certainly, to my mind, only lead to feeling even more rejected and unloved, so I began to cling to it more and more obsessively and desperately. Even though it didn't bring me any real peace, it became my everything. Something ugly within me grew and became quite ruthless. During many weaker moments my control would slip and the genuine, needy me would give in and frantically soothe its pain with the deeply entrenched childhood habit of eating to feel better. At these times sheer terror would eventually set in that my image would be destroyed and before long I was slipping farther and farther into the frightening, tug-o-war life of a bulimic.
There was never any lack of communication in our marriage. B knew how I felt and tried to repair the damage He paid my new image a great deal of attention. He was sometimes rather confused when his compliments actually seemed to make me feel worse. I think that his lavish homage to an image that I had purchased at the unacceptable price of the real me further alienated the true self...that crying infant I'd stuffed below decks. B seemed to be saying, "I love this new you... I love you because..." when I needed to hear "I love you forever... I love you regardless... I just love YOU."
But of course he was then struggling with his own worsening problems with paranoia and anxiety and couldn't really seem to comprehend or identify with my pain. Whether he understood it or not, I too had left reality and entered into the realm of a sickness. My obsessive insecurity left me stranded in a no-man's-land where he couldn't reassure me anymore. If he ignored me...I resented it. If he praised me...I resented it. He never really did figure out exactly what it was I wanted and needed. I didn't really understand it myself. It couldn't be gotten from him any more than what he needed at the time could have been gotten from me.
And still we tried. We always tried. To the very end there were parts of each of us that felt deep compassion for the other and wanted only to help. I wanted to relieve his worries and fears and make him feel better just as much as he wanted to make me feel secure again. But our constant failure to fix or help each other only made us both feel more discouraged and angry at ourselves. Over time we began to pull apart and live more and more separate lives because our interactions were so painful. We both turned for comfort more and more to things that deepened the chasm between us.
In the last couple of years of his life, B had a series of breakdowns that revolved around his worries about certain work-related situations and health issues that he had blown completely out of proportion to the extent that it was obvious to everyone but himself that his thinking was paranoid. He had always, since childhood, been a worrier and a micromanager who tended to dream up worst case scenarios about everything and then stew over them. If my insecurity made it difficult for him to live peacefully with me...his constant debilitating worry and relentless negativity and anxiety made it increasingly difficult for me to live with him. Despite my worsening bulimia and my self-image issues I still tended to be someone who could put things on the back-burner and relax for a bit, enjoy a meal or a movie, have a good laugh. Not B. Everyone who knew him had to agree that the man didn't HAVE a back-burner. Lacking the ability to put his fears out of his mind for a time, the only times he could really relax and enjoy anything was when he had nothing at all to worry about...and that happy state became more and more rare as his mind began to create non-existent problems to fill in the gaps. It hurt him...he suffered a great deal. I cried with him many times because as much as he wanted relief he just couldn't stop the worrying and negative thinking and they led him to despair and eventually to suicidal thoughts.
Think of one of your own worst bouts with extreme worry and anxiety over some truly frightening problem. Now imagine that feeling continuing with little or no relief for days, weeks, months. It isn't any wonder that he eventually started to think in terms of escaping his own mind. At times we would have long discussions in which he would try to convince me that suicide could be a reasonable thing for someone to do if they were suffering enough. My answer was always that there had to be a cure, a better solution; that he should hang on and we should look until we found it. But he always forcefully resisted seeking any sort of help or seeing a doctor or therapist about his problems, mainly because his fears had him believing that he would then lose his job. This was always one of his deepest terrors even though his job was actually quite secure and his employers did everything they could to reassure him.
About a year before B's death he seemed to sink into another of his obsessive episodes. It went on for a few weeks and one day at work he dialed 911 and told them that he was suicidal. He was taken to the ER and this brought us into the realm where he was finally forced to seek treatment. Unfortunately, treatment consisted mostly of major drug therapy which did settle out the worst of his extreme agitation and rage behaviors, but wrung him out; stole all of his energy to the point where most of his time not working was spent in a listless stupor or sleeping. Then about the time this effect began to wear off he would feel almost normal for a week or two, creating a short period of false hope before the anxiety inevitably began to creep in again. Whenever the anxiety returned he had a very stubborn tendency to resist seeking any additional help saying that it didn't do any good anyway and that it was obvious no one could really help him. If I waited too long to get him back to the doctor his condition would escalate out of control and he would have frightening episodes of rage or horrible panic attacks that lasted for hours. But when I did somehow coerce him into going back to the doctor and the help obtained didn't last he would then often blame me, saying that I was just prolonging everything and making it all worse. I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place. Whatever I did it seemed to be wrong. I couldn't "get a fix" on him anymore. At times I tried to do what I could to repair what damage there was between us hoping that that would help, but one moment he would seem receptive and the next moment he would be pushing me away and saying that it wasn't about me...that our relationship was only a side issue and that he just "couldn't handle life". His thoughts, opinions and emotions changed so frequently that I never knew who I was dealing with or what the "real B" thought and felt...or if there even existed a "real B" anymore. He felt this confusion himself and his despair grew.
I could tell a million stories about B and I during this last year; of how many times I helped him and how many times I hurt him and made things worse because I couldn't cope with it all either. Our relationship had already had some serious problems. I was dealing with my own sickness, coping with my teen-age son's autism, and now I was helplessly watching my husband slowly lose his mind and there didn't seem to be any stopping it. I still don't know for sure what was wrong with him. He was officially diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder but he had also been diagnosed at one time as possibly Bi-Polar and when I had subsequently read a book about Bi-Polar Disorder he seemed to me, who knew him best, to closely fit the description of someone who had a less common type of Bi-Polar with what was described as "mixed episodes". I do believe that he had a brain chemical imbalance of some sort that got much worse as he got older, but my understanding is limited. I know that wrong attitudes and thinking certainly contributed to his worries and problems, but from what I saw there was also something very much beyond his control taking over and it was extremely frightening to both of us.
Sometimes my own responses were kind and loving and bordered on the heroic; at other times I was selfish, terrified and just wanted to run. While B was considering suicide to escape his reality, we each occasionally brought up divorce as a way to escape the stressful torture chamber our marriage had become. We had come that far. We seemed less and less able to help each other and more and more inclined to feel overwhelmed by and react negatively to each other's pain and to turn away and seek comfort elsewhere.
In those last few years I had isolated myself from most of my friends and family. I didn't want to reveal the strange caving-in of my world to people who seemed to be living normal lives, but I didn't have anything else to talk about with them either. Little anyone said or cared about seemed relevant to me or pertinent to my own waking nightmare. I grew less and less capable of relating to anyone normally. While part of me knew it was I who was withdrawing, another part of me resented the separation, the alienation. Sometimes a diseased part of me even begrudged them their normal, relatively stable lives. I didn't wish them any harm; it just hurt to hear about happiness. I wanted to run, to hide, to escape from what my life had become. I didn't think that anyone would truly understand those feelings, so I generally kept quiet and kept my distance.
If I had been a personality with a suicidal bent of my own, I may well have gone there myself during this period. I won't say that the thought never fleetingly occurred to me. If I hadn't had a helpless, innocent, autistic son to look after I might have simply walked away or disappeared...or tried to. I felt completely trapped in a hellish situation with no viable way out. I continued to ravage my body with starvation diets, bouts of bulimia and on isolated occasions I abused alcohol to escape the emotional pain and loss. A number of times when B and I fell into yet another heartbreaking, no-win argument of some sort I would "flip out" and begin hitting myself in the head and thighs, leaving my legs and hands bruised for days.
For his part, B never hurt our son, myself, or anyone else. Not once. Considering the intensity of the horrible emotions and confusion he was feeling, I recognize this as a tribute to his basic gentleness, his genuine love for us, and to the presence of God beneath his illness. A few times he approached me threateningly; threw, broke or overturned objects and made a horrible mess. He would then proceed to meticulously clean up and fix everything with obvious shame and regret as soon as he'd calmed down.
Many more things happened than I can include in any book. There are some aspects of the story that are either too painful and personal to write about or that are simply not mine alone to tell; but I think I have conveyed a general sense of where each of us lived when the curtain came down and the unthinkable happened.
During those last three years I had bottomed-out spiritually. The sources of my pain seemed relentless and I suppose my expectations of God were that He would take away these sources rather than seeing me through it all in His own way and time. Inasmuch as I isolated myself from almost everyone in my life, I eventually completely turned my back on God. Something inside of me had rather not believe in Him at all than believe that He couldn't or wouldn't stop the craziness and pain. I was never ready to completely rule out the existence of God, but I had, in effect, flung up my hands and admitted that I didn't understand Him anymore and wasn't at all sure He was even there. Or, when I did sense Him there, I guess I saw Him more as Someone who, if acknowledged, would simply want more from me than I had left to give. I was terrified that He would only rip away the coping mechanisms that seemed to be keeping me functioning, leaving me with no comfort at all. Where had my belief in grace gone? Why was I again thinking of God in those terms? I really don't know. With my family I avoided the entire subject as much as possible and with my friends who were not believers I openly labeled myself an agnostic. I'd shut Him out of my life, and for a long while anything to do with God or my previous faith seemed to me only nostalgically painful, vaguely threatening or downright annoying.
And then my husband committed suicide.
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