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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
The family fairytale was officially over. Life was a street-fight, and I was losing the fight.
The previous chapter ended with me hoping that I could shield my children from problems. It was a hope that didn’t work out. There is no need to give the details of what went wrong, other than to say that it wasn’t all that bad. Many parents would be happy if their children had the sorts of “problems” mine had.
Nevertheless, I had no perspective to make sense of my children’s actions. My few years as a non-Christian had left me with a lifetime of pain. Though my outward acts of disobedience had been small in comparison to those of many others, I suffered from unending emotional withdrawal, as if I had sought out wild addictive pleasure throughout my youth.
The long struggle had made me increasingly fearful, and I had handled this by becoming increasingly determined. I banished from my mind the possibility of ever again gambling at sin’s table. Though R-rated movies, non-Christian music, and worldly situations weren’t theologically forbidden to me, I stayed away from them anyway. I had been hurt badly enough already.
My pain and resentment were a continual reminder that something horrible had happened to me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it had something to do with sin. I kept my distance from situations that could lead to trouble in the hope that I could keep the pain from spreading further. With the panic of a blind man fleeing unseen muggers, I stumbled away from the forces that might hurt me and my family.
All of this left me without the tools I needed to relate to a teenager exploring the world’s rebellion against God.
I had run from the devil, but he hadn’t run from me. As I struggled with my children, he seemed to be speaking to me:
“I’m going to destroy the one thing you really care about on this planet, your family. You are going to flounder and thrash helplessly as I lead your children into my grip. You have tried to protect them, but you blew it. You can’t even handle your own problems; how do you expect to handle theirs? I will turn them against you, your wife, and everything you love. Look at how God already doesn’t answer your prayers for them.
Now I’m going to push you, play on your weaknesses, and increase your inner anguish until you shatter into a thousand pieces. You will become a bitter, broken, dysfunctional mental case with nothing to show for your life. Face it; you are already most of the way there. Look at the feelings that torment you – and that’s after following Jesus with all your heart for most of your life.
You always get it wrong; it won’t take much to complete your failure. You will be an embarrassment to God’s people and a laughingstock before the world.”
I of course didn’t accept Satan’s lies, but I had to admit that they made a lot of sense. He was gaining ground, and I didn’t seem to be able to stop him. I was neurotic about sin, and though my emotional problems were still caged by self-control, the cage was weakening. I had kept myself from losing my grip, in part, by closing the door to worldly influences. Now, in spite of my best efforts, the door had swung wide open. I didn’t know how much more I could handle. It wasn’t hard to picture myself snapping under the pressure.
As always, the devil wasn’t playing fair. Life was a street-fight; I never knew when he was going to sneak up and hit me over the head with a brick. I had survived that for years, but he wasn’t sneaking around anymore. He was in my face declaring an all-out war.
I hadn’t grown up in a Christian family, so I didn’t understand the strain that truth can bring into family relationships. It makes a young person’s choices important, and this increases the stress on the parents. I sometimes felt it would have been much easier for me to raise my children under the false god of permissive-love.[24] I could have said, “It’s your life; do what you want and try not to hurt yourself too badly. I’m here to encourage you as you find your own way.”
Believing in God, sin, death, and hell raised the stakes. Because I loved my children, I had to oppose their unwise choices, and I hated doing that. My natural inclination was to support them unconditionally. It was hard enough to oppose my own foolishness; trying to figure out what to do with an immature teenager was beyond me.
I felt more threatened than at any other time in my life. When I was younger, I knew that as long as I followed Jesus, nothing could really harm me. If God was for me, who could be against me (Romans 8:31)? If I obeyed Him, who could interfere with His plan for my good? Even if someone made me a martyr, my reward was safe in heaven.
With my children, I felt exposed like never before. I loved them more than I loved myself, and I knew how badly I would be hurt if they fell prey to sin’s devastation. I was vulnerable to their decisions. It was tough on me during the times when they chose to slowly give themselves over to the forces that I had fought to escape for most of my life.
For years I had distracted myself from my own pain by focusing on God’s blessings in my family. Now I felt those blessings were evaporating. To make matters worse, I knew that my ineffectiveness as a father was contributing to their demise. I fought to keep the monster within me from bursting into the open. I knew the damage I could inflict on others if I lashed out.
I didn’t understand the emotions that fueled my rage. Thirty years earlier, a series of events had altered the course of my life. As a child, I had tried to care for my family by telling my mother that smoking might give her cancer. After initially dismissing my advice, she responded as my youthful optimism had expected; she quit. Then my father stepped in and told her that she was cranky without cigarettes. He convinced her to start again – and in that moment shattered my world.
He showed me that he was willing to sentence my mother to an early death for the sake of his convenience. My mother showed that she didn’t care enough about me to remove an unnecessary threat from our family.
My sense of betrayal and confusion led to several difficult years of inner turmoil. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it and felt abandoned as I tried to come to grips with my emotions. I became so distraught that I began to cut myself with razor blades, and in time my angst spilled over into the smoking fetish, which still haunted me decades later.
My emotional world had fallen apart over the issue of my parents’ foolish choices and had never really been put back together. For thirty years, that wound had remained hidden, even from me. Now it was being stirred into the open. I was once again trying to care for my family, and sin was once again showing its face. It stirred within me a deep dread that my pieced-together emotional world would once again fall apart as someone close to me gambled with darkness.
It wasn’t long before a conflict arose and broke through my defenses. It touched the wound that none of us knew existed, and I lost control of my mouth for three seconds. I spoke twelve unpremeditated but extremely hurtful words, using the sort of language I usually reserved for myself.
This led to over a year’s worth of family trouble. I apologized that night and the next day, but it was too late. My feelings of regret made me have thoughts of suicide for a day or two. I wondered how much damage I had done.
In Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents, I said that we sometimes face days of adversity when the supports that have protected us are removed. During these times we need to find new ways to rely on God.[25] My belief that God was using me to help my family had supported me for years. Now this protection was removed. A new day of adversity had come.
The family fairytale was officially over. Life was a street-fight, and I was losing the fight.
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