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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 53>
Chapter Eight. The Hedge of Thorns
My heart became like a train that ran downhill – and a frighteningly large number of the tracks led to the fetish.
Misled Fear and Guilt
When I first found myself struggling against demonic attacks, my emotional state changed to what is shown in Figure 10.
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The highlighted box and arrows show the change in my experience from the time I described using Figure 9 on page 44. Previously the Pleasure of the smoking fetish had been enough to distract me from my Fear and Guilt. Now these emotions were amplified by a menacing sense of supernatural darkness. Spiritual forces had made their way into my consciousness, and this gave me a Perception of Danger I had never before experienced. Life took on some of the characteristics of a horror movie as an unseen world inflicted anxiety and condemnation on me in ways that defied reason.
Years earlier, the seeds of abandonment had been planted in my heart. Now those seeds took root and grew. I had trusted my Heavenly Father to take care of me, and it looked like He hadn’t. I now found myself in a dark world that seemed to defy His love. And when it came to human help, the mixture of the smoking fetish and the schizophrenic-like oppression all but guaranteed that few people were going to be able to relate to my trials. I seemed to be largely alone in a battle against forces beyond my comprehension.
I turned to the coping mechanism that had helped me with Fear and Guilt in the past, the smoking fetish (the arrow from the Fear and/or Guilt box to the Sinful Behavior and Attitudes box), but it was no longer enough to handle my distress. Though it numbed the pain, it did nothing to drive the demons away. So I returned to it with more desperation in order to briefly find relief …and this increased my Fear and Guilt …which amplified my need for relief …which <page 54>drove me back to the fetish with greater intensity. I was sliding into a full-blown downward spiral of addiction.
Misled Anger and Sorrow
As I sensed myself slipping, my heart fought back. I sought God in Bible study, worship, prayer, obedience, and fellowship, but my problems remained. This Frustrated me, and I became Angry. I was mad at the devil for attacking me and at God for not delivering me.
The fetish had helped me to escape Anger in the past, so my subconscious mind moved me in its direction again – but giving in no longer got the job done. I descended into Long Term Suffering which pushed me toward Sorrow and depression. …And how had I handled Sorrow and depression in the past? With the fetish …so I was drawn into it all the more. All of this is symbolized by the highlighted boxes and arrows in Figure 11.
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I was clearly disobeying God, but I didn’t feel as if I was purposefully rebelling. I confessed my sins as if I was, because I knew that this was what I was supposed to do, but I felt as if I had no other choice but to turn to the fetish. When I looked at my heart, it just seemed to be where the deepest parts of my being compelled me to go.
Each failure left me feeling more confused, which reinforced my Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow. My internal Parent found it harder and harder to manage these emotions, which gave me yet another reason to turn to the fetish for relief. The downward spiral of addiction was gaining momentum.
Thorns
<page 55> I was experiencing what the book of Proverbs calls a “hedge of thorns.” I had reached a place where wisdom and obedience felt like dragging myself through a briar patch. This was similar to what Proverbs says happens to a lazy person:
The way of the sluggard is as a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway.
The hedge of thorns can be illustrated using the Emotion Commotion Chart. The sluggard doesn’t have the discipline to focus his Fun Emotions and Desires on work, so they gnaw at him, pulling him toward Sinful Behaviors and Attitudes.
The desire of the lazy man kills him, for his hands refuse to labor.
The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing…
The lazy man desires, but he hasn’t learned how to turn that desire into practical effort, so it spins out of control within him. He spends his emotional energy on wild daydreams or pleasurable activities that never bring true fulfillment. He wastes so much of his inner resources that he becomes confused and exhausted, which leaves him without the strength for healthy living.
Figuratively (and sometimes literally) his desire kills him. The very Fun Emotions and Desires God has provided to inspire him to labor end up robbing him of the ability to do so. While a healthy person’s hunger keeps him working, the lazy person’s hunger only brings suffering.
A worker's appetite works for him, for his hunger urges him on.
(Proverbs 16:26, NAS)
…an idle person will suffer hunger.
Down the Emotion Commotion Chart
The hedge of thorns in the lazy man didn’t exist at birth. It expanded slowly as his personality was restructured by his experiences and choices. Gradually it deceived him until it all but locked him into its lifestyle. In time, labor felt impossibly difficult and rest pulled him under like quicksand. It was as if he had been sedated with a tranquilizing spell.
Laziness casts one into a deep sleep…
When it comes to Self-Control, laziness produces unclear thinking. Without good Knowledge, the sluggard can’t make sense of his own condition or the world around him. He falls into the flaw of being too ignorant to recognize his own ignorance, and he thinks of himself as a genius. His heart fails to see his need for change.
<page 56>The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can give a discreet answer.
The sluggard’s ignorance also leads to Fear and Guilt. Irrational terrors grab his heart, and he doesn’t have the wisdom to quiet them. This paralyzes him, and he ends up sinfully hiding from remote dangers instead of taking wise risks.
The sluggard says, "There is a lion in the road! A lion is in the open square!"
The lazy man’s downfall can also be seen in the remaining boxes of the Emotion Commotion Chart. Hard work takes steadiness in the face of Frustration; he quickly becomes exasperated and gives up in Anger. Hard work also involves Long Term Suffering. When this leads to Sorrow, he becomes overwhelmed and retreats to a more cheerful life.
Ultimately, his choices are not based in reality, so they result in poverty and weakness …which leads to more Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow …which inspires the sluggard to retreat again into more laziness. The cycle of addiction pulls him under.
All of this is in contrast to what happens to the diligent. In their case, the appetites that turn the sluggard’s way into a hedge of thorns create a highway (Proverbs 15:19). Their personality forms around habits that lead to wise labor. Desire becomes a tree of life.
…when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.
…the soul of the diligent shall be made rich.
More Thorns
What is true of laziness is true of other sins as well. For example, violence can be addictive:
Evil people are restless unless they're making trouble; they can't get a good night's sleep unless they've made life miserable for somebody. Perversity is their food and drink, violence their drug of choice. (emphasis added)
(Proverbs 4:16-17, The Message)
If violence can be someone’s drug of choice, just about anything can be. The psychological forces that spring up in the presence of unresolved Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow can be incredibly compelling. They push us into activities that we would never accept in their absence. They create a crisis for our internal Parent, and if it can’t nurture us through the struggle, we are likely to turn to sin for relief. Once sin opens a significant breach in our protection, we find ourselves spinning out of control into some sort of addiction.
Eventually we can reach a point where just about everything we feel leads to temptation. My experience is an example. A good deal of my Fun Emotions and Desires led me toward the <page 57>fetish (my approach to delight, security, excitement, relief, the sense that life was working right …). With Self-Control, the fetish entertained me during the boredom of discipline and supercharged my expectations of the rewards of hard work. It also helped me move past Fear and Guilt by offering the false security of a hormone charged world. With Anger, it made me too happy to care. With Sorrow, it cheered me like an antidepressant drug.
One might expect that my fetish was a way of escaping from everyday life into a sexual fantasy. This wasn’t the case, at least not in the beginning. Instead, it was a way of bringing the power and wonder of sexuality into everyday life. It felt as if it was helping me to fulfill my responsibilities in the world.
This is similar to the way in which nicotine functions in a person’s life. It isn’t a drug that is used to escape from family, job, stress …. Instead, it soothes a person while they do what is required of them; it makes the difficult tasks of life easier. In the same way, the fetish helped me with college, friends, stress …. I was a better student and a more confident person when I indulged in it.
Unfortunately, the fetish was at the same time reshaping the foundational pathways of my personality. Over time, my feelings just showed up in “smoking fetish form” (a form that drew me into the fetish). The fetish became so intertwined with my God-given desires and thought processes that it seemed impossible to separate the one from the other. With the exception of my few safe areas (worship, sports, and creative expression), hardly an idea appeared in my mind that didn’t lead me into something related to my growing compulsion. My heart became like a train that ran downhill, and a frighteningly large number of the tracks led to the fetish.
I was learning through hard experience that the sorts of problems I had were difficult to overcome. They had become tied to so many different parts of my personality that they just seemed to be who I was. They fed into my work, my hopes, my security, my daydreams, my view of human nature ….
The hardest part of resisting wasn’t the pain of self-denial; it was the sense of futility that came from trying to give up the person I seemed to be. I could turn from what felt normal for me day after day for months, only to wake up the next day feeling like I had months earlier. It was hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that I should just accept my “orientation,” at least for the time being, and get on with life.
I didn’t realize how thoroughly my sins and misconceptions were becoming woven into my inner being until God later delivered me. It sometimes felt as if my heart was being ripped out (or perhaps I should say, “torn out of a hedge of thorns”). The thoughts and feelings that made life work for me were being denied and rearranged. They reasserted themselves from a mystifying number of angles, sometimes all but taking over my perception of life, and I had to decide whether I was going to endure the pain of turning from them. Practical obedience felt as if I was entering a new world for which I was unfit, and I had no reassurance other than the word and Spirit of God that what I was doing was even possible. I had to choose to believe that He was bringing me into His goodness and follow Him as best I knew how.
Brokenness
In my teens and early twenties, I couldn’t seem to find that sort of wisdom. I tended to interpret my experience with simple concepts: “Perhaps I am just living out of my own strength rather than <page 58>God’s. It could be that I am too confused to find Him, or maybe He doesn’t want to be found at this time. Either way, what hope is there for me until He does something?”
I wondered if perhaps it would be best to temporarily give in to the fetish until He made it go away. If nothing else, doing that would feel sort of like love. It would be unconditional acceptance rather than trying to force myself to act in a way that was beyond me. Though it wasn’t the direction that made sense, I wondered if it was the only one that was realistic for me at that time.
I fought against that conclusion for the first eight years of my Christian life. Slowly, I lost the fight. It was such an effort that I found schoolwork difficult. The conflict between what I believed and how I felt strained my inner resources. The train within me was fixated on one final destination, and I was bewildered as I tried to hold it back. Finally, I became too exhausted to continue.
When I was twenty-one, almost eight years after I had become a Christian, I started to smoke and let myself privately act out without restriction.[23] I felt as if I had no other good choice. The battle was too draining. It was affecting my ability to survive in the real world and was making me neurotic
I had entered a new level of the Emotion Commotion Chart. I was now recognizing that I was so broken that I didn’t know how to find God’s grace for obedience. Whether He was offering it and I was missing Him or He was holding back didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t receiving what I needed. My problems were beyond my current level of spiritual maturity. The highlighted portion of Figure 12 represents this change.
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Rather than fighting to avoid the losses that would come to me if I gave in to limited sins, I chose to Grieve those losses (the arrow from the Sorrow box to the Brokenness <page 59>box). I now accepted that I didn’t know how to obey and that this would cost me something. I was Broken and couldn’t fix myself.
I still had hope that God would fix me. That’s why the picture above still contains the arrows from Fun Emotions and Desires and Self-Control to Obedient Behavior and Attitudes. I continued to faithfully pursue Jesus in most of the ways a follower of His should. I worshiped; I read the Bible (sometimes while I was smoking); I went to church; I sought His will; I tried to serve others. But with regard to the smoking fetish, my heart was admitting temporary defeat, and I reorganized my life to handle this concession.
I am not sure exactly what to say about this decision on my part. On the one hand, Brokenness is a good quality. It is important to be honest and humble about our weaknesses, and I was doing that. My sins motivated me to seek God for His answers; I confessed them to my church leaders and some of my friends and reached out for love and support. This is why there is an arrow from the Brokenness box to the Obedient Behavior and Attitudes box.
On the other hand, I was using Brokenness as an excuse to indulge my flesh, which is why there is an arrow from the Brokenness box to the Sinful Behaviors and Attitudes box. My heart was making a significant step toward an unbridled expression of an addictive fetish that was likely to kill me. I was becoming more fully entangled in my hedge of thorns.
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