Chapter Seventeen. Family Difficulties

Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good

I stuck to what I believed, which left me feeling that I was stuck in a totally unreasonable amount of pain. I could find no good way out of the trial and no good outlet for my overwhelming feelings.

Forced to Face My Fears

As I had learned about wisdom throughout the 1990s, I tried to use it to make the emotional part of the smoking fetish disappear. This wasn’t because I was in great danger of falling into smoking fetish-based actions; my actions had been under control for more than ten years. It was more because it seemed wrong to allow myself to feel something so bizarre, even if I never acted on my feelings.

Yet in spite of my best efforts, the feelings remained, and this was not what I expected a Christian to experience – so I did my best to change it. I put in place restrictions for my eyes and actions that I hoped would gradually transform my emotions. Unfortunately, my well-meaning guidelines only buried my emotions beneath the surface, where they festered and became resentful. I felt as if I was hiding my “true self,” and continuing to do so became increasingly awkward and unworkable.

I could tell my approach wasn’t working, but I felt I had no other good choice. To attempt anything less than to banish the fetish from my inner being might hurt my wife and children. So I did my best to ignore the pain and drive it from my heart. When its images and emotions showed up, I became angry and refused to allow them. When that stopped working (not that it really ever did work), I chastised myself for my weakness. I became increasingly harsh with myself as I tried to force the fetish from my life.

Though my heart was losing ground, my approach seemed to work for everyone else. God blessed my family, my job, and just about every other part of my life. I deeply appreciated the peace and prosperity He was bringing, and I was willing to suffer for that to continue. Unfortunately, the painful mental and emotional gymnastics I embraced eventually created a sense of mistreatment and growing sexual temptation that turned my emotions into a frightening inner monster.

I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I fought hard to love everyone, and especially my family (who I knew could have been terribly hurt if the fetish rose to the surface). I didn’t want them to have to deal with the fact that their husband-and-father was angry about life and strange sexually. I hoped to protect them from whatever had gone wrong in me, and I was willing to watch myself slowly disintegrate if that was what it took to avoid placing this burden on them. As long as they were doing well, I felt it was my responsibility to continue to hide my gradual decline for their sakes.

I didn’t realize that the devil was setting a trap for me. That trap sprung in 1998 when my family began having trouble. I won’t describe that struggle in any sort of detail. It is enough to say that my teenage children were typical of many teenagers. Each faced their own temptations, which they sometimes handled well and sometimes didn’t. My goal isn’t to focus on them, it is to focus on how those struggles affected me. All of those years I had spent squashing anything <page 102>within myself that looked like irresponsible rebellion had left me ill-equipped to deal with the typical processes by which teenagers find their way in the world.

No Longer Able to Hide

I did my best to not treat my children in the way I treated myself. With myself, I wasn’t afraid to use my internal Parent to do whatever seemed necessary to keep my emotions in forced submission. I squashed them and drove them underground. With my children, that was off-limits (or at least I tried to keep it off-limits). I didn’t want to inflict it on them, and I was fairly certain it wouldn’t have worked. It would have driven them away.

Still, as my children had their ups and downs, all of the fear and resentment that had built up within me clawed its way the surface, and I had to squash it with greater and greater force to keep it from lashing out at the people I loved most. I felt as if I was being asked to give what I had rarely received, love and understanding about what I truly felt rather than what I thought God and others wanted me to feel. I resented that everyone was glad to benefit from my hard work, but no one wanted the real me – the person I had to live with every day. I was too much of a freak …too much to deal with. I confused myself; there seemed to be no answers for my incessant issues; yet I was now being asked to be understanding with the very sorts of struggles few had understood in me.

I hadn’t brought my problems into the open for years. I just didn’t have the sorts of difficulties that Christians tended to discuss – and just being honest about them might hurt my family. So I didn’t feel I could let people see the kinds of distress signals that were flaring in my heart. Bringing my problems into the open would have caused strained relationships, so I had hidden them for everyone’s sake.

Now I felt alone and abandoned. That left me with little foundation for helping my children – who were stirring within me the very sorts of fears, frustrations, and temptations that I had worked so hard to avoid.

This situation wasn’t like what had happened when I was on my job or in church. In those situations, I didn’t feel nearly as responsible for people. I cared about my children more than I cared about myself. I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive if they made irreversible mistakes.

My job and church also couldn’t really threaten one of the main places of safety in my life – the peace and godly atmosphere of my family. Yet my children could. The strain over what was at stake was shaking me to the foundations of my being, and it was too much for me. I began to show signs that I was headed toward an emotional breakdown.

Another Chance

I didn’t know why I was falling apart. A situation that millions of parents handled regularly was shattering my world. I expected that after following Jesus for so long I would be more stable. The devil told me it was because I was beyond help, “You never get it right. Even God’s goodness isn’t enough to save you from your pitiful perversity and weakness.”

But God meant it for good. He didn’t want me to hide from the Unprotected Heart Stronghold; He wanted to bring it into the light. I was once again facing one of the major issues at the root of the smoking fetish. My current family was reminding me of the family I grew up in. When my <page 103>parents had chosen sin over truth in my childhood, my emotional world had fallen apart. Now my children were acting, at times, like my parents. Where I had fallen into confusion with my parents and their world, God was now giving me a chance to stand with my children and their world. I would have to choose Him and His truth above my desire to fall to some easily available emotional crutch that might seem to protect me.

The fears I had faced at church had partially prepared me for this. My willingness to risk my relationships with my spiritual family had set the stage for me to do the same with my natural family. Still, my experiences at church were only a small warm-up for what I was now facing. I knew that if church got bad enough, I could find a new church, but I couldn’t do that with my family.

My friends at church also gave me many reasons to believe that everything would work out in the end. When we disagreed, I could see them wrestling with God and responding to Him. They would take my words and look into the Scriptures to see if what I was saying was true. That gave me some confidence that God would get us through our difficulties.

My children didn’t always give me the same confidence. In fact, they sometimes led me straight to my fears, and this all but overwhelmed me. I had seen what sin could do to a person, and I was deeply concerned for their sakes. My own pain screamed at me all day long that the wages of sin was death (Romans 6:23). I desperately wanted to keep them from that. Unfortunately, I had little idea what to do, and my inner reactions were only making the situation worse.

My instinct when dealing with this sort of situation was to run and hide. I had a long history of retreating to a safe place and not confronting people, but I couldn’t abandon my children in this way. I had to stay with them and do my best to point them in the right direction, even if it made me feel as if I was being abandoned by God. It continually exposed me to a situation which made me feel as if I wasn’t finding the strength He had promised. The answers I needed were eluding me, and the situation had only grown worse over the years.

My childhood trauma was forcefully repeating itself. A disagreement in my family was causing my emotions to snowball out of control, and it shook me terribly.

Hanging on to Truth

I knew I could find short term relief by returning to the false god of permissive-love.^[52] He would have allowed me to support my children in whatever decisions they made, which was what my flesh wanted to do. My instinct was to say, “I love you, and I am glad you are becoming your own person. I stand with you as you explore your desires and find out for yourself what life is about. Just try not to get hurt too badly.”

The Bible told me to speak truth, and that forced me to grapple with issues like consequences, heaven, and hell. I had little choice but to disagree, and I can barely describe how much I hated that. It flushed my Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow into the open, which made me want to either find relief in some addictive activity or grab control and try to force my children to do what I thought they should. The only way I knew to avoid these two extremes was to use my mind and will to force myself to walk the middle road of loving confrontation.

I felt so inadequate for that. The best I seemed able to do was to stay committed while hanging on for dear life.

<page 104>There didn’t seem to be any other good alternative, however. I couldn’t turn against God by forsaking His truth, even if holding to it all but overwhelmed me. So I determined to stay in a situation in which I didn’t have good answers, because to do differently would have forced me to deny everything I held dear. I had always moved forward by relying on Jesus rather than my own understanding. Though I was concerned that attempting to do that this time might push me over the edge of sanity, I chose to believe that He would get me through.

Losing Control

Eventually, my Unprotected Heart Stronghold went into overdrive. Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow rose in waves, and my mind raced through possibilities; I looked for something to say, something to do, something to change what was happening. I wondered how God could expect a parent to believe the Bible when it meant believing that a child might end up in hell. And how could I continue in my feeble attempts to share His love when I felt my efforts fell so far short? I wanted to end the struggle in whatever way I could, but the Word of God stood firm:

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

(Luke 14:26)

I stuck to what I believed, which left me feeling that I was stuck in a totally unreasonable amount of pain. I could find no good way out of the trial and no good outlet for my overwhelming feelings. My inner state at that time is represented by Figure 18.

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<page 105>The highlighted portions of the figure show that though I continued to use Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow as motivation for Obedient Behavior and Attitudes, I couldn’t use them to address my main concern: my anxiety over my children. These emotions were building up inside of me. The fact that I also expressed them in self-induced emotional abuse toward myself didn’t help (symbolized by the arrows to the Sinful Behavior and Attitudes box). I had no workable answer for them. They were increasing in pressure …intensifying …crying to be let out, and I found myself wondering how much longer I could keep them in.

A New Form of Brokenness

I was learning through hard experience that simply trying to have the right attitude and perform the right actions wasn’t enough. Doing this helped, but it wouldn’t always get the job done. There were always going to be circumstances that couldn’t be improved, and I needed to be able to handle them.

Also, with my current approach, even when they did improve, they still tended to damage my heart in ways that lingered long after the trial was over. Years’ worth of experience had taught me that the sort of pain I was now feeling would become an ongoing part of me. It wouldn’t disappear when this trial ended. I still carried the wounds from a thousand past battles that I had largely won.

The cumulative effect of those wounds now left me dragging myself through my days, trying to find some way to feel “normal” again. I didn’t know how much longer I could last, and there was no resolution in sight. I needed some way to reverse the damage, but what was it?

As I contemplated what I should do, I considered my past. I remembered the time in my life I described in Chapter Eight of this book, “The Hedge of Thorns,” when my sexual emotions had overwhelmed me. I had allowed myself to fall to smoking and privately acting out because it seemed unrealistic to live in any other way.^[53]

Amazingly, that decision had led to the greatest sexual healing God had done in me up to that point. In five months, I made more progress with the sexual part of my nature than I had made in the previous eight years. It was the one time when I was sure that God had reversed emotional damage.

I now use the term Brokenness to describe what had happened (illustrated by Figure 12 on page 58). I admitted that I was out of control and was acting against my better judgment. I saw myself as if I were a machine that was Broken and unable to function properly. So I permitted myself to sin and looked for God to show me how He wanted to fix me. …And He did!

That sort of Brokenness wasn’t an option after marriage. I couldn’t start openly sinning (especially sexually) and wait for God to fix me; I knew what this would do to my family, so it was off limits.

That left me struggling to find ways to work around my disabilities. The upside of suppressing them was that this seemed to help everyone around me. The downside was that it also seemed to lock my emotions into a downward spiral of delinquency. Rather than being healed, they were pushed below the surface where they festered and became resentful.

It was now becoming obvious that this couldn’t continue. I needed a new form of Brokenness, one that I could practice after marriage. I had to somehow release my tight hold on my inner life <page 106>and allow myself to once again feel my dysfunction. I was terrified that doing so would lead me back into the fetish – or that my suppressed anger would rise and explode against others. I also feared that simply allowing myself to feel what was inside of me was a form of indulging in sinful imaginations, that it was an act of rebellion that would sabotage my relationship with God.

I didn’t know the answers to these concerns, but I knew I couldn’t keep going much longer as I was. Although I didn’t want to risk hurting anyone, I was already hurting the people I loved most. It seemed best to see if I could lose control with God’s help rather than to hold out until I lost control through a breakdown.

I sensed the Holy Spirit saying that it was already past the time to give this a try.^[54] The situation with my family gave me a good reason to take the gamble that I was hearing correctly. My heart was prepared to see what would happen if I once again embraced Brokenness.

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