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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 82>…I was, in some ways, still living like an addict. It was just that I was now using a combination of the Holy Spirit and creativity as my drug of choice rather than sex.
After giving up the fetish, my life remained a “Potiphar’s-house-like” experience for the next seven years. I left college and began to prosper in almost everything I did. God blessed my family, job, and ministry, and people praised me for my zeal and transparency. It was a time to celebrate my newfound victory over sexual sins, and I was glad for the chance to start a new life. Though much of the emotional baggage that drove the fetish remained, my heart wasn’t forced to deal with it. I was too distracted by a tremendous time of affirmation from both the Holy Spirit and others.
I became more active in sharing my creative gifts. I spent hours honing my musical skills and looking for ways to share the songs I had written. At one point, I bought a four-track recording studio and arranged and recorded some of them. When I listen to those songs today, I am almost embarrassed by the out-of-control creativity. Each song had a unique arrangement unlike any of the others. Three of them contained long sections of scripture put to music. Others were grouped together to make a multi-song allegory.[35] There were clever rhyming schemes, unusual chord patterns, and many tempo changes.
I broke a large number of musical rules, but I didn’t care. I felt a tremendous desire, really a compulsion, to express my heart. I sensed that if I didn’t channel my feelings into something productive, they would spill out into something evil. Music was the easiest way for me to maintain my emotional balance.
I also began teaching the Bible regularly, and my preaching style was equally unorthodox. I sometimes wore torn jeans as I spoke in church. My appearance was made more unusual by the fact that the microphone stand in our church was too short for me, so I propped it up on a box and stood with my legs spread apart in order to reduce my height enough to speak into it. God blessed my words with His presence as I poured out my heart with Bible verses, stories, and jokes. Many people told me how He touched them through my sharing.
I loved doing this. It felt so right. I had growing desire to minister full time, which seemed like a real possibility for me. Our church didn’t require those in full time ministry to have attended seminary. A person just needed to be called by the Lord, tested, and faithful. I suspected that God was leading me in that direction, and I dedicated myself to being the person He was birthing inside of me.
<page 83>Underneath, my Anger and Sorrow were still festering, but I didn’t know it. I thought that now that my actions were under control, my inner struggles would quickly fade. It didn’t occur to me that my remaining emotional problems had previously been medicated by the fetish, and now they were now being medicated by blessings.
I was in a temporary reprieve from their pain. The blessings would eventually fade, and I would be forced to deal with the remaining parts of the mess within my soul. Like Joseph, I was going to face a second trial of my faith:
Joseph was a strikingly handsome man. As time went on, his master's wife became infatuated with Joseph and one day said, "Sleep with me." He wouldn't do it. …She pestered him day after day after day, but he stood his ground. He refused to go to bed with her. On one of these days he came to the house to do his work and none of the household servants happened to be there. She grabbed him by his cloak, saying, "Sleep with me!" He left his coat in her hand and ran out of the house. …She said, "The Hebrew slave, the one you brought to us, came after me and tried to use me for his plaything. When I yelled and screamed, he left his coat with me and ran outside." When his master heard his wife's story, …he was furious. Joseph's master took him and threw him into the jail where the king's prisoners were locked up.
(Genesis 39:6-8; 10-12; 17-20, The Message)
I am sure that being thrown into jail for a crime he didn’t commit felt like a disaster to Joseph, but the simple truth was that God had something bigger for him than Potiphar’s house. In order to prepare him for his destiny, Joseph had to learn lessons that he was never going to learn in a place of relative prosperity. He was shielded from the ugliness of human nature by the efficiency of the operation. He wasn’t forced to come to grips with the disease in human hearts. In order to get him ready to lead all of Egypt, God sent him to a perfect classroom to study weakness and dysfunction, a prison.
Previously in Potiphar’s house, Joseph worked with some of the best people in Egypt; in prison, he worked with some of the worst. The criminals weren’t waiting for someone to show them a little kindness so they could reform. The only good they saw in kindness was the chance to take advantage of it. Their character had been shaped by choices and incidents that occurred years before they met Joseph. They had been prisoners to their own hearts long before they were placed in iron chains.
My “Potiphar’s-house-like” experience was shielding me from the truth about people. There were lessons about human nature I was never going to confront while everything was going my way. It wasn’t that I didn’t try to learn them. I did, but the difficulties involved in working with others felt so unspiritual that I didn’t know what to make of them. My Anger and Sorrow rose to the surface, and that felt more like the devil’s work than God’s.
I didn’t run from others, however. My heart knew the pain I felt when someone was upset with me, so I tried to be loving and patient with everyone, keeping a pleasant and positive outlook. Unfortunately, I did this by internally running from what I was feeling. When my Anger was <page 84>stirred by conflicts, I backed away from it and forced myself to be kind and non-judgmental. When Sorrow rose, I grabbed my guitar and strummed up positive feelings to mask the pain.
I wanted to be a great example of what living for Jesus was all about, so I ignored and bypassed my uglier emotions in order to treat others with the pleasantness with which I wanted them to treat me. Though I sensed that I was damaging myself in the process, I wasn’t sure what else to do. I couldn’t just express my displeasure by treating them in ways that I knew were unloving.
People seemed to appreciate my approach. I wasn’t pointing out their faults or complaining about my lot in life. I was trying to give everyone the freedom to be themselves while I showed them God’s love. Obviously, there were many good parts to what I was doing, and I continue to practice much of it today. People do usually respond better to love and joy than to confrontation, and there is little good in nagging them. In my case, however, my actions were tainted by the fact that I could barely confront anyone about anything. The inner stress that rose in me when I let myself truly see the sins of others, or even just their weaknesses, caused my Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow to misfire.
So I avoided negative subjects, pretending that everything was alright even if it wasn’t. My dysfunctional internal Parent had robbed me of the ability to handle conflicts well, so I avoided them.
I had no idea what was about to happen. God had lessons to teach me that could never be learned in my “Potiphar’s-house-like” experience of joyful self-expression. Like Joseph, I needed to be confronted with the fact that it is hard to love people. They fight change even when they know it is good for them. Some cry out for truth and then fail to see it when it comes; others don’t even bother to cry out. Many complain about their lot in life and then turn against you when you offer help that requires something of them.
Writing nice songs and preaching moving sermons wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to learn how to show them that Jesus could deal with their messes and bring them from where they were to where He wanted them to be.
Unlike Joseph, however, I wasn’t thrown into a “prison-like” experience all at once. Instead, God slowly changed my circumstances. I began to sense the shift as I worked with those who delighted me the most, my family. After my first child was born, I told God that raising children couldn’t possibly be as difficult as it felt for me. If it was, the human race would never have survived. After my second child was born, it seemed as if I had entered a twilight zone of impossibilities. There was so little time and money that I was forced to drop most of what I did with music, and the rest of my life became a matter of juggling responsibilities. If I wanted to devote myself to some worthwhile project, I could only do so by taking away from some other worthwhile project.
I was frustrated, my wife was exhausted, and the whole setup seemed to be broken. My emotions were churning for creative outlet, but I was slowly losing the opportunities to express myself. …But what could I do? I loved my kids and wasn’t willing to take time or money from them just to make me feel better. I set my heart to plow ahead with what was necessary, devoting my creativity to my family and trusting God to help me adjust.
<page 85> I didn’t know that He was removing the crutches that held my emotional life together. Music, time, and money were the first to go, and their loss weakened me, but the fatal blow was yet to come.
While I was in college, I had come up with an idea for writing a specific software tool, and the hope of being able to work on that project became something of a “dream job” for me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of anyone in the world who was working on that tool, so I took a job in another area. Then I found out about a small group in my company that had teamed up with a professor from a university to write the exact tool I was considering! I quickly joined them and dove into the research. After about a year, I was made the team leader. It all seemed perfect! God was bringing everything together to allow me to express my heart on my job in the same way I did in ministry.
Unfortunately, leading the team was harder than I expected. Some of my fellow employees disagreed with my approach, and they challenged me incessantly. This so stirred my Frustration and Anger that I often decided it was easier to do the work myself rather than try to convince them. I began to spend long hours on the project.
We still had meetings, however, and they made me increasingly miserable. At one point I remember being so upset in my office before a meeting that I feared I would lose control. I could see myself throwing papers and making a scene, which wasn’t exactly the sort of godly example I wanted to present. So I got down on my face in my office and prayed for twenty minutes. By the time I got to the meeting, my spirit was soothed, and I handled their objections without problems.
Although it was wonderful that God met me, the fact that I had to go to such extreme measures to avoid a major outburst showed my weakness. I was emotionally dependent on creativity, and my job had become a major part of that. When my coworkers stood in the way, I tended to react with a temper tantrum.
As a Christian, I did my best to be loving and gracious, and I was willing to spend twenty minutes medicating my anger with God’s presence if that was what it took. But I was, in some ways, still living like an addict. It is just that I was now using a combination of the Holy Spirit and creativity as my drug of choice rather than sex.
My unsaved coworkers were generally able to act civilly just by using a little maturity and self-control. I didn’t understand how they could do that; I didn’t have the necessary emotional stability. Instead, I relied on a coping mechanism of drumming up enough spiritual and creative feelings to make me feel OK.
My job was pushing me to the limits of that approach. My internal Parent was barely able to manage the inner storm that was building inside me.
In 1986, a large project at our company ran into trouble, and my “dream job” was moved to another location in order to transfer as many workers as possible to the large project. Though I had the opportunity to move to the new location, my wife and I chose not to go. We felt the Lord <page 86>wanted us to stay near our extended family and church, so I passed my work to others and accepted a new assignment on the large project.
Making that choice was easy; living with it was much harder. During one of the first meetings for the large project, a spokesman tried to encourage us about our reassignment. When he gave time for questions, I asked if management realized that we felt like we were being moved to a sort of “programming slave plantation.” He laughed and said they did.
My comment was meant to be funny, but it also showed the sarcastic resentment growing in my heart. I couldn’t seem to handle the fury that was building over what I had lost and what I now had to live with. I hated the new job, and after a few weeks I fell into a state of rage. I was no longer able to find enough spiritual or creative feelings to keep my Anger and Sorrow under control, and I fought daily to keep myself from doing something stupid. The fruits of the Holy Spirit that I expected to be in my life (love, joy, peace …) had somehow gone missing, and I wasn’t sure why.[36]
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