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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
Into the Hedge of Thorns
Introduction
For most of my life I had wondered what had gone wrong with me; for the first time, I felt I knew.
Butterfly Effect
Scientists sometimes speak of the “Butterfly Effect.” It is a metaphor for the fact that seemingly insignificant events can determine the weather. The movement of a butterfly’s wings in China may set in motion wind currents that result in a storm in the United States many days later.
Over time, the term “Butterfly Effect” has been expanded to refer to any set of seemingly random occurrences that determine the course of our lives. A word spoken here, an unexpected happening there … pretty soon we find ourselves on a path we never expected. For example, a seemingly chance encounter with a caring teacher or coach may uncover gifts and abilities that form the foundation of a future career. A bit of encouragement or an insightful observation can determine the direction of a young person’s life. On the negative side, a tragic event in childhood may derail a child’s promising hope.
Some ancient peoples believed in fate. They saw the Butterfly Effect in action and pictured a semi-divine force (fate or the fates) behind it. People could fight fate, but they couldn’t win. In spite of their best efforts, good and evil were beyond their control. The end of the matter was determined by an uncaring power that brought fortune, poverty, joy, or despair.
Many Christians have believed in predestination (and I am one of them). The word ‘predestination’ is made up of two parts: ‘pre’ meaning beforehand and ‘destination’ referring to where we are going in life – our destiny. Predestination means that our destiny is decided beforehand by God.
In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will
Predestination sounds, at first, like fate, but it is different. God predestines, but He doesn’t directly control the will of men, angels, or demons. Instead, He works through their choices as He carries out His plan for history. He weaves the consequences of their actions together in a way that demonstrates His mercy and judgment. He doesn’t cause evil, but He allows it for a greater good.
(I have barely begun this book, and already I am getting in trouble for using the p-word: ‘predestination.’ I have several times heard people object that if we believe in predestination, we make a mockery of human choice and responsibility. If you find yourself uncomfortable with what I have said and will say throughout this book, you might want to jump to Appendix A. I have devoted a couple of chapters there to explaining predestination.)
Unprotected
What I wrote above is an intellectual description of predestination. The emotional description feels quite different. When evil happens to us, it often appears to be random and pointless. It seems as if God either doesn’t care or isn’t in control. We can’t imagine how His love and power could allow the painful drama we endure. It seems that if He were truly who He claims to be, He would quickly bring happiness and protect us from victimization.
Though I have intellectually believed in predestination for much of my life, my gut has fought against my faith. There was too much pain. Reality seemed too dangerous for trite talk about trusting a Heavenly Father who was in charge of the universe. It seemed safer to conclude that the only way to find security was to take control and make my own destiny.
A few events in my childhood were like the metaphorical butterfly that flapped its wings and set in motion a major storm. My parents made some poor choices, I reacted badly, and one mistake led to another. Before long, my heart contained enough buried pain and misguided emotion to plague me for decades. Then my inner angst warped into a sexual problem called a smoking fetish (in which I was sexually fascinated with smoking). This strange “orientation” threatened to drag me down into perversion and destroy my life.
NOTE: While the other books of this series only touched on the subject of my smoking fetish, this book will look at it in detail. I know that this will make some readers uncomfortable, but I am at the point in my story where God freed me by explaining the details of this problem. I will try to not be overly graphic, but I need to focus more attention on the specifics than you might like. If you believe this will make you too uncomfortable, I am warning you ahead of time so you can decide if you want to keep reading.
I didn’t understand what had happened. I wasn’t trying to be fanciful and create my own unique eroticism. The fetish just seemed to come with puberty. It felt normal for me …and it was fun – so much fun that it buried the pain that had led to it. My hurts faded away as an incredible sensation transformed my turmoil in a sea of pleasure.
While I was in that state, God came to me with His truth and living reality. He birthed faith in my heart through the good news about Jesus Christ, and He began to teach me from His word. It was then that I realized I had a problem. The Bible said that God had created sex for marriage, yet something within me had deviated from that design.
I, of course, asked God to fix me – and I expected the process to take all of a few seconds, but it didn’t happen like that. In fact, my attempts to change seemed to drive the fetish deeper into my heart. It was as if fate had decided my destiny, and there was nothing I could do but to come along for the ride. The Butterfly Effect had whipped up a storm, and now I seemed to have no choice but to let its winds carry me wherever they willed.
But I didn’t believe in fate or the rule of Butterfly Effect; I believed that God was in control. Still, I wondered why He wasn’t answering my prayers. Why had He allowed (predestined?) that I should have this problem in the first place, and why didn’t He quickly make it go away? I sought Him day after day for years but struggled to find answers. I asked others for help, but they knew as little as I did.
That made it hard to trust God. In one fatal area of my life, He seemed to have abandoned me. Though I read about His care in the Bible, and though His Spirit confirmed it to my heart, the everyday evidence before me seemed to say something entirely different. How could He claim to love me while He left me suspended between His wonderful promises and the feeling that I was a sexual freak? My inner conflict was obviously too much for me. Why did He leave me in it without explaining what was happening?
Still, where else could I go? He was God. Even if I chose to run from Him, could I get away? It seemed best to stick with Him and try to work out my issues. At least doing that kept me from living like a hopeless pervert. I was able to build a relationship with Him, and I comforted myself with the thought that He was working even my mess for good. He had a purpose behind it; I just had to follow Him and wait to see what that purpose was.
Joseph
The Holy Spirit was with me. I found myself imitating the example of Joseph from Genesis 37-50. Joseph had more than enough reason to feel that God had abandoned him. He was sold into slavery by his brothers. He was then falsely accused and thrown into prison. For thirteen years he experienced enough mistreatment to convince any of us to live as a victim for the rest of our lives.
Instead, he chose to make the most out of what he had been given. He didn’t understand it, but he looked for God to intervene at each step of his journey. …And God did intervene – maybe not in the way Joseph expected – but He made Himself known.
…the LORD was with Joseph and showed him mercy …
In these few words, we see the answer for all of our pain and trauma. If we consistently find God and His mercy, everything else will fall into place. He will give us the hope, wisdom, and perseverance we need to survive and overcome our obstacles. Our circumstances might not change (Joseph’s didn’t at first), but we will find the way to a better life.
The problem we have is that we often doubt God’s character. When He doesn’t show up in the way we want, we assume He is failing us. We can’t understand how He could expect us to face slavery, prison, perversity, or any other overwhelming problem, so we turn to our own plan.
This is the crucible in which our future will be decided. Will we look to God to provide the faith and strength we need, or will we rely on ourselves?
The sad truth is that our own resources can only give us the limited future we can create for ourselves – and that is if all goes well. In reality, we often make a royal mess of our lives. Our trauma transforms into either rage or escapism that hurts those around us, which leads them to turn and hurt us, which traumatizes us all the more. We fall into more and more bad “solutions” and live at a level far below what God offers.
He has designed us to find the sorts of blessings that Joseph found. Joseph was able to leave behind the bitterness of his past and share God’s goodness with many people. He found himself able to accomplish more than he ever could have on his own. God’s destination for him was spectacular.
We may not experience anything quite as spectacular in the eyes of men, but it will be no less spectacular when looked at through the eyes of truth. If we follow God, we will express heaven’s mercy on earth and bring supernatural grace to those around us. Our trauma will be replaced by a beauty that will influence others for many generations to come.
This brings me to the message of Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good. It is that our disappointments can be God’s appointments. He wants to meet us in the middle of our difficulties and to teach us how to respond as Joseph did. He wants to give us abilities that go beyond human strength. His goodness will so eclipse the wrongs we have committed or that have been committed against us that we will be able to show mercy and truth even to those who have hurt us.
…I am Joseph your brother whom you sold into Egypt. But don't feel badly, don't blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives. …you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good …
(Genesis 45:4-5; 50:20, The Message)
Divine Coincidence
For thirty-three years, I didn’t understand the Butterfly Effect that had led to my sexual problem. It just seemed to be a mysterious virus that had somehow infected my emotional DNA. I had few clues as to where it had come from or how to get rid of it.
Fortunately, I gave my life to Jesus as a teenager, which infused me with His spiritual DNA. He gave me the wisdom and strength to counteract many effects of the smoking fetish, and I was able to limit the damage. Though I longed for a cure, I was grateful that His work at least allowed me to live a fairly normal life.
In 2002, when I was forty-five years old, Jesus began a Butterfly Effect of a different kind. It started when I heard someone describe how a daughter had been affected by her mother’s smoking. As a young girl, the daughter had emotionally removed herself from her mother out of the fear that her mother’s smoking would lead to cancer. The daughter didn’t want to become close to a parent who might die.
When she was a late teenager, the daughter’s fears came true. Not only did her mother die from cancer, but her slow degeneration from the disease was extremely difficult for the entire family. The traumatized daughter then met an older woman who led her into a lesbian relationship, taking advantage of the daughter’s grief and becoming a substitute mother. The relationship lasted for several years until the daughter realized that this wasn’t the life for her. She left and married a man.
When I heard this story, I sensed the Holy Spirit speaking to me. He drew my attention to the fact that a parent’s smoking could be extremely traumatic for a child. In fact, it could lead to long term psychological damage. I had toyed with this idea before, but I had never figured out how it applied to me. Though I suspected my fetish had something to do with my mother’s smoking, I didn’t know how. Lots of people had parents who smoked; why had it affected me so strongly?
Also, my initial reaction to smoking had been to dislike it. It smelled and contributed to my respiratory problems. I had complained about this to my mother and tried to convince her to quit. How could my mini-crusade against smoking have led to a fetish in which I loved it? It would have required a boomerang reaction in my heart that didn’t make sense to me.
Eroticization
At the time I heard the story of the daughter affected by her mother’s smoking, I was reading a book called Love is a Choice.[8] It mentioned one possibility that seemed like it might explain my strange fixation. The fetish might be my attempt to recreate my childhood world so that I could fix it. My mother had smoked, and I had been unsuccessful in getting her to quit. Perhaps I was attracted to women who smoked because I had a secret desire to do for them what I had failed do for her.
I concluded that this wasn’t the case. If I had established a sexual relationship with a woman who smoked, the last thing I would try to do would be to convince her to stop. The fetish was all about hoping she would continue. Whatever my unusual motivations were, they clearly weren’t caused by a desire to make up for a missed opportunity to help someone.
I considered another possibility: perhaps I was trying to imitate my father. One time when my mother had quit for a few days, He convinced her to start again because she was irritable. Maybe I wanted to be like him.
This made some sense, but it didn’t really match my feelings. Though there were many areas of my life in which I imitated my father, his treatment of his family wasn’t one of them. He had been an absent workaholic, and I had focused my attention on my wife and children. When it came to his actions concerning my mother’s smoking, they had offended me. It was one of the areas in which I least wanted to be like him.
As I prayed and considered more, a new thought hit me, one that had never before occurred to me. Perhaps I had turned smoking into a fetish in order to deal with emotional trauma I felt over my mother’s smoking. I had been like the daughter in the story I had just heard. My reaction to the thought of my mother dying from cancer had thrown me into a state in which I was vulnerable. Somehow the difficulty of this had led my young heart to subconsciously create the fetish in order to shield itself from the fear and anger I felt. The fetish transformed the deadly habit that threatened me into something that seemed so wonderful I no longer cared about its negative effects. I was able to forget my objections, accept it as a part of my family, and move on with life.
Up until this point, I had not heard the term ‘eroticization,’ where a person makes someone or something sexually desirable. It normally occurs toward the opposite sex during adolescence. In homosexuals it becomes directed toward the same sex. In my case, it was directed toward smoking. My heart had hijacked the eroticization process and focused it on the point of conflict between my parents and me. It was attempting to end a painful situation in my family by turning the thing I hated most into something I craved.
It would be several months before I would run into research that supported my conclusion. Even before I found it, however, I sensed that I had indeed found the “dark magic” behind my fetish. For most of my life I had wondered what had gone wrong with me; for the first time, I felt I knew.
The Emotion Commotion Chart
In the years following that first insight into the starting point of my sexual abnormality, my understanding grew in ways that amazed me. By the time I began serious work on Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good, I found myself with a detailed understanding of both the battle that had led up to the fetish and the fallout from it. My life was transformed as God gave me insight into what had gone wrong and how He was fixing it.
I decided to rewrite my existing draft of Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good. In the new version, I would retell my entire story from the beginning, using the understanding I had just gained. It would be a book that focuses on the emotional side of our journey with God. I believed He was showing me valuable truths that would benefit many people. Although the details of their experience wouldn’t exactly match mine, the general principles would be the same.
In order to describe those principles, I will use the following chart. Please don’t be concerned about the large number of boxes and arrows. I believe God has given me the ability to explain them, and I will devote a large part of this book to doing so. The complexity will be broken into small pieces and illustrated slowly with examples. I trust that if you work with me, you will find the Emotion Commotion Chart to be both intuitive and extremely helpful.
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Prayers
This last book of the Exchanged Glory Series will be more specific to my personal problems than the earlier ones. I will go into much greater detail about my background and personality. I don’t do this to imply that you must be like me. That would be impossible. You are unique! Instead, I am using my life to illustrate the love of God which reaches out to each one of us in our uniqueness. If you will respond to Him, He will meet you as you are and reshape you according to His designs for you. He loves and cares for you as an individual, and I trust He will speak exactly what you personally need to hear.
I pray that the He will teach you how to apply His truth and give you clarity about your life. May He bring healing as He maps out what is going on in your heart and gives you His answers. I also pray He will give you the perseverance, wisdom, and power to walk with Him through the often-difficult process of change. May He hold you and speak to you tenderly. May He show you insights beyond what I have written as He miraculously reveals to you His heart and His plan.
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Bill Cadden
2012
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