Weeping may last for the night,
But a shout of joy comes in the morning...
You have turned for me my mourning into dancing
You have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with gladness,
That my soul may sing praise to You and not be silent.
-PSALM 30: 5, 11-12
I didn’t want to write this post but four conversations in the last two weeks led me here. The details aren’t important, as far as I can see, but if He tells me to write them, then I will write them. I really think very little of our story in the realm of stories out there because in some sense it’s every rescued person’s story: Jesus saves. And we all need saving.
This isn’t to say I think little of our story altogether. Personally, it’s very special to me because it’s ours; because it’s one of the strongest ways Jesus taught ME that He alone saves and that I needed rescue from myself as much as my circumstances. It was a miserable trial, and long enough that I wouldn’t soon forget it because He knows how quickly my heart is led astray and how firm I needed the lesson.
And so without further ado, here it is... our story:
Once upon a time three years ago I was married to an emotionally unhealthy workaholic alcoholic. (Labels are silly but sometimes helpful when you have a lot to say and don’t want to waste words.) I was nursing a two week old, my fifth child, the night God let down His hand on the timer measuring this trial and it was finished, just like that. He reached into the dark pit, grabbed us by the shirt collars, and said “enough.”
(Only this viewpoint was something I could only see in hindsight.)
There was wrestling that followed. A lot of Holy wrestling; thorns and tests... grieving... healing... then: victory and fruit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself in the telling...
Salt enhances sugar and sorrow enhances joy. While this trial is in no way our identity, to understand the weight of His glory in our today, I must first describe honestly our yesterday; the first decade of our marriage.
We were babies when we married, just barely 20 years old. Our first five years of marriage involved the repercussions of my parent’s new divorce, 5 moves, several jobs, two babies, one diagnosed with Vesicourteteral Reflux that would lead to surgery, and the loss of Shaun’s best friend from our church in Jacksonville in a car accident.
Over the second 5 years something slowly began to happen. Shaun became more and more immersed in his work and less and less engaged at home. We had experienced a couple of “binge” episodes in our first five years but they were few and far between. In the second five, though there was still only a time or two of visible binging, He moved seamlessly from Adderall to cigars, from cigars to cigarettes, and from cigarettes to drinking.
He always had a deadline, a looming project, ridiculous hours, constant work drama that needed tending. He was increasingly unreliable, irritable, passive aggressive and generally resentful.
Those were the visible symptoms. What I couldn’t see was how his theology had slowly become unglued and unhinged. He would tell you that the gray areas of life became a place of justification and rationalization. These “gray” areas were initially induced by intellect-worshipping PhD professors during his college years who sought to conform Christ to the World and not the World to Christ; a malleable theology that made for a malleable lifestyle.
Shaun’s own intellect took this thinking and ran with it; working against him and making him a double-minded man, having been taught by once-respected individuals that it was okay to only agree with Your Creator where your finite intellect was satisfied, and perfectly acceptable to spend the majority of your day dancing in the gray.
Naturally, this is what happens when we worship a god of our own making, not the uncontainable, incomprehensible God who is; when we become the Potter instead of the clay and inflict moral relativism on a God who will have none of it.
By year nine, things were at an all-time low. I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it. Maybe a day in the life? But who wants to read that?
See, most days we survived without drama. We both agreed our kids rocked, we both knew how to make each other laugh all along the way, we both thought the other had a “good” heart “underneath it all” and we both wanted to stay married. I knew Shaun’s transparency was gone, but not all was gone, so most days were okay.
But not most weeks.
And because I never knew which night of the week would deliver the inevitable, I turned into a fragile shell of the person I am today and had once been. Paranoia set in. Insecurity would be a gross understatement.
Every night at dusk my body refused to cooperate with my mind. My peace would set with the sun. Soon, the racing heart and shallow breathing would take over.
One foot in front of the other, one dinner plate served after the other, one head washed after the other... and Oh God, please don’t let it be tonight.
Why doesn’t he like being home? Why aren’t we enough? What part of me is so unbearable to live with? Even if I deserve it, the children don’t... Lord, please fix this mess.
And if it did turn out to be a night when the dog never barked and the alarm on the door never beeped and my texts and calls were never answered, things got ugly for me. I would’ve felt less alone were I actually alone in my parenting.
Those nights began with stalking for information; stalking Twitter, stalking Facebook, calling up restaurants, checking the bank. Never good news, always more hurt... yet helpless to stop till he stopped.
There was the coping. The calling his parents, the sitting by the toilet in case I vomited, the fetal position on the shower floor. I might as well have been Jonah crying out from the whale’s belly, I felt so helpless to save our family. Any night he was going to do something he could never take back... if he hadn’t already.
Basically, his alcoholism showed me my weakness, my frailty, my own limitations and sinful, totally uncool responses. I needed to see what was in me as much as he did. Our marriage needed me fixed as much as him.
Alcoholism ran in the distant (not immediate) family but I was too stupid to realize this was the problem. I didn’t realize all the forms of alcoholism there were, and that they didn’t always manifest as drunk-off-your-butt or daily drinking. Drunkenness didn’t seem an issue. In an entire decade, the nights of actual drunkenness I could only count on one hand, but there was an absence so severe words could not have described it.
I inserted my own baggage of an unfaithful parent into the blanks in the equation. I was convinced he was cheating on me... only there was no real evidence of that, so it was just a miserable place of confusion and feeling I’d lost my mind.
If I asked for help, what would I say? “My husband works long hours and doesn’t like to come home, and sometimes he isn’t working but having a drink alone and watching a game in a restaurant and ignoring us.. sometimes with coworkers?”
Looking back I wish I’d gotten help. When money is tight and you have four or five kids it seems impossible to find help. You don’t want to tell your family because you don’t want to turn your family against him. You can’t afford a sitter because your finances are unpredictable enough... you can’t quite figure out how or who to approach for help.
But I wish I’d approached a church family. Back when we were newly weds and leaving Wheaton my favorite professor prayed that we would find a church family and grow and prosper there... that prayer has always lingered in my mind.
I can’t believe I was that stereotypical enabler wife that kept the secret. I guess I also thought if I outed him, he’d leave me and the children or just wouldn’t accept counsel or help. My esteem had slowly surrendered to the lies.
And then, it all came to a head two weeks after we had our fifth child. It was another night like all the others, but for three things that were different this time:
1) Christian friends were involved in the knowledge of that night and the secret was no longer a secret 2) He was not only inebriated this time, but so much so that he couldn’t remember anything the next morning for the first time ever and 3) he’d been sitting under highly convicting, Scripture-based preaching in our new church for just shy of a year; preaching that didn’t just tell us we were okay as we were, but that also challenged us to look for fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives; preaching that had made him angry and antsy and had given him no wiggle room for months... but preaching that he kept returning to hear.
Ironically, though that night was the worst scenario we’d been in yet, it was the safest I’d felt in a decade because for the first time, I wasn’t alone. I had friends that told me they would not leave me, and I can’t even describe the gratitude and relief that washed over me. It was as if warm arms were upholding me though I was alone in my yellow bedroom.
I had no idea at the time that it really was the end of a decade, the end of an era. We had been married 10 1/2 years exactly. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told me.
But that night, that block of time missing from his memory, genuinely terrified him. To his credit, it terrified him, because that terror was the catalyst for change, for accepting help. Broken, he went to the aforementioned friend’s house the next day who was formerly a narcotics abuse counselor. (I will always be grateful to him and his wife.) This friend confirmed the authenticity of the black out and went on to diagnose him as an alcoholic.
From that week on he went to a recommended Biblically-grounded counselor for a year. This man (to whom I will also eternally be grateful) taught Shaun to grieve the loss of his friend he never grieved, to recognize emotions when they came, and call them what they were, and handle them like an adult. He taught him it was okay to experience happiness without wondering when the other shoe would drop. He taught him that even Jesus got angry and confrontational. He helped him realize his desire for a healthy marriage, and the skewed, self-destructive mentality he’d been operating out of. Shaun began to desire to function like an adult and have control over his choices and the steps he took in life.
The less Shaun hid and avoided feelings, the more boldly he approached the throne. He began soaking up the Word, saturating himself with Scripture and songs of praise and healing. And after a year, his counselor said he didn’t need to be coming anymore.
I will say this: though God delivered me that night it came to a head, I didn’t trust the deliverance for about two years.
It was my turn to be crazy now that he was acting sane. I was waiting for it all to happen again, and carried my paranoia through another year until it became too heavy and I set it down at the throne. I went through a brief depression. A counselor-friend told me it was because now that life was stable I was experiencing the emotions I couldn’t back then. You can’t avoid grief. I learned that once already, so God walked me through it... and the fog lifted.
Here is some of the fruit that came in the two years of recovery:
1) We moved two weeks after that fateful night (it had already been in motion) and left all those sad memories in another town, another home.
2) Prior to that night we had just become members at a new church that has become our family and support; an answer to my professor’s prayers a decade after he prayed them.
3) God sent Shaun to the perfect counselor for his needs, in the fullness of time.
4) God allowed me to struggle a full year after the trial was over that He might finish stripping me of things that needed to go; insecurities, idols, self-righteousness, etc. Even though I felt I’d had quite enough pain already, God loved me enough to finish the process because He saw the reward I could not yet see.
5) God planted me in a small group of women I could laugh with during that time; a safe place to not feel alone and read Scripture and laugh without having to bare my tender and bleeding soul.
6) God taught me to really serve this year Shaun was receiving counseling for the first time in my life. Not just at home (which is a work in progress) but to serve in my church and do the not-so-glamorous things like nursery duty and VBS food preparation. The unseen things. Even with lots of kids. Even with no reward in it for me. Even if I felt unappreciated. He showed me the ugliness of my heart in my resistance to these things and the pity party I was carrying on.
7) He taught me to love people that didn’t instantly love me. I encountered more people like that in one year than I’d encountered my whole life!
It seemed constant warfare, the struggles I faced that year of Shaun’s recovery, and I felt at such a weak place for dealing with them, very wounded that God would allow them to come at such a vulnerable time, and yet He saw it as the perfect time.
8) Shaun had constant struggles with people that year. He was mistreated, genuinely, a handful of times. I felt wounded that God would allow that when he was trying so hard to be faithful and recover; that God would strike him while he was down. But God saw it as the perfect time to teach him invaluable lessons that have grown and matured him in now-visible ways.
9) In the second year I was asked to take over the small group Bible study I’d been a part of and take up the teaching position. Shaun encouraged me, I prayed about it and decided I would rather be the teacher than let the group fade away because it was such nice “adult” time for me. Then I realized I’m “me” and I don’t do anything laid-back or partway and so I taught Exodus and studied it thoroughly and that time with God and in His Word was so healing for me.
10) Shaun’s place in the church body began to cement the second year of his recovery and he was no longer striving to belong or fighting insecurity because His security was no longer in people, (in what they did or didn’t think about him,) but in Jesus. And sure enough, the minute he began to care less what man thought, that was the minute he found himself surrounded with men-friends and enjoying a place on Harvest’s worship team, ushering in the King’s Holy presence every Sunday morning.
Shaun has a unique way, a unique style of playing the drums, that I believe God specifically gave him for ushering in His presence, and it’s always a blessing to worship with him encouraging and arousing praise in the sanctuary.
He’s been sober for nearly three years now, but it’s the first time I’ve stopped to count because I never felt a need. For a long time I’ve plainly seen, it no longer has a hold on him. (He keeps a safe distance and stern boundaries from substances of all kinds, but that’s only wise.) I want to be very clear about why it has no power over him: He’s given Jesus the reigns. Only God. Only God can change a heart like this. I would’ve thought it impossible.
Another thing He has accomplished in both of us (perhaps this should be numbered 11?) is that we no longer want to make our names great and feel a need to do great things and be seen. HE SEES. That’s all that matters, and we want to make HIS name great. We no longer want to elevate Self but we want to elevate Jesus. Both of us would’ve said that before, but our lives said differently.
After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.
-1 Peter 5: 10
You know what made the difference? He saved us. He rescued us out of a pit neither of us had the power to pull out of, and we owe Him everything, and it is our deepest joy and greatest privilege to lift up His name because He restored everything and made all things new for us.
Now for the “today” part of our story! Finally! Because this is my favorite part... the fruit!!! We’ve walked through the pain and lessons, but I am just realizing the fruit!
I just want to keep counting blessings!!! Blessing upon blessing, and provision upon provision, and fruit upon fruit.
I’ll attempt to tell it through a mini-story:
Shaun flew to St. Louis to see his family last week. (Trips used to be a time for serious panic. Even a year after they made me nervous.) Not this time.
This time, the morning he left, it needn’t occur to me to worry. I sat in my car in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot with the kids. Having handed out donuts and milk I excitedly opened the new Live Worship CD he had recorded with the church last summer. It was finally released! I popped it into the cd player and the words (that our pastor wrote) began to play-
“Living through the battles You have won. Pressing through the trials still undone... for Your glory, for Your honor we will overcome, we surrender all to You.”
Tears. Streaming down my face and completely unexpected. I mean, we sing these songs at church all the time and I was at the recording, and none of this has been a fast process, but I think Perspective hit me and God gave me the big picture in those few lines- I was suddenly on the mountaintop, looking back and able to see.
Evan, my oldest who sat shotgun, was looking at my out of the corner of his eyes like what.in.the.world. #mommaslosthermarbles
I explained my tears; how God had pulled us out of the pit and placed us in a family.
Those musicians are my husbands friends. That music is my husband worshipping. Those voices in the congregation are the kids and me. These lyrics were written by the man who preached us out of the pit. All of it, a gift from God.
It washed over me like a flood; how much FRUIT there has been. How much purpose! Not an ounce of that pain was wasted; not.one.ounce. Like Joseph in prison, the days felt slow but the victory came suddenly.
Sometimes it is so important to look back and remember how far we’ve come and that God saw all of this fruit while I lay limp on the shower floor. (Some get so stuck looking back that they can’t move forward, I realize that.) But others are so busy and “on to the next thing” that they forget to look back and remember all God has done, like the Israelites He brought out of Egypt and who so quickly turned to foreign gods. So I want to look back, in healthy measures, and remember and give thanks.
Other scenes flashed before my mind in that Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot while listening to that cd...
I was asked to branch out and teach an official church Bible study (instead of my little small group under the stairs.) :) And so this summer I prepared. I prepared for a study on the Life of Christ, a chronological study of the Gospels, but I had no idea what a gift God had waiting... 40 sweet, hungry women eager to eat His Word...
Their faces came to my mind listening...
I had no idea what joy there would be in being the layman, feeding them His good Word! And yet, I am so much more acutely aware of WHO is providing the food and how weak and fallen I am, and WHO accomplishes change and gets all the glory... SO much more aware than I ever could’ve been 3 years ago.
My role there feels exactly like my role as a mother at home; feeding and nurturing. Nothing glamorous to see here except the God in it all. (And of course I try not to show up with food on my clothes and I usually shower first.)
I don’t know WHY it took 3 years to learn this. Well, actually I do. I’m stubborn and prideful. I’m a firstborn perfectionist. I think the extent of the trial shows the extent of what God had to rip out of me.
Charles H. Spurgeon said "You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself." Yeah. Read that again.
Some things just can’t be learned in a classroom. Some lessons take a field trip through the valley of the shadow of death in order to hit home and inspire real heart change.
I’m not saying “I’ve arrived” and my nature is essentially the same... I will always battle my nature this side of Heaven... but God has radically changed my perspective and motives and deeply inspired me to yield to His Spirit.
He’s taught me to desire to worship, not control. He’s taught me to serve, not lead. He’s taught me to love, not manipulate. He’s taught me to love women because He loves women, not because they love me.
I’m not better, but rather more surrendered than I was three years ago... more eager to see HIM receive glory.
Additionally, in the past two weeks, two women approached me whose husbands were struggling with this very battle Shaun fought, and one of the men is meeting with Shaun regularly- now, the work is the Lord’s, not mine, not Shaun’s- but I mention this fruit because it reminds us God had purpose in the pain.
There’s more, so much more... but I have to cut it off at some point. Let me end by describing the sweet change in my husband.
Shaun is at peace. He calls feelings what they are when they come, he faces problems head-on, he leads our family, he is transparent and honest with me, he wants to be a leader worth following, he desires integrity, he wants to be engaged with the children and engaged with me. He desires to give his first fruits to God. He is in Scripture. He is studying, He is worshipping. I find him playing the keyboard and singing praises to God often when he is stressed. He has boldly spoken the Truth and prayed with coworkers. He is a good friend not just to me but to others. He is merciful, soft, and yet strong. He is bold and has a sound mind and wise thoughts. He loves Jesus. To quote another- “He used to be a proud man and ashamed of who he was, but now he is not proud and not ashamed of who he is.”
I admire him. He’s not just my best friend, but he’s my hero. To realize God saw all of this when I was doubting and angry and scared blows my mind. He is the Author of all good things. He is the Redeemer and Restorer and nothing- NOTHING- is impossible for Him.
Lastly, I’m eternally thankful for the body of Christ; for Lyle Dorsett’s prayer, Joel Anderson’s preaching, Rick and Megan White’s availability and friendship, Russ Phillips’ counsel, Chris Hammond’s gentle encouragement and wisdom, the sweet sisters who encouraged me to write this, and to countless others. God is good.
