Missing It
A new life, my spirit right with God, back with my wife, only good things before me.
A new life, my spirit right with God, back with my wife, only good things before me.
That Spring I was called into ministry, went back to school, got a Bachelor of Theology degree. I worked, learned to be a husband and began to minister in a small church. I quickly grew back into the life of God I left nine years before.
Through the Eighties, I worked as a layman or as an Associate Pastor in churches. My God-given abilities brought me into leadership but I longed not to overstep my callings. Through the decade a pattern emerged: coming alongside a Pastor, helping him build leadership and ministry and then becoming either a scapegoat for any lacking or the perceived cause of any discord to save his ministry.
After a series of hurtful experiences, we moved to another group where we liked being anonymous but able to minister. Over the next seven years, we both ministered wherever needed. Eventually I became part of musicals performed several times each holiday season; my love for people, freeing them up to be fulfilled and an eye for details made this a natural. For the next several years this was me.
That changed in 1999 as in November my life began downhill. Unable to get skilled volunteers, I had to do things I lacked the ability to do well. An adult foster daughter living with us was raped. She was scheduled for surgery on another problem a couple weeks before Christmas but only my wife would be able to be with her 500 miles away. I should have seen it coming—overworked, bone-weary, helpless, failing expectations of my own, and alone—I was due.
A couple weeks of 18-20 hour days mixed between business and production left me unprepared for opening night’s personal disaster: only moments before I gave the opening cue, I was taken aside and told that “we” needed and were counting on me for excellence, that “we” knew “we” could count on me to deliver excellence. I died within. I immediately knew my failures over the last months, all the not measuring up, all the letting others down. Too tired to think, reason, correct, I simply turned off my pain as I had learned so many years before. Moments later I was on stage, acting, singing, watching, doing whatever I could for others while growing cold within. I made it through eight performances, wrapped it up, and on December 21, 1999 began to binge.
Forty years before with no sense except to survive by not feeling, I had the first experience in the world of non-rational feelings. I had learned early to turn off emotions because they hurt—not a willful decision but a coping with what I could not deal. At the age of 12, in the midst of transitions, separations, loneliness and fear, a new emotion delivered me from my inner agony. One day, wholly unprovoked and unanticipated, I awoke to the laughter of two girls, standing in the doorway naked, exposing themselves and laughing at me. In shock, I chased them away, closing them out but the image remained, the first of many over the next 40 years. I felt something unidentifiable, back deep in my soul where I hadn’t allowed feelings--a warm, alive, feeling different from my detachment.
The next four decades, gathered images brought warmth in my soul; I did not set out to gather these curios but accumulate they did. In retrospect, I see that I was living a “what if” “if only” existence based in what had never been, would never be, only the moments with an illusion of acceptance.
When I collapsed into the coldness of depression in December 1999, my soul immediately knew where to find warmth—it had been there before. A pattern emerged—work, then to my place of comfort for a visit with my images. Thinking back it’s so obvious, then it seemed my only chance for survival. My despair was overwhelming, I was alone, no one knew, everyone was busy. Now I see I sought out images of my unfulfilled past, right back to where I began to lose hope. I sought a familiar desire—intelligent, bright-eyed, lively, confident, beautiful, open—her image in so many. Yes, many were vulgar, crude, vicious, even brutal but these were curiosities where I did not linger. With nightly visitations to the images of my youth, I felt the warmth as lost emotions revived briefly, then I would collapse into sleep only to rise and do it over again.
Through the holidays and into the midst of January, I binged daily trying to warm my soul wherever I could. Then something more disturbing happened: I found these friends not being faithful to my needs, ceasing to warm my soul. It took more time, more images for the same warmth. Now guilt and shame followed each venture—these were not mine, they betrayed my needs.
As the depression eased it was replaced with the reality that I was participating in something that I found repulsive to my values. Facing God was the hardest, deceiving my wife was close behind, lying to myself and justifying my deceptions was unconscionable.
This was not who I had hoped to be.
More recovery tomorrow.
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