C-19 Reflection #73: Living and Praying the Scripture: Part 5 (Transformation)
C~19 Daily Reflection (#73)
Theme: Living and Praying the Scripture: Part 5 (Transformation)
Reflection:
Several years ago, I attended a funeral service to support some people from our church who had befriended a person named Dave. I had only met Dave a couple of times at church and did not really get a deep sense of him or his story, but his other friends from the church knew him well and had been really impacted by his life and his death. When the following testimony by Dave was read in the service, I understood why they had been so affected. As Dave’s own eulogy was read out in that service, it was like God speaking to us directly. I will never forget it.
Following the service, I asked the family if I could get a copy of Dave’s reflection. They agreed, as long I used it to strengthen and encourage others, which is why I am sharing it with you today. At the end of the day, the way Dave perceived being addressed by God is how the scriptures operate in our hearts, to reveal God’s great love for us, to touch us deeply and to transform our lives.
When God Spoke to Me (Dave)
I think, looking back, that probably I heard God most easily as a child. I remember vividly the Gideon's Bible Society coming into my fourth or fifth grade class and offering each child a copy of the New Testament, the only charge being a request to sign it and read it. Those were more innocent times, the late 1970's, when God and State were not so passionately divided.
I took that little book, and I signed it, and I set about reading it at all of eight or nine years of age. I recall not understanding too much, but that was somehow the best part. In my childish innocence, I talked to God all the time. I asked Him what it meant, I prayed every night over things that worried me: my parents and their arguing, my sister and her mental issues, my little dramas at school, even the health of my cat were subjects for God to be queried on. These were the fabric of childhood and I spoke to God about them with the earnest care that a child gives to a parent. God was not so much a thought on Sunday, as He was a companion in my life, one who I couldn't imagine being without.
But time, and peers, and age all caught up to my faith. Somewhere in early adolescence, rebellion reared in me, and the staid, quiet Presbyterian services of my childhood became a punishment imbued by my parents. As my reading grew more mature, I found icons in Sartre, and Kamus, and Kafka, and even Voltaire. Suddenly God seemed to be a by-product of childish fancy. The idea of a universal father figure who heard all and governed human lives became a ludicrous flight of fancy, and my journey into darkness truly began.
University furthered my distaste for organized religion, and faith in general. Philosophy taught existentialism, a close cousin of nihilism I think now as I look back. I became self-reliant, an object of worship unto myself. My fears and insecurities were not diminished at all; rather I subjugated them as the reality of a man living in an irrational world, with a rational mind. I fought vehemently against Christianity and faith wherever I encountered it, always challenging, always assured of my righteousness in depriving the ignorant of their manna.
Life moved on as it will, carrying me into my first real romance, and marriage at twenty six. I built my life around human principles, attainment of the things deemed to qualify as success. Pretty wife, nice home, good job, future planned in accordance with the 'Freedom 55' philosophy of the time were the staples of my journal. But I was lost without knowing it. God had a plan, and I was not following it at all.
At twenty six, just before I was married, I suffered a major depression. This was not something I had ever felt before. I could not get out of bed in the morning; I had no energy, no libido, no appetite, and no motivation for anything at all. All of life was drained of its color; I saw for the first time the 'abyss' the existentialists had written about, it was terrifying. Life meant nothing, I lost the ability to experience joy in any form, and the idea of suicide formed in my mind like a ghost from Dickens' musings. I could not escape this darkness, I felt I would suffocate, simply die of abject misery.
As weeks grew into months, this darkness lifted through no action on my part. The spring came and the sun shone and I was lifted up, buoyed on the current of something I can't explain. In that spring of 1997, I had what psychiatrists would describe as a pure ascent in mania. It was the exact equivalent, but on the opposite end of the scale to the depression I had suffered in the winter, and with it came an experience I won't ever forget.
I did not sleep for many weeks; I was hospitalized and given no less than horse tranquilizers in an attempt to subdue my restless, sleepless state. It was largely to no avail, and eventually they let me return home. I was alone one sunny afternoon when I had the experience of direct communion with God. Even as I describe it, I can imagine the skeptical doubting, as I would have done. But this was truly ineffable, my words here are poor trade for what I felt that day. I lay on the floor, praying for the first time in many years, begging God to answer me and explain why I suffered. And He came, first as a voice, then as a blurred vision above me. He told me that I suffered because I had chosen a certain path, and that he knew I would do so, and that suffering was not His aim, it was the result of my choice.
He spoke to me of relatives I had lost, and He let me know they were with Him, and that I had no need to fear for them. I asked Him many things, some lost now in the distance of time, but I begged him for understanding after so many years of scientific inquiry. He showed me something I cannot explain, I looked out over my balcony, and I could see the molecules of the air, the wings of a Hummingbird beating, the leaves on the trees budding in the light of a May afternoon, I understood that they were all related, that from those molecules to the most distant star in the universe there was a design, an incomprehensible plan that if explained in its entirety would overwhelm and obliterate my mortal mind. I understood that I was given the briefest glimpse of the universe that He created, and that any more would leave me unable to continue in the human world. A term has stuck with me from that experience that hasn't left over the years. I was told I would be 'A soldier of God'. I didn't know then what it meant, but I believe I'm beginning to now.
God told me that I should remember the experience, but not flaunt it. He told me that my doctors would no doubt discount the experience as a product of bipolar mania, and that I should allow that explanation to stand without challenge, for in our time such visions are the realm of madmen. He told me that there were others like me, and that I would meet them in time, when it was meant to happen. And He told me that I was beloved, and one day my purpose would be clear.
Naturally, at that time I was overwhelmed. I cried, I tried to tell my wife and others, and I saw what God had predicted, disbelief, tempered with pity. So I put that experience away, and I moved on with life for close to a decade. I believe God had intended this; He knew I had roads to walk before I could be who He wanted me to be.
My career blossomed after 1997; I became in time, a leader in business, a manager of men, and by all accounts a successful member of society. In 2003, however, my marriage fell apart. I had been married on a beach by a Spanish judge seven years prior, an overt statement about my lack of faith in religion or in God at the time. My wife and I grew apart, we lacked commonality in so many ways, and I allowed career and money and pride to be my obsession. When I left our home and set out on my own at 33, something in me died. I missed my wife, and my beautiful four year old daughter, more than anything in the world. On the first night I spent in my bachelor apartment, I experienced an emptiness that reminded me of that first, awful depression in 1996. Once again the specter of suicide loomed in the corners of my mind.
But ever resourceful, I found a way to suppress the pain. I discovered debauchery. Alcohol and women were my new religion. For three years I chased woman after woman with more and more vodka. There was seldom a moment when I was alone, for either a lover, or my other mistress vodka, left me no time to myself. I pushed every painful thought and realization away with all the energy of a drowning man beating the ocean to stay afloat. But I sank lower, and lower.
There came a time when I found the lowest place in human existence. I realized that I had lost, not a battle, but the war. I was crushed. Nothing meant anything. I was empty, vacuous, beaten. I had squandered everything I'd been given, to a degree that seems unfathomable. I could not eat. I shook from the ravages of alcohol addiction. I wanted to die, but lacked even the courage to end my misery. I was utterly alone, or so I thought.
From that despair, some who knew me reached out. Only when I had sunk to such a level was I open to hear them, and when I did their words were a light in the abyss of hell. They spoke to me of being saved. Of Christ and his death for all of our sins, even my own disgusting past could be forgiven in that blessed act. And slowly, God appeared to me again. He had never left, I came to understand, and I had ignored him at my peril. And my failings were not His; they were mine to claim, as I had wandered far from where He wanted me. I was filled with such a joy, such a relief, such a sense of hope, I felt like I had left my father in a fit of rage, only to be welcomed home without any rancor, and with true celebration after many, many years.
And I have never lost that feeling of being welcomed home. I have faced many doubts, and many failings, but I can only describe that there is again that childlike trust that God is with me, every step and every day. It is enough that Christ knows of my failings, and He has made them benign by His own suffering. I have read the Bible, and discovered among a few close Christian friends, a sense of belonging that supersedes human relations, it is a bonding among travelers on the same vessel, who can love each other knowing that we share a common destination, and thus won't ever really be apart. God brings the light, but it shines through others who bear witness to Him, and I have been truly blessed in having those people come into my life and show me a way out of the hell I created for myself.
Looking back, I would not trade my experiences. I have walked a dark and lonely road for many years, and only in doing so can I appreciate what it means to be back in the light, back in my Father's garden where I have no secrets, where I am forgiven for all of my sins, and where there is joy in the simple act of trying to follow His guidance. The prodigal son is a story I will never forget, I have truly been in the company of swine, and been lifted back up without blame to the highest honor; obedience to Him.
