ChosenRebel's Blog

We are driving down the road together. The “we,” being my bride, who is driving, and me, the one who can no longer drive at night because my eyes don’t function without the brightness of day. We are listening to National Public Radio. People are telling stories for an audience that laughs and “oohs” and “ahs” as the story moves from humor to poignancy to intimacy, and I realize something that I have never fully expressed but have been living with for fifty years.

There is a certain kind of story that comes from different and mostly oblique angles that work in my spirit, like the handle to an exterior water hose on a house. One slight turn and the water begins to flow and spray, and yet I don’t turn away and “turn the knob off.”

Something reshaped me 50 years ago from whatever I was going to be to what I have become today. Fifty years ago, I changed the lives of dozens of families, all of whom were also changed in one way or another, some of them profoundly, because of my experience and choices. I sometimes hate myself for my impact on all those lives. People I love have lived with a burden I placed upon them that they didn’t ask for.

So, when I hear a certain theme, a certain type of experience, a certain type of story that touches the skin of my past, tears of loss and longing, guilt, and the harrowing of a heart remind me of the hole in my heart that keeps me from being whole, reach up to my eyes and turn on the faucet of my soul. It’s like a sinkhole suddenly opens, and everything around me drops away. After fifty years, there is no choice now. It is a homing instinct of my soul. I hear the story, and I am transported to . . . transported to . . . I need a bigger and better language; I need a hundred languages to describe the . . . depth of my sorrow and longing for a eucatastrophe, a sudden turning to the good, an end to a story that started 5 decades ago, and time is running out. I don’t know if the eucatastrophe will come, and that only deepens the sorrow.

Sometimes, I hear the story that opens the faucet, and I am in public. I don’t want to make those around me uncomfortable, so I kink the hose. My tears are waterless, hidden behind eyes dammed up by will. But the kinked hose creates a pressure that closes my ears to the room’s conversation. I drift out of the moment and wonder if the blood shed on a cross, “for the sins of the world,” truly is enough to cover my sin and all of its quilt. Trying to fill a hole in a soul is a study in temporary patches, all of which fail when the right story comes along. And then I’m defenseless—defenseless, and somber.

Surviving these times is tricky. My bride is helpful. She knows my story. I told her about the tragedy of my life, on one of our first dates over 41 years ago when our relationship was only a month and a half old. Though the relationship was young, I had already seen its trajectory. I knew on the first date, actually, the first 45 minutes, that “I could marry this woman. She has the character traits I know I can’t live without.”

When I saw the future, I told her the past. It was only fair that she have the opportunity to abandon me before her heart was involved any further. But she didn’t. Foolish woman, but oh, how I love her for it. She hung around through long-distance phone calls and half a country’s distance, and a year later, on her birthday, after telling her I loved her for the first time, the next sentence was a proposal of marriage. “Stephnie, I love you. Will you marry me and become my wife in December?” (By the way, that is the proper spelling of my bride’s name. “Stephnie,” two syllables, not three.)

It is not the happy times or memories that are most life-changing. It is the failures and defeats that have the potential to reconstruct us into something we were not before. If we are going to be useful in some way, we first have to be hammered like steel into a new and harder metal. To mix metaphors, we have to be emptied to be refilled with new material. I was a broken cistern, unable to hold anything useful. But the sorrows of that time and the stories that remind of that time, are the continual tools that God uses to keep me humble and malleable to His will. Despite the sorrows, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Hold on to me Lord, Jesus.”