I’m sitting on a toilet. Beside me a bathtub is filling. Knelt down in front of me is a friend of mine. I don’t know his name, I can’t remember his face but he felt like a friend. He tells me I should call Brian before I get in the tub. He tells me to use the carpet knife with the thin blade. He hands it to me. He walks me through the cut, pantomiming, going through the motions, gliding his finger down the length of my arm. It tickles. He tells me to do it too, just practice, and I do. He turns off the water. I lift my leg to step in with my tennis shoes on. I’m wearing a suit. I slip. I fall awake.
That was two weeks ago. The early hours of Tuesday.
Feeling nothing turned into true depression Tuesday. I realized if the trajectory of whatever this was I was strapped to didn’t change I would crash and be lifted from a bathtub by Brian. I didn’t want that. I had no interest in ending my life but I realized part of me might, and that scared me into calling another friend for help.
I won’t use her name here. What I will say is that she is the spookiest person I know. So much so that I’m uncomfortable being around her sometimes. She’s a tiny thing with an intense and glimmering stare. Her eyes crawl through mine and wriggle around inside my brain. I feel like she can see stuff I don’t want seen. She never pronounces judgement or even hints at it, always hugs, holds, smiles and encourages. But there’s something bizarre and attractive about her eyes, something both spiritually seductive and repellent. Like I said, spooky.
She’s mentored a few of us young pastors, befriended us and counseled us when we’re in over our heads. She’s our sansei. She’s the adult on the playground, telling us again what we should already know. Most of all she senses what’s happening beneath what is seen, beneath the obvious circumstances and the “I’m fine"s we offer up to her probing. And she addresses fearlessly, bluntly, lovingly, joyfully the reality underneathe. She’s wise. And I needed wisdom - or something. I hoped she knew what.
I called her and begged for a meeting. I told her I really didn’t think it could wait but I told her nothing about what was going on with me. She agreed to see me the next afternoon, Wednesday.
But before then I had to prepare to teach at IKON. We were in week four of our study of Paul’s first letter to Corinth. It was my turn to teach, Chapter two, all of it. With my computer dead so many of my resources were unavailable. I sat down to study with a couple bibles, commentaries, notes I’d made before this crisis hit, and a pencil and paper. A pencil and paper and a busted hand. It took all day but I was finally prepared - as prepared as a guy as out of sorts and unbelieving as I was could be.
And that night I was honest. I taught the chapter true to the research I’d done. Unimaginative, page after page of notes, almost recited, very planned out so no frailty or fear in me would show. There in that community of people who love me and whom I love I felt something - maybe it was manufactured from the great desire I had to feel something, maybe it was nothing more than music and friendly faces and words from an old book I’d grown up reading. Maybe. Maybe, I thought, but whatever it was made me feel thhat I’d come out of this darkness someday. It dawned on me as I was wrapping up my talk on the words of Paul that I was the point he was making.
1 Corinthians 2:1-5 When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
1 Corinthians 2:13-14 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
Paul was teaching the new Christians in Corinth that he, Paul, and their other favorite teachers and heros didn’t convince anyone of anything regarding Jesus. If they believed the story was true it was God who provided the proof. Preachers may argue and persuade, they may prepare and learn, practice and plan, but if anything comes of all that posturing and pontificating it’s not because the preacher was superhuman but because God uses humans. God provides the proof. We sometimes gravitate towards the great orators and professional productions but Paul reminds us without slamming excellence that God is perfectly capable of using the unexcellent, the weak - especially when those weak realize they are and take the job of representing God so seriously that they are afraid and nervous.
I imagined myself looking back on 2006 as the year of depression and doubt sandwiched between decades of belief and normalcy. I believed for a moment on Tuesday that such a life was possible. And I don’t know why the sudden burst of positive thinking. But it gave me an idea - a scary idea. And I went with it.
“I’m a walking sermon illustration tonight,” I said as someone chuckled thinking the much needed - and usually frequent - joke in the laughless evening was finally coming. “I woke up on Saturday morning in a dark place. And I’ve been there ever since. I’ve dealt with depression a few times in my life - in short small doses - nothing major. I don’t know why God makes some of us this way but he does. Some of us just wake up sad and we don’t know why and we can’t stop it and all hope just goes away. Maybe it’s because I’m artistic or just weird, I don’t know, but I’m there again. My youngest daughter Penelope is ten months old and today she said “Dada” for the first time. And I felt nothing. I couldn’t smile. I knew I should and I wanted to but I couldn’t. Guys, I’m weak. I’m barely making it through tonight. But I’ve watched your faces all night and I’ve seen some of you getting stuff you never got before, taking notes, nodding, smiling, thinking. I’ve seen you reacting to the words I’ve been saying up here. Have you been changed at all tonight? Are you better off for being here? If you are it’s not because of me. I’ve got nothing. I’m empty. I’m tired and having a hard time concentrating. I’m as low as I get. And if anything good came from tonight, came fro my mouth, Paul says it was from God. And he says it always is even when I’m not depressed. He says there’s something happening under what we see and hear, there’s a world of power and influence under everything. And Paul believes the wisdom and hope and change you walk away with tonight doesn’t come from me but comes from the influence and power of God.”
I didn’t tell them about my doubts. I didn’t mention the dreams, the hand, or any of the other crazy junk I’m telling you now. I didn’t want to shatter anyone’s fragile foundations. And the truth is I even wondered if what I did share was too much - if any at all was too much. A pastor once told me that the congregation of a church looks to the pastor like passengers look to a captain. “Passengers don’t need to know when the captain’s lost,” he advised. “Keep your personal problems personal.”
Well I blew that rule. And after IKON people came up to me and prayed for me and hugged me and didn’t run away. They told me their own stories of depression and weakness. And I didn’t feel as crazy or alone anymore. I felt God. Or was it just kindness and empathy?
I went to bed wondering two weeks ago today.
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After the interview Sunday night Brian and I shared a pizza backstage - in Calvary Chapel’s prayer room. It’s an odd thing to be in a church and sense nothing, for it to be transformed suddenly from a house of worship to just another building. We talked about how I should handle the night’s performance and Brian reminded me that the pastor was preaching after me and so my set was much shorter than usual and really required no talking or teaching on my part. I was there to draw a crowd and set the stage for the pastor. I was just the opener and never more thankful for that.
Brian, in his own way, expressed concern for me. My guess is that being around me for eleven years he’s picked up on my periodic mood swings and my propensity to overthink and overtalk everything in life and so he might have thought at first that this dip and these questions of mine were just par for the course. But in the prayer room together he seemed to be realizing as I was that this was serious. This was no ordinary fleeting doubt coupled with a dash of melancholy. This was potentially fatal, career ending, life ending even. I assured him I had no desire to kill myself, that I mostly felt nothing instead of sadness. I’d labored under sadness before but this nothing was far heavier. And we prayed. We prayed with the pastors of the church, whom I confided none of this in, still hoping it would pass. I prayed with my eyes open. To close them as if I were seeing or certain of the listener would be dishonest.
And I took the stage.
“Should I tell them that you are the one who has had made me
And saved me to set up your home there inside?
Should I tell them that I am a perfect example
Of all you can do with a life?”
I never meant the words more as I sang them to begin the evening. I stared up where the back wall met the ceiling and tried to picture God as I do every night. And He wasn’t there. I decided to sing as if He was, to try to fake myself out for the night, and to leave Jesus out of the set entirely. I never mentioned scripture or Christ or salvation or anything else related to the person Jesus. I said things I’d never said before, all I’d often said now rendered useless, inextricably linked to Christ. I ducked and dodged his name and his words all evening, playing only one song from White Flag - the CD written in response to Jesus’ beatitudes, part of his Sermon on the Mount.
I focussed instead on the Father God, His love for us, His making us. And I sang through tears..
“Abba Father, my Defender.
You are holy. I surrender.
In my weakness you protect me.
When my heart strays you correct me
I cry Abba Father
I love you, Daddy”
And oddly I meant it. While I sang I found some sanity in my own words. I remembered the orphanage I wrote them for, the kids smiling at the thought of a God who wanted them as His boy or girl. I remembered the chaplain I replaced for a time there, the one who checked out and became agnostic. I remembered how certain I was during his uncertainty and for thirty minutes or so two weeks ago last night I believed more than I doubted. I looked around the room at the faces, the intelligent people deciding to believe in the story of Jesus. I thought of the millions throughout history who died for that belief, who gave up everything to be a peculiar thing called a “Christian”. I sat and heard with skeptical but thirsty ears the story of Jesus for the millionth time - this time from an aging hippie preaching from Second Thessalonians. He said it is the Gospel - the simple story of Jesus dying and living again - that changed lives and not fancy arguments. He said words don’t convince people of anything but the Spirit of God proves that the story is true.
And I prayed that God, if He was there, would tell me the truth. I didn’t know if He was there, I doubted He was the longer the day went, but I had nothing more to lose.
Brian and I flew most of the next day, Monday. And flying is torturous when your computer is broken, your hand is broken and your mind is broken. I tried to get some sleep but turbulence, announcements and that blasted argument in my head wouldn’t let me. It’s amazing how little we care about how we’re perceived by others when we’re at the end of our rope isn’t it? I laid down across three seats and stared at the ceiling while chewing my fingernails, wide-eyed and frazzled looking - like some homeless crack addict watching an air show no one else sees - tuned in to some thriller no one else receives.
I wanted Becky. She became my God two weeks ago today. I called her constantly just to hear her voice. We didn’t talk about the debate inside me or how I felt. She knew it was bad. She knew she couldn’t understand or argue me out of it. And so she just kept me grounded in the everyday minutia of life at home: who took a good nap and who didn’t, what was for dinner, who she saw at Target and what they talked about, the movie she rented. I’d asked her on Saturday to keep me moving. I told her this could get worse and go on for a while - I’d battled depression for three months in college. I’d learned from that fight that a key to surviving is getting up and doing something - anything. Depression, I knew, would tell me to go to bed. So I told her to curse me, drag me, carry me, to do anything she had to do to get me out of bed and doing the simple things like eating a meal or reading a blog or talking on the phone. And so on Monday, when she couldn’t be with me in person, she told me over the phone to get up and buy a magazine and some water. She told me to call her back when I got on the plane. She made me remember when we first saw the movie she just rented. She made me live.
And Becky, who has never had more than one bad day in a row, who can say something nice about anyone and any situation and mean it, didn’t comprehend the level of skepticism and nothingness I was feeling. No one did. But on Monday she was the closest thing to proof of God I had. Better than facts, she was and has always been to me compassion and hope and mercy and forgiveness and all the things Jesus said he alone could install in us. And with Jesus gone and God fading I worshiped her voice, her happiness.
But even my conversations with Becky were darkened. I’d hang up and the goodness that had just coursed through cell towers out to me evaporated. In its place was the shattering fear that if I never believed again she’d leave me or I’d leave her. Fourteen years of friendship and shared values and purpose would surely crumble without belief in her Jesus at the center of my existence.
As I stood at the baggage claim in Nashville I felt like I was riding the belts myself. No control over where I was going next. No idea when or if this ride would stop.
That was two weeks ago today.
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TWO WEEKS AGO TODAY: WEDNESDAY Pt.2
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I picked at the flaking white paint on the guardrail and forced a smile for the passing room service lady pushing an overstuffed cart of towels and toiletries. I crouched with my back against the cinder block and left Greg a message. “Hey, this is Shaun. Uh, I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I hope I’m not waking kids up or anything, but I have a...theological, um, problem I guess I’m hoping you can help me out with. It’s sort of urgent but not life or death really. Uh, you can call me at this number. I’m in L.A. at a hotel and my reception’s not the greatest so leave me a message if I don’t pick up and I’ll get back to you when I get better service. I have a gig in three hours so, um, yea, if you can call me before that I’d really appreciate it. Alright, talk to you later.”
I stood and looked out over the gray California skyline, the cars full of people passing by unaware of my present drama, unaware maybe of anything beyond getting to and from wherever. Ignorance really is bliss, I thought. If I’d grown up without God and Jesus I wouldn’t be so confused right now and I’d probably have figured out a way to make life work without them. People do it all the time - drive here and there, marry, divorce, have kids and jobs - and without ever thinking about gods or picking one out. I scanned the sky, out over the rippled surface of the swimming pool below and the empty deck chairs at its edges. A storm was coming.
I sat again on the concrete walkway outside my room, slumped into the cinder block, my head resting heavy in the humidity hum of the city. My eyes closed and I slept.
I was exhausted. The crowd surrounded me again the night before - the second night of nightmares leaving me with what felt like only a few minutes of unturbulent rest. Then some time in the early morning hours, as Sunday was just beginning, I felt a tiny hand press into my back. Gabriella, age five, is scared of the dark these days. She often runs into our room, taps Becky awake since she sleeps closest to the doorway, and admits through tears that she’s afraid. Becky holds her and reminds her of a verse Gabriella learned at church, “God is my helper. I will not be afraid.” Her tears dry, her eyelids grow heavy again and she’s carried back to bed where, when the sun comes up, we she wakes unafraid and happy again.
And so Sunday morning when I felt her tiny hand on my back I woke from my nightmare and rolled towards her touch ready to rock and sooth and carry. But Gabriella wasn’t there. No one was.
As the silvery sky slowly twirled over the City of Angels my phone rang, waking me from my short nap on the balcony.
It was Greg. I told him that even though we don’t talk often anymore I still thought of him as one of the fathers of my faith and the only mentor I felt I could be this honest with. Then, without thinking, I tearfully admitted I was scared. The last couple days were my darkest, I told him. I needed help. In unchronological order all the events and thoughts of the last forty-eight hours or so burst out of me: the great dinner on Friday night, the nightmares, the paragraph, the accusing crowd in my dreams, the depression and the hand. The hand that had me fearing I’d finally cracked. I’d finally gone insane.
I told him I could see myself being that artist cliche soon, the madman rocking in the corner of a pink room in some place called “Shady Pines” or “Happy Acres” - my arms strapped to my torso, my hair tussled, eyes bugged and bleary, mumbling to myself about hands that weren’t there and crowds in my brain, voices no one else hears. I was certain my dam had finally broken. Too many books read, too much history and facts swimming in too small a pond. It all finally spilt over and flooded my frontal lobe with crazy. A tidal wave of crazy - out of nowhere.
I doubled back to the beginning, to explain in detail the accusations against the origins of Christianity I’d stumbled upon Friday night by accident. I gave him dates and names and snippets of history. I explained how I’d grown disenchanted and critical of the modern version of Christianity we cling to in America and how that had sent me on a search - beginning two years ago - for a better understanding of the ancient Christianity Jesus left us - before Constantine and Catholicism and reformations and political and personal agendas tainted and twisted our faith. I told him how these new accusations lined up so perfectly with the history I’d discovered on that search. That Christianity was a copy, contrived and derived in equal measure made sense to me - after all the lifeless churches I’d been to, all the vicious and selfish people I’d ministered to, after all the impotence and profanity my life had been. I’d seen no proof, I told Greg, of the supernatural, of a God greater than man’s imaginations and story telling that couldn’t be written off as self-convincing or psychosis, insanity, gullibility, the power of traditions and upbringing, the palpability of emotion or the blinding fear of a life without God.
“I’ve never felt this much...despair and...hopelessness, this much...doubt. I want facts. I don’t know. I still think there’s a God but I don’t think Jesus is real maybe or that he’s the Jesus we read about today in the Bible. But even if you gave me supposed proof, facts that prove these accusations wrong, I don’t know if I’d trust myself to determine that. I’m biased strongly toward belief in Christ because I’ve spent my life believing in Him and I stand to lose everything - marriage, work, life purpose, face - if I dont’ believe he’s real. I’m damned either way. If he’s not real I’m obviously screwed. If he is I won’t trust my belief in the evidence of that fact as anything more than my wishful thinking, believing what benefits me most. I’m stuck,” I lamented.
“And I have a show in a few hours where I’m supposed to get up and teach and play about this God I doubt and I’m supposed to do it with a smile on my face and I can’t smile. I’m so tired. And I’m supposed to teach IKON this Tuesday and I haven’t wanted to study or read the Bible and I can’t make much sense of it right now anyway. I can barely have a conversation. I can’t teach like this. I can’t.”
“What are pastors supposed to do when they doubt or get depressed or crack up? There’s almost no one for us to talk to. There’s no one who would accept that their pastor is this jacked up, you know? A small part of me thinks this will pass but most of me thinks it’s over for me and I’ll never feel anything good or believe again. Now if the small part’s right and this blows over and I come out OK I’ll always feel like a fraud, like I’m not fit to talk about God to anyone and I’ll always be afraid that this’ll come back - that I’ll get depressed out of nowhere again. Because this literally came out of nowhere. One day I’m great and the next I’m dying.”
Greg just listened. Then he got mad. He went off in a way only a guy working on his doctorate in theology can - using words longer than my brain can digest and attacking the scholarship behind these accusations. Then he calmed down. He took a breath and he told me his own story of doubt and despair. He had been worn out by two churches that didn’t see things as he did. The resulting battles took a toll on him, made him cynical and critical and shook his focus. He struggled under anxiety, doubt, fatigue and depression eventually.
He told me about Francis Schaeffer who reportedly, after mentoring hundreds of Christians and being dubbed a revolutionary leader of the Church, was struck by deep doubts about everything he’d ever taught and based life around. He was about forty Greg said. And Schaeffer retreated and started at square one, asking Himself if there was a God. He decided there was. Then he moved on to Who is He or She? And over much time he rebuilt his faith this way brick by brick, one truth at a time. And he became stronger than before, Greg said.
I wanted to believe I was Francis Schaeffer. I believed it when Greg was saying it. I believed I would be OK, stronger than before, when Greg told me his own story. But as I hung up and walked back into my room even that belief was drowned out by my inner dialogue - so relentless and confusing. Believing anything had become like hearing a whisper on the floor of the New York stock exchange. Too soft a voice to cut through the noise.
A few hours later I soundchecked at Calvary Chapel in Pasadena and then sat down for an interview before the show. I tried to smile, to be upbeat and positive, but I’m sure I was unconvincing. I’m a bad actor. Asked what one thing I’d like to leave readers with I fought the mess in my brain that made every question next to impossible to hear and understand, let alone answer, and I answered. “Be the proof,” I said.
That was two weeks ago today.
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TWO WEEKS AGO TODAY: WEDNESDAY Pt.2
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The throbbing pain in my hand woke me up before the sun. The nightmares left me with less sleep than usual.
The pain was from Friday morning’s trip to an indoor playground with my two oldest kids. I came down a slide in my sock feet and slipped when my less than agile thirty-two year old body made the transition from sitting to running unsuccessfully. My feet went forward, my head went backward, my hand collided with asbestos tile and cracked at the wrist. Three x-rays later I left the clinic with “probable joint damage” of some kind, a “bone bruise”, no breaks, a red face and an expensive brace - a brace I wore on my date Friday night but refused to wear to bed. I paid for that. Left to flop around untethered all night my wrist swelled and ached me into Saturday morning two weeks ago today.
Th nightmares require a little more explanation.
Where I left the story last I was sitting on the bookstore floor alone - for just a minute. Then I got up and walked one aisle over to peruse the Christianity and New Age books. I thumbed the Left Behind novels, counting thirty something of them I think. I passed the Wild at Hearts, the bibles and The Purpose Driven Life and it’s journals and other spin offs. I turned the corner and plopped down on the floor in Religious Studies.
I picked up a book I’d never heard of and read one paragraph. One lengthy paragraph and a few footnotes.
“What’s that?” Becky returned.
“Ah, it’s about that freemason stuff I told you about remember? They supposedly changed Christianity or invented it and rule the world now and-”
“The Rothchilds, the Gettys, the Vatican and the Colonel before he went teats up,” she interrupted me quoting Mike Myers - one of her many giftings.
“Yea, so I was just reading how the Colonel and the freemasons did that exactly - made the whole thing up. I wish they’d stop telling people our secret. The Colonel’s gonna be pissed when people find out those eleven herbs and spices of his aid in the brainwashing process - And who’s gonna buy my CDs once the secret’s out?” I joked.
We walked out arm in arm, drove home, took some Tylenol, unwrapped my wrist and dreamt. I dreamt the same thing over and over again. A crowd of people and me in its middle. They’re angry. They’re arguing, sometimes yelling, profane, belittling, laughing at me. And the ruckus is about faith - my faith. They’re tearing it apart, asking questions I can’t answer. But I’m doing my best. I’m telling them everything I know but every answer is laughingly and easily batted down with some fact or airtight argument I’d never thought of before. I’m frustrated, doubting, depressed. In my dreams.
And I wake up that way too. Hand pulsing with pain. Head full of questions. The world suddenly darker than before.
I’ve been depressed before and this wasn’t it. This wasn’t near depressed. This was blue at worst - fatigued feeling - like playing spin the bottle in junior high and waking up the next day with Mono. You might be dying, you think at first, then you realize you’re just really tired and weak and it’ll pass soon.
I sludged up to my office and fiddled with the mouse, checking e-mail, Googling in lethargic search for more on the fanciful freemason conspiracy theory in that paragraph I’d read. But there was no sense of urgency - just poking around out of boredom for a few minutes. Glad to be awake - but just barely so.
After a couple hours of this poking around for minute, to my gut wrenching amazement, it seemed everything I’d preached, based every aspect of my life on, sold my house for, committed my days to, written and sung about and was willing to die for was a lie. It was obvious suddenly. How’d I been so stupid for so long. A lie. Christianity, it was becoming clear, was a fraud.
And then blue became a little blacker shortly after. Fatigue morphed into fear and this mental Mono felt more like cancer. And it ate at me all day as I debated and reasoned with myself, tugged at the knots of fact and fiction now binding up my tired mind. I was near hopeless at times, surrounded with questions I couldn’t answer, trapped by lies that sprang from what I once believed to be truth. At other times I felt silly for even entertaining the idea that Christianity was a lie.
And these two sides warred inside me all afternoon and into the night two weeks ago today.
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TWO WEEKS AGO TODAY: WEDNESDAY Pt.2
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"I really like my life right now,” I smiled across the table at Becky.
Have you ever had a moment or a day or, if you’re lucky, weeks of clarity when you see where you’ve been and have some idea of where you’re going and it just makes sense? Life’s not perfect - it never is - but it makes sense. It’s not a view completely saturated with rainbows and blue skies but the clouds in the past and on the horizon ahead seem necessary parts of the vast landscape - the awe inspiring landscape.
That was dinner two weeks ago today.
We talked. Two adults without kids. We looked back on our five years in the music business and thought out loud about what might be next, about all the great possibilities already knocking. Book deals. Mission trips. Overseas living. Painting again. More music.
And more dinners together.
EVentually the trail of remembrance led beyond Nashville, back to Texas where we first met. Nostalgia birthed gratitude greater than any trepidation of today. We relaxed. Together. Smiled.
Peace.
After thirds on sweet tea we paid our bill, drove across the street to Barnes and Noble, bought some hot chocolate and sat on the floor between walls of books and talked some more. That’s when Becky remembered a book she’d wanted to buy for the kids and scurried off to find it, leaving me alone for five minutes.
Five minutes. That’s all. That’s all it took to stop the party and change me forever. That was two weeks ago today.
[I’ve turned off the ability to post comments for now.]
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