Fantasia

13.  Fantasia

 

fan·ta·sia (n):  an instrumental composition in a free and improvisatory style sometimes based on well-known melodies.  Also called fantasy.[79]

 

“Men live in a fantasy world.  I know this because I am one, and I actually

receive my mail there.”[80]

 

 

The darkness in my life made Vicki feel insecure and overwhelmed.  The lone bright spot was Chris’s spiritual hunger.  He wasn’t being swept up in the inherent peer pressure that exists in some church youth groups, the expectations of a girlfriend, or even by being encouraged by us.  He was opening his heart to God in unprecedented ways, and in his own, unique way – slowly, deliberately, and bravely.  From time to time he’s talk to Vicki about the changes occurring in his young heart.  He was trying to wrap his mind around the love of God, and what it meant to enter into it.

Because Chris was seriously considering his spiritual future he began to pragmatically look at other things in store for him.  It would be four years before he would graduate from high school, but he began to focus on college requirements.  He also started his scholastic wrestling career.

Vicki partnered with Chris at his request; he confessed he didn’t have the discipline required to do what needed to be done academically.  She delighted in helping him.

May 11, 1994

Chris and I went to a college preparation night, and they said they best way to prepare for SATs was read, read, read.  Also, turn off the TV.   Lord, help me to have the courage to do what best for my children, even when it makes me unpopular.  “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.”  (Proverbs 12:1)

 

July 6, 1994

What an unbelievable month!  I’ve read the book, “Men In Mid-Life Crisis”[81] and realized that that is exactly what Lowell is going through.  I truly never thought it would happen to him (us).  I guess I thought I could love him enough – that he’d always feel secure and happy.  But he’s been miserable for the last year – especially the last 6 months.  He’s been depressed, angry, discouraged.  (This book scared me to death, and pointed out that even the strongest Christians can succumb to this “curse,” and desert their church and families.  It seems the only thing a wife can do through it all is be patient, loving, and very forgiving and pray, pray, pray!)

Now … on top of this … Brandon was caught shoplifting and is banned from the Mall.  He’s been slowly drifting away from the Lord and his Christian friends, and we’re very concerned.  We had a very emotional, tearful talk around the dinner table, where he asked for forgiveness and we told him it would take time to rebuild the trust that has been destroyed.  We prayed together as a family before bedtime for the first time in at least a year!

Lord, I believe you’ve given me Jeremiah 29, 11-14 for Brandon.  I haven’t lost hope.  A mother can never lose hope for her children … or she has lost everything. 

And I haven’t lost hope for my marriage.  I know that You are able to carry us through all this, and bring us out whole.

Lowell told the boys that the most important thing in the world to him is making sure that all four of us spend eternity together … that he would give up the church and anything else if it threatened our relationship as a family.

Lord, I trust You to give us the wisdom we need to make sure that we all see You face to face.

Chris was wonderful tonight.  He talked to Lowell and me for an hour or more, and reassured us that he was doing okay in his life right now.  He really has been growing spiritually, and making a lot of right decisions lately.

Thank You, Lord, that it seems that only ONE boy at a time usually has problems.  I think You know we have our limits.   Please give us wisdom.  We need YOU so much right now.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you.  You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.  I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will bring you back from captivity.’”

 

Chris was asking for help and maturing.  I, on the other hand, was trying to keep my nose above water, flailing and fighting the current of melancholy and the rapids of hopelessness.  I was totally unpredictable.  One day I’d be rational and the next day behave illogically and franticly.

In order to protect herself Vicki insulated her heart, as best she could, from my weirdness.  When she did she felt safe.  My depression was telling me that she no longer seemed to need me, and I was more right than I knew.  She was carving out a life of her own because, frankly, I wasn’t fun to be around.  That’s when I began to ask the questions most men ask when they’re in mid-life:  “Is this all there is?  Why am I killing myself for people who don’t really give a rip about me?  Where’s the money?  Where are the rewards – the accolades and acknowledgments?  Does anyone care about ME?”

My eldest son no longer met my expectations.  While I was so imperfect I expected more from him.  Vicki and Chris were uncomfortable around me.  As a result I felt worthless, directionless, and empty.

Most men, when they begin trying to deal with a mid-life crisis mindset begin to figure, “If I can’t count on others to make me happy, I’ll do it myself.”   I’ve talked with a bunch of them since my crisis experience and this line of reasoning is common.  That why some men reward themselves with a new car.  I couldn’t do that.  No money.  Other men reward themselves with a new wife … or a mistress.  I could have but I didn’t do that.  Two things were true and I new it:  God wouldn’t like it, and no church would hire me in the future.

Vicki began to notice more danger signs on August 17, 1994.

I talked to Lowell tonight about this “mid-life crisis” he’s been going through for the last year.  He’s really been depressed a lot, and questioning his value to God and men.  It’s been very scary and difficult, but I felt like God was speaking through me tonight as I told him how I saw his life right now.

I truly believe that God is preparing him for his next step up in ministry. He’s been pastoring Trinity for 8 years now, and he’s developed a bit of a rut.  He’s comfortably settled into a routine of ministry.  He has a style, and he’s pretty good at it.  But lately he’s been feeling very much like a failure and a phony in his ministry.  There is an unsettledness that makes him want to run away from it all.

I believe God had to create or allow this feeling of failure and lack of confidence in order to shake him out of his comfortable rut.  It’s time to move on to a higher level of ministry where he can’t rely on natural ability to carry him, but he must narrow his focus to few areas, and allow God’s supernatural abilities to empower him.  As the church grows he can’t continue to do all that he’s doing now or he will surely burn out.  He must seek God’s will and discover the areas God wants to strengthen him in by His Holy Spirit.  (I believe, more than every, that he’s being prepared to fulfill the vision he received for Trinity.  No one can build a supernatural church with natural abilities.)

Lowell!!  It’s time to get out of your comfort zone and allow God to do supernatural things through you.  He has to shake you to your very core to prepare you to get desperate enough to rely totally on Him!  (Jeremiah 29:11-14)

 

I began to fantasize.  Daily.  I dreamed of growing my hair long (concealing my identity).  Then I’d buy a motorcycle (cheap form of transportation), drive to San Diego (a warm climate far, far away from Richmond, Virginia), and live out of trashcans (literally, all the “junk food” I could ever need).

I know that sounds goofy, but I wanted away from any and all pressure.  I was done with stress.  It was killing me.  I couldn’t keep everyone happy.  I didn’t want the responsibility of fathering any more.  And being a husband wasn’t working real well for me at that time.

It was then that goofy gave way to dangerous.  Because I wanted OUT of life’s duties and responsibilities I started to fantasize about death.  I daydreamed while behind the wheel that I could make pulling into a tree at 80 miles per hour look like an accident.  I wondered if anyone would miss me.

I wanted to quit the dance.

In Jeremiah 18 God’s relation to man is pictured as “artist-to-artifact” – Potter to clay.  C. S. Lewis noted that we are, not metaphorically but in truth, “… a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.”[82]

At this time I was tired of the Potter’s rough handling of my heart … all the rubbing and scraping, pushing and forming He was visiting upon me.  I wished God’s design for my life was less glorious. 

My depression came to a head in Florida.  Vicki recorded on September 14, 1994:

[Here’s the account of September 1-7.]  We drove to Florida for Gary’s wedding.  Went to West Palm Beach first, then on to Tampa.  The first 3 days were horrible.  Lowell was so distant, so quiet.  We were together 24 hours a day, yet I’ve never felt so far from him.  It was like he’d given up hope.

On days 2 and 3 I took long walks on the beach … and God was so faithful to me.  I had such powerful prayer times.  He spoke HOPE into my spirit.  He showed me that we’re (God and me) involved in intense “spiritual warfare” [involving] Lowell and the boys.  I prayed a powerful prayer of deliverance over the boys and Lowell.  (Brandon was significantly different from that day on.  He became more communicative and open again, like his old self.) 

[God] also showed me that I have a great responsibility … to model Christ’s love to my husband.  [Lowell] has an incorrect view of God’s love for him because of events in his background.  [God also showed me] that I am the closest thing to God’s “perfect” love in his life.  Marriage was created to give us a picture (though poor) of Christ’s love for the Church (His “bride”).  If I am judgmental and unforgiving, that’s how Lowell will see God’s love.  But if I can rely on the Holy Spirit and can live out 1 Corinthians 13, then it will help Lowell come through this time with a better understanding of God’s love for him.  I have been chosen to be a mirror of that kind of love to him.

It’s like I have a mission now.  And Christ gave me a new hope and confidence that we would make it through this time.

I don’t understand why it’s happening.  It’s been the loneliest time in my life, but I have to find my strength in the Lord through this.  I can’t lean on Lowell now because he needs to lean on me.  It’s okay, though, because I’m going to grow in this and find my place in Christ like I never have before!  I can no longer ride on Lowell’s spiritual coattails, but I have to develop my own place in Christ.  His grace is sufficient for our greatest needs.

 

Vicki took a walk that changed her life and mine.  She walked down the beach at West Palm one person and returned a different one. 

Months later she told me what happened about a mile down the beach.  While she was walking she was complaining to God, out loud, saying, “Lord, do something!!  Put him or me out of our misery.”

God interrupted:  “Lowell doesn’t understand how much I love Him.”  And with that God pulled back a curtain in time and showed her Jesus, His Son, on the Cross.  This was years before Mel Gibson produced The Passion of The Christ.  Vic told me it was the scariest, most vivid picture of Christ she had ever seen, and it broke her heart.  It was then that Jesus, looking down and blinking away the blood from a split brow, spoke to her, through His torment, and asked her, “For Lowell’s sake, will you join Me?  Here?  On the Cross?”

She understood that she could no longer wait for someone else to come to my rescue.  Even God.  He had chosen her to do His work.  She had been chosen to jump into the ocean of my pain, and she had to, sink or swim, try with God’s help to be more loving and self-sacrificing toward me.

I didn’t believe ANYONE loved me unconditionally, or ever had.  My parents.  Vicki.  Not even God.  For me, love was something I earned, based strictly on my most recent performance.  I had to work to deserve love.  I had come to believe that I had to be “perfect” in order to receive love from anyone …  everyone – and that included God. 

Vicki’s “mission impossible” was to show me Christ-on-the-Cross love – the kind of love I could never earn or deserve.

She walked down the beach an angry, hurt woman.  An hour later returned and sat in a beach chair on my right.  I remember her reaching out to take my hand.  I couldn’t respond.  I didn’t have the energy, so I didn’t take it.  I just left my hand on the beach towel, like some lifeless thing.  I also remember thinking, cowardly, that it wouldn’t be long before Vicki would tire of me, give me my walking papers, and show me the door.

Instead of pulling her hand away, huffing out her frustration at another failed attempt to resurrect my dead feelings toward her, Vicki placed her hand ON mine.  And left it there.

She did it all day long, stroking my hand or touching my shoulder.  She’d brush up against me and smile.  Once I thought, “She’s toying with me, playing with my head!”  I turned away once or twice, but she kept coming back for more.

Slowly my heart and hardness began to melt, and I mean slowly.  Days went by.  Then weeks.  And then months.  September.  October.  November.

Vicki didn’t just have me to deal with either.  She had the other Two Amigos, too.

September 22, 1994

I can’t stop crying.  I can hardly see to write.  I came upon some writings of Brandon’s that were so dark and desperate.  What has happened??  His anger, even hatred, against God and the church are so frightening.  He told Lowell he doesn’t believe in Jesus or God … [he feels] he’s been brainwashed, and is rebelling against it.

How could this have happened?  I fear for his soul and even his life.  How is this possible?

Show him You’re real, God!!  Answer his questions, and reveal Yourself to him.  Help us to know what to do for him.

What did we do WRONG??  You are powerful enough to overcome all obstacles and draw him back.  I have to trust You or I have no hope.

I remember Jeremiah 29:11-14.

 

Vicki and I feared we were losing our eldest son.  In the middle of loving me back to health, she had to tap into God’s love for Brandon.  She seemed to be the only one that had the energy … and a reservoir of love … to draw from.  

Two encouraging quotations came her way in the midst of this double crisis.  Her life began to embody the truths found in them:  “To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others,”[83] and “Love is everything it’s cracked up to be … It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.”[84]

Because Vicki loved God “deeply in one direction,” and because she knew love was “worth fighting for,” God constantly renewed and refreshed Vicki with His love and energy, and blended wisdom into both.

Shortly after she began giving up her life for mine and for Brandon’s she came across a very special book, one born out of one man’s life-altering loss.   Sheldon Vanauken wrote about God’s heart:

September 28, 1994

I just finished a wonderful book – A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken.[85]  It’s about an amazing love between 2 people … a search for Christ … an untimely death … and love lost.  It moved me so.  I’m still absorbing the full meaning of it all for me.

He (Vanauken) talks of the necessity of losing “youthful love.” 

[Vanauken often wrote to C. S. Lewis, one of his dearest friends.  Lewis wrote the following back to Vanauken not long after Davy, Vanauken’s wife, passed away.] “I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in which men lose the happiness of youthful love.  For I believe it must always be lost in some way; every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and rebirth.  But far more have missed the rebirth.”[86]

That’s what seems to be happening to [Lowell and me].  Our youthful love, that even a year ago we spoke of with pride and deep satisfaction as being in a better condition than any other couple we knew, has been wounded and seems to be dying.  I feel like I’m grieving a lost friend … in fact, a best friend.  I keep remembering how deeply in love we were, how much joy we found in just being with one another.  We always looked forward to long trips in the car because of the wonderfully deep conversations we’d have.  It was like a catching up with one another … a re-uniting of goals and common direction.  But our last trip to Florida for Gary’s wedding was so empty … and so lonely.

When I first met Lowell I had a wonderful SHELL that I could crawl into whenever life got too unpleasant.  I had developed quite a talent for protecting myself from unpleasant emotions.  I was very much like Vivian Leigh (Scarlet) in Gone With The Wind when she would say, “I can’t think about that today.  I’ll think about that tomorrow!”  Only tomorrow never came.

Then … things changed.  Over the years Lowell very lovingly pulled me out of my shell.  He showed me such extraordinary love and tenderness that I became willing to risk opening my heart completely to him.  I began to experience freedom in my emotions that I never knew was possible – not only with him but also in every area of my life.  He truly awakened the deepest part of me, and it was a wonderful thing – to feel a passion for love and for life.

Lowell was a man so full of passion that it couldn’t help but rub off on you.  I loved it … and I loved him completely.

But now it hurts to love him.  It seems to take such an effort for him to love me … and he seems so tired all the time.  He’s tired of people … tired of life … and tired of love.  Is this really “mid-life crisis,” or is it youth love dying? 

The problem is that it hurts so much … and I can’t turn it off.  It hurts to remember “the heights from which we have fallen.”  He awakened the passion in me and I can’t find my shell again.  It seems to have shattered, and there’s nothing there to protect me anymore from the pain of loving.  No shell – just lots of tears.

But what about what C. S. Lewis said – that youth love must always die and be resurrected?  I think he means that if our natural love is so consuming that our primary focus is on our lover (and not on God), then it should die … and be reborn with God first and our love second.

Maybe this terrible pain … this dying love … will result in a holy purpose.

Maybe we loved too deeply and too completely.  I must admit that if I had to weigh what was best for our love against what was best for God … our love would have won.  Lowell has been the most important thing in my life.  We always took great pride in telling one another that our love for each other was stronger than even our love for our children.  Perhaps it was even stronger than our love for our Lord …

As long as I could touch Lowell and feel what we shared so deeply, our love seemed more real somehow than my love for Christ.

But now Lowell “feels” so far away.  Maybe it’s time (past time) for me to put our love in its proper place – in submission to my love for Christ.

It certainly has been a less self-centered love lately.  I’m no longer getting my needs met, and I find myself constantly asking for God’s help to love Lowell with a Christ-like love … this sense of laying down my life for him.

Maybe this poor dying love will be reborn in a more Christ-centered love.  I hope and pray and trust that something good will come of it.