In the wake of darkness light prevails, because one person loved someone enough to tell them that they were wrong.
Since exhausting my prayer journal from 2015 and 16, the book I dubbed Sehnnsucht and set about to transcribe here, I have been faced with the bi-weekly conundrum of what to write about, what to set in wax and share with the wider world. I have a file cabinet drawer filled with my journals from the last 10 years, and thought I might glean some insight from a self long-passed. I picked up my oldest journal, from 2011-2012 to see what nuggets I might find. The writing recorded in the pages was miraculous, but for all the wrong reasons.
In those pages I saw first a hopeless romantic waxing poetic about the deeper truths of existence and adamantly defending his faith against an unrealized sociological foe—all the bad, bar-stool arguments against religion straw-manned and cut down in all of their erstwhile glory. The writing began neat and tidy, scrawled with fervent determination the first day on a job when nobody else had bothered to show up on time and this young gentleman was left to his own devices in an office he had no understanding nor preparation for. As the months and following year went by, however, I noticed a shift. The writing, so tidy, so concise, became jumbled and chaotic. Three or four words filling a line that once could hold a sentence. The vehemence in the writer’s stance that he was defending the true faith continued unsullied, but the caliber and coherence of said stance became that of a drunkard, a wraith. A self-assured wise man blathering on about things of which he knew less and less.
Absent context and recorded verbatim in a typed format with uniform font size, I wonder what the world might make of these thoughts. The chipping away of conviction as each month passed, the capitulation to the world system until the final passages reflected a world-view completely agreeable to the most ardent atheist.
I suppose folks might be pleased with such development. The fool-hardy religious child had, it seemed, discovered the truth about the world and adapted as such. He had defanged the Lion of Judah and gone on to present a Gospel that could offend no one. All in a day’s work.
I’ve seen this pattern reflected in the writings of many of my peers who set out those 10 years ago in a similar mindset. They began eager to defend the faith, but along the way capitulated to the world and gave ground to compromise and ultimately untruths, all the while trumpeting their triumph over the nonsense of ages past in light of their newfound enlightenment. I cannot speak to my colleagues personal faith walks, but I can speak to mine, because the Lord saw fit to cut it right short. You see, these entries were miraculous, yes, but context is the key to understanding why.
I know full well where my heart was during the months I’ve described. I know what I did during those months, the drugs that I took, the one-night stands, and the sheer hedonism I had partaken of. I know the rough locations and time-frames of the lost weekends, work-weeks, and finally months that transpired as I recorded my descent into the “deeper truths”. I further know the lies I told myself each and every day from the fall of 2011 until the spring of 2013 when the loaded revolver in my hand seemed a more fitting answer to my hunger after truth than anything that I had been pursuing. “Tomorrow will be better,” a daily mantra, “hang in there,” another, “the night is darkest before the dawn,” I knew my cliches down pat. Beyond those, I devised my own: “church folks are so damned judgmental, they’ll never understand where I’ve come from, and what’s more, how dare they expect me to adhere to their morality—I wasn’t raised that way, it’s a difference of upbringing.”
You’ll notice the implied virtue in each statement: all is contingent upon luck, and my own wherewithal to wait it out. There was no onus of change on my part, no demand that I better myself. I was, despite my protests to the contrary in my journal entries, relying on the world to change, never my heart nor my actions. Surely, I assured myself, surely God would alter the cosmos to reflect my own morality. Surely God would honor my steadfastness in brokenness, adamantly refusing to present anything remotely resembling a sin to him.
So where’s the miracle? Why are these entries anything more than the ramblings of a self-professed “wise man” swinging a wooden sword at windmills while his own world burns? Because I was the writer. I was the man. I was the fool and I can recognize my foolishness for what it was. I see the failure of logic and morality behind each entry and can disavow each and every line in the present.
More than this, however, I know where I was headed in the midst of it all, and know the consequences. That I emerged from this lifestyle at all and can live to speak out against it is, in itself, a miracle.
I credit God for the miracle, above anything else. God saw my heart throughout it all. Christ sat beside me during each of the damned rituals I partook of in the meantime, and the Holy Spirit cried out day in and day out that something needed to change. But how? How could anything change when I was unwilling to listen to the Divine calling? A wise teacher once said that God speaks in different ways in different seasons. A way that he calls each of us in a community, however, is through other believers. And this is precisely how he got my attention.
Where was I when the Lord called me from damnation to salvation? Pre-2013, I had two answers, the first that I had always just “believed in God,” the other that “God became real to me after a suicidal episode in 2007, and that was when I believed,” my answer now is simple: back on that lonely road, I-16 between Savannah and Dublin, Georgia, headed home for Atlanta from college.
It wasn’t quite the final ride home from the semester, I know that because I returned with sermons blaring from my speakers and a desire to convert my unbelieving girlfriend. It was close to the final drive, however, because I had taken to wearing flip flops in the spring months and was completely assured of myself…until I wasn’t.
The months preceding this experience had been harrowing: I had set out in November of 2012 with a successful Kickstarter campaign and $12,000 of crowd-funded capital plus my own savings to realize my dream: the production of a feature-length motion picture. By April 20 of 2013, our designated release date chosen so as to coincide with marijuana user’s favorite holiday, I was a shell of a man. I hadn’t slept the week leading up the release, pouring over second after second, frame after frame of the 90-minute movie until I was confident that we were releasing the best possible product. When we finally released the picture, I fell into bed and didn’t get up for several days.
One of my producers, my best friend and future best man at my wedding, had been in touch during this time. He had shown a great deal of loyalty and resilience during production, quitting his full-time job and foregoing the security of a paycheck in order to realize my dreams of “going Hollywood.” He had slept on my floor and eaten what I could bring from the campus cafeteria for several months while we wrapped filming, and in the despair that such a situation inevitably brings, had re-discovered his faith.
We were recording the commentary for the movie in Atlanta a week or so after the movie’s release and stepped out for a smoke. I had always talked a big game about my faith and God’s faithfulness, and this night was no different. “Preston man,” I said, “I can’t believe it, but we’re finally here. The movie’s done, and I can’t wait to see what God has in store for us.”
Preston was quiet.
“What?” I asked.
It took him a long while to formulate his thoughts. I expected a sermon, but his response was simple enough, and all the more convicting: “Thorne, I don’t think God’s all that happy with either of us, and anything that we’ve done here.”
I was thunderstruck. How could he say this? We had been fighting this battle for months now, and now that we were on the other side, we were going to capitulate that we were in the wrong all the while?
He continued: “I’ve thought about it, I’ve talked about it with my parents and grandparents, and the fact is: I can’t show this movie to anyone I really care about. My poor Mimi would have a heart-attack if she saw what I’ve poured my time and energy into over the last six-months. If this is what it takes to make it in the film industry, I’d rather go back to driving trucks for $15 an hour. At least then I knew where I stood with God and didn’t have to make excuses.”
I too had felt the shame of the project. We had not written the movie but merely adapted other people’s words, and the fact was that the content we were adapting for the screen would not have secured an R-rating if properly submitted to the MPAA. It would have secured an NC-17. Equivalent to an X rating. Pornographic. Reprehensible. But we had done it, right? We had made the movie and were on the other side! The next movie, I assured myself, would be better, and much more God honoring. You’ve got to pay your dues, you’ve got to prove your worth! You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do so you can finally do what you’ve always wanted! Right?
Right?
I ultimately conceded the point.
I could lie to myself about the movie, but Preston was right. We had sold our souls for notoriety, and I was the ringleader of it all. I had lead my friends astray chasing a pipe-dream and securing a fine millstone around my neck in the process.
“You should listen to this,” Preston said, pulling a CD from his coat pocket. “I was in church this past week and this sermon…well, I think God wants you to hear it.”
I looked at the disc: it was a sermon from The Church of The Apostles in Atlanta, the church where Preston had grown up and where I had been an infrequent attender. The sermon itself was on the book of Haggai. I don’t recall the title.
I left the CD in my car for a few weeks after that until it was time for me to return to Atlanta for I know not what reason. On that drive, before I had even gotten out of the Savannah metropolitan area, something compelled me to listen to that CD. I wasn’t prepared for what was to come.
The sermon spoke of the remnant of Israel who had returned under King Zerubbabel from the Babylonian exile to rebuild the temple of God in Jerusalem. It seems that their labors to rebuild were skupped in the face of trying to build up their own homesteads and fortunes, leaving the temple in shambles. The prophet Haggai is sent by God to exhort and convict the people, stating that “they ought not to look to their own homes when the Lord’s home was in shambles,” (my own paraphrasing). Haggai goes on to comfort them, saying that they had begun in the right mindset and spirit, but had been misguided by the world. Softly and tenderly, he calls them to resume their work.
And resume they did. And the Lord blessed their work and their own individual homesteads in the process.
I pulled into my driveway in Atlanta, not a changed man, but a changing man. This sermon spoke to my heart, called out the folly of my own delusions of grandeur, and called me back to a pure pursuit of the Lord.
I began to consume the other sermons on offer from the church. I began to preach in my own fallen fashion to those around me about what I had heard. It cost me friendships, it cost me the relationship I was in at the time (for the best, I assure you,) and ultimately set me on a downward spiral of ego-death that resulted in a season of growth… and ultimately to the journal that started this series. It was my great-awakening. It was my ultimate conversion. It was my salvation story, and it came because a friend cared enough to tell me that I was wrong.
Flash forward three years to 2016. I was back to parent’s house, suffering from extraordinary existential angst, and convicted by God that something had to change. The recurring theme, in prayer, was simple: “community.”
“What community?” I thought defiantly, “those church folks have never understood me, they don’t know where I’ve been or what I’ve done, why should I go back to them?”
You know, truthfully, I don’t know what the answer was to that plea. I just know that God called me to community, and somewhere along the way I responded to that call and went back to my then irregularly-attended Bible study, the same community of believers that had originally lead me to my then girlfriend and now wife. And you know what? It was a blessing all its own.
To be a part of a group of people that held no reservations about one another, but strove as a group to empower each other to become better in the name of Jesus Christ, that was everything that I’d been missing up until that point.
I found a backpack from 2010, my first year in college. It had a torn bandana tied to one of the straps, from my freshman orientation at Baylor College. We had been asked to write down our prayer requests for the years to come and keep the bandanas with us until the prayers were answered. At the time I had written two things: “close the carnival,” a reference to my emotional instability, something that was ultimately solved by my walk with Christ, and “bring me brethren,” an earnest plea for a place where I belonged.
I had never felt that I had “fit in” anywhere. Not in high school where I was too artsy, not in college, an art school, where I was too conservative and religious, not in everyday conversation where both of those failings would rear their ugly head—nowhere.
That is, until I found that group and started showing up every week.
Where once I had feared not having enough friends to fill out a wedding party, I had to cut people from the party itself in lieu of offering them other jobs in the ceremony. I had found belonging, I had found my true family.
I found a true “church,” a place where broken people—engineers, web developers, entrepreneurs, teachers, bankers, artisans, and all other sorts of folks with seemingly nothing in common gathered together to share the one thing—the deepest and truest thing that they did have in common: Jesus Christ.
I’m fairly confident that I burned that bandana. The prayers had been answered.
And I reflect on an entry in my journal from 2015, about standing before a veil beyond which my true family walked without me and I wonder: had this dream finally come to pass?
Yes, I think. Yes.
And so, the New Year came and 2017 and the slow pace of the first financial quarter set in. No clients would call for at least a month, and we had no expenses. It was time to set our hands towards a project more our style, and actually invest in a community of believers.