Continued on tumblr

Continuing my tale of sin and stupidity (and hope for redemption) on Tumblr. May God be glorified, one way or the other.

Big day yesterday. Came clean to Mrs. VoW before going to church at the aforementioned PCA church. She had to pry it out of me; apparently my poker face is not everything I thought it was.

She was justifiably upset, but handled it well. Coolly. She's doing the give-me-rope thing. "I gave up on raising our children with shared liberal values a long time ago, so it's not like I'm so disappointed about that. I'm just upset that you lied to me."

Now we get to my favorite part of the cycle: I will attempt to be a real live full-blooded Christian for as long as it lasts, all the while fighting a sense of... wait for it... GUILT. GUILT? GUILT?! Of all the stuff that's supposed to come with the "repent and come to Jesus" package, I thought guilt was the ONE thing we got to see the back of?! "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus," right?

Am I doing this wrong? Well of course I would be, but it's God supposed to be doing it. So is He not really doing it?

Am I (once again) ruining everything for a mirage?

Lord Jesus strengthen my faith. Don't let me be a jerk, and don't let me backslide, and don't let all this be for nothing. Bring us home, really home.

Bad work day today. I've been taken away from what I'm supposed to be doing by worrying, by coffee shops, by blogging. Note to self: follow the above link as many times as as necessary tomorrow, but don't blog. Just work. Get the project done. OK? OK.

She calls from Target to ask if I need anything. She is bright and cheery. Friendly. She is confident we are on the same side. No clue she has been lied to.

The revelation of the lie will be bad enough. What the lie was hiding will be poison to her. She will still call from Target. But the tone behind her words will be resentment. I am raising your daughters, it will say, to be good people, in spite of you. You cannot be trusted. You are on the wrong side.

Question: why on earth would somebody blog about this stuff? It's so private. I would be absolutely mortified (as would my wife, I'm sure) if anyone I knew ever found this blog and put two and two together. So why risk it?

Answer: I'm lonely. Really, really lonely. There is NO ONE I trust to discuss this with, NO ONE I can ask for counsel. I am in the quantum space between two absolutely opposed worldviews. I know and love people on either side of the divide, but nobody who's floating in the dark chasm between.

I don't need advice. I need the blood of Christ. Or else psychiatric help. See? There it is again: total quantum separation.

Well I know which one makes for better songs, better stories.

I should just own up. I need to. It's the right thing to do.

But my faith is weak. It's a silly child's faith. She'll cry her hurt, then speak in her reasonable voice, and I will search my heart, and I will realize that I am hurting her for a mirage, a Freudian grasp at immortality or some such thing, and the whole beautiful Narnian dream will evaporate, and I'll be left with nothing but the self-loathing.

That's right: I'm not firmly-enough convicted to risk hurting my wife's feelings even in obedience to the commandment of God. But I am firmly-enough convicted to complain about it in a blog. I hold on to the pretense because it's the pretense or simple nihilism, I guess. I once heard John Piper say, "Until you realize that life is a war, and the stakes are your soul, you will probably play at Christianity." Indeed. Or until you can somehow stop doubting that you have a soul.

It was an interesting weekend. I went to a PCA church a few miles from my house. Big church, maybe not quite "mega". I went to the early service, but it was still pretty full.

The circumstances that got me there were a bit odd. I'd been thinking of going for a while, but I didn't (and still don't) want to have the fight with my wife. I thought about going clandestinely; since the early service at the PCA church is only a half hour later than the service I usually attend at the nearby Episcopal church, I could "get away" with that, but didn't like the hypocrisy and dishonesty involved. So by Sunday morning, showered, dressed and running late for early service at my usual spot, I had talked myself out of adventuring elsewhere.

But for some reason no one was at my usual spot. No one. Not a car.

So I kept driving. Why not, right? Weighed my options. Turn around, go home. Surpise hon, no church today, let's just hang out; OK. Or I could pick up the cell phone; looks like they cancelled, gonna try the PCA church, we'll fight when I get home, OK? OK. Well, why do that? Just go check it out. Maybe it's not for me. Maybe no more will need to be said about it. Because it's only the deepest longing of my heart to go there, right? (Well, the deepest longing besides avoiding ANY ACTUAL IN-DEPTH CONVERSATION WITH THE PERSON I'M MARRIED TO. But let's move on.)

Predictably, the service was moving and hit home. Predictably, it would be the Sunday they served communion so it would run long and I'd have to sit there and think about whether I was "supposed" to take communion here. Unpredictably, I sat there in my khakis and sweater amongst the suburban Republicans while they passed the bread and wine around and I had to work hard not to actually sob and I wished the girl up front would just stop playing that damn violin so I could just catch my breath for a second. I let the body and blood pass me by because I couldn't face them. I felt that if I took that step I couldn't hold on to maybes and what-ifs anymore. Couldn't lie to Mrs. VoW and to myself about what I really want to be. (Or am I lying to myself about that now? Oh, it's slippery, it is...) Most of all I'd be forced to tell her where I'd been and what I'd been doing.

I had this crazy idea of going up to the deacons after the service and asking them to hide me there in the church. "Call my wife and tell her where I am and that I love Jesus and I won't come home unless she's nice about it!" A theoretically grown man with children, having thoughts like this about his family. This is a nice woman. She's not an ogre. But her tears, her disappointment, are a miserable scourge to me. I see her pain and I just hate myself.

So of course I didn't hang around to talk to deacons or anyone else. I didn't quite run over anyone getting to my car and drove home as quick as I could, trying unsuccessfully to prepare myself to discuss my visit to the church with Mrs. VoW. She called my cell as I was driving up our street to inquire what was taking so long and that broke any nerve I might have worked up during the drive home, so I made up some story about a long-running service and socializing afterwards and looked her in the eye and told myself I was being a nice guy.

Well, in a word, oops. And then Tim Challies goes and publishes something like this. And I realize the nature of the problem, vividly, unmistakably: sinful disbelief. I think it's fair to say I don't trust God to take care of Mrs. VoW and the little Vessels.

I know! I'll just start trusting God more! Here goes! NNNNGGGGGHHHH.......

Okay, taking a few deep breaths.

Here are the facts as I understand them.

1. The doctrines of grace, as given in the Bible and summarized by the confessional Reformed faith-- Westminster will do-- are the most consistent, believable way of understanding reality that I've yet found. To wit, God made man to love and serve him; man fell; God became man to redeem us by his perfect life, death and resurrection; and those who are able by the grace of God to believe this will thereby escape hell and see God. I'm squidgy around the edges on Biblical inerrancy, or maybe my "hermeneutic" is somehow "postmodern". Maybe I'm spiritually immature and scared of denouncing sin. I'll be working that out here. Even in my pride or sin or stupidity or whatever, I know enough (or am desperate and ignorant enough) to give the Bible "accurate to a first approximation" in terms of political history, and "accurate to a high degree" for biography of Jesus, and "rings true" to the content of the epistles.
   
2. I've got to stop whining and agonizing. It's doing nobody any good. If the agony is God's little message, great. I'm reading it. You're getting through, Lord! I need you! I have not acknowledged you as Lord in all the areas I need to. Please help! Meanwhile, I lack the faith or cojones or whatever it takes to have another confrontation in my family on this point. I'm a bad "leader" and for now I have to live with that.
   
3. There is stuff I can do. There is truth I can tell without appearing openly hostile. There are ways I can love my family, friends and coworkers sacrificially even as I go to my mamsy-pamsy mainline Protestant church, study the scriptures, and go about my daily routine looking for strength to improve, to walk in greater holiness and knowledge of Christ.
   

And I'm gonna. How's that for positive? I hear that He won't quench a smoldering wick or crush a bruised reed. So Merry Christmas, all you other folks out there who wonder if you can quite believe, or if you've quite believed enough. Let's pray and hope and maybe 2011 will begin to tell.

It's a year later.

I'm a year older.

Otherwise... No change. Unless you count the oscillations, which have pretty much proceeded as described in previous posts. And which, strangely, always feel sincere at the time. A month ago I was sincerely an atheist. Today I am sincerely open to the reality of God and Christ and the inerrancy of scripture. As a friend of mine likes to say, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! And when will it end?

"How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."

- Elijah, I Kings 18:21

I'm getting tired of the arc. Is all this Jesus stuff just wish fulfillment? A way to feel more important than I am? If not, why doesn't a good woman (yes, I know, ALL have sinned and fallen short blah blah ad nauseum) like my wife believe? I'm a terrible witness. That much I am certain of.

A lot happened since my last post. I got in contact with the local OPC pastor. He advised me to go to a nearby PCA church. I should have listened, but instead went for the dramatic and begged my wife to come with me to said OPC church, to hear what I hoped would be a clear presentation of the gospel. She refused and took my urgency wrong. I actually held her down at one point, trying to get her to hear me. Can't believe I did this, but I did. My oldest daughter walked in on the scene. I wanted to kill myself, and actually came near doing it the next day.

The subsequent weeks were a replay of the last time I tried to do the OPC thing back in '06. Mrs. VoW started out trying to keep her distance and not get in my way. Then she started to argue and hector and accuse me of betraying her. I gave in, I gave up. I convinced myself that I had been wrong, that no merciful God would demand that I trouble my family this way. I denied God and Jesus. Again.

Not immediately, though. I went through the arc. Back to Episcopal church. Then back to skepticism. Then back to something akin to Ayn Rand's objectivism. This was helped along by a visit to a Buddhist temple in China, where I saw people worshipping or praying (or whatever) in ways that were so obviously (to me) pure superstition that all religion started to look bogus. Incense and drama and helpless people trying to control something by petitioning God: could be Christianity too, I thought.

But I don't really believe that. In my "religion" as in other aspects of my life, I can't believe I'm a product of brute forces; or if I am, they have produced something that has a deeply-ingrained illusion of its own purposefulness. But I'm no child of God, either. Jesus has left me behind. My wife has made it clear that an expression of belief in Biblical Christianity on my part will also be taken as an expression that I want to be alienated from her-- that I have rejected the core of what makes her who she is. She wasn't threatening divorce, not even threatening to withhold sex. She was, however, threatening to withhold the intimacy, the sympathy that we have generally shared in our marriage.

Several weeks ago we had a conversation where I told her that I had become skeptical of Christianity; that my China experience, combined with the fact that the supposedly-living Christ is never available for interviews, combined with my poor experience and track record in my efforts to be a Christian, had left me pretty much bereft of my previous faith.

Then I got sick. Something put me down for a week and a half, maybe two weeks, with nausea and headaches. (My doctor's current theory is gallbladder problems, but that's not material to the story.) I was reminded of my helplessness. I prayed a little, because nothing else helped.

And then I felt a little better. I'm not stupid. It's probably coincidence. But I realized that either way, I didn't totally disbelieve. I told my wife I thought I might like to go back to church, after all. Episcopal church. The church that's not a threat to her. She's all about that.

But the arc is always the same. If Christ is real, then he's real. He's not relative, he's not therapy, he's the Lord, and he commands us to do a number of things, some of which (to be honest) mainline Protestantism blithely ignores. I can't stand on its slippery slopes. I'll either slide down to the hell of materialistic nihilism or else to what is frankly, to me, the slightly different hell called the Lordship of Christ. I don't mean to be heretical just for effect here: it is painful beyond anything I've ever experienced to suffer my wife's distrust, disapproval, disrespect; and I have seen time and again that this is the sure consequence of professing Biblical belief.

And here I sit. Halted, helpless, and crying out to Jesus when I can bring myself to believe he is what I've always been told he is.