Chapter 3 | Into the Light
This is from a series of blog posts I wrote back in 2020 to share the background for what was to come.
My eyes were opened one Sunday morning in January 2018.
Our family went to church as normal, except this Sunday we visited a new church where my friend Paul attended. Paul had invited us to come to church with them earlier, but it just hadn’t worked out that way until now.
One of the forces that kept me from visiting this church earlier was fear. In the culture I grew up in, there was a powerful fear of “new beliefs” that could lead you astray (lead you out of the conservative religious structure).
A lot of different forces came together that morning to wake me to the nature of Love and the power of Love to change our lives. The Spirit was guiding me of course, and Pastor Jamie preached in a way that really resonated with me. Another factor was that I was becoming more desperate in my seeking of God, or at least I was becoming more aware of my need for help. I was self-destructing and I knew it.
I was on a path that I knew would eventually cost me my marriage and my family - possibly within the year. It was terrifying to feel like there was a part of me that I couldn’t understand, couldn’t live without, and couldn’t control and it was dragging me into hell.
Crash
A few months before, I was in a motorcycle crash. A pickup truck rear-ended me at a stop light less than two miles from home. Fortunately, I wasn’t hurt badly. The bike wasn’t as lucky- it was totaled. The accident shook me up though. Initially, I brushed off the crash- I even went to the office later that day.
The motorcycle crash didn’t hurt me physically but it ripped a gaping hole in the thin veneer of ‘okay-ness’ that I used to hide my secret life. It was as if the mental constructs I had erected in my mind that allowed me to live with myself in that state had been knocked off of their foundations by the trauma.
That Sunday morning I was looking for help. I was looking for some way out. With apologies to Johnny Lee, I was looking for Love in exactly the right place that morning. And I found It.
Or it found me.
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The Good Shepherd
When a sheep gets separated from the flock and it becomes aware that it’s lost, it doesn’t run around looking for the flock. It lays down and cries out for help. A good shepherd knows his sheep and when one cries out in distress, the shepherd leaves the rest of the flock and runs towards the lost sheep. He scoops the lost sheep up and brings it safely home and tends to its wounds.
That was me on that Sunday. A lost sheep, crying out for help.
The Good Shepherd did just what he said he would do. He ran to me and lifted me up in the arms of love.
