I remember a line from Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts’s character says, “The bad stuff is so much easier to believe.” It makes sense that Satan would use the bad stuff about us to keep us feeling less than what the Lord has planned for us to be. The Enemy has done a masterful job of convincing us through media that we are not, and can never be, the ideals that our culture has set up as symbols of success.
We read Bible verses that tell us we can give God thanks because we are fearfully and wonderfully made, we are the light of the world, we are a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, and we will shine like stars in the sky. We can read the blessings from the best book ever written. We can even believe them for others. But sometimes it’s hard to conceive that these verses were meant for us. Why? Maybe because we tend to see ourselves through eyes of betrayal, hurt, and rejection, which forces us to believe that striving for approval and perfection is the answer.
A while back, I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. We talked for a few minutes, and he said, “You know what I remember most about you?”
My mind began to race. What had I said to this guy that was rude or unkind?
He said, “Once, you asked me if I would run the media program for the lyrics at church. I was scared to do it. And instead of forcing me to do it by insisting I was capable and could do it, you said, ‘Ya know, you do have permission to say no.’ That has freed me up on many occasions to not be bound by my need to always say yes.”
What a small, insignificant thing I’d said. It had become a blessing for that man.
We have no idea how one small word of affirmation can change a life permanently. Interestingly, in an unrelated incident, a worship pastor said I’d once told him the same thing. It set him free to not feel responsible to say yes to everything.
Blessings are obviously a big deal in the Bible. When Jacob wrestled with God, he refused to let God go until God blessed him.
Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.
—1 Peter 3:9 NIV
I wonder if there is neutral ground between curse and blessing or if everything is either a blessing or a curse in varying degrees of power.
I may be walking down a street and see children clutching their parents’ hands and feel a prompting from the Holy Spirit to pray for those children. I quickly, quietly pray the Lord will bless them and place them in places where they will rise up to be world-changers for his glory. I may pass an acre of ground and pray the Lord will bless that place and consecrate it for his glory. Sometimes we may give a blessing to someone that is a direct word from God that will set that person’s life on a path straight into a relationship with the Lord.
I serve as a volunteer mentor at a prison. One of my guys there is Mark. He’s in prison for murder. Although the death was an accident, he was strung out on drugs and alcohol during his interrogation. His lies and deceit after the accident sealed his conviction. Mark wrote out his inventory when he went through a Celebrate Recovery step-study several years ago. It was 320 pages long. He gave me permission to write his story in novel form. One of the chapters is hard. I believe the Lord spoke directly to what Mark needed to hear the most.
It’s all still pretty surreal to me, looking back. Within my first week in county jail, I was placed in isolation for observation because of my history of suicide attempts. This was all too much for me to withstand. I made another attempt at taking my own life.
This is the one that changed my life forever. Why would you ever put someone on suicide watch and provide the means necessary to kill himself?
When I was locked down, I was provided with all the amenities that the standard inmate is provided upon intake. This included a towel, a mat, a blanket, and a uniform. An inmate on suicide watch is provided none of those things. The suicide smock and a hard concrete bed are as good as it gets.
I was on my third day of lockdown. I decided that I honestly couldn’t take the horror my life had become. I previously told you about two other serious attempts on my own life, which were by hanging. And both failed miserably. I’m not sure why I chose hanging. Maybe it was all I could think of besides blowing my brains out.
By the time I made my first attempt on my own life, I had lost my pistols due to incidents like running into people’s houses and brandishing a weapon like some sort of cowboy. Plus, have you ever seen an attempted suicide by gunshot go wrong? I have. And Lord knows that’s no way to live.
Maybe on some subconscious level, I felt an overwhelming kinship to Judas Iscariot. No loyalties to anyone except myself. And that in itself became too much to withstand. My literary style might lead you to believe that I am making a joke of the situation. Granted, some of the predicaments I have been in are worthy of being made a laughingstock. However, suicide attempts are taboo.
Without this particular incident, though, I’m not sure I would have come to recognize God’s actual existence. I am like doubting Thomas. I thought I believed at one point in my life. Those days were long behind me. It was going to take me seeing God face-to-face before I truly believed.
And that is just what God had in store for me.
I don’t remember a lot about the incident. Just tying the knot in the blanket. The guards left the food slot on the door open. I tied off one end of the blanket through the food slot to the handle on the outside of my cell door. I tied the other end of the blanket around my neck and sat down on the floor.
Strangulation is an unpleasant way to go. But once unconsciousness comes and darkness slips over you, it is peaceful. It’s the period up to the blacking out that is unpleasant. The knowledge you are choking, that your body is starved for oxygen. That’s the hard part. I almost made it. I slipped off into that long good night, that beautiful darkness, only to come to, surrounded by two deputies performing first aid.
The next thing I really remember is the ambulance pulling into the ER and being rolled through the front door on a stretcher. My reality started truly caving in on me when I realized that the ER technicians were putting me in the exact same room where I faced my crime ten days earlier. The same room. Even the same bed.
That’s when the collapse of all things temporal happened. I lost my bearings and began to sob hysterically at my recognition of this place. It felt like some sick joke being played on me. Honestly, it felt like I had entered the first circle of hell. The one Dante forgot to mention. Hell on earth.
In my panic attack, I came to notice several nurses walking in and out of the room. The other patient in the room with me was moved to another location. My police escort and I were the only ones left in this room. All these nurses I noticed were huddled up outside the nurses’ station, which was right outside my room, all talking and pointing in my direction.
Of course, they knew who I was. For a week, I was front-page headlines, every local news broadcast. The fact is, in a small town, news spreads like wildfire. And it burns out slowly. My crisis of faith began, my deus ex machina.
A short, portly man walked into the room, and it was obvious he was the doctor. You can always pick a doctor out from a crowd of nurses. They display a certain take-charge demeanor that gives them away.
This doctor had a very unpleasant look on his face. It was not a look of anger or even resentment. I couldn’t place the emotion, but it was obvious discomfort. I believe it was a form of fear. The fear of facing a monster. The fear Ananias had when God instructed him to go to the apostle Paul and heal his blindness. Even with God on his side, Ananias was afraid of a blind, helpless Paul because his reputation had obviously preceded him.
Such was the case with me. I lay handcuffed to this bed under the supervision of an armed police escort. This doctor knew there was something definitely not right. But he proceeded anyway.
What he said to me changed my life forever.
Now, listen closely. I’m not going to get all “I had a revelation from God” or whatever. But that night, I had myself a good old-fashioned come-to-Jesus meeting in its purest form.
I laugh at Old Testament stories and the misconceptions that movies like The Ten Commandments make about God’s voice. It’s not some booming voice that comes over the intercom like an elementary school principal reading your daily lunch menu and saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Not saying he can’t or he won’t go that route. But I have come to understand, for me, God prefers more subtle ways of communicating, because that is the most effective.
I believe God sends messages through people just like you and just like me.
So this doctor calmly walked up to my bed and looked down on me. He said, “Look, son. I know who you are. And I need you to understand: it’s not your time to go yet. God is not ready for you yet. He has some sort of plan for you. I don’t know what this plan entails. But it’s obvious it does not consist of your dying yet.”
He also informed me that he went to church with the victim’s family and that more people than I could conceive were praying for me specifically. To me, that was as good as showing me the holes in Jesus’s hands and the wound in His side.
I know you probably expected some tunnel with bright lights and a booming James Earl Jones–type voice. And if you were, I’m sorry my encounter with my God has let you down. It was not Wizard of Oz theatrics.
I believe in my heart’s depths that my personal Savior knew precisely what I needed for me to believe. It was Him.
Mark is now a senior counselor for the substance abuse program at the prison and basically the leader over four barracks of inmates. He has completed eight Celebrate Recovery step-studies since I’ve known him and has never, in those eight years, missed one single class.
His dream is to finish college, even in prison, and then pursue his master’s in substance abuse.
I don’t know why the bad stuff is so much easier to believe. It’s not from God. It’s not what he feels about us, and it’s not the truth. If we believe his Word, then we have to arrive in a place of healing. He makes no mistakes. We are created with a purpose, with specific gifts. No one can uniquely do for God what he has planned for us to do. No one!
