Mike would discover that in order to overcome despair, he would have to be willing to let go of the things he so feared losing.
— Mark Galli
Michael Wells stood in the kitchen looking at his wife, Joanne, who had just said she needed to talk. Her eyes — sad, fearful, almost panicky — were filled with tears. She started shaking and blurted out, “I don’t think you realize how unhappy I am!”
Mike’s body turned cold. “What do you mean?”
“I’m thinking about moving out.”
The words echoed off the dull tile counters. A heaviness settled on Mike, and his mind went numb. As a Methodist pastor, he had heard parishioners tell him what he thought were clichéd reactions to shocking news. Now they weren’t clichés: This is not happening to me, he thought. I’ll wake up any minute, and it will be a horrible dream.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know you were unhappy.”
Joanne had been seeing a therapist for a year. Mike had asked her what she talked about in her sessions, but she had always answered vaguely: “Oh, about my parents.” Mike had learned that with Joanne the more you push, the more stubborn she became. So he hadn’t pursued it.
“This is not fair!” he now continued. “We should go to therapy together before you move out.”
Through her tears, Joanne just kept repeating, “I’m just so unhappy. I need time alone.” She promised to be gone only three months.
The next few May Saturdays, Joanne went apartment hunting in Austin, Texas, where they lived, and within a month she was ready. The June weekend she planned to move, Mike had previously planned a choir trip for his youth group. That Friday, he and Joanne went to breakfast at a little bakery. Over the aroma of croissants and coffee, they chatted nervously about this and that, and then it came time to go to work. Matter of factly, with promises to keep in close contact, they got into their separate cars and drove their separate ways.
Mike, before turning toward the church, stopped and watched Joanne drive away. “Good-bye, Joanne,” he muttered. He wondered if she would ever come back.
Two days later, Mike was exhausted when he returned home and depressed when he walked inside. He flicked on the lights; half of their belongings were gone; it looked so lonely. He tried to sleep but spent most the night crying silently.
That summer, always blistering in Austin, Mike lived in a cold daze. Though Joanne said she would return in three months, Mike feared she wouldn’t. As a minister, he was ashamed, and he believed his very calling was threatened, so he told only one or two close friends at the church. Sometimes Mike would weep. Sometimes his shoulders and arms would quiver, as if he wanted to hit somebody. Mostly he felt like giving up.
One morning as he stepped into the shower, Mike noticed a black spider on the shower wall. He squirted it with water and knocked it to the stall floor. The water pushed it toward the drain, but the spider tenaciously held on, giving way only slowly. Gallons of water poured over it, but the spider hugged the floor. A minute passed before the spider was finally swallowed by the drain.
That’s when Mike fell apart. He burst into tears and sobbed, as he hadn’t sobbed in years. I’m going crazy, he thought, I’ve totally lost it. I’m out of control. He knew he was that little spider. He had been holding on against tremendous odds, holding on to his dreams, to his life, but he realized it wasn’t enough. Everything he had lived for was about to wash down the drain.
During the next three years, Mike would time and again wrestle despair. He would discover that in order to overcome this enemy, he would have to lose the very things he despaired of losing: his marriage, his ministry, and his faith. And today, he thanks God for it.
Soured Dream
The first to go was the marriage, the hinge of Mike’s life.
A couple of years before Joanne moved out, Mike had happily told people he felt “very married.” They had been together about eight years by then and had just bought a home in suburban Austin. Mike was associate pastor of Aldersgate Methodist, and Joanne worked in personnel at a company that made computer disk drives. And most important, Joanne had finally agreed to have children, even though she feared the surgery it would require.
For Mike, everything was falling into place. Though he’d had many dreams about his career, it was visions of family that most captivated his imagination. A house in the lawn-lined suburbs, a wife, children, a dog — that was life. Joanne’s willingness to get pregnant was the finishing touch.
The year they tried to get Joanne pregnant was one of delighted anticipation. They talked about the baby’s room, whether it should be painted blue or rose, where the crib would go. When Joanne bought a colorful mobile or a furry stuffed animal, they would ooh and aah. And it was a time of making love, the special kind of love a man and a woman share when they are trying to create new life.
Then slowly, almost imperceptively to Mike, things started deteriorating. Joanne became increasingly critical. Mike was too heavy. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He wasn’t home enough. He didn’t pick up after himself.
Mike recognized these faults, and he set about to correct them. He had swelled to 300 pounds, but a diet dropped 100 pounds in a year. He went to therapy, as Joanne had been doing, and tried to better understand his feelings. He skipped some church meetings and rescheduled others so he could be home four or five nights a week. He tried to be more neat around the house.
Mike, of course, had his complaints too. Joanne was beginning to balk about having children. They made love less and less. It got to the point where Joanne didn’t even want to touch Mike; she seemed repulsed by him. Oddly, the more evenings Mike spent at home, the more Joanne needed to work late.
Mike also wanted Joanne to be more open with him, to tell him what was bothering her, but when he asked, she would just clam up. He wanted her to be more willing to admit her own faults: she could give him a seventeen-point litany of his faults, but whenever he would mention merely one fault of hers, she would throw a tantrum.
Between Mike’s sarcasm and Joanne’s reticence, communication broke down.
Joanne would say she didn’t want to talk, that she needed to get in touch with her feelings. Mike would retort in Obi-wan Kenobi fashion, “Luke, go with your feelings.”
“I don’t appreciate your making fun of my beliefs,” she would say.
“Well, I don’t appreciate hiding your feelings from me. You use this ‘I don’t know what I’m feeling’ as an excuse not to talk to me!”
Still, Mike didn’t think their problems were extraordinary, nothing other couples didn’t face. Then came Joanne’s announcement and move.
Dreams for a Quarter
After Joanne left, Mike grieved hard.
He slept on Joanne’s side of the bed. Sometimes he would walk into her closet and just stand there, inhaling her scent, which still lingered there.
Joanne had always folded laundry on Sunday night while she watched Murder, She Wrote. Mike never had much interest in the show, but now on Sunday nights, he did the laundry while watching Murder, She Wrote.
Sometimes he would just amble around the house; it made him feel as if Joanne were still there.
One windy day in the fall, he was digging in his garden. As he planted bulbs, his tears wetted the dark, clay soil; he prayed, “God, I’m burying these dead things; someday they will be raised up into beauty and glory. I hope that someday you will raise up my marriage. You’re the God of the Resurrection. Please, raise up my marriage!”
After three months were up, Joanne hesitated about coming back. They argued about it in front of their therapist for months before Joanne agreed to give it another try. Mike was ecstatic. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to work it out. She’s my wife again. We’ll have kids together.
The night Joanne returned, when they went to bed, Joanne rolled over to go to sleep. Mike reached over to rub her back.
Joanne bolted upright. “I can’t stand it!”
“What?”
“The tension is so thick! Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
Over the next few months, the marriage continued to unravel. Mike discovered some letters and other papers that suggested Joanne had been having affairs, but she explained all the evidence away. Mike agreed to believe her, but he remained suspicious and hurt.
And despairing. One Sunday night, he sat in his office holding a tiny Guatemalan worry doll. A girl in his youth group had given it to him some months before, telling him kiddingly that whenever he worried, he should rub the doll. For two hours, Mike cried in his office, praying, worrying, rubbing the little doll.
As these things go, periods of hope mixed with periods of despair. At one point, Mike was confident the marriage would last, so he agreed to take a new church in San Antonio, some eighty miles away. Joanne said she would quit her job and work on her M.B.A. Mike would move over while Joanne sold the house. Then Joanne would join him.
To prepare for the move, they held a yard sale, and one of Joanne’s friends, Roger, came over to help. They were putting things on the tables when Joanne and Roger came across a box of baby things — mobiles, crib sheets, stuffed animals. They put them on the sale table.
You’re going to sell that? Mike thought.
Later in the morning, a woman came up, glanced at the baby things, and asked, “How much?”
“A quarter a piece,” Roger said.
“I’ll take them,” the woman replied.
Mike noticed that Joanne didn’t even flinch. But he thought, That’s all my dreams are worth. All my dreams are being sold for twenty-five cents. Then voices shouted from within, “You’re useless. You’re worse than useless!” He wanted to run around the corner of the house and cry.
When the house sold, Joanne said, “I’ll move over in about a month. Let me just tie up some loose ends here.” Another month turned into four, then into eight. On his days off, Mike commuted back to see Joanne and to attend counseling with her. He kept pursuing her, begging her to move. He was lonely, and a permanent separation terrified him.
But Joanne continued to waffle. At counseling she would mention how unfulfilled she felt, how unhappy she was with Mike. The next fall, by now a full two years after she first moved out, she cried to Mike, “I just can’t see being married to you for the rest of my life. I just can’t.”
Something clicked in Mike. Pursuing her any longer was pointless. He knew now he could release his wife, his dream. Somehow things would be okay.
“You’re free to go if you want,” he said. “If you don’t want to be married to me, you don’t have to be.” Mike was sad yet relieved.
He still didn’t know, though, that there was more to lose.
A Way of Escape
When Joanne first moved out, Mike believed his ministry was doomed. He often hoped and prayed and dreamed of Joanne’s return, but he feared she never would, and his separation was a huge contradiction for him: how could he manage a church if he couldn’t manage his own marriage? He was sure he would have to give up ministry.
But to give up ministry — the thought flooded him with despair. All he’d ever done was prepare for ministry or minister. He loved to search out God’s Word and then preach it to others. He was honored that in counseling people trusted him with their souls. It was a privilege to stand with people at the critical moments of their lives, at birth, marriage, and death. Ministry was, he believed, the highest calling. But it required a virtuous character, a model lifestyle — things he felt he no longer had.
His first instinct when Joanne first left, then, was to keep it a secret. He was ashamed, and he didn’t want the church to know. The Sunday she left, Joanne stood up during the sharing of prayer concerns and said nothing more than, “I’m not going to be coming to church for a few weeks. I have some things to work out.”
When Mike received dinner invitations for Joanne and him, he made excuses. When people asked awkward questions — “How are things going? I haven’t seen Joanne for a while. Has she been going to the later service?” — Mike remained vague. He knew his excuses were paper thin, and he feared that any minute the truth would come bursting through. He was constantly nervous.
Mike even quit seeing his Christian therapist and sought someone “outside the household of faith.” He figured a non-Christian counselor wouldn’t be disappointed in him.
He did confide in the senior pastor and in one of the church’s leaders, and the church secretary found out soon enough when Joanne put in a change of address to receive the church newsletter. Other than that, the separation remained a secret.
To resolve this great contradiction, Mike began looking for a way out of ministry. And a path, divinely ordained it seemed, appeared to open. At a gym one afternoon, Mike met Al Williams. Al invited Mike to lunch. “I’d like to talk to you about something you might find interesting,” he said. Mike was lonely and intrigued, so he went.
At lunch, Al asked Mike, “How are you doing financially?”
On his associate pastor’s salary, Mike was trying to pay all his usual bills plus his own therapy and for half of his and Joanne’s joint counseling. “Not well,” he replied.
“Well, how would you like to double your income in two years?”
Al took a napkin out and sketched a pyramid-shaped graph. “The principle of my business is this,” Al said. “You work, but then you get others to work for you. It takes a lot of work and good people skills, which I see you’ve got, Mike. But in five years, you can be independently wealthy. You can stop working. You’ll be earning close to $500,000 a year.”
Mike felt a rush. One of Joanne’s complaints was that as a pastor, Mike didn’t earn enough. “Look at the people around us,” she would gripe. “People our age have nicer cars; they have bigger homes. Some of my friends at work have private planes.” Maybe he could woo Joanne back by becoming rich. He’d buy her a big house and a new car. He’d have to give up ministry, but at least he’d have his wife back, and maybe they could get back to making a family. Maybe he could at least partly live his suburban dream.
Another part of him, though, feared she would never return, in which case, his ministerial career was over. It didn’t matter then. If I’m going to be unhappy for the rest of my life, I might as well be unhappy and rich, he thought. In either case, this business opportunity seemed a golden opportunity. Still, he had reservations, but he agreed to think about it.
The next time they met, Al brought a friend who had formerly been a minister. This former pastor gave Mike a pitch: “I used to be a pastor. But now that I make lots of money, I do even more for the kingdom of God. I could build a whole church if I wanted to.” He explained to Mike how he had made over a million dollars the previous year, and how he had given $300,000 to his church. “What could your church do with that?”
At the time, Mike’s church was in the middle of a building program. If I could give my church $300,000, we could retire our debt and get that new building and beautiful new sanctuary!
Pastoring a Therapist
Mike was all but ready to sign on when he was startled by something that happened in sessions with his therapist. At the end of one session, she asked him, “Do you have some time?”
Mike wondered what she could possibly want. “My husband just became a born-again Christian,” she continued, “and I don’t understand what’s going on with him.”
Mike grimaced inwardly and shifted in his chair. He didn’t want to be a minister just then. He was getting ready to shed that role, and here this woman was seeking spiritual advice from him. But common courtesy demanded he listen.
She told him about the circumstances leading up to her husband’s conversion, and how he and his minister were now witnessing to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “They keep saying I have to give my life to Christ and surrender to his Lordship. But I keep thinking, What if he tells me to go be a waitress? I don’t want to do that! I want to be a therapist. I want to live my own life.”
Though Mike suspected it was wrong for a counselor to seek advice from the client, his pastoral self was hooked. For the next few sessions, they ended his therapy with some pastoral counseling. Soon the therapist was going to church with her husband.
As this went on, Mike began to feel God saying to him, “I still want you to be a pastor.” When this thought first came up, it startled him. It had never occurred to Mike that he was still fit for ministry. At best, he would have to take a sabbatical until he got his marriage straightened out. But the more he talked with the therapist, the more she grew in faith. God was still using Mike.
And with that, Mike phoned Al Williams and gracefully declined the business offer. By the time Mike decided to stop seeing his therapist, she was attending church regularly and relishing the sermons. When they parted, she gave Mike a big hug and said, “Another client of mine is a priest. Both of you came to me within the same week. Do you think maybe God brought you guys to me?”
Mike had given up on ministry but had been given it back. But it would take one more incident before he was to have it back on the right terms.
Losing His Reputation
When Joanne began divorce proceedings, Mike had been at his new church only about a year and a half. He had spent that time building trust. In addition to the usual pastoral concern of living what he preached, Mike was anxious to move his theologically liberal congregation to a more personal, biblical faith.
Now, he figured, his year and a half of trust building was about to crumble. He had to tell the congregation of his impending divorce, and the thought filled him with dread and shame. One night, a few days before he would make the announcement, he sat despondent in his office. He was filled with grief and guilt. I’ve been preaching this gospel of power and transformation, and I wasn’t able to transform my marriage. What a hypocrite!
“God, there are a lot of kids in this church,” he prayed, “and they’re going to grow up and remember that their minister got divorced. What’s going to happen to their faith in you?”
He agonized for two hours. “How can you allow this to happen, Lord? It will hurt your reputation.”
Suddenly, he had a physical sensation of God putting a hand, big and warm, on his shoulder. All the tension went out of Mike’s body, and he slumped in relief. He sensed God saying, “Don’t worry. I love you, and I’m with you. Just let go of the worry.”
Then he was surprised by what he heard next: “You just worry about your own reputation; I’ll worry about mine.” Mike, a little embarrassed, thought, Of course. He had for years assumed that the gospel’s reputation rose and fell with him; if he looked bad, so would God. He now realized there was no way out of his mess, that God would have to take care of himself. And it occurred to him that God probably very well could.
The next Sunday, Mike had an opportunity to test this new insight. As the last hymn of the worship service was being sung, Mike took off his robe; he didn’t want it to be fouled by what he was about to tell his people.
“Could you please sit down,” he said when the hymn finished. A few people looked quizzical. When they had settled in, Mike continued. “After years of trying, it’s not working out with Joanne and me. We’re going to get a divorce.” He said it with composure, but inside he was sick. He talked for a minute or so and then dismissed the congregation.
He had assumed the response would be, at best, mixed. Some people just wouldn’t care; they didn’t know him that well. Some, though, would be offended and leave the church, maybe up to a third of the congregation, he calculated. Some of those, he was sure, would hear his announcement as an excuse to give up on God.
Afterwards, however, literally everyone in church came up and gave Mike a hug. They said they were sorry. They said they were going to be supportive. In the ensuing weeks, he discovered they were. No one left the church. No one, to this day, has criticized him for his divorce. No one’s faith in God seemed disturbed.
To the contrary, and to Mike’s amazement, their interest in things Christian began to flourish in some ways. People were more attentive to his preaching; they believed him when he said he was a fellow struggler seeking God’s grace. And many of those divorced and widowed sought him out now because they felt he would understand their loneliness and pain.
Mike’s new ministry, however, is another story. The main story here was that he had fully given up his old ministry, the one that rested on his goodness, on his reputation. He had begun to let God be God of his ministry.
Before he could finally defeat despair, however, he had to lose one more thing: his life-long faith.
Failed Faith
When Joanne left that first summer, Mike, as he walked aimlessly around his empty house, kept hearing a voice rattling in his head: “People who love you give you away.”
He tried drowning it out; he left the TV on in the bedroom and in the living room, and sometimes he turned the radio on as well. Still he heard, “People who love you give you away.”
He tried exorcizing it. “God, this must be a demon. It’s horrible. Take it away, now!” But it continued, “People who love you give you away.” At times, he thought he was going crazy.
When nothing else worked, he decided, with the help of a therapist, to discover the source of this strange oracle. In part, it came from his childhood. Two incidents, he discovered, had long clung like a leech to his subconscious and to his faith.
At age two, Mike had contracted pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. The hospital was in Dallas, some thirty miles north of his home. It was awkward for his parents to visit, though: they had only one car, which his dad used to drive to work; his mother didn’t drive. So for the two weeks he was hospitalized, his parents never visited him. Mike remembers being a scared, little two year old, absolutely alone in a strange place. He believed he had been given away.
He also remembered some incidents with his dad when he felt he had been emotionally given away. Terror, Mike says, is a soft word to describe how monstrous his dad could be when he got angry.
To take one example: Mike was 15 years old, and he and his dad were working on the car. Mike hated it when his dad asked him to help. His father was a handyman — and a perfectionist. Mike was a klutz. Mike was sure to blow it, and his dad was sure to blow up.
They were changing the oil in the car. His dad was under the car getting impatient trying to loosen a bolt. He yelled to Mike, “Give me the g–d— seven-sixteenths!”
Immediately, Mike tensed. He frantically rummaged through the tool box, picking up and dropping a dozen wrenches. The more he fumbled, the angrier his father became: “G–d— it. What’s taking you so long?” Everything became a blur; Mike could hardly read the wrench sizes. In a panic, he handed one to his father.
His father rolled out from under the car and threw the wrench on the ground and swore again. “This is a nine-sixteenths. You can’t even give me a g–d—- seven-sixteenths wrench.” Mike remembers his dad’s voice echoing off the houses down the street.
His father stood and hulked over Mike. “You are useless. You are worse than useless! I can’t even count on you to help me to change the g–d— oil!”
Mike remembers feeling as if all the neighbors stopped mowing their lawns, playing catch, doing hoola-hoops; they were all watching him as his dad screamed, “You are useless. You are worse than useless. Get out of here!” An emotionally-whipped Mike retreated to the house.
Mike learned early on to avoid experiences like that. He learned to be funny, to tell jokes, to act the clown. When he kept his dad laughing, he learned, he didn’t get mad.
Most of all, he learned to be the good boy, to never make the same mistake twice, so he would never be emotionally given away. One day he was scolded by his dad for leaving his bike on the lawn. Mike never, the rest of his childhood, left his bike on the lawn.
Mike learned that when his dad was in a bad mood, he better not be idly watching TV or listening to the radio. When he heard his dad slam the car door a certain way, Mike would shut off the TV and open his homework before his dad walked in the door.
This fearful pharisaism was carried into his adult years and, in a modified form, into his relationship with God. God was more fair than his father, but he was a vending-machine God. You put a quarter in, you get the product out. He and God had this deal (though he never would have admitted it so bluntly): Mike would be a good boy, a good pastor, a good husband, a good man of God. In return, God would bless Mike with a happy family and a successful pastoral career. No one would abandon him. No one would think him useless.
Mike didn’t fool himself. He didn’t believe he was worth others’ loyalty: his family didn’t even think he was worth visiting in the hospital. He wasn’t very useful: he couldn’t even find “the g–d— seven-sixteenths.” But if he kept people laughing, he might fool them into thinking he was a great guy. And if he would keep his part of the bargain, God would make sure no one abandoned him.
Well, it didn’t work. He had been a good husband. His wife said, “Be home.” He was home. His wife said, “Lose weight.” He lost weight. His wife said, “Go to counseling.” He went to counseling. He had prayed about being a good husband. He had studied other marriages to improve his own. Furthermore, he was a faithful pastor and, as much as one could reasonably expect, a model of Christian behavior to his people.
But his marriage still fell apart, and with his marriage, his dreams. For months, Mike grew increasingly discouraged; though he continued in ministry, and though ministry flourished, he wasn’t sure what to believe about God.
Cursing God
Slowly, and this was some months after he announced his divorce to his congregation, Mike began to realize that at the root of discouragement with his faith lay anger, anger towards God. But for a long time, he couldn’t admit it. Good boys don’t get angry with God; that is blasphemy.
His therapist (he was now seeing a Christian therapist) tried to explain, “Sometimes anger is a way of loving someone. It’s honest. It’s revealing some of your deepest emotions to another.”
Mike was incredulous: “What are you talking about?” Mike had been constantly praying for God to take away his anger. He didn’t want to feel anger, ever; it felt awful. Besides, God wouldn’t love him if he was angry.
But the anger wouldn’t dissipate. Instead it became hotter, and the pain finally became too much to bear. He decided, finally, with the encouragement of his therapist, to be honest with God; the simple fact was that God knew he was angry. If God was going to love him, he was going to have to love him with all his rage.
So he began praying, “God, I feel you failed me. I feel you’re no good. For years I’ve been telling congregation after congregation to love and trust you. But for what? It’s all been a lie and a sham. You let me down!”
His emotions fluctuated wildly for months. There were days when he basked in God’s grace and mercy, and there were days when he would rage at God.
The more he raged, the more he realized the subtleties of his deal with God. He told his therapist once, “I’ve been trying to make God happy by giving him the one thing he wants most: souls, people to love him. And I’ve been giving him people for dozens of years. And he was supposed to give me something back. He failed me!”
The more he raged, the more intense became his prayers: “I wish you would reincarnate so I could kick you in the stomach! You let me down, you sob!” Mike would deliberately go out of the way to be blasphemous, cursing God in the most vile language, as if he were provoking God, testing God.
And the more he raged, amazingly, the more he experienced God. “I was shocked,” he now says, “I didn’t understand it. Even though I was vomiting up all this anger, God was a silent presence to me. He was more present than he had ever been. I can’t explain it, but I experienced him inwardly. It was as if God, like a compassionate parent, was letting me throw a tantrum, but he wasn’t going to leave me. For months, I had an on-going theophany. God was as close as breath.”
One time in prayer, Mike envisioned Jesus on the cross, and he took all his blasphemous anger and poured it on him, stabbing Jesus with it, crucifying him afresh. “Christ just stayed there,” he says, “letting me get all this poison out, taking it upon himself. It was as if he died for me once again.”
Late in this process, his therapist asked him, “How do you feel with God’s just putting up with this?”
“I feel loved,” Mike said. “I’ve said the most unimaginable things to him. And yet it’s as if he’s saying, ‘I’m not going to leave you. I will not give you away.'”
Slowly in this process, Mike lost his old faith, and the despair that went with it.
Confused and at Peace
Despair still attacks Mike, as it does all of us. But the war against debilitating despair has been won, though mop-up operations will continue the rest of his life.
Mike regrets the loss of his marriage. He remains single, with diminishing hopes of remarriage and a family. But he says, “I’d like to get married again. But I’m in my mid-forties now; I realize the odds are against me starting a family at my age. I’m content to remain in this state, if this is what God wants of me.”
His ministry continues in San Antonio. The church remains healthy, and Mike’s preaching is well received. “I don’t have to play games in my preaching anymore. I don’t have to pretend that I’m the model Christian, that it’s my reputation that’s on the line each Sunday. When I preach law, people know that I do so standing under grace. For all of us, that makes obeying Christ much more attractive.”
As far as his faith, Mike remains happily confused. When he was cursing God yet not dying, he would ask, Why isn’t God leaving me? This was not right: be good to God and he’ll be good to you; blaspheme God and he’ll curse you. But Mike discovered, to his frustration at first, he couldn’t make God do anything. As he reflected on it, though, he realized it was the best news yet.
“God was just being God,” he says. “That was a breakthrough for me. I didn’t have to figure out God anymore. He didn’t do anything I could have predicted: no judgment, no quick-fix answers. He was just present. When I had God figured out, I didn’t experience him. Now that I don’t have him figured out, I experience him.”
One more thing: to this day, when Mike finds a spider in his shower, he carefully picks it up, opens his front door, and places it outside.
Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today
