Leaving Cloud 9

by Ericka Andersen

  Jenny’s kids were now fifteen, thirteen, eight, and six, and her husband had just retired from the army after twenty years of service. There would be no more moving around the country for them. They were settling down in Indiana, where Dean’s family was from—and church was a part of that settling.

  But it wasn’t just “church.” Jenny seemed to be genuinely changed and affected by what she was experiencing there, and she wanted to share it with Rick. She would offer him tidbits of sermons, text Bible verses to him, and try to encourage him positively. And though he hadn’t been to church in years—and hadn’t tried prayer for more than a decade—Jenny’s God talk sparked something in him.

  Being divorced and in a new place had been freeing in one sense. But he was also a single guy in his thirties with no real plans for the future, spending his money on going out drinking with people he barely knew—all the while attempting to handle his inner struggles. He was feeling the emptiness. So when Jenny talked about the fulfillment she was finding in Christ, he listened.

  He didn’t start going to church immediately. But the Holy Spirit had begun to work on him. A seed had been planted. Now it just needed some watering in order to grow.

  All this was going on when Rick agreed to sign up for Match.com. So he felt he should look for someone who might be a “God person.” That had to be the right direction.

  Rick never imagined that signing up for a dating site would actually work. But he knew that having intimate relationships with women was something he did well. And meeting them online was perfect because it didn’t require going to a cocktail party or meeting a stranger randomly at a bar. It all happened on a screen, and you got to define exactly who you were and what you wanted. Designing the Match.com profile gave Rick a chance to reflect on how he saw himself and what he wanted in a woman—maybe even the woman who would change his life.

  Most people are not all that serious about online dating the first time they try it. You kind of laugh at your own antics, thinking it will be an interesting experiment. You don’t imagine you’ll actually be successful at the process, that you’ll someday tell your grandkids you fell in love on the internet. But sometimes it happens. And whether you use Christian Mingle, eHarmony, Match, Tinder, or Snapchat—or a different method entirely—God still manages to bring the right people together.

  Rick went out with a couple of his matches immediately. No need to wait around, he thought. If they looked semicompatible, they might as well meet up and see if there was chemistry. There was always drinking involved. Alcohol—the stronger the better—was the great soother of all evenings. In his mind, the more liquefied the conversation, the less uncomfortable. He had no problem charming the ladies, and they had no problem succumbing to his charm. The life of an attractive bachelor with online dating access wasn’t so bad.

  While many men complain that online dating is difficult, that they struggle with getting women to respond to their messages or contact them at all based on their profile, that was never the case with Rick. He was handsome, an army veteran, and had a nice body. His profile was being perused by all kinds of women, getting pokes and messages and likes and everything a man would wish for in this scenario.

  Then one day Rick came across a profile that stood out to him. He recognized this girl as a good person. She seemed wholesome, pretty, kind. She was from Indiana, where his sister lived, and she claimed to value family, God, and traditionally good things about life.

  This girl’s comments about being a Christian stood out to him too. She was clearly different from the other women he’d dated—and those had never worked out. Maybe it was time to try something new.

  By this point he was thinking that God and church might not be a bad thing. With Jenny’s recent encouragement and her noticeable attitude change about life, he thought he should go out with someone who exhibited these qualities.

  There were no red flags in the profile. She seemed like the kind of person he would like to get to know. So he decided to send her a short message and see how it went. She responded quickly and, like him, didn’t want to waste time exchanging a lot of emails. She agreed that the only way to know if the chemistry was there would be to meet up in person.

  As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, she was me.

  Just like many other girls on Match.com, I’d been interested when I saw Rick’s profile. He seemed humble and sweet. I really respect people who choose to serve their country, so I liked the fact that he’d been in the army. And one of his photos showed him with his two young nieces, which made me think he valued family.

  I’d been on and off online dating for a couple of years, recently going out on a lot of one-off dates from the site to see if anyone clicked. I wasn’t taking it too seriously anymore, because it was way too stressful when I did. I had decided to treat the site as just a fun way to meet people—and maybe, eventually, the right person.

  When I decided to meet up with Rick, I had decided it would be my last go for a while. So many of the meet-ups had fallen flat, and I had decided that after this one it would be time for a breather.

  As usual, I arranged for him to meet me at a restaurant around the corner from my apartment. In DC, meet up spots can be really inconvenient, so I made this as easy as possible, considering I was probably wasting my evening on yet another person who wasn’t right for me anyway.

  I was a few minutes late—purposely, though Rick didn’t know that. Rick was anxiously waiting outside of the restaurant. Waiting for an online date whom you’ve never met—even if you’ve seen photos—can be exceptionally nerve-racking. Will you remember what the person looks like? What if his or her photos are not accurate? You always hear stories about the people who post pictures of themselves from thirty pounds ago.

  I spotted Rick from across the plaza. I was thinking, Please be cute and normal. He was just trying to clear his mind and brace himself for the energy it would take to get through a date.

  “Rick?” I approached him, recognizing him from the side view. He seemed to match his profile. We gave each other an awkward hug.

  He says I didn’t look exactly like he’d thought I would—not in a bad way, just a different one. With light brown eyes, freckles, and auburn hair, I was—according to him—cute, sweet, and (lucky for him) easy to talk to.

  We got a table at Lebanese Taverna and ordered a beer and a glass of wine respectively. The conversation continued for two hours over those two drinks as we learned all kinds of things about each other. Family, politics, jobs, travels, dreams. It was starting to get late, so we went outside to say our goodbyes. We both felt the spark was there—the chemistry felt right. Something was different about this one.

  “Well, I should get back,” I said, feeling that awkward, end-of-date nervousness approaching.

  “A hug, I guess,” he said adorably and embraced me half-sideways. He says he had wanted to kiss me but couldn’t tell if the moment was right.

  “See you later,” I said, and turned to walk back home.

  I was walking on springs back to my apartment, feeling something light inside me, something good. This was different. With every other person I had met up with, I had questioned myself: Did I really like him? Should I go out with him again? What if I’m passing up someone great if I don’t?

  With Rick, there was no question. I knew I would go out with him again if he asked. I recognized a spirit inside him that was good.

  Rick left our meeting feeling good as well. I was the kind of girl I had portrayed myself to be online. He just plain liked me, and he even thought that maybe, just maybe, I could change his life.

  It wasn’t me, of course, but God, orchestrating this whole thing. But whatever it was, it seemed like something good to Rick.

  The good I saw in him that day turned out to be real, and we began our lifetime journey together that week. For the first time, it seemed, Rick was with a woman who could see past both his superficial and his angry exterior.

  After Rick and I began dating, I
moved past his mask and saw his darker side rather quickly. I saw the irrational anger, the temper, the severe social anxiety and depression. I saw it, but somehow I didn’t run away as many might have. It was scary, and sometimes I questioned if I was doing the right thing for my life. But at the same time, I felt an indescribable pull to stay. I knew there was something beautiful and kind underneath all that troubled exterior. I could tell that those qualities of anger and impatience weren’t really him. Eventually I had to admit to myself that he was a man I loved, a man I could imagine spending my life with.

  It wasn’t easy. It’s never easy being the partner of a person suffering from PTSD, bipolar disorder, and social anxiety disorder. There are support groups, guidebooks, and lots of online resources specifically for partners of people who struggle with such conditions. Though suffering from those disorders can most certainly be lonely at times, being in a relationship with such a person is also very lonely.

  It can be tough to find others who understand how it feels to deal on a day-to-day basis with irrationality that you have no ability to control, even as a rational person yourself. Additionally, the depression and anxiety of your partner can begin to rub off on you, erasing your good moods, stealing joy from normally happy circumstances, and causing you to feel totally helpless. You can usually distinguish the disease from the real person, but sometimes the collision course is almost too much to bear.

  As I struggled to learn how to cope with Rick’s issues, a still, small voice kept telling me there was something special about him.

  Rick knew that church was important to me, and I was aware that church wasn’t a part of his life. I didn’t pressure him about it. But just weeks into dating, he asked if he could come to church with me. I was delighted, of course, and surprised when he started attending every week after that.

  To go from a lifetime of not attending church regularly to attending every single Sunday is a big leap—and it wasn’t just about me. There was something about the passion of our preacher and the messages getting to him in just the right way. Plus, the casual attire, tattooed worship leader, and modern, relevant subject matter spoke to Rick. He had never been to a church like this.

  He’d heard sermons before, of course, and been exposed to worship songs and prayer. But none of it had ever stuck with him in any meaningful way—until now.

  “I had hit rock bottom,” he remembers. “I was a broken man, and I wanted to be healed. And the way they made it sound at this church—God could be the healer—I hadn’t ever taken that to heart before. I was tired of walking around so empty.”

  I didn’t know the extent of his brokenness at this time. He would reveal that to me gradually, over time. But I was thankful he was going to church and kind of shocked that he was attending so regularly.

  It reminded me of a boyfriend I’d had in high school. His whole family hadn’t been going to church. When they met me and heard I attended, they all decided to start going—and then just kept going every week for years and, I assume, still do. His dad eventually was even ordained.

  In both situations I felt that I hadn’t done anything, really, but that God had used me somehow to draw people to Him. In both situations, I was awed by how God works through us when we don’t realize it.

  It wasn’t just about going to church. For the first time in his life, Rick was feeling God in a real way, speaking to him. He was looking back and seeing for the first time how grace had worked in his life—keeping him safe, protecting him from addiction, helping him through college, providing the ambition he needed to keep going, and bringing him right to where he was at that time.

  “I had tried doing life my way, and it got screwed up, and I figured . . . God’s way made more sense,” he says. “The Holy Spirit convinced me over time.”

  Although Rick was a reader, he had never read a Christian book before. Around the time he started attending National Community Church with me, our pastor, Mark Batterson, came out with a book called The Circle Maker. It was filled with the exact messages Rick needed to hear at the time, and it changed his thinking.

  Batterson wrote about praying circles around all the issues in our lives. There are numerous appropriate lines to share from the book, but it was passages like this one that convinced Rick what he was missing out on by not praying and started to help change his thinking about where God had been throughout his life:

  When you pray regularly, you never know when God will show up or speak up. Today could be the day. When you live in prayer mode, you live with holy anticipation. You know that coincidences are providences. Any moment can turn into a holy moment. God can invade the reality of your life at three o’clock one afternoon and change everything.1

  God did invade Rick’s reality that day his sister told him she was going to church. While things didn’t change in a split second for Rick, a seed was planted. A switch flipped. The Holy Spirit got to work. Which meant his life was going to change

  By the time he and I met, God was moving big time, and He was speaking to Rick very clearly.

  I had no idea the blessing that was in store for Rick and me through National Community Church in Washington, DC, when I moved there in 2006. But that church played a huge part in channeling Jesus’ love and message to Rick. Each sermon seemed to have a word just for him—and we’d come away from services discussing those messages like Bible studies and talking about how they related to our lives.

  For the first time in his life, Rick was beginning to see an actual life plan unfold. All the things that had happened in the past had been preparing him for this life that was coming together. And we both knew that I was going to be part of that life. Our backgrounds and our personalities were so different, and they often clashed, but we held strong and grew together in love and faith and truth. And we did it knowing that without God this kind of love did not exist.

  Rick describes the change in his life this way:

  I began to change, and over time, after reading [Batterson’s] book, going to church, and starting to pray every day, I started to feel better. It felt like I was slowly being healed, like the internal scars I had were being healed instead of constantly broken open over and over again.

  I thought about my life and how many times I could have gone to jail—or should have. The fact that I was living in DC when I should be living in some trailer, that I had a college degree and I shouldn’t. There are so many “shouldn’t have beens” in my life. There was no way—even though I didn’t believe in God back then—that His hand wasn’t in my life to bring me to this point.

  So I had to go through everything I went through, but I also believed that He was walking with me—to get my degree, to go to flight school—walking with me. And sure, sure, bad things happened. But He was never not there with me.

  As much as I’d like to take credit and say I made some good decisions, I just went through life, I just went with what happened. I just made short-term decisions and, thankfully, God was there to guide me through it all as I walked blindly. He inserted His hand into my life.

  Yes, a spiritual transformation was occurring in Rick, but that doesn’t mean everything became peachy all of a sudden. There were missteps between us, like when he talked about getting engaged and married within a few months of our meeting. That totally freaked me out and excited me at the same time. We even looked at rings, and I pictured one on my finger within months. But somehow it felt wrong to me, as much as I wanted it. Rick soon realized that was probably the wrong decision, too, so we dropped it.

  Through his newfound relationship with God, Rick was beginning to recognize that he had an unhealthy addiction to love and relationships. He looked to women as a source of comfort and to ease his pain, and he was hooked on that euphoric feeling you get at the beginning of a relationship, before all the nitty-gritty stuff of life takes over. That euphoria is pretty great. It feels good to be lost in a fog of happy fascination with one person. But that feeling doesn’t last, and it’s not a good foundation for a healt
hy relationship. If our relationship was to have a chance, Rick had to learn a different approach.

  Our relationship would endure many trials in the coming months, even with God’s hand working to bring us together. Most relationships and marriages that endure the type of struggles we had don’t last, especially when it’s a third marriage. The odds were against us, but I knew that we had God on our side. I felt strongly about that, and my prayer life began to uptick in a way it never had before.

  No, it wasn’t easy—and sometimes it still isn’t. But in the really hard moments, the ones that felt most painful, I prayed that God would show me the way. I felt that in a way I was an answer to Rick’s prayer. And over time, God put more and more specific prayers on my heart.

  As time went on, Rick began to unlock some of the hardness from his heart and recognize the truth about decisions he’d made in his adult life. On one hand, guilt and pain flooded him. On the other, he began to let go of the stony-faced mask he’d been so desperately holding onto.

  I had my own problems and insecurity with men—issues of confidence and self-esteem as well as fears of intimacy and immaturity with relationships. Had we moved forward with marriage so quickly as he’d attempted to do at first, I’m not sure how things would have panned out.

  I had never had a committed, serious relationship. I was twenty-eight years old and had never met anyone I thought I could marry, despite numerous dating relationships that did nothing but diminish my self-worth. The problem was the way I chose people, the haphazard way I let myself be devalued by how men treated me. I didn’t demand respect or respect myself in the decisions I made in regard to relationships. In short, I had previously been the opposite of the strong woman I desperately wanted to be.

  Some of my weaknesses, however, helped piece together this one, real relationship with someone who was so severely broken. I wasn’t broken in the same way as he was, but I definitely had baggage. We all do. Mine was mostly emotional and mental—and Rick actually soothed those extremely vulnerable parts of me in a way no one else ever had. His patience and understanding about my biggest insecurities, his reassurance and care, were like nothing I’d ever experienced before.