When it was too much for my young mind to comprehend, for my swollen, tear-soaked eyes to see, I scooped the saddened dog into my arms and ran outside. Freezing in nothing but Garfield pajamas, I pushed the golf clubs, Beatles tapes, and crumpled packs of cigarettes out of the way and climbed into my daddy’s Chevrolet. There my devoted dog and I waited for the ambulance to arrive.
The paramedics finally came, and only a few seconds later, my mother’s Oldsmobile screeched into the driveway as if a stunt driver were behind the wheel. Frazzled, Mama ran into the house and her best friend, Mrs. Murphy, stayed in the driveway to console me. Soon my father was wheeled out of our living room on a stretcher, and my mom climbed into the ambulance with him and left me with Mrs. Murphy and the depressed dog.
I sat on that floral nightmare of a couch and waited on the call from my mother—the call that would explain that this was just indigestion or the flu or something mundane. I waited for her to call and say this was, indeed, a hangover. This was my dad’s first hangover—long overdue after not drinking for so many months. He was going to have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and smoke a cigarette and come back home. That’s exactly what was going to happen. And we were going to cry together as a family. And Daddy would apologize and swear he’d never drink another drop. And then we’d go to Wendy’s and I could have a single with cheese and a chocolate Frosty. Yep. That’s what was going to happen any minute now. The call was coming. I would hear her comforting voice over the line. Mama would ease my fears. Mama would call and crack one of her hilarious jokes that deserved a rim shot.
But that call never came.
Instead, an EMT walked through my front door, without knocking. This man, tall, heavy, and bald, waltzed through my blue living room and told my mother’s friend he was there to retrieve the resuscitating equipment left on the stupid blue carpet. Mrs. Murphy held me close to her side and asked the man how my father was doing. Extremely casually, too casually, the bald man answered, “He didn’t make it.”
That man, that stranger, whose face I can still see so clearly twenty-six years later, spoke the words that pierced my innocent heart and robbed me of my childlike joy. We’d had ups and downs in my family, but for the most part, I thought of us as the stars of a sitcom with jokes constantly flowing or humorous events taking place. Now I felt like I had a starring role in a catastrophic drama. I was on an after-school special. I was utterly and hopelessly broken.
My father’s funeral was one of the largest our town had seen because everyone knew him—and not because he was an alcoholic. He was known for his kindness and willingness to give the shirt off his back. He was known for being positive and jolly no matter what demons he secretly battled. My daddy was just an all-around great, funny guy, and his death was a loss not only to our family but to his coworkers, golf partners, and many friends.
My mother, the young widow, left with heavy burdens and responsibilities, came home from the funeral home that cold November afternoon, her face soaked with tears and her heart shattered. But she was determined to find praise in the storm. She was determined to speak Scripture over the loss we’d endured that day: he’d “prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Mama was confident, despite my father’s sins, that he’d been saved by amazing grace a few years before while on a business trip. Therefore, she was confident he’d finally arrived in the place where his soul and all of our souls long to be. My daddy was home—his heavenly home. He no longer battled addiction to alcohol. He no longer battled guilt for choosing golf outings over family outings. My daddy no longer battled. Was that anything to mourn?
It would be a lie to say that waves of grief didn’t pelt us all to the sand and leave us feeling as if we were drowning. No, the grief came. It came often at first, and so many years later, it still comes. The waves are smaller, but they still come. I haven’t seen my daddy in decades, but I still long for his hugs and his jokes and the sound of his raspy voice. When I feel despair creeping in, I cling to Scriptures and faith that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and our present sufferings are nothing compared to eternal glory. I cling to the happiness found in humor. I cling to the wonderful memories of my childhood sitcom. Those are the moments that I choose to turn my tears into laughter. That’s what sees me through.
The Bible says we will have trials and tribulations in this world. We are going to experience storms and valleys, and we may even find ourselves questioning why God has allowed things to happen and whether He really is good. Oh, the Enemy loves this. He loves to creep into our thoughts, especially when we are downtrodden and vulnerable, and whisper to us that God has forsaken us. He doesn’t want us to see the beauty in the ashes. He wants us to question God’s love and mercy. He wants us to feel like victims. And he definitely wants us to suffer a bout of amnesia and forget all the times in the past when God pulled us through.
When I begin to question God’s goodness, when I begin to question why things weren’t different—why my daddy had to have a heart attack while I was home alone, or why he had to die when my mother and I were both angry with him for drinking—I have to cling to the Word and remember that all things work together for good for those who love Him. I have to remember God is the Author of my life’s story and every tragedy I’ve gone through has been His perfect will. I have to remember that there’s beautiful purpose to be found in pain.
I also remind myself of the incredible pain Jesus endured on that old, rugged cross. Mercy! He was bloodied and beaten and battered. He was ridiculed and mocked. He endured pain we cannot even comprehend. But, wasn’t the beautiful purpose revealed? Wasn’t it revealed three days later when the tomb proved empty? Praise hands!
We cannot measure God’s goodness solely on our emotions and experience. Instead, we have to know—truly know—that our Father bestows perfect gifts on us that our mere minds cannot even comprehend. Whatever our trial, no matter how painful or debilitating, it can be considered a gift if it points us to Jesus.
That is the upside to life’s downs.
CHAPTER 8
Hang Up Those Hang-Ups
I love to eat. Do you hear me? I love to eat. Like, I get really excited about eating. You know how kids react when their parents tell them they are going to Disney? I’m that way when my husband says, “We’re going out for steak.”
My love of food is no doubt attributed to the fact that my mother was a phenomenal cook. She was like a Southern Julia Child, which means she was like a crazy cross between Paula Deen and Lucy Buffett.
Mama knew how to whip up homemade biscuits and potatoes in a hot, buttery way for every single meal. Meat, potatoes, bread. Meat, potatoes, bread. For my entire childhood. Carbs are absolutely delicious, but they are absolute hades on a waistline. So it’s no surprise that I was a chunky kid.
I once went on a camping trip with my friend and her family, and her brother found my extremely large bathing suit inside our tent. Because I hadn’t worn it yet, no one knew it was my suit, so I made fun of it with them. “Ha! That thing is huge!” My friend’s brother assumed it was his stepmom’s bathing suit, but now that I look back on it, I don’t know why they thought their stepmother would have a bathing suit with a unicorn on it.
I had to swim in a T-shirt and shorts all weekend to hide that the suit was really mine. I think I left that unicorn suit at the campsite because I didn’t want anyone to see me pack it in my bag. Ten bucks of my mother’s money left in a pile of pine needles . . .
I haven’t been overweight in years thanks in part to watching some Netflix specials on how we are what we eat. I now only buy organic meat and produce, and I don’t devour corn dogs like they are potato chips or pour high-fructose corn syrup down my throat at every meal. I used to scoff at the ladies in the grocery store wearing their workout clothes while pushing a shopping cart containing overpriced organic strawberries and whole wheat taco shells, but I’ve realized they had it right all along because our bodies aren’t garbage cans
and we need to stop filling them with junk. And although I still love bad foods, I make better choices, and let me tell you, it’s nice to go for a brisk walk and not sweat bacon bits.
Based on my love affair with food, it’s probably obvious that I have an addictive personality. The first time I smoked a cigarette in my friend’s car when I was fifteen, I was a slave to tobacco. I was that stupid kid who lit one up every day I pulled onto the main road from the high school parking lot and then doused my car with aerosol air freshener that left everything smelling like a bouquet of formaldehyde. And there was a wild stint in my late teens and early twenties when I drank so much alcohol that my “check liver” light was constantly on.
And I come from a long line of addicts.
My daddy, a functioning alcoholic, went to the country club every day after work to play golf and drink whiskey until well after my bedtime. Some nights I would wake to the sound of him stumbling around the kitchen and warming up his dinner. Have you ever heard a drunk person operating a microwave? He pressed so many buttons it sounded like he was launching a space shuttle. And, unfortunately, his button-pressing resulted in a scorched plate of meat, bread, and potatoes. I would roll over and go back to sleep because I thought it was normal for daddies not to come home right after work.
Recently I listened to some cassette tapes of my father and his friends singing and playing guitar in our living room. In the background, I hear beer cans slamming onto the coffee table or being tossed into the garbage. And occasionally, I hear me, at five or six, asking Daddy for a Flintstone Push-Up or another Little Debbie. As a child, it seemed completely normal for the sounds of Led Zeppelin and the Eagles to blare from my living room every weekend as I stepped over empty cans and bottles.
Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics too. Hilliard would run off on a two- or three-day bender and leave my sweet grandmother at home with two little girls. Billy always had a smell about him that I thought was cologne until the first time I got a whiff of Southern Comfort and put two and two together. So I knew that the generational curse of alcoholism ran in my family.
When I was ten, I read my daddy a letter I’d written about how I didn’t want him to drink anymore because he was never home. I wrote about the time he picked me up from the babysitter’s and weaved all over the road. I wrote about the time he and my mother got into a drunken argument in front of all of my friends at my slumber party. And as I read it to him, it was the second time I’d ever seen my father cry. Without hesitation, my daddy agreed to go to rehab because he didn’t want to hurt me anymore.
When he got out a month later, our family seemed normal. If he wasn’t home after work, he was at an AA meeting. For the first time in my ten years of life, we went on family outings. We went to the zoo and matinees. While on vacation, he didn’t leave my mother and siblings and me on the beach while he went back to the hotel balcony or some bayside bar to drink. That lasted for a little over a year until the night my father fell off the wagon.
All the dysfunction associated with my daddy’s addiction didn’t stop me from drinking. I scored a fake ID in the eleventh grade and spent nearly every weekend parked on some field road with a group of friends, downing a six-pack and listening to Alice in Chains. I would drink until I passed out or threw up, and then I would drive myself home. I know the only reason I made it home alive many nights was because of my mother’s prayers.
When I was in college, I was still drinking quite heavily. Instead of just drinking on the weekend, though, I found a reason to go out two or three times a week. One evening, while driving back to my friend’s house, I saw blue lights in my rearview mirror. When the police officer asked me to walk a straight line, I looked at him and said, “There’s no possible way. Book me, Danno.” And he did. And I spent my first night in jail.
I sat in that drunk tank for hours praying and wondering where I’d gone wrong. I thought about the heartache my father’s drinking had caused not only me but my poor mother, and now I was putting her through it all again. After a friend bailed me out of jail that night, I went to my mother’s house and had never been so scared or ashamed to tell her where I’d been. I think dragon’s fire shot out of her mouth as she scolded me, and I straightened myself up for a little while. But, the next year I got another DUI. I lost my license for twelve months and had to depend on rides from friends to get to and from work and college.
I’m embarrassed just typing that.
I was dating Jason at the time, and he, too, was a partier. We spent our weekends drunk and screaming at each other. I liked to throw things, and the walls of Jason’s poor house proved it. It’s amazing the damage an ashtray can do to Sheetrock. And one night I got so mad at him I left him at the bar and walked home through the not-so-safest part of town. Again, I had a mother who prayed constantly over me, and that’s the only reason I didn’t end up dead in a ditch.
I drank heavily up until the moment I learned I was pregnant with Natalie Ann, and when she was born, something in me changed. I was a mother, and I no longer had the desire to stay out all night and throw ashtrays. And I certainly didn’t want to be the kind of parent my father was to me. I shuddered at the very thought of my children sitting across from me in a chair and reading me a letter begging me to get help.
But not only did having a child change me, the Holy Spirit did.
I’d been saved when I was in elementary school. I was raised in church and prayed and asked God for forgiveness when the hangover had me hugging the toilet or when I was sitting on a concrete bench in a jail cell. I knew I wasn’t living for the Lord, and I was convicted of it, but I continued down a destructive path. But when I started really praying for Jesus to remove the temptations from my heart, He did it. The Holy Spirit came in and changed both me and Jason. And trust me, the fact that my beer-loving, karaoke-singing, pool-shooting husband no longer drinks is nothing short of a miracle straight from God. And look at me: the stupid young girl who was once puking Boone’s Farm in a cotton field now writes devotionals.
We really can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. First Corinthians 10:13 says, “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (ESV). God will help us hang up those hang-ups!
Hang-ups don’t have to be addictions to food or nicotine or alcohol like mine. Temptations can present themselves to us in many different ways. We can be tempted to constantly fear and worry. And, the Enemy wants us to be bound to strongholds. He wants us so tightened by his grip that we cannot see our purpose—that we cannot clearly hear from the Lord and live an abundant life of peace.
According to Luke 10:17–19, we have a way out. We have authority. We have authority to tread all over the power of the Enemy.
“The seventy-two returned with joy and said, ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.’ He said to them, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.’”
You hear that? We can tread all over snakes and scorpions. Although I don’t recommend you intentionally stepping on a snake or scorpion in cheap flip-flops.
But believing we’re always going to be in oppression to our hang-ups is a lie straight from hell. Believing we are just naturally worried, anxious people is a lie straight from hell. Believing we need alcohol or drugs or whatever vice to survive is a lie straight from hell. Believing depression isn’t curable is a lie straight from hell.
God’s sweet truth found in the Bible sets us free. The sweet truth of Scripture causes the Enemy to cower. The sweet truth that Jesus died on the cross for every iniquity, every weakness, every sin sets us free. We’ve got to know the truth, meditate on the truth, and keep the truth bound around our necks and in our hearts.
God also provides relief to us through antid
epressants, therapy, rehab, seeing a Christian counselor, and many other solutions. These things are not substitutes for the Word—the truth—but they are wonderful tools to help defeat our strongholds. I’m proof that prayer works. And Lexapro ain’t bad either.
Refuse to believe that strongholds are just a way of life for you and your loved ones. That right there is one of those lies straight from hell.
The truth. The truth. The truth.
Know it. Claim it. Speak it.
CHAPTER 9
Leave the Trolls Under the Bridge
Natalie ann is a middle schooler now, and she and her friends all wear cute sweaters and leggings and Birkenstocks. They put their hair into fishtail braids and messy buns and finish off their shabby-chic look with pearl earrings. When she walks into school every morning, she looks like she stepped right out of a Gap ad.
But when I was my daughter’s age, I was twice as wide as I was tall. My feet were huge (my loafers looked more like bread loaves), and my White Rain–doused bangs were in the shape of a large-barrel curling iron. For some godforsaken reason, I thought it was a good idea to tuck my T-shirts into my Duck Head shorts even though my butt was as flat as the pancake centerfold in an IHOP menu. Needless to say, middle school was a really awkward and difficult time for me.
My awkwardness did not go unnoticed by a group of popular girls and their minion boyfriends. They made it their mission every day to oink at me when I passed them in the hallway, or tell me I should be drinking low-fat milk at lunchtime, or do the old “cover their mouth and whisper to each other and then point and laugh at me” trick. I know as Christians, we aren’t supposed to hate others, but gosh I hated them. I really, really, really hated them.
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