by Lee Strobel
When Michael Shermer described how prayers for his paralyzed girlfriend seemed to rise unheard into the ether, I could empathize with his lament. Although my faith endures, I can understand why his waned. Maybe you can too, because you’ve been imploring God to meet an urgent need in your life—with no miracle forthcoming.
This chapter is for you—and Leslie and Michael. And me.
* * *
Sometimes Leslie experiences “fibro fog,” a mental cloudiness or forgetfulness that’s endemic with fibromyalgia sufferers. That’s what my friend Douglas Groothuis thought was happening with his wife, Rebecca, who had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia several years earlier.
Then one day, she went to the same beauty salon where she had been going for years—but she couldn’t find her way home. Becky was missing for several hours; Doug finally had to seek help from the police. Clearly, this went beyond mere absentmindedness.
Thus began a descent into dementia for Becky, who was later diagnosed with a progressive, incurable, and invariably fatal brain disease. In a dark irony, this onetime Mensa member who wrote and edited books with such elegance and flair now struggles to find the right word for common household objects.
Humanly speaking, there is no hope. Death is as certain as the slow and inevitable deterioration of her ability to speak, to think, to plan, and to perform the simplest of tasks. So as committed Christians, Doug and Becky have earnestly sought divine help—and yet, all the while, she continues to gradually lose her mind.
The Interview with Douglas R. Groothuis, PhD
Groothuis (pronounced GRŌTE-hice) grew up as an only child in Alaska. His father, an activist in the labor movement, died in an airplane crash when Groothuis was eleven. That tragedy was formative in a lot of ways, contributing to his drive for achievement, as he tried to earn the acceptance of a father who was no longer in his life, and fueling his naturally melancholy temperament. He found solace in books and became an aficionado of jazz music.
His original goal of becoming a journalist was thwarted when he failed a typing test in college, unable to peck out twenty-five words a minute on a manual typewriter. He soon found that his inquisitive personality, his passion for learning, and his attraction to deep issues gave him a flair for philosophy.
Although taught as a youngster to believe in God, he began delving into Eastern mysticism when he attended the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. His brief foray into atheism was stymied every time he would look at the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. Finally, through some Christians he encountered and books he read, including The Sickness unto Death by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, he came to faith in Christ and was baptized at age nineteen.
Groothuis went on to earn his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oregon, while retaining a journalist’s taut writing style. He served as a campus pastor for a dozen years before joining the faculty of Denver Seminary in 1993.
Since then he has published thirteen books, including Unmasking the New Age, Deceived by the Light, Truth Decay, The Soul in Cyberspace, Jesus in the Age of Controversy, and Philosophy in Seven Sentences. His 752-page Christian Apologetics is a comprehensive and lucidly written survey of the evidence for Christian theism. His interests are truly encyclopedic—from history, psychology, and sociology to art, poetry, and theology.
Along the way, he has taught at a secular college, debated atheists, and contributed to such books as The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition and The Encyclopedia of Empiricism. For years, he blogged under the banner The Constructive Curmudgeon, whose title was a nod to both his melancholic personality and his deft sense of humor. (He quipped, “I once read a book called Against Happiness—and I enjoyed it.”)
And then there’s the book he never wanted to write. His crushingly honest memoir Walking through Twilight chronicles his wife Becky’s affliction with primary progressive aphasia.1 This memoir is, without exaggeration, a masterpiece.
“This is a hard book to read—like watching the news and learning about war, poverty, and famine,” said Kelly M. Kapic, professor of theological studies at Covenant College. “We would rather look away, ignore, and pretend.” And philosopher J. P. Moreland said he had never read a book like this. “There are no cheap Christian slogans, no slapping of a Bible verse as a Band-Aid on a near-mortal wound, no simplistic happily-ever-after,” he wrote. “But there is hope. Hope built on deep reflection about Christianity, suffering, and the meaning of life.”
Groothuis, approaching his sixtieth birthday and wearing an unruly beard, had not yet written this book when we met for an interview in his cramped and book-lined office in Littleton, Colorado.
In fact, I later learned that he nearly canceled our meeting because of the difficulty of talking about what he and his spouse were going through. But he agreed to proceed if it might benefit others who are also waiting—apparently in vain—for a miracle to rescue them from their own painful plight.
The Post-Hume Era
Dressed casually as if for a morning stroll, Groothuis turned around in his office chair to face me. He looks young for his age, though some lines are freshly etched on his face. His brown hair looked like it had been combed with his fingers.
I began our discussion by noting that he is coeditor of the scholarly book In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment,2 which systematically dismantles David Hume’s arguments against God and miracles—a case that Michael Shermer considered a “knockdown” of Christianity.
“Hume’s arguments were long considered sacrosanct and impenetrable, but the tide shifted in recent years due to the vigorous resurgence of Christian philosophy,” Groothuis told me. “The solvent of critical thinking and affirmative evidence for theism has pretty much dissolved Hume’s case. Personally, I find his arguments unconvincing. His criticisms end up either begging the question or not carefully considering the New Testament evidence.”
“So it’s rational to believe in miracles?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “When you consider the strong evidence for a creator and designer—for instance, the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments—then miracles are certainly possible. Beyond that, you can look at the compelling historical evidence for miracle claims and see that miraculous events are actual. If there’s a supernatural Creator, then certainly he could intervene in history—and Christianity sticks out its neck by basing everything on the miraculous resurrection of Jesus.”
“Speaking of the resurrection, this miracle brings hope to those who are going through suffering,” I observed. “A philosopher once told me that if God can take the very worst thing that could ever happen in the universe—the death of his Son on a cross—and turn it into the very best thing ever to happen in the universe—the opening of heaven for all who follow him—then he is able to take our difficult circumstances and draw good from them.”3
“There’s truth to that. I often go back to Genesis 50:20, where Joseph says to his brothers who betrayed him, ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.’ We may not know what good God is achieving in the short run, but given the credibility of Christianity and my forty years of experience as a Christian, I am justified in believing there can be significance and purpose in suffering.”
“Yet,” I said, “often that’s small comfort in the midst of our pain.”
“We can’t read the mind of God,” came his reply. “We’re not privy to why he chooses to work a miracle in some cases and not others. Yes, it can be agonizing when you’ve prayed and fasted for the healing of a loved one and God seems to have said no or to wait until eternity.”
And that brought us to Becky.
The Story of Rebecca
“Tell me about Rebecca,” I said. “Where did you meet?”
“We were both in our late twenties and part of a campus ministry in Eugene, Oregon. She was a writer and an editor, and I was a campus minister.”
“How would you describe her?”
“Ser
ious, maybe a bit melancholic like me. Shy, sharp, bookish, insightful, an excellent sense of humor, attractive. A pianist and singer. We were interested in the same things, especially apologetics and the relationship of Christianity to culture and art.”
“She was especially good with words,” I commented, having perused some of her writing. Through the years, she wrote and edited several books on marriage and gender issues, including The Feminist Bogeywoman; Women Caught in the Conflict: The Culture War between Traditionalism and Feminism; Discovering Biblical Equality; and Good News for Women: A Biblical Picture of Gender Equality.
“Absolutely, she was an elegant writer and a sharp editor. I remember she marked one short paragraph in an article I was writing and wrote in the margin, ‘One grammatical error and two clichés.’” The memory prompted a smile. “That was the worst I ever got, though. But she always improved what I wrote.”
“What did she add?”
“Clarity. The perfect word. The right turn of a phrase. She loved language. She could write magnificent sentences that flowed for sixty words or more.”
“How long after you met did you get married?”
“Only about a year.”
“And how much later did the health problems emerge?”
“She was in her thirties when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia,” he replied. “It was a fairly new diagnosis back then—some doctors didn’t know what to make of it. We tried alternate therapies, but nothing helped very much.”
I nodded, having gone through the same process with Leslie, starting in the days when skeptical doctors thought the illness was more psychological than physical.
“Over time,” he continued, “she began experiencing forgetfulness and confusion. At that point, we didn’t know if it was the early stages of dementia or what. The most troubling event was when she went to the hair salon—which she had visited dozens of times—and couldn’t find her way home. I had to file a missing person report with the police. It was a horrible evening.”
“Were there other episodes like that?”
“She went to the dentist, and when she got in the car afterward, she didn’t know how to start it. I went and found that the car had been in gear. She once asked me, ‘How do you work the windshield wipers on our car?’ At that point, we had owned that car for ten years. She had increasing difficulty working on the computer—in fact, I bought her a new one that was simpler to use, but she never figured it out. I ended up giving it away.
“We thought that all of this was fibro fog, but it was getting worse. A neurologist believed it was depression mimicking dementia and treated her for a year, but there was no improvement. In fact, she got worse.”
Sliding into Dementia
Then the day after Valentine’s Day in 2014, Groothuis rushed Becky to the emergency room for acute depression. “She basically couldn’t get out of bed. She couldn’t talk,” he said, pursing his lips at the recollection. “The psychiatrist put her in the behavioral health unit of a hospital across town. They strapped her down and took her away on a stretcher—she looked so forlorn.”
“How long was she hospitalized?”
“Five weeks in total. I visited her virtually every day. It was incredibly sad to see her in that psychiatric unit, wandering aimlessly, muddled and confused. At the end, she wasn’t even able to sign the release papers. They diagnosed her with primary progressive aphasia.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” I said.
“It’s pretty rare. Aphasia is the difficulty in finding words, especially nouns—tragic because of her love of language,” he said. “Just this morning, she came downstairs upset because she couldn’t find a hairbrush and she couldn’t think of the word for it. She would gesture and point to her hair. I said, ‘Hairbrush?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ The other day she didn’t know what the telephone was or how to work it.”
“The condition is progressive, is that right?”
“Yes, it begins in the frontal lobe of the brain and moves backward, which is the opposite of Alzheimer’s. You lose your use of words and then your executive functions—the ability to analyze and perform tasks. The particular cruelty of this disease is that you slowly lose your mind—and you’re aware of it slipping away.”
“I’m so sorry,” was all I could muster.
Groothuis acknowledged my sympathy with a nod and then continued. “Alzheimer’s patients can generally speak to the end, even though they might not know what they’re saying. But with this illness, words fail from the beginning. Typically, people die within five to ten years of onset.”
“So day by day, you’re seeing deterioration,” I said.
“Unfortunately, yes. Now we have a caretaker who lives with us; she and Becky live upstairs in our house. Becky can still tie her shoelaces, since that’s an automatic function, but many times her shoes are on the wrong feet. For the most part, I can figure out what she’s trying to say, and I find myself completing her sentences. When she’s upset, though, she can be unintelligible. It’s so unnatural that this woman who adored language no longer has a single book in her bedroom.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Sadness settled like a dark cloud. For a few moments, Groothuis didn’t speak. When he resumed, his voice tender, he said, “I always marveled at her mind. She was smarter than I am. I remember cleaning out some papers and finding her membership card from Mensa, the society for certified geniuses. I held it—and I cried. Her signature at the bottom was in her beautiful handwriting—but today, she can’t write a word. She doesn’t know how to use a pen.”
“We live in a disposable society, where divorce is common,” I said. “Yet you have maintained your Christian commitment in a way that’s countercultural.”
He shrugged. “I guess it is. But I’m no hero. The decision to stay married and to be supportive of my wife was settled when we exchanged our wedding vows—for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. Of course, that turned out to be more profound than either of us thought.”
The Marks of Tears
I’ve known Groothuis for many years, and so I felt the liberty to be candid. “You look exhausted,” I said to him.
“I am exhausted,” he said. “This is a daily struggle. Many years ago, a colleague’s wife was suffering from cancer, and she said to him, ‘I didn’t know the human body could bear so much pain.’ Well, I didn’t know a soul could endure so much emotional anguish. I’m becoming an expert on suffering.” With a weak smile, he added, “I wish God had picked someone else.”
“As a philosopher, though, you’re uniquely equipped to reflect on many of the deep issues all of this raises,” I said.
“On the intellectual level, I suppose that’s true,” he replied. “But much of what we’re going through is just visceral. I’ve never cried so much as I have in the last few years. Even in public. Sometimes when my glasses are smudged, I take them off and see that they’re the marks of tears.
“One day Becky and I were lounging on the bed, just enjoying some quiet moments together, and I started to weep. I was feeling melancholy over what we’ve lost. She said to me, quite sweetly, ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’” I said, ‘It is everything.’ She laughed a little, but it seemed appropriate—an acknowledgment that, yes, everything was an apt word. This dementia has spread its tentacles to every aspect of our life.”
“When Becky despairs, what do you say to her?”
“What can I say? I can’t tell her it’s going to get better in this life. That wouldn’t be honest, and we’re committed to avoiding clichés and too-easy answers,” he replied. “So I tell her to take it one day at a time, to look for the good things in life, to remember that God loves her. I say, ‘Think of the future, of the world without tears, without a curse, when you’ll have a perfect resurrection body and you’ll be face-to-face with God.’”
“Does that help her?”
“It does. In fact, just this morning I said to her, ‘In the long run, everything will be all right.’ She asked, ‘What
do you mean?’ I said, ‘The new heaven and the new earth.’”
“How did she respond?”
“Big smile. We have hope, but it’s deferred,” he replied. “Recently Becky and I were having dinner, and I felt moved to offer a toast.”
“A toast?” I said. “To what?”
“To the source of our hope,” he said. “To the afterlife.”
To Lament but Not Sin
“How has all of this affected your relationship with God?” I asked.
He exhaled deeply. “I’ve learned to lament,” he said. “Sixty of the psalms are laments. There’s lament in Ecclesiastes and Job. Jesus laments over the unbelief of Jerusalem. On the cross, his lament came as the cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’4 If Jesus can lament and not sin, then I suppose we can. And just as his lament was answered by his resurrection, so ours will be too.
“Look—God’s good world has been broken by sin, and it’s morally and spiritually right to lament the loss of a true good. I’m grateful for the lament we see in Scripture—it’s God helping us learn how to suffer well.”
“Suffer well?” I echoed. “Sounds oxymoronic.”
“That phrase can take people aback. They say, ‘Suffering can’t be done well; it’s bad.’ No, you can suffer well when you admit your grief, when you pray despite not feeling like you want to, when you’re honest with God, and when you don’t paper over your emotions.”
“That’s messy, no doubt.”
“Very. And I haven’t always suffered well. I’ve gone over the line at times. I’ve told God that I hated him for what was happening. That was a heartfelt expression of my grief at the time, but I don’t want to impugn God. He, too, bears scars—the scars of your sins and mine. Jesus suffered far more than you and I ever will.