Toughest People to Love by Chuck DeGroat

Author:Chuck DeGroat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 2014-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part 3

Dealing with Ourselves:

The Best Help We Can Give Another

Chapter 6

growing through pain:

the gift of the dark

The dark night is a key part of God’s missional purpose in the world.

Daniel Schrock

The journey has to feel like night because it leads to the unknown. If Christianity meant mere maintenance, then bewilderment or darkness would spell disaster. But . . . darkness is a condition of the Christian life.

Iain Matthew

In embarking on the journey, we must leave the world of certainty. We must courageously journey to a strange place where there are a lot of risks and much is at stake, a place where there are new problems that require us to think in new ways.

Robert Quinn

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real

The needle tears a hole

The old familiar sting

Try to kill it all away

But I remember everything.

“Hurt” by the band Nine Inch Nails

Alone and very, very cold on an Iowa winter night in 1989, I saw no point in living. My parents’ marriage was all but over. Fourteen hundred miles away from my home on Long Island, I couldn’t intervene as I typically would as the eldest son and hypervigilant system-­caretaker of my family. The crumbling marriage was only a piece of an overall narrative that was coming apart at the seams. Once the model Christian family in other people’s eyes, we were far from that now — our fragile guise could no longer endure the pain of reality. My parents’ separation would only externalize what I knew to be real and true — that our happiness was an illusion, that life itself seemed like a cruel joke.

I could not believe anymore. And I could not hope anymore. These things only brought greater pain and disappointment. A friend said, “Chuck, lots of families are screwed up.” But this was my family, and I felt that it wasn’t just my family that was disintegrating — my entire worldview was falling apart. What I viewed to be rooted, steady, and reliable was not, and this opened up the bigger question: Could I imagine God being secure in this kind of brittle existence?

That night, I couldn’t. When I was younger, I’d retreat to my bike or my Go-­Kart, riding away from the craziness, but hopefully riding toward something more steady. When I was fifteen, I’d venture off on my scooter, a ride that would take me further still. And when I was able to drive, I’d head north, into upstate New York, looking for retreat among the rolling mountains and in the great falls at Niagara. But tonight I was looking for a more radical kind of retreat. Though I wasn’t on a suicide drive, I no longer cared. If I died, so be it.

Turning onto Highway B40, I accelerated. It was dark. It was icy. And I was alone on the road, which wasn’t unusual at this time of night on an Iowa highway. I continued to accelerate. When my ’85 Olds Cutlass passed 80 MPH on its speedometer, I turned off my headlights and accelerated.

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