7. The King Can Bleed
The cracks in the impenetrable fortress and the first shock to the system.
I was twenty-two years old, sitting in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning just weeks away from starting my senior year of college. Beside me sat my emotionally intelligent wife, a woman planning a career as a marriage and family therapist. Sunday was my favorite day of the week. Sitting in those pews felt like being insulated inside an impenetrable fortress. My defensive strategy was simple, because any psychological or existential issue I encountered could be brought to my pastor, whose material I had binged that summer, and he would apply his flawless interpretation to solve it.
For weeks, I had been deeply wrestling with the theological concepts of predestination and Calvinism. These ideas were sweeping through campus ministries via the Acts 29 movement and were also the exact position of my mentor, whom I met with weekly. I was struggling to reconcile their intense logical arguments with my pastor’s anti-Calvinist positions. On this particular week, I brought my questions to him, pressing him with the specific scriptures and frameworks the opposing theologians were utilizing.
For the first time since I had met him, I watched him struggle to explain away an anomaly and address it adequately. As I pushed for consistency, his composure completely unraveled. He grew increasingly frustrated until he finally snapped, saying, “Listen, they do not understand, and they are wrong!”
I felt utterly shell-shocked, belittled, and exposed. He treated me like a naughty child simply for pointing out a logical flaw in his system. As I walked back to my seat, a terrifying realization began to settle in my chest: maybe this man did not have all the answers. Maybe this system couldn’t handle every critique. Maybe the fortress was not as safe as I had thought.
The Threat of Intimacy
Mary and I met during my sophomore year through Campus Crusade. She was the absolute opposite of me in almost every measurable way. She had been brought up in a loving, stable household by two present, Christian parents and was an introvert. Her baseline was defined by warmth, goodness, and a sense of wholeness and control.
Honestly, looking back now, I do not know how she decided to enter into a relationship with the trainwreck that was my life. In many ways publicly, I was highly charismatic and playful, effortlessly projecting an image of a capable, fun loving person to the people at church. But underneath that performance, I was struggling deeply with the pressures of college and was frequently depressed.
Because I had historically used dating as a volatile, horizontal support system, I had resolved that the next girl I dated would be the woman I married. But Mary was emotionally controlled, composed, and incredibly difficult to read. Her emotional stability terrified me.
Our dating period did not last long because we both entered it with the explicit intention of marriage. Within four months of our first official date, Mary casually mentioned that she would be open to getting married while still in college. I was shocked and incredibly excited. I purchased an engagement ring by the end of that summer.
But before I could give it to her, my system initiated a massive, automated self sabotage routine.
Systemic Sabotage
Even though I loved Mary, the terrifying prospect of true intimacy triggered my deepest insecurities. During a road trip to a wedding, I became completely distant and aloof, refusing to speak to her for days. My system was actively trying to destroy the goodness she was offering because it did not know how to receive it. The sabotage routine escalated until I finally broke up with her the week of my twenty first birthday.
Immediately following the breakup, my system fully destabilized. For the first time since converting at fifteen, I sought out the old party crowd and drank heavily to numb the emotional pain.
I confessed the relapse to my weekly campus mentor, desperately wanting comfort and reassurance. Instead, I was met with shaming and disapproval. He told me how disappointed he was in me and required that I step down from my leadership positions.
I felt utterly devastated, abandoned, and punished. The very spiritual framework I had downloaded to protect my psyche had turned on me, using my failure as a weapon. In response, I continued to drink in secret, sinking further into isolation.
The Pseudo Parent
The downward spiral stopped a few weeks later when I saw Mary on campus. She looked happy, vibrant, and at peace with her friends, while inside, I was a complete wreck. That night, I had a profound epiphany, I was throwing away a loving, restorative relationship simply because I did not know how to accept that someone could love me for who I actually was.
I resolved to fix what I had broken, but I could not do it alone. Mary’s mother had always been incredibly kind to me. After the breakup, she had left me a compassionate voicemail checking in on my well being, completely unaware that I was drunk when she called.
I decided to call her. Rather than chastising me, she offered immense wisdom. She held me accountable and told me to take ownership of the pain I had caused, but she did it with profound sympathy and encouragement. In that moment, Mary’s mother stepped into a massive systemic deficit in my life, simultaneously playing the role of a loving pseudo mother and a restorative pseudo father. It was the first time an authority figure had called me to right action without using shame as a mechanism of control.
Strengthened by Mary’s mother support of me, I apologized to Mary. We reconciled within two weeks, and we were engaged two months later.
The Wise Warning
By the time we had been married for a year, Mary and her family had started to become a literal bulwark against the residual chaos of my internal instability. Because Mary was so emotionally resilient, she was able to shoulder the weight of my ongoing insecurities and the intense enmeshment my trauma had created in our relationship.
Yet, I still demanded absolute theological certainty. Mary was the first to notice that my dependency on our pastor and his theology was profoundly unhealthy. She gently warned me about his dogmatic, unyielding control, but I completely blocked her out. Emotions were volatile, deceitful, and entirely untrustworthy. Logic was the only reliable currency. I believed that emotions were something to be mastered and suppressed, and that absolute doctrinal certainty was the only thing keeping the chaos of the world at bay.
The First Brick Falls
Which brings us back to that Sunday morning in the sanctuary.
When I sat back down in my pew after being chastised by my pastor, the damage to my wall had been done. I needed this rigid, literalist theological interpretation to protect my relationship with Jesus, the ultimate perceived source of my safety. I needed this pastor to be an infallible, unshakeable fortress to buttress the theological interpretation. But here I was, doing everything right, and the anchor to my safety was lashing out at me for trying to understand threats to our theological system.
It would take fifteen more years and several massive life struggles and earthquakes to completely bring the building down, but that Sunday morning was the precise moment the foundation began to weaken.
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