I saw the reverse of this story take place in Parker Valley Hope, a residential treatment center where I have volunteered. There I met a woman who had abandoned her children to her own alcoholism. She had hurt them and scared them. Now she found herself alone and feeling about as much like a loser as possible. She had gotten her second DUI after she passed out while driving on the interstate, running into a divider on the highway. She believed that her children would never speak to her again. She was desperate to rewrite her story of loss, abuse, and abandonment.
One afternoon, she walked out of a group meeting to find her seventeen-year-old daughter waiting for her. The girl held a bouquet of balloons, a basket of chocolate-chip cookies, and a stuffed teddy bear. The bear came from the mall’s Build-A-Bear store. The daughter had implanted a sound chip in the bear, so that when the mom pressed the bear’s paw, she heard her daughter’s voice saying, “Nothing you can do can make me stop loving you.”
Mom and daughter hugged each other. In the midst of tears and loosened balloons floating to the ceiling, I sensed kamar, and I saw the reflection of the Most Desperate One. In the New Testament, considering the wayward children of Jerusalem, Jesus cries out, “How often I have longed [this is similar to kamar—“to desire”] to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks.”9
GOD AS DESPERATE LOVER
Fifty million paperback romance novels are sold each year, but the love story of God makes them seem lackluster and unimaginative by comparison. God speaks to His people as a lover who has been betrayed, a lover far greater than any romantic hero. God’s persistent love for His beloved is painful in its humiliating detail:
“But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers—
would you now return to me?” declares the LORD
“Look up to the barren heights and see.
Is there any place where you have not been ravished?
By the roadside you sat waiting for lovers,
sat like a nomad in the desert.
You have defiled the land
with your prostitution and wickedness … .
You have the brazen look of a prostitute;
you refuse to blush with shame.”10
God’s intention for His traitorous lover is even more staggering:
Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.11
God invites harlots to intimacy. It’s almost beyond comprehension. He desperately hungers for intimacy—an ineffable mystery. Somehow God interacts with human stories of love sought, love lost, and love endured. The revelation of God’s desperate love compels us to wrestle with the reality that He is “simply in love with us [more] than our mind is capable of reconciling with the way we still have to think of God.”12 In fact, in the Old Testament story of God’s love, the beloved prostitute returns again and again to her old ways. God considers giving up on this loser who can’t change her bad habits, but then with the tenderness of a lover He says: “How can I give you up … ? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion [the word kamar again] is aroused” (translated “kindled” in the King James Version).13
Recently a woman came to see me for counseling, wanting help in confronting her alcoholic husband. She explained with deep remorse that she had failed to deal with his heavy drinking for more than ten years of their marriage. She knew that wise intervention should have been enacted much earlier, but now it was her only hope. Desperately she faced him with the truth. She was fortunate: her husband heard her hard words and is now in the difficult early days of sobriety. During the course of our work she began to tell stories of their chaotic, destructive life together. She shook her head with incredulity. “Why did I stay with him? I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. But I could not stop loving him.” Her story is like God’s story.
The deepest story shows us God’s heart. Jesus embodies God for us. He is the Word of God. He is the touch of God. He is how God makes us, keeps us, and saves us. In Jesus’s death on the cross, God’s heart is crucified for the love of us. The Cross judges the wrongdoing of the world. There Grace descends into hell and leads a host of captives free—that is good news that addicts desperately need. God knew that all would disobey, fail, and lose, and He allowed it so that He might have mercy and grace upon all. That He might have Jesus upon all. He seeks, saves, and loves the destroyed. We are made by Him, saved by Him, set free by Him, and redeemed by Him. If you want to read where these truths are recorded in the Bible, check the endnotes for references.14
Knowing God as desperate lover answers the desperate longing of our hearts. No one longs for love or feels more loverless than an addict. Wanting to stay in control can keep us human beings from knowing—experiencing—God as desperate lover. As Robert Bly explained in his book Iron John: A Book About Men, “Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a … sanitized, hairless, shallow man.”15 But we addicts know that we need a wild man. A man who will love us when we wander, when we drink too much, eat too much, spend too much … or try to drink our own urine. The God-man who has gone to the absolute extreme for us.
If Jesus is the heart of God, the representation of Gods love for us, then He did not take all our sins on Himself so that He could command us, “Okay, now try harder. Try harder. Become more lovable.” That’s not freedom—that’s the last addiction.
In The Signature of Jesus, Brennan Manning tells the story of a repressed nun, a woman in her midthirties who never smiled, laughed, or danced. In prayer she had a vision of a large ballroom filled with people. She explained:
I was sitting by myself on a wooden chair, when a man approached me, took my hand, and led me onto the floor. He held me in his arms and led me in the dance.
The tempo of the music increased, and we whirled faster and faster. The man’s eyes never left my face. His radiant smile covered me with warmth, delight, and a sense of acceptance. Everyone else on the floor stopped dancing. They were staring at us. The beat of the music increased, and we pirouetted around the room in reckless rhythm. I glanced at his hands, and then I knew. Brilliant wounds of a battle long ago, almost like a signature carved in flesh. The music tapered to a slow, lilting melody, and Jesus rocked me back and forth. As the dance ended, he pulled me close to him. Do you know what he whispered? … “I’m wild about you.”16
Peter Hiett, my pastor and the one who has influenced my understanding of the gospel more than anyone else, reflected on this story of the repressed nun. He urges us, “Don’t be afraid of Jesus. He’s the One you long for, so wild He’ll hang on a cross and sacrifice everything for you. He wants your freely given, naked heart.”17 You don’t need to be afraid to commit your life to Someone who gives His life for you.
GOD AS DESPERATE SAVIOR
In his monumental book The Crucified God, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann attacks the view that the crucified God is detached, unmoved: “And because he is so completely insensitive he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being …. But in that case is he a God? Is he not rather a stone?”18
Moltmann further argues that Jesus entered the despair of Gethsemane and Calvary in order that, by acknowledging His own desperation, human beings might become more fully human. The agonizing cry of Jesus on the cross invites the release of human tears of rejection, loss, and despair. However, even Moltmann is unwilling to see God as desperate, asserting that Jesus came primarily to reveal humanity, not deity. But I am convinced that, most astoundingly, the crucified God reveals the desperation of deity.
Redemption of my own despair did not begin until I stopped reading the Bible as if it were a textbook of answer
s for Sunday school questions and saw this story in light of the desperation of God. Slowly, I became intrigued, even dumbfounded, by the stories of the Bible. Reading John 19, I encountered a story of such desperation that my pink women’s devotional Bible fell to the floor. I wept as I saw anew the coarse wooden cross, the gambling executioners, the crude nails, the gaping wounds, the cup of vinegar, the cry of utter despair from the fatherless Son, and the anguished turning away of the sonless Father.
I saw it clearly: God became the most hideous creature, described by Frederick Buechner as the One with the swollen lip, cauliflower ear, and ruptured spleen. In a flash of stunning light, shattering my darkness, I knew that God could look at me with kamar because He had looked away from His own Son. This was a God of desperate grace who desires all men and women to be saved.19
Those who live by this deepest story know that the crucified One shows the way because “he came to us not with the crushing impact of unbearable glory but in the way of weakness, vulnerability and need. Jesus was a naked, humiliated, exposed God on the cross who allowed us to get close to him.”20 At the cross, the very first became last, that we might be first. The winner became the loser, so that the losers could become winners. At the cross, Jesus revealed the glory of God—love, mercy, and unquenchable grace.
AN INVITATION TO LOSERS
Jesus has invited us to a party greater than any in our wildest imaginations. Those of us who have created our own hell know that there is no party in hell, but Jesus is hosting a party for prodigals, addicts, and losers with no requirements, no entrance fees, no credentials necessary. Does this picture of extravagant redemption scare you? We’ve always believed that we need to do something to deserve our invitation. But we’re already invited, like the prodigal son. Don’t be like the older brother in Jesus’s story, the older brother standing in the hell of his dark field, saving himself.
How does this deepest story change anybody’s personal story of addiction? That’s a good question. I wish that I could tell you that there were steps to follow, principles to adhere to, and lessons to learn that would guarantee freedom from addiction. And then again, I don’t. That wouldn’t be true redemption; that would make it too easy for us to believe that we save ourselves. Redemption is only possible to the degree that I am lost in God’s story. Reading His stories, meditating on His stories, allowing His stories to make sense of my own, I am invited to surrender to redemption. And as I surrender, I discover that I have been redeemed already.
This is the mystery of redeeming love. It allows no one to remain unchanged. The movie Little Miss Sunshine brings all the characters face to face with their own failures, and then they begin to love. The last one to fail is the little sister, Olive. Her goal drives the whole film: to compete in a beauty pageant to be named “Little Miss Sunshine.” For the talent competition, she has learned a surprise dance. Her perverted grandpa, who died on the way to the contest, has taught innocent little Olive a striptease to the song “Superfreak.” Shocked, the pageant hostess tries to stop the performance. Olive has failed.
The surprise of the story is that her father—and her brother, her uncle, and her mother—all choose to lose with Olive. They get up on the stage and dance with her.
The plot may sound silly, but this movie speaks profoundly to me of the Deepest Story. I’ve been Olive—certain I could win, only to find myself humiliated, making a fool of myself again. But God—the Father of orphans, the Brother of strangers, the Lover of widows, the Savior of sinners—chooses to lose with me. He joins me and asks me to dance with Him, and that dance is love.
I used to believe that we were all desperately searching for God, that addiction is a reflection of our search for something to fill the “God-shaped” hole inside of us (a concept Pascal originated as a “God-shaped vacuum”). But my experience of redemption in the humiliating and broken places of my story has taught me that the deepest reality is that God is searching for us. In the midst of our pain and foolishness, we wonder why God isn’t doing anything about it. But in fact, the pain, failure, and foolishness are driving us to God. Redemption does not mean that God meets our needs and then our souls stop longing. No, redemption does not eradicate kamar. Instead, redemption allows us to surrender. We don’t give up craving. We give in to craving God. And God doesn’t want something from us. He wants us.
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THE HEALING PATH
Heal me, long-expected Love; heal me that
I may continue. Renewal, release; let me begin
again without this fault that bears me down.
—THORNTON WILDER, The Angel That Troubled the Waters
I walked into a vast gray hall in the ruins of an ancient civilization. Broad stones stepped down to a round pool, now filled with dirt and crumbling gray rock. Near the top of the stairs, a sign read in both Hebrew and English, “And Jesus said to the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, ‘Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.’ See John 5.” I was standing inside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, at the pool at Bethesda. I knew the story from my Sunday school days. I imagined those who had once come here, the sick, blind, and malformed, lying on the steps by the pool that promised healing. I could almost hear their groans, sighs, and wails of pain and desperation. Those ruins also spoke to me of people broken by addiction and those who love them—the alcoholic, the family crippled by the lies and promises of their loved ones, the bulimic, and the man who can’t stop looking at pornography.
The New Testament recounts the experience of one man among the blind, crippled, and paralyzed visitors to Bethesda. This particular man had been sick for thirty-eight years. According to Johns gospel, “When Jesus saw him … and knew how long he had been there, he said, ‘Do you want to get well?’1 The sick man answers Jesus’s question with what seem to me to be excuses: “Sir, when the water is stirred, I don’t have anybody to put me in the pool. By the time I get there, somebody else is already in.”2
I know, and love, addicts and their family members who have waited for years to be healed, believing that everyone else gets the “miracle” but them. In the New Testament story, Jesus doesn’t answer the man’s excuses, shame him for being in this state for thirty-eight years, or even give him a shove into the “miracle pool.” He simply says, “Get up, take your bedroll, start walking.” John’s gospel reports that the man was healed on the spot. He picked up his bedroll and walked off.3 In his beautiful play The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Thornton Wilder calls this character “the mistaken invalid.” “Mistaken” because his paralysis was not permanent. His condition was part of his transformation. Thornton Wilder adds these words from the healed man, “Glory be to God! I have begun again.4
Healing, miracles, beginning again—isn’t that what we all long for? I see this story as important because it reveals how complex healing can be. Miracles often take time and are sometimes missed because we don’t understand the healing path. The story suggests that Jesus took notice of this suffering man when He “knew how long he had been there.” I believe coming to the pool of healing for thirty-eight years had made this man ready for Jesus.
Wilder’s literary imagination offers us understanding of the implications of the gospel account. What I love about Wilder’s perspective on this story is that the “mistaken invalid” knew that he needed something. He hoped it could be found in the pool at Bethesda, where he had heard others had found their miracles. In Thornton Wilder’s fictionalization of this story, he includes another man at the pool who longs for healing as well. Wilder names him “the Newcomer.” Unlike the man with the thirty-eight-year miracle, this man has only recently become aware that he needs healing. He doesn’t look sick. He has no outward symptoms, but something has shaken his heart to bring him to this place for the desperate. To the Angel who stands by the pool, the Newcomer explains, “Surely, O, Prince, you are not deceived by my apparent wholeness. Your eyes can see the nets in which my wings are caught; the s
in into which all my endeavors sink half-performed cannot be concealed from you.”5 The Newcomer’s symptoms were not as obvious as the “mistaken invalid’s” were, but his desperation for healing is the same.
Some of my readers are like the first man Jesus healed. You know you need healing; you need something to bring renewal and release from the burden of addiction. But I hope there are others reading too, perhaps to help a family member or loved one, who realize more subtly that you yourselves need healing also. We all do. We all get lost in our workaholism, people pleasing, and numbing behaviors as we try to escape the pain of life and the messiness of loving others. But some of us appear more whole than others, and that may be the greatest danger of all. It results in the last addiction: we rely on ourselves to heal ourselves, and so we miss the healing path.
LOOKING FOR SIGNS ON THE PATH
Every few years I run a marathon. Each one is 26.2 miles of agony and surprising joy, of physical suffering and spiritual dependence on God for something I tell myself every few miles that I certainly cannot do. I run to remind myself that I can do hard things, and that I can’t, that I need to cry out to God continually, “Help!” What keeps me on the path and goads me on to finish are the signs along the way. First there are the mile markers. These are the official signs posted by the race sponsors to indicate each mile and/or kilometer along the way. I rejoice at every mile marker, and as soon as I pass one, I begin to visualize the next. Other signs keep me going too, signs held up by the cheerers-on that say, “You can do it!” “You rock!” and “We are all Kenyans!” (That last sign refers to the amazing ability of the Kenyans to run with beauty. Seemingly effortlessly, they capture the best times and prizes in most marathons. It is an honor to even be in the same race with them! It lends me courage and hope.)
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