GRAVITY
Sandra
Bullock told me to leave my husband.
Well, that’s
only partially true. It was God but he
used Sandy to do it. God doesn’t often
speak to me in words or pictures that are crystal clear but when he does, it’s
generally one of two ways. The first
method is more subtle. It’s a tap on the
shoulder; a “hey, over here” kind of thing.
The other method has all the subtlety of blunt force trauma. This time, though, was something between the
two.
A brief
recap for those of you who might not have seen the movie: Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock’s character) is part
of a US space shuttle mission. Near the
end of their mission, she and the rest of the shuttle crew are caught in a
shower of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite that demolishes their shuttle
and leaves Dr. Stone stranded in space with a very slim chance of ever
returning to Earth.
My life at
the time I saw Gravity was feeling
more and more fragmented. Like Bullock’s
character, I saw almost no chance of our life returning to anything close to
what it had been. When the Spousal Unit and I met
and married, he was AA sober and had stayed that way for many years. However, over the last decade, and especially
the last six years or so, his drinking had steadily increased to the point
where he was now drinking copiously every day – whole bottles, morning and
night. His willingness or desire to try
and hide it was less and he was becoming more vocal about how I needed to just
shut up and deal with it or leave. The SU
and I were both in the grip of alcoholism and codependency. I wasn’t the one drinking but alcohol and its
effects ruled both our lives:
irresponsible behavior, isolation, lies, deceit, anger, sorrow, rage…
Living with
a drunk is difficult at best and soul-destroying at worst. Part of that is the actions and attitudes of
the alcoholic but part of that generates from the person living with the
alcoholic; in this case, me. In general,
those of us who love alcoholics become part of the insanity without even really
knowing it. To borrow the AA/Al-Anon
phraseology, our lives become unmanageable but we don’t really see it. We’re so set on trying to figure out the set
of circumstances, the ritual, the “bottom”, the ONE THING that will cause the
alcoholic to realize what he or she is doing and turn away from their self-destruction
and towards sobriety that we miss the signpost that says we passed the Twilight
Zone a long time ago.
To quote
Eeyore: “It’ll never work.”
During this
time, I started journaling again. My
opening entries are full of anger and fear, so many of them starting with some
variation of “SU drank. And lied. Again.”
I desperately wanted change and healing.
I wanted my husband back and I brought that to God time and time
again. There was no one prayer. There was no one time. There was no one experience. All of it involved tears. I did not understand why I continually
implored God to rescue my husband and was always met with the response (subtle
in this case) to remain in the marriage, to continue to learn about God and to be
Jesus with skin on to my husband. Didn’t
God know how hard this was? I mean,
seriously, dude (Lord)? You want me to
be Jesus to a guy who gets blind drunk every night, calls me names, lies to me,
threatens to beat me, leaves me feeling bereft, alone and insecure?
Every time
I’d ask that, He’d say “Yes. I do.”
Looking back
with the benefit of hindsight, I can see better what was happening at that
time. In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about cheap
grace versus costly grace. Cheap grace
acknowledges what Jesus did for me but lets me go about living my life exactly
as if nothing has changed. Costly grace
calls us to follow Jesus, to understand what He did changed everything and I am
to follow in his footsteps. With cheap
grace, it was very easy to consider that God loved me. After all, I wasn’t the alcoholic. I wasn’t the one wreaking havoc. Costly grace told me to remember that my sins
were no better than the Spousal Unit's and that God loved him just as much as He loved me
and hurt just as much for the SU as I did.
Cheap grace creates a hierarchy.
Costly grace makes us all equal.
While I
prayed to God to change the Spousal Unit, God was working on changing me. One of the first things that He worked on was
my willingness to be obedient and submit and one of the biggest ways I was
asked to submit was by staying in my marriage because He was telling me to do
so. God and I talked a lot about that
one because, to be totally honest, there were a lot of days where I desperately
wanted to leave. But I had to come to a
place where I was willing to put God back in his proper place, to let him be my
security above all else – even my husband and my relationship with him. To help with that, He pointed me towards
Brennan Manning and Henri Nouwen.
Manning wrote a Christian classic, The
Ragamuffin Gospel, yet he struggled with alcoholism his whole life and died
from its effects. Nouwen dealt with deep
depression. Both of them wrote
truthfully about their struggles and how God loves us as we are in all our
brokenness and pain; that He hurts along with us even as He asks us to follow
him and carry the crosses He assigns to us.
Their writings gave me hope and showed me a God who was NOT indifferent
but was, in fact, deeply involved in my life and in my particular
circumstances. A journal entry of mine
on that topic reads:
“Whose mind, whose outlook do I
adopt? God’s or man’s? I must deny the right to set myself up as the
authority. You have my interests at heart. I must deny my desire to take authority and
wrest this situation away from you. I
must pick up my cross and follow you, seek you, become you. Be your beloved and find my identity and my
safety in you and not the things of this world – not even my relationship with
my husband.”
Another
thing God taught me was the need for consistent prayer and that my timing was
not necessarily His. I learned to beat a
path to Him every day and, more than that, to be honest when I prayed. A lot of times there was nothing very pretty
about my prayers. There were no elegant
words or pretty turns of phrase. If I
recall correctly, there was some cursing involved at times. I had to ask forgiveness a lot for trying to
impose my timeline and asking for proof.
I had to learn that just because I didn’t feel like God was there didn’t mean He wasn’t. It meant I wasn’t experiencing Him the way I
thought I should or wanted to and I had to back up and rethink my attitude and
mindset.
In Gravity, there is a point shortly after
the space shuttle is destroyed where it appears communication with Mission
Central in Houston has been lost.
However, Dr. Stone keeps talking, telling Houston what she is doing,
what is going on and what she is going to try to do next with the hope that
they can hear her even if she can’t hear them.
Every time she does, she starts off her transmission with “Houston in
the blind” and I tend to classify a lot of my early prayers as starting off
with some version of “Houston in the blind” because I was angry. Angry that even though I was praying and
trying to do what God wanted me to, I still wanted my timeline. I wanted my
miracle – even more so when it became very apparent that my husband would, in all
likelihood, drink himself to death. You
see stories all the time about God miraculously doing something or another in
response to someone’s prayer and all those stories seem to sum up with “And the
next thing you know…”. How could God ask me to stand by and try to be
Jesus in a situation like this? Wasn’t
He going to rescue my husband? Wasn’t
there going to be some obvious, unmistakable turning point where everything
magically became better?
Yeah…no. God can certainly do that if He wants to but
a lot of times I think he has things to teach us in the midst of our suffering
and we can only learn those if we choose to bend our will, submit and be
obedient to what he asks us to do. In Jesus, the One and Only, Beth Moore
writes, “A plan of profound importance exists that sometimes overrides the
miracle we desperately desire.” She also
says later that Jesus doesn’t only see our excitement but that he also sees our
exhaustion. Well, he was seeing a lot of
exhaustion with me.
Let me tell
you, obedience is a slog. It’s a
painful, heartbreaking slog where you have to get up every day and ask for the
strength to submit to Him again because you just don’t see the freaking
point. You have to bend your stiff knees
and remind yourself in prayer that you have asked for God’s will to be ascendant,
not your own. You ask for patience when
you can feel the frayed threads of your sanity ready to snap. Some days you can say that all in a normal
tone of voice. Some days you scream it
out in the car on the way to work. Or
sob. Or a combination of both.
It’s a good
thing waterproof mascara exists.
God was speaking to me but he was doing it
in a book chapter here, a worship song there, a conversation with someone. Then, in July 2013, God spoke directly to me
through my journal. I’m not going to
write it all down but there were some very important things he said that I kept
holding on to as things continued to get worse and worse:
“Do not try to steer. You don’t know the way, where I want you to
go. Let me steer. You cannot perceive of what I am doing but I am
about my Father’s business…. Your strength is
in your submission…The beauty of what I will do is far beyond your
imagining...Do not hold back until you “see” me act because you will miss
it. Step forward. Act forward.
Act in love. Act in faith…What
you ask for will be done. Do not hasten
it or try to craft it, push it into being.
We are on my timeline. Walk the beaten path to me everyday…I will give
you everything you need if you trust me to do so.”
That was in
July. In December or so, we went to see Gravity.
I remember watching the Spousal Unit to try and gauge how sober he was and settled
down for what I figured was going to be just some time to turn my mind off and
get away from the wreck of my life and my marriage for a little while.
I got much
more than that.
One of the
first introductions we get to Dr. Stone is when the mission commander, Matt
Kowalski asks her what she does after work.
She just says she listens to music and “just drives”. It turns out this is what she was doing when she
received word her daughter had died from a freak accident and it’s what she’s
kept doing since, caught up in an endless cycle. After the debris destroys the shuttle, Dr.
Stone manages to make it to the International Space Station. She takes off her space suit and curls up in
the fetal position, floating. The hoses
attached to the airlock door look almost like umbilical cords. This was the point where I truly heard God
say, “I want you to pay close attention from right now through the end of this
movie.”
What became clear to me through the
words and pictures of Gravity was
rebirth, was the idea of more than just the will to exist but to more than
that, do more than survive. Bullock’s
character became me in a way. She was
showing all the behaviors and all the ways I’d shut down and shut myself off –
I’d been “just driving” the same way she had been. When she makes the choice to try and get to
the Chinese shuttle, Tiangong, and
says that it’s time to stop just driving and go home, God said, “I want you to
do this.”
My response? You want me to fly in a space shuttle,
God? Really? ‘Cause that’s a little weird, I gotta say. Also a little out of my price range.
That was the moment God proved He has
a sense of humor ‘cause he didn’t smite me.
Instead, he said, “No, keep watching to see what I mean.”
I watched the last several minutes of
the movie feeling like I could barely breathe.
The Chinese escape pod, pointed towards Earth, is caught in the planet’s
gravity and Stone’s control of the pod and the outcome of her journey is
negligible at best. She calls out to
“Houston in the blind” and says:
“All right, the way I see it, there’s only two possible outcomes: I either make it down in one piece and I’ll
have a hell of a story to tell or I burn up in the next ten minutes. No harm, no foul. Either way, whichever way, it’ll be one hell
of a ride.
I’m ready.”
Stone then
punches the ignition button and begins a bone-rattling, fiery free fall to
Earth. At this point, I’m starting to
cry because I understand what God is telling me. He’s saying,
I’m going to ask you to do something
that seems at least as scary as this.
You’re going to feel like you’re in free fall too; completely out of
control. You have to trust me and be
ready. You have to love me more than you
love your husband. You have to love
clinging to me in uncertainty and faith more than you love the predictable
insanity you now live in. You have to
decide who you love more: the person I
gave to you or the One who did the giving.”
On February
6th, I told my husband we needed to separate. My journal entry that day contains a plea to
God that this not be the road He is asking me to walk down. On February 8th, our 22nd
wedding anniversary, I wrote: “Henri (Nouwen) talks about choosing to respond
to circumstances and how you can choose to respond with joy. Right now all I have is sorrow. Abba, the cry of my heart is that this can be
stopped. ..my first request is for my husband to be returned. If not, help me to be obedient to you and
walk the path and someday find joy again in it.”
That was my
own way of saying “I’m ready.”
At what
looks like the last possible second in the movie, Stone’s escape pod releases its
parachute. My parachute came in the form
of friends, and family and church members who grieved with me and helped me do
the things I needed to do in order to move out and set up my own apartment.
The
parachute deployed again when my husband left me a note pleading with me to
help get him to rehab and God moved swiftly and obviously, bringing together
both the rehab and the funds to get him there in just a four days. On February 14th, I put my husband
on a plane to California to begin three months of rehab (which means I totally win Valentine’s Day
forever). My prayer that day and every
day since has been for both of us to have the courage to face up to the
triggers, issues and pain we have been carrying around, that we would have the
strength to submit and seek to make God the center of our lives both
individually and collectively as a couple.
I’ve prayed for both of us to be able to find the resources He will
provide to live in a state of separation while we work on reconciliation – and
He has. He’s provided my husband with a
job, a place to live and even a car.
He’s provided us a therapist who cuts through the smokescreens we cling
to and helps us figure out other ways to go with care and with honesty (and not
without a little sarcasm as well).
He’s now
been sober nearly eight months. We are
tentatively talking about living together again and how that will work. There are no guarantees he will never drink
again. Of course, there’s no guarantee I
won’t try to revert to previously insane behavior again so, you know, all’s
fair. Our therapist asked me during our
session last week what I would do if the Spousal Unit started drinking again. My response was that if he stumbled but got
back up on the horse, I would have all the time in the world for him. If it began to turn into what it had been
previously, it would depend on the situation and what God was telling me to do. But I know now that I can do more than
survive. I can do more than “just drive”
whether or not he is drinking, whether or not our marriage falters or is
renewed.
Either way,
it’s going to be a hell of a ride.
I’m ready.
