How Could God?

Up here in the wilderness, one can be alone with one’s thoughts, one’s faith and doubts—as well as probe the same in others. I did this last night. I began reading Jack Deere’s Even In Our Darkness. Being a graduate of Dallas Seminary, I knew a little bit about this former instructor, but after reading his memoir, I know him much more.

I was not prepared for the encounter. There are fifty fast-paced chapters, and after each one, I found myself saying, “Okay, just one more.” At close to 11:00 pm, I finished the final chapter. I’ve read nearly all of the 80+ reviews, and most all capture my own assessment—raw, gripping, tragic, real, disturbing, gut-wrenching. I went to bed troubled. How is it so many Christian leaders–fellow seminary graduates, my own spiritual godfather and spiritual mentor (who died of AIDS)—end up with such dreadful stories? How could God? But maybe I should be asking–how can we?

In places, I could relate to Deere. I grew up in the 50’s in a modest home with working parents and a father who could be harsh and demanding. I too had my own Davy Crockett coonskin cap. There were the same occasional family fights, the men who came by from the Baptist church, and similar stories of adolescent love, and campus ministry. But Deere’s early years were much darker. A father who committed suicide, a drunken mother who could be abusive, and Deere’s own struggles with addictive sex.

Like Deere, I had to go to secular college to see if the truth I was embracing about God could stand under scrutiny. And eventually, I too ended up at Dallas Seminary. But Deere’s spiritual journey shifted from a Dallas classroom to John Wimber and the Vineyard movement. It was a radical shift from a more cessationist worldview (God has ceased performing signs and wonders) to one where God is active in healing and inspiring prophetic utterances. Deere discovered the “voice of God” and the “power of the Spirit,” and he became the chief theologian in a movement of more than 500 churches.

It is here the book drew me in. Deere was preaching all over the world and living the life, but his personal side was beginning to rip apart. Deere’s oldest son could never come to terms with his own identity, and after years of drug abuse, he took a gun and killed himself. Reeling from the suicidal deaths of a father and a son, Deere writes, “Once my life had a lofty purpose—to speak to churches and write books about God’s goodness so that people would want a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. But Scott’s death robbed me of the story I had told myself to make sense of my life. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I still got out of bed at dawn. But I didn’t know why.”

Mixed with this despair, Deere’s wife began to drink. On a few occasions, she nearly took her life, and their marriage began to fall apart. It was only then that Deere became aware that his wife’s father had sexually abused her for years. It was part of the reason she chose to escape—and Deere was discovering that she also wanted to escape him. Years of unresolved anger had taken their toll. While his wife Leesa lived from binge to binge, Deere lived from failure to failure. There was a falling out with Wimber, and church ministries that did not grow.

But it does not end here. Relationships begin to heal. Deere comes to deeper terms with God’s mercy, His love, and His beauty. As Deere concludes, “God took away just about everything I used to fuel my self-esteem until there was nothing left except His love.”

Also near the end, Deere quotes from John Steinbeck–“We all have one story, and it is the same story: the contest of good and evil within us.” He then follows up with these words, “Any honest person knows that they are losing this contest.” Are these Steinbeck’s, or Deere’s?

Either way, I can’t go here. Doesn’t our faith go further than–“Life’s a mess, but thank God Jesus is our friend”?   I’m not dissuaded from the conviction that God can powerfully change a life. All things are new (2 Cor. 5:17). We can do the same, if not greater works than Jesus (John 14:12). Sin no longer has authority over us, so the contest has been won (Col. 1:13). God can do more than we have imagined according to the power of the Spirit (Eph. 3:21). We do live under an open heaven.

These are the things that have not ceased. These are the real signs and wonders.