(Thursday Afternoon, June 4)
Lindsey and Cynthia spent last Thursday afternoon together and have seen each other a couple of times this week. Each time, I get a little uneasy about what they must be saying. But a couple of phone calls to Andy and Carlos have helped get my thinking relatively straight again.
So here we are, back at Bo’s. This time it’s Lindsey’s idea. She’s catching the group up on what we’ve been talking through this past week.
“Steven and I have struggled in our marriage for a long time. Three weeks ago I was contemplating divorce. I’ve thought about it before, but this time I was actually playing it out in my head—where Jennifer and I would move, what kind of job I’d get. It was awful.”
I’m listening, imagining how hard—even last week—it would have been to let her say those words to this group. To anyone. But now it doesn’t seem that bad.
Cynthia laughs softly. “Steven, do you realize how amazing it is that you can let Lindsey say this to us?”
“Yeah, I guess. But it’s pretty hard to sit here and be… pitied,” I say.
“Oh, man!” Carlos responds. “No one at this table pities you. No one. We’re all really sad she had to feel and think that junk. But look where you are. Surrounded by a table of friends getting to love and respect you like never before. You’re letting us in, man. This is it. This is the good stuff. We’re so proud of you.”
Andy nods. “Every one of us at this table has stories of failure and immaturity like yours. Remember, all of us are learning to be convinced that if we have a safe place, where the worst about us can be known, the cycle of shame from old dead issues can be broken.”
Cynthia adds, “I really think there is this great secret payoff for all those who give others permission to see behind the mask.”
Once again she is awkwardly close to my face. “You find out the thing you feared the most never comes true. In fact, the opposite happens. You actually get to be known. You find out, in your vulnerability, that the real you is validated and loved.”
Keith joins in. “When I was hidden, everybody was paying for it. Even if they didn’t know it. Everybody was being robbed of the best of who I was. Even when I was on my game, I couldn’t give you the real stuff God put inside me to give away. People wanted to love me, but they couldn’t; people wanted me to love them, but I couldn’t. Everybody lost.”
Carlos jumps in. “Keith, you’re on it, man. The goal is not just someone’s exposure, but their freedom—so everyone gets the best of you. That’s the deal.”
Lindsey says, “Sometimes at church it feels like the ones who look all cleaned up are the admired ones. If you dare let someone know something wrong about you, it’s like you’re suddenly a second-class citizen, part of the leper group. You know what I mean? Who would dare let anyone in with those stakes?”
“You must have been attending my old church about five years ago.” Carlos laughs. “Maybe you don’t recognize me. I was thinner.”
He stands up and pulls in his stomach.
“No, Carlos, it wasn’t your church.”
“A lot of churches,” Carlos answers, “resemble that remark, Lindsey. But like my dad used to say, ‘There ain’t no together people. Just those with whiter teeth.’ ”
Cynthia stands up. “I think I was one of those people who could have made you feel that way. If we’re not careful, we can do it here too. A well-dressed woman of maturity like myself can give the false impression of being above the common faults and failings of others. So, I guess it’s my turn.”
She takes a long drink from her water glass. “It’s been nearly twenty-five years.”
Cynthia then sets her glass back down on the table. “Keith and I had struggled for some time. We were married young and had almost no support base or instruction. Keith was a hotshot navy pilot. We spent two or three years in some of the hardest places in the world for a marriage to survive.”
“Cyn and I had no clue,” Keith says, reaching over and grabbing his wife’s hand, her bracelets jingling. “We grew up in the same town in Kansas. I had known Cynthia since I was six. At some point, on one of our times home from college, we just realized we were in love.”
“He told me he knew since fifth grade that we would get married.”
“After college Cynthia and I got married and were immediately stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Then Annapolis, San Diego, back to Norfolk, and the Gulf Coast—all within two years. We just thought everything would work out, somehow.”
“It didn’t,” Cynthia adds flatly. “I was unhappy and depressed. Oh, and I was sure to let him hear about it all the time. I didn’t know how to make friends with military wives. Most of them were so… well, military. And they thought I was some kind of hippie art kook. And Keith was away so much of the time.”
Keith takes over. “I was spending more and more time in town with officers just as young, stupid, restless, and frustrated as I was. I started telling Cynthia I was held up after work for briefings with the commanding officer or some such bunk.”
Cynthia looks down at Keith. “After a while I knew he was lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to face it. I wonder now how may of the lies I helped him create. The poor guy couldn’t win. When he didn’t come home, I was miserable and let him know it. When he did come home, I was miserable and let him know it. Oh, I was a regular witch.”
“Most of you know the rest of the story,” Keith continues. “Trouble knows how to find someone hanging out in the same room. It was one night, one stupid act. It was never about being in love with another woman. I was just so immature and disappointed with my life. I gave myself permission to do something very wrong, and somehow, at least in the moment, almost felt vindicated in doing it. And, of course, I hid it from her.”
It’s hard to believe I’m sitting here on this deck, listening to these two sharing something as intimate as this.
“We drifted further and further apart,” Cynthia explains. “Our double bed seemed like three king-size beds.” She stops for a beat before she continues.
“Then one evening, at a going-away party just before we were being transferred yet again, I overheard an offhand remark from a pilot friend of Keith’s who’d had way too much to drink. I confronted Keith when we got home. He confessed. I came completely undone. Whatever illusions I’d had of a happy marriage dissolved in that instant. I felt anger, embarrassment, disgust, and fear, all in the same moment. I was suddenly a victim. And Keith represented all that destroyed my childhood dreams.
“Oh, and I was hurt that God knew and didn’t let me know sooner. So I was a victim with no one to run to.”
Keith’s eyes have clouded with emotion.
“It tore me up to see what I had done to her,” he says. “I grew up in a Christian home, but I think that was the first time I ever took God seriously. I cried out to Him, day after day. I got help from a base chaplain and his wife. I repented to God and to Cyn. It was an incredibly wrenching experience. But I gradually grew to believe that God had forgiven me. Cynthia and I tried to get back to some form of normalcy in our marriage, but even after a long time something still wasn’t right.”
“What was it?” Lindsey asks.
“I became convinced I was a better person than Keith. I reasoned that I never would have or could have done something like what he did. I was better than that. I was a better person.”
She is walking now behind Keith’s chair.
“And I held it over him. God was freeing him from bondage, and at home I was retying all the knots. I thought I had to be in control to get my life back. And so I thought my job was to keep him in a perpetual state of penance.
“It worked. He became convinced that in order to regain trust, he had to take the abuse of my arrogant superiority. I leveraged that control over him in a hundred ways. I used it to manipulate his behavior and ensure that he never forgot what he owed me for staying.”
She sits back down, her ringing bracelets the only sound on the deck.
“And slowly life leaked out of my husband. He became a well-behaved, compliant little boy, always trying to stay out of the doghouse. I couldn’t see that I was robbing myself of my husband a second time.”
Cynthia looks directly at Lindsey. “My dear new friend, I fear there are thousands of husbands and wives living in similar prisons. One fails, and the other finds control by never letting the other feel free and restored. It destroys two lives. One is kept pitifully pinned down while the other is trapped in arrogant blindness, allowed to ignore their own debilitating issues.”
Lindsey has been very quietly taking this all in. “So, what changed?”
Cynthia looks steadily at Keith as she responds. “One evening I was looking at my husband. He was sitting across from me in our living room, watching television. I happened to be browsing through a photo album, looking at pictures of the two of us. One picture was from soon after we were married. He was full of life, mischief, and playful affection. And oh, dear, he was so handsome! He was messing with my hair, looking at me with such confident delight. It looked like he was about to say something funny or take me in his arms and dip me, or tell me about some exotic place he was going to take us on leave… .
“Then I put down the album and stared at the stranger on my couch. He looked old, empty, and tired.
“Over time I had succeeded in convincing him that he wasn’t the man in that picture. I’d taught him he was a hollow failure whose highest aim should be to try, over a lifetime, to earn his way back into my favor. For years I’d seen him as weak and in need of my control. In that moment I gained a glimpse of how much I had hurt him, forcing him to become that hollow man. But I wouldn’t allow myself to stay there. For I had lost the ability to allow myself to hurt for him. To do that, I’d have to face my own sins. Oh, and, dear one, I was not ready for that. But from that moment on, it began to haunt me.
“Eventually God sent me an older woman who had the courage to ask, ‘So, Cynthia, how does Keith’s failure reflect on you?’ In a moment I realized that my own deep shame had caused me to be publicly embarrassed by my husband. The pain from his actions had left a long time ago. I wasn’t a victim of his sexual failure; I was the victim of my own shame. My friend began to help me uncover the lies that would cause such a distorted nine-year-long response.”
A waiter has been refreshing iced tea glasses around the table. He is taking his time, drawn into the story.
“Thank you, Cynthia,” Lindsey says, reaching out for my hand. “I do not want to go down that road.”
Cynthia puts her hand on both of ours. “That’s why we’re here.”
I feel a wave of gratitude for this place, for these people. “I’ve got to believe,” I say, “there are a whole lot of people who need friends like this.”
“No doubt,” Andy answers. “The writers of the New Testament talked a lot about it. They actually imagined churches that would be this way.”
I answer quickly. “Not likely. I’ve never seen churches like that.”
“I have,” Hank says, coaxing ketchup out of a bottle with a french fry.
“You’re kidding yourself, Hank,” I say. “Church doesn’t work that way. They’re institutions. And what self-respecting pastor would hang out with a crowd like this? Too much risk to his reputation.”
Andy tilts his head and says, “Well, now, that’s odd, because I’d swear I see Carlos here almost every week.”
Carlos says nothing; he just grins back at me.
“I’m sorry, Carlos. That was a stupid statement. Sometimes I forget you’re a pastor.”
“So do I,” he responds. “It’s something I’m working on, though.”
“But you’re not like this at church, are you?”
“What do you mean?” he asks, genuinely puzzled.
“Well, I just mean, how do you reconcile, I mean, how much does your church know about some of what you shared with me that day a while back. You know, I mean… they don’t know about the way you are around here—do they?”
Carlos is suddenly very serious. “Steven, do you think we’re doing something wrong here?”
“What?” I ask.
“Is Jesus happy with what goes on here in this little gig? Is this right and good, what we’re doing?”
“I think as right as anything I’ve ever done.”
“Then you tell me, Steven, why wouldn’t this be fit for a church?”
I go silent, not wanting to make a bigger fool of myself.
“Steven, this is not a game, man,” Carlos says, leaning in to me. “We’re not playing hooky, you know? Carlos has to be the same cat in a hotel on the road as he is praying in front of people on Sunday. Otherwise we’re just playing dress-up, man. This is me, Steven. I don’t get no more religious than this. Lotsa people probably wish I would. I just don’t think God is one of them. You know?
“Listen, we don’t need places like this to become more like church. We need churches to become more like this place. You know?”
“I think I do, Carlos. I’m sure sorry for what I said earlier. You’re as self-respecting a pastor as I’ve ever known.”
“Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.” Carlos smiles warmly.
“So, Carlos, does everyone on the deck crowd go to your church?” I ask.
“Oh, no, man, are you kidding? Would you want to go to church with Hank?”
Everyone laughs, and Hank just nods sheepishly.
We are interrupted by Bo shouting something to an employee, then laughing his big, barrel-chested laugh. It seems to signal the end of our time together. Carlos says his good-byes. Hank takes our pile of cash and debit cards up to the front register. Cynthia stands up, gives Andy and me big hugs, and then walks over to my wife and sits next to her.
“How are you feeling about all this, Lindsey?”
“Hopeful, I think.”
“Lindsey, this whole regaining of trust doesn’t come overnight. There will be some hard times. Steven will fail again. He will explode in anger again. And you’ll feel the same fear all over again. But something else is happening too. Your husband, I think, is beginning to humble his heart. So God is now free every moment to let his new story begin to dominate his experience. That will change everything.”
Standing behind my wife as Cynthia says this, I put my hands on Lindsey’s shoulders and say, “I want to say this in front of you guys. Lindsey, you have my permission to let Cyn or Hank or Andy or anybody know when you think I’m starting to get out of control. No more secrets. No more hiding.”
Cynthia adds, “You’ll need to find others, who can stand with you as you begin to risk learning how to open your heart again. I’d be honored to be one you can grow to count on. This doesn’t have to take nine years. We just didn’t have anyone. You guys have all this in front of you. You just have to let others care for you.”
Lindsey grasps Cynthia’s hand. “Thank you, Cynthia. You’ve been great. This is all so new. I don’t know what’s coming for our family. I’m hopeful, but it’s scary too.”
For a moment all the strangeness returns. This is all because of me. Everyone’s stepping to the plate to meet with my wife because of what I’ve done. I feel like a recovering monster, still capable of wiping out a community with a single swipe. It’s hard to believe this new identity when I am daily faced with the living consequences of the old one.
But I look over at Andy. He’s smiling at me. I’ve learned the meaning behind that smile.
Don’t be afraid. I know who you are. You know too much to listen to the lies now. Nothing to come can change that. I’ve got your back.
I smile back.
Thank you. Thank you for being my friend.