5:58 a.m.
Before the day’s thoughts have had the opportunity to pile into a great snowball, a gathering mass of worry that sweeps me up and spins me over and over and over, I am thinking about a text sent by my friend Joel.
“In Mark 5,” he types, “Jesus sent the demons from the demoniac. No man could restrain him. Only Jesus.”
They came to the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gerasenes. When He got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met Him, and he had his dwelling among the tombs. And no one was able to bind him anymore, even with a chain. . . . And He was asking him, “What is your name?” And he said to Him, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” And he began to implore Him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby on the mountain. The demons implored Him, saying, “Send us into the swine so that we may enter them.” Jesus gave them permission. And coming out, the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea, about two thousand of them; and they were drowned in the sea.
—MARK 5:1–13 NASB
“Only Jesus,” Joel says.
This is a good thought, and I consider it, though I also know I have been running from Jesus for a long time now. I have fashioned a noose around the neck of an efficacious Jesus; I swung him from the rafters at a children’s hospital in Little Rock when I stopped praying in earnest for Titus’s healing. The Jesus of Mark 5 has never had the opportunity to meet me, the demoniac on the far shore of the Gerasenes. This present-day, healing Jesus—he is dead to me. Or maybe it’s my faith in him that is dead. It is hard to tell.
This doubt in Jesus the healer—I suppose it’s been this way for most of my life.
Even to type this is painful, and it would be even more painful if I did not believe that I am not alone, that there are so many who, if they were honest, would admit the same thing. So many of us have tied up Jesus, have pretended to kill him proper. Granted, there is no comfort in mass delusion, but I figure someone ought to come out of the closet, and it may as well be me.
Here I am, murderer and doubter.
6:04 a.m.
Titus has walked into the room this morning. He has come in, red blankie in tow, and he lies in front of the couch. He is rail thin, even one year after the hospital, after feeding tubes and dietary changes, after appointments with the best medical professionals in the state. In the last week, we have found ourselves again mired in another season of quandaries. Not only has Titus stopped gaining weight, he has begun losing it again. This is maddening.
A few weeks ago, Titus began hacking something awful, and after a round of X-rays, the local pediatrician thought it might be best to send Titus back to Children’s Hospital for an arthroscopic peek into his lungs and a meeting with the pulmonologist. Days later, Titus sat in the hospital waiting room, asking Amber for chicken nuggets, when the specialist entered.
“You want some chicken nuggets, little guy?” he asked.
“Chicken nugs,” Titus said, eyes brightening.
“Right this way,” said the doctor, and he led him behind the swinging doors where a team of anesthesiologists waited in ambush for our stick-legged son. The team scooped him up, slapped a laughing-gas mask on him, and put him under. The good doctor (occasional white liar though he may be) sent a mechanical worm into Titus’s lung. The worm, equipped with camera and pincers, found a popcorn kernel that Titus had aspirated some weeks before. The doctors removed the kernel as if playing the childhood game Operation, but the procedure created a small nick in the lung tissue, one the pulmonologist said may cause irritation for a few days.
Titus coughs this morning—hacks, really. Even still, he smiles as he rubs the corners of his blankie. He is a happy boy. I see him, bobble head atop a toothpick body. His head is in the eightieth to ninetieth percentile, while his body length remains in the fifth to tenth percentile, and his weight in the negative percentiles. This is the math that mocks faith, the equation that doesn’t add up to a healing God.
I can feel the fires of anxiety creeping. There is fear here. Why can’t Titus seem to get on the right track? Why isn’t he being healed? Why can’t he eat popcorn without sucking a kernel down the wrong pipe? Why can’t he hack the intruder out? Why are so many anomalies baked into Titus’s DNA?
I think back to Mark 5, to the demon possessed of the Gerasenes, and in this moment I wish I could be delivered from the demons of doubt. But in truth, I identify less with the demoniac and more with the swine. Unsuspecting as they are, ignorant as they are, the little piggies make perfect demon temples.
My therapist tells me that the nervous fire that makes me feel insane is nothing more than my body’s limbic response. Each time I think of Titus’s sickness, when I remember the days at Arkansas Children’s, my amygdala responds and tells my body to release adrenalin. Fight or flee, it says. The adrenalin rides in on a rough wave of cortisol, the stress hormone, and the hormones wash over me, prepare me for the next battle.
The amygdala is the storehouse of emotional memory, my therapist says; he supposes it is the home of what we have come to call the soul. It is the most protected part of the brain, sitting between the temporal bones located behind the ears. It helps in the processing of life’s stressors, sends the signal to “stand and fight like a man!” or “run for your life!” This, he says, came in quite handy when the cavemen stumbled across the pad-footed track of the saber-toothed tiger. Or St. George’s dragon, I think. “But you,” he says, “have learned to see saber-toothed tigers everywhere, and instead of facing the pain and realizing that your son’s sickness is no such animal, instead of seeking solutions, you numb the response with alcohol.”
And here is my precarious position: instead of facing pain with faith in the Christ who promises rest, I have learned to avoid it all by way of substitution. I’ve traded the abiding rest of Christ (if such a thing is real) for the temporary rest of liquor.
I have become Jonah, a man in rebellion swallowed into the hollow belly of something other.
Yet I will name it now. I think I can.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a running rebel.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, an addict.
6:22 a.m.
I’ve turned on Sesame Street for Titus. He loves Elmo, and the red puppet-face is going on about birthdays and cackling in high-pitched joy. A kazoo carries an annoying but happy melody. Titus laughs, then coughs.
The therapist has told me to turn in to the pain, to see that it is a normal part of the human experience. “Face the grief you have over Titus’s sickness and allow yourself to heal.” It seems ridiculous that fear and grief could be so crippling, seeing that my son is alive, drinking juice and laughing at Elmo. But the human heart is an awkward mess, and the brain even more so, at least as far as mine are concerned.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And give me rest.