In the months before my coming clean, Amber asks me whether I have considered taking a break from drinking.
“Perhaps you don’t need to drink every day? You’ve had a drink every day for the last several months,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t drink . . .” I trail off, considering the most recent forgettable day. “Last Thursday.” It’s a firm assertion. She looks past the lie.
“Have you considered that God might have something for you, that you might be at risk of screwing it up with your drinking? It worries me.”
She is trying to tattoo me with purpose again, leave some Spirit mark on my skin. This is something I’m not ready for. I resist.
I might say I could stop whenever I like, or that I live in Christian liberty, and Christian liberty should be celebrated. I might say I write better when I drink. I might wring out every cliché in every after-school special from the 1980s, depending on the given day.
Some things aren’t red flags; they’re mushroom-cloud warnings. There is radiation that could blow this way if the winds shifted just so. I feel the winds shifting, but I’m a fallout kind of guy. I smile. I like mushrooms.
In the calendar week before drying out, I give myself to drinking. Amber is away, neck-deep in ministry events, and I am left to tend to a career, four boys, and a habit that’s become an affair. After work, I drink on the sly, just enough to keep a gentle buzz. I cook supper and tend to the evening bathing and teeth-brushing ritual. I tuck the boys into bed at 8:00, and at 8:05 I turn up bottles with great gusto. I drink on the couch, television streaming nothing in particular. It streams a History Channel documentary about the life of Hitler, or the pilot episode of Sherlock. I do not care about content. I am content to drink myself to sleep for eight days.
I wake with the rhythmic head-thud of a morning mallet. My nerves are soothed, though. Coffee and aspirin begin the trick of relief. By noon, I am somewhere near clearheaded. By four, I start the process of numbing my match-lit nerves. I keep a gentle buzz until 8:05, the time at which the boys are asleep, and then I’m back at it. Bottoms up.
This rhythm doesn’t feel problematic. It is only rhythmic. Sometimes rhythms are just rhythms. But sometimes problems wear pretty masquerades, dance to rhythms.
On Thursday, I’m to drive to Austin to meet Amber, who is at the tail end of a Christian women’s conference. There we’ll exchange cars, and she’ll return to Fayetteville while I attend a different conference over the following weekend. This is part of our rhythm—ministry obligations, family logistics, a busy schedule that is convenient for hiding secrets. Wednesday night, I make a run for another bottle of gin, a replacement. I drink it to an appropriate headspace, hoping she’ll not think it a new bottle. The empty bottles raise too many questions, and I’m afraid Amber might consider me an alcoholic if she returns to this container full of bottles. I gather them—one gin bottle, one whiskey bottle, a tequila bottle, and numerous beer bottles—and I load them in a garbage bag. Thursday morning, before pulling from Fayetteville, I take them to my office dumpster, pitch them in secret.
These could be the anxious acts of a guilty man always looking over his shoulder, but I sink only into the rhythm. If I feel the fire, I quench it. This is the way of things; it’s the way I reckon they’ll always be—that is, if I reckon anything of it at all.
Here is the difference between the healed of Scripture and me. I do not feel my sickness, cannot see my own blindness. Jesus’ patients were eye-opened people of faith. Didn’t the paralytic know he was a paralytic? Didn’t the lame know he was lame? Didn’t the hemorrhaging woman know she was hemorrhaging? There was the mustard seed of faith in their requests. Wasn’t there always?
Except maybe there wasn’t. Every rule has an exception.
The demon-possessed man of the Gerasenes—did he have his wits about him when Jesus came healing? Did he exercise extraordinary faith prior to the exorcism? There’s no indication of it in Scripture.
The demoniac—maybe he is my twin brother.
I travel to Austin unaware that I have become the cave dweller, the anemic addict. I am faithless and all fired up for the numbing.
Where is my mustard seed (Matt. 17:19–20)?