Chapter Nin e

Rock Bottom

W hen I went viral for Rebecca’s miracle, it felt like a witness. Then, I was still humble. When I was broken before God, after everything had failed us and the only place left to look was up to Him. Science had left us alone and without recourse and He was the last place where healing could be found. The doctors had failed us. We could only leave our answers up to our Almighty.

I believe now, as I reflect on it all, that what made that initial moment resonate with so many people was not my charisma, it wasn’t even The River. It might not even have been what we all thought was a healing. It was because so many people wanted to see a pastor who was just as broken as they were. By literal accident, I had let down all my pretenses and stood naked before God as the whole world watched. I showed them all my fear and shame and pleaded with the Great I AM to listen to me. I wasn’t speaking like some dynamic apostle who knew everything. I looked like a scared child standing before their daddy begging for help. The walls that stood between those in the pews and me had fallen down. The curtain had ripped, just like it did when Jesus said, “It is finished.” Nothing separated us anymore, and they knew that I understood their pain. So when I declared that He had healed her, they believed fervently along with me.

I believed so fully that He had.

Thousands upon thousands of others had believed as well. I did everything I could to keep up with the miracle God had given us. I cherished it. I tried to brand it and market it and bring the gospel to the nations who were now coming to my front door. That was what felt right. God had flung wide the heavenly gates and brought the trueness of the good news to our little town. So we raised up our voices and we sang songs of praise. Our song, our worship, our collective fears and joys were brought into the throne room of God at the altar of His church. Then there were also the tithes and the offerings, so our cup overflowed with blessings. Everything happened so fast.

It all happened so fast that I believed Rebecca was being sluggish due to the exhaustion of the new mission before us. I believed her headaches were because of her weaning off of caffeine because she wanted to build “true stamina” to face all these new challenges before us. We allowed ourselves to believe it was anything other than that her cancer had returned. We never would have even thought to question if it was because it had never left. We never considered that something had gone terribly wrong and she had never been healed to begin with.

This was all so easy to overlook because I too had been carrying far more than I could handle. I was experiencing the drain of giving my time all over the world, on television, in tweets and statuses, three exhausting two-hour-long services each Sunday. I had convinced myself that I needed to take more and more of my Ritalin. I told myself this wasn’t a drug addiction. No, this was different than what others deal with. Just more lies to myself. No, this was me using it for the purpose it was intended, to keep me focused and sharp. I just needed a little bit more now. It was alright. It was fine. It just helped me stay focused and awake. Each month, I was running out a little faster. And faster. Soon, I never had enough to make me through the month. At first, I told the doctor I lost a bottle, and it got me ahead enough to create a storehouse. Then I purchased some off a friend … and then a stranger in the parking lot of a closed-down movie theater.

I had it under control.

So when Rebecca showed signs of weakness, I brushed it off as being the same as my own exhaustion. In the back of my head, a voice nagged that if this was truly God’s doing, why wouldn’t He make our energy sufficient to meet the call? I silenced that voice quickly as the enemy letting doubt make its way into our hearts. I attributed this to nothing more than the devil trying to make me fatigue and falter. I brushed it away. I told Rebecca to do the same. We couldn’t let doubt in because, if we doubted, maybe then the unthinkable would happen. She took more and more doses of aspirin for her pain, and I took more and more Ritalin to keep me going, awake, and alert. This was what success looked like. I was certain of it.

The virality I was now experiencing because of my rant at Dennis felt very, very different. I was not a hero of the gospel; I was a backslid sinner, someone who had cracked under the pressure of the devil. I was being rejected by the Church. But instead of being welcomed into the rank of sinners, many gloated at my public fall from grace. Now that the elders had removed me from my pastoral duties, one of the associates took my regular schedule of preaching and teaching. I issued a public apology for my anger; I denounced my denunciation of God. I told the world I would be taking a sabbatical. It had all been planned for me. Nothing was my own. I was being held on to as a liability and they needed time to figure out what to do with me and how to free themselves of the stronghold my family had over the property. I was on the verge of losing everything and I was too numb to care.

Countless blogs were written about how I was a coward. How I lost it after only eight months in the spotlight. I guess I didn’t get credit for the fifteen solid years of laboring in the field, all the ones spent outside of the spotlight that also weighed on my soul? No, that was lost in the narrative. I didn’t matter until I suddenly mattered. As far as the world was concerned, I was only created eight short months ago. Now I had failed at the job I never wanted. Truth be told, I had only finally found my faith to save my wife, and now she was gone, and with her my faith flushed down the drain with the rest of the wasted life I had lived. I was angry and bitter and afraid to admit I was addicted to the only substance that seemed to make it possible to move through the day. Like they needed any other reason to throw me away .

With my sabbatical, I was able to keep my salary, for now, and it was sizably different from what it had been when we were a small rural church. I had to forfeit the advance I got on my book deal. No one wanted to read a theology book written by a man so weak and willing to denounce his God at the first sign of pushback.

One Christian blogger theorized that had I been born during the persecutions of old, I would have been “the one in the colosseum ready to rat everyone out and tell where the underground churches hid.” He saw me as worthless and spineless and said that I deserved to lose everything. There was nothing of the apostles in me. I was nothing more than a flash in the pan who God used “in spite” of my many failings. That’s what he believed. Honestly, I believed it too.

I wasn’t the only one suffering consequences. Poor Dennis got his share too. Instead of receiving praise for exposing me, people ripped him to pieces for attacking me in a moment of weakness. When the news finally broke, he got a taste of his own call-out-culture medicine, and many of his former friends wrote blogs about how he went after me just moments after my wife had died. Many people defended his conclusion but not his method. Someone from an Assembly of God discussion board found Dennis’ address. He still lived with his parents. They posted his parents’ address online. They doxxed him. Thousands of Christians wrote letters to his parents’ house. They threatened to kill him. “Die in hell, faggot,” was written in red on his parents’ garage. This was the example of “Christian love” that Dennis was shown. I didn’t speak out. No one did.

Dennis took his own life two and a half weeks after our ill-fated video encounter went viral.

When I heard the news, I mourned for him. I wanted to say or do something. So many times I had thought about calling him, telling him that it wasn’t his fault. So much of him reminded me of myself. This wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t my enemy and I don’t think he ever saw me as that. He truly wanted to see something better in me than I even believed was possible. I didn’t show him that. I failed us both that day in my anger and rage. Without fanfare, I anonymously paid for his funeral. More than anything I envied his courage to put a noose around his neck. I was too big a coward and too self-important to kill myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was already planning my Jim Bakker moment. I was going to have a comeback !

My mother took charge of keeping watch over the girls. I had abandoned them. Their whole life, they had only known their father as a preacher man standing confident behind a pulpit. They never saw the real me: scared and concerned and uncertain. I was bigger than life to them. I was their daddy. Now I was a broken man who couldn’t see enough to love them past the heartbreak I felt for their mother. Instead of pouring into the little genetic replicas of the woman I loved, I drowned out every feeling I could have with my drug. I began mixing it with an old bottle of my father’s whiskey. I had kept it in its place in the desk as a reminder to me that he too was a failure. Now I was drowning myself in the very same bottle of alcohol he used to forget I existed.

At the encouragement of my only pastor friend who hadn’t distanced himself from me, I took a vacation. 

“Get out of town before you drive yourself mad,” he said. “You’ve got the money. You’ve absolutely got the time. If you just sit here and listen to the sermons rattling in your brain that you might never get to preach, you might fall into a space that you can’t ever crawl back out of. You are far beyond burnout, brother. You are in the pit of Hell. This is Hell. Or at least the closest you’ll ever come to it. It’s time to get out and find yourself again.”

I am absolutely certain that he meant I should take a retreat to somewhere that deals with burnout or helps you find inner peace. He meant something refreshing to the mind and soul. To find my way back to myself and to God and my ministry. But I wasn’t looking to reconcile with God just yet. If He wanted that, He was going to have to step off His fancy throne and walk on down here, show up at my front doorstep and hand Rebecca back to me. Isn’t that what it means to repent? To turn away from what you were going to do and make it right? Well, I needed a little bit of repentance from God in that moment. How was He planning to make this alright? Crickets, I thought. Instead of looking for that peace my friend talked about, I drove a few states away, a short two-hour drive, to the city of sin: New Orleans. 

Whatever pain I needed to drown out, this city was willing to ease every pain, for a price.

I rented a small creole shotgun cottage a block from Bourbon Street. It cost me almost $2,000 dollars for the week on AirBnb. I didn’t care. I had money now and I was willing to waste it. It didn’t take long to find someone who would supply me with medication. Drink was aplenty down Bourbon and Frenchman and anywhere else my feet would take me by stepping right outside my door. It was surprising how quickly I allowed myself to fall. The truth was I didn’t have far to fall at all. I had been building up to this for years, lying to myself that my addiction was different than the ones I preached about from the pulpit. This wasn’t the same! But it was exactly the same. Made worse only by the fact that mine was coated in hypocrisy.

Each night of the week I roamed a different part of the city. I went to comedy clubs and walked through a bathhouse just like the one my father accused the mayor of visiting. I watched as men gyrated on each other. I was not repulsed, like I thought I would be. It was almost alarming how much I didn’t feel guilt. I didn’t feel like a sinner. I had found my new home. For so long, I had judged everyone, never realizing that these dark spaces where they had been forced to hide in order to be their authentic selves had been created by me and my father and my grandfather and every other pastor, priest, and apostle who came before us. We forced people into the shadows and into dark places. We were the ones who made sex unsafe by preventing access to protection. We had let AIDS spread because we thought people deserved it and wouldn’t let the government respond, lest they incurred the wrath of the “moral majority.” We made people who only wanted to be loved and love each other hide in dark alleys.

We were the reason why alcoholism was so high amongst the LGBTQ+ communities. We didn’t welcome them into our coffee shops or churches or grocery stores. They couldn’t show themselves to us in society. So we pushed them to the fringes. To the only place that would accept the people we rejected. The brothels and bars and strip clubs were all too eager to welcome them in. It was us who pushed people away and then mocked them and said they got what they deserved.

It was along these very streets I was roaming, that a small congregation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Christians had attempted to form a church carved out for themselves in the 1970’s. They met in the upper room of a gay bar, very much like the early Church. One day, a fire was started, and over twenty people were killed in the blaze. Two of the parishioners were found holding each other. The pastor’s charred remains hung out of a window for hours as people gleefully mocked them. The local government and the mainstream Church turned its back on these people. We didn’t see them as martyrs, we looked at them as sinners mimicking and perverting genuine Christianity. We acted as gatekeepers to the throne room of God.

Maybe there was a reason I hadn’t felt God in our church. Jesus was too busy hanging out with the people who would actually love Him back.

Everyone our churches had rejected found family and community on these streets that was far thicker than any church could offer. They now lived where people did not judge them or hurt them or deny who they truly were. There was more genuine family inside a strip club than inside my own congregation. Our church sure could have learned a lot from these spaces, if only we had been willing to listen.

I kept extending my stay. A week turned into a month. I walked further down the hole of my gluttony. I bought whiskey and women and drugs. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel a part of this world. I still judged everyone I saw. I wanted to reach out and save them from the same things I was also doing. I was a hypocrite. I couldn’t even see it or smell it, but I reeked of self-righteousness. These people were better than me because they lived authentically and I lived a lie. Every one of them was self-aware and I lived in a cloud. Had I been willing to listen I could have learned so much from building authentic friendships. Instead, I just continued to use and exploit those around me. 

In the mornings, I would return calls from the elders. I would thank them for this sabbatical. I would promise that soon I would return, restored to the Lord and ready to preach the good news. I would wait for them to give me any sign that they were willing to let me return, but nothing would present itself. Attendance was beginning to wane at the church. It seemed that people hadn’t only come for The River, though that cursed fabric was still a big enough draw for some. It seemed that many wanted to see the apostle, me, restored to the Church. I couldn’t understand why. But I also wanted to go back to what felt normal. I lived stuck somewhere between wanting to hide behind that pulpit and explore my own flesh. What I was really waiting for was one of those old men to say, “Come home, son. We will work it all out. You are forgiven and redeemed and beautiful and made in the image of God and you are perfect just the way you are.”

I wanted the same thing that I withheld from everyone else. If one of these folks had walked into my church, someone just like me, I would have rejected them. I would have tried to change them. To make them look more like me. More like what a Christian is supposed to look like. I would have taught them how to judge and reject and be cruel. 

Instead of reconciling any of those feelings, I lay naked with a sex worker in my bed while I spoke on the phone with the elders. She tried to speak and I hushed her. As soon as I had completed all of my responsibilities—called the church, called the girls and responded to emails—I ate my pills and began to drink. It took so much more to silence my head now than it did months ago.

The news cycle had almost forgotten about me. There were wars and protests and police brutality and an upcoming election for them to worry themselves with, not little old me. On occasion, if I sent out a tweet or sparked any sign I would regain my public life, there would be buzz of both criticism and support. I would make a headline or two. Then it would die away.

I’m not sure what I was thinking in those moments. Would I start just giving my sermons high and drunk and hope no one noticed? I suppose I really was that stupid. The whole world didn’t make sense anymore. Maybe I would turn the whole world upside down. Might this be how the world is consumed by fire and water? Me pissing away my life along the French Quarter?

How haughty I was. This city wasn’t a place of sin. I was making it sinful because of my own actions. Like any place, there was darkness and light. There were people receiving healing and finding brokenness. There were bartenders hearing confessions far more genuine than any priest had ever heard. There was a beauty here that I was refusing to see because I was still only seeing it through the lens my father had taught me to see this place through, an area where sinful men went to fulfill the desires of the world. I wasn’t seeing it as a place where people came to be free. Free from all the trappings we had set up for them. A place where young girls flashed for beads alongside women who also flashed their mastectomy scars, both feeling beautiful as lead-painted beads came raining down on high from the wrought-iron balconies.

I was still too arrogant to see that there really wasn’t much of a line between the words of prophesy I spoke on Sundays and those who lined the sidewalk surrounding St. Louis Cathedral reading palms and tarot cards. I was too blind to see that maybe it was the same whisper of hope in their ears as mine. Maybe God was just trying to speak to people by any means necessary, giving us moments of hope and pleasure and just a little nudge of direction. I felt better than them, but the truth was they had more God in their little thumbs dealing out those cards than I had in my heart.

One uneventful night, I stumbled out of my favorite bar. I had grown a beard and I let all my grays show. I wore my glasses instead of contacts. I was almost unrecognizable as the once powerful apostle to the nations. I suppose this was how I got away with all that I did. I was like a hellhound Clark Kent. 

I was giddy with finally being able to play slot machines. Out of all the sins I tried on, I liked gambling the most. Many of the bars along Bourbon Street had cheap slot machines and I loved every minute of it. There was this thrill, similar to that of prayers, that maybe today would be the day I would get an answer. Maybe I would roll this coin down into the belly of a machine and win. The odds seemed about as equal to the absurdity of me thinking God had actually listened to me and healed my wife. Actually, this felt more real.

At about 3:00 a.m., I made my way into the street. It smelled of urine and stale beer, cheap perfume and fried chicken, sex and Mardi Gras beads. It was a hot night and the entire place was sticky. The aroma filled the thick humid air. I wondered if I could swim home in this cloud of mist that covered us all.

There was a caller outside one of the strip clubs. It was not one I frequented. If you aren’t familiar, a caller’s job is to try to lure people into a club. There are hundreds of choices all throughout the French Quarter. Any flavor of debauchery one might want to try on is there. So, the callers stand outside and make promises of what you might find inside. They can promise you drink deals or detail the shows you will see inside or promise you some alone time with a pretty girl or boy or whatever you desire. Sometimes these callers are women, scantly clothed, showing off what someone might see inside. Many times, they are comedians on their day off, just trying to make an extra buck. In this case, it was one notorious comedian and caller named Rowdy.

Rowdy had grown up on the streets of New Orleans. Legend had it he lost his virginity in a brothel when he was only thirteen years old. As a child, he used to dance on the streets as his brothers played music with broomsticks and repurposed five-gallon paint cans. He would tap dance and make his dollars and pennies and bring them back to their father. Their father would drink away those dollars and the boys would be sent back out to the streets. His life didn’t sound that dissimilar from mine. How privileged I was to think that. He was as authentic a figure in New Orleans as Café du Monde. People traveled to hear him crack jokes and dance. He was a frequently viral figure himself. He was especially famous for cat-calling a famous female celebrity that now owned a home in the Quarter.

“I’ll raid your tomb!” he shouted.

It was crass and irreverent and it resonated with those who like that sort of thing and don’t see the humanity in people of means. And why should he? They certainly didn’t see his humanity as they stripped his city of its culture for personal gain. As they gentrified the neighborhoods and turned their homes into rentals. As people were pushed farther away from their city to make way for tourists. So to Rowdy, it was street justice. That was the only justice that he ever knew.

He was culturally minded and kept up with all the current affairs. He loved to crack jokes that were laced with the truth. Nothing was off-limits for Rowdy, absolutely nothing was too sacred.

As I made my way down the streets, he tried me once. “Hey mister! You want to see some naked ladies? Everyone likes naked ladies! ”

I walked on past him; I didn’t even look in his direction. I didn’t take the bait and I was going to pay the consequences for it.

“My apologies. I didn’t mean mister. I meant minister. Hey minister, you wanna see some nakedladies! I’m sure it’s been a while, with your wife being gone.”

I shot around and looked at him. How could he? I didn’t even take the time to realize how stupid it would be for me to go after him. I was barely safe from my last viral outburst, there was no doubt I couldn’t survive another one. Those are thoughts that a logical person would think, not someone who was drunk and high on Bourbon Street closer to dawn than dusk. I should have just walked on. I was angry and my current situation lubricated my rage. I rushed at him.

He smiled. He had his target. I was willing to play.

“Heal my pecker, apostle! It’s gone limp,” he jested. 

He reached for my hand, I assume to place it on his genitals. What a laugh that would have gotten. Instead, I lifted my hand up into the air. He was a small man, maybe only 5’4”. I towered over him. I brought my closed fist down on the top of his head with a thud. It was like that old arcade game where you hit the moles. He fell out cold. Some people say he faked passing out so I wouldn’t keep wailing on him. But I felt my bones crack against his skull. I hurt him, and badly.

I slumped onto the ground. People crowded with their phones out recording everything. I lay there in the piss and spit and cheap beer on the corner of Toulouse Street. I put my hand down to balance myself and felt the squishing feeling of a used condom melt between my fingers. I wondered if this was what the prodigal son felt like as he lay there in the mess with the pigs. Except those who surrounded me were not pigs. They were human beings. They were people made in God’s image and I had used and exploited all of them for my downward spiral into my own personal abyss. 

The police arrived. Maybe I was wrong about the pigs. I was handcuffed and placed into the back of a car. Soon, my image would be everywhere again. My daughters would know what had become of their dad. The elders would certainly attempt to use this as the final moment to remove me from the throne. We would see how well my grandfather’s scheme to keep a Thackery as head of the church would hold in this new bout of disgrace .

The verse rushed through my head, “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!” I passed out in the back of the car. It was the first time I had really slept in a very, very long time.