“….And you may be sure that your sin will find you out.” Numbers 32:23b
My father’s addiction—the building storm referred to earlier—broke open and ravaged our lives in the fall of 1986. My father, the preacher, the doting husband, the strict disciplinarian, the one I had always thought invincible, was an alcoholic. It was the unveiling of a secret of half a lifetime. A secret my parents had kept from me and my brother—from the world—for over thirty years.
And it explained a lot. Why my father, always quick to make a joke, failed to find humor in certain things. Why there was such a large gap between my birth and that of my only sibling. Why my father had stopped on the way home from the fair one night when I was nine to buy a Colt 45, only to vomit all night in the bathroom across the hall from my bedroom.
Unknown to me, buried beneath the surface, while I had been battling my addiction, he had been caught in his own hell–his own cycle. God knew, Papaw knew, Mom knew—no one could help him either. Papaw kept quiet. Mom made excuses and covered it up. Heaven was silent. And we moved a lot—different churches, different career paths, and different cities—until a group of doctors, specializing in Substance Abuse, sitting in a Nazarene Church, recognized, confronted and reached out to him as he tried to preach under the influence of an earthbound spirit.
All was revealed–all the years of deception and rationalization; all the fresh starts which had failed. Sound familiar? It should. And it was a revelation that, instead of scaring me into seeking help, only served to further confuse and disillusion me.
So my father was destroyed—lost credentials; tarnished reputation, vanished influence. Mom was done—unable to trust the man she had loved and unwilling to stay in the never ending cycle she had endured for so long. My brother, an early teen at the time, lost his faith in everything. And, I struggled on with my cycle.
The divorce was expected. The remarriages of each, in direct contradiction of all those earlier lectures regarding adultery, was not—they affected me deeply.
So, in addition to the deep-seated and pervasive deception which defined my existence, my rationalization of it all was reinforced by my parents to the point that it seemed to take on a life of its own.
Anything could be rationalized and, consequently, justified.
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