Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (17 page)

But one day as I was being pummeled in the familiar cycle of condemnation → justification → accusation → exasperation, I stumbled upon a much more effective way to fight back. I remember exactly where I was (in my front yard) and what I was doing (cussing at packing peanuts) when it started.

Before you judge me, hear me out.

The Christmas season is supposed to be a time of joyful family chaos. But for me as a preacher, it’s more like a spiritual decathlon. In the three days leading up to Christmas, I preach at least ten times for our worship experiences at Elevation. And these are not little Advent sermonettes. They are ten, full-throttle, preach-as-if-it’s-somebody’s-last-time-to-hear-the-gospel sermons—delivered back to back. It’s a great privilege, and God does amazing things each year, but it leaves me feeling wrecked physically and somewhat catatonic emotionally.

Holly is empathetic and doesn’t expect too much of me come Christmas Day. She knows that, given the condition I’m in, I’m doing good to smile for a few pictures, stare amicably at walls, and avoid flipping out on a few distant relatives. It’s my little way of saying, “Happy Birthday, Jesus.” Normally, though, we manage the season and make some good memories even if I am too fried to remember most of them. We have pictures to prove it.

A few Christmases ago we were feeling slightly adventurous. So rather than staying home and enforcing our typical seventy-two-hour, post-church recovery
period, we made the drive to Holly’s parents’ house the day after Christmas. We did decide, though, that it might be better to take separate vehicles. Yes, the trip was only two hours, but when my nerves are this shot, two hours with three small, very vocal children can be hazardous to my Christmas spirit.

Holly left ahead of me, taking the two most, shall we say,
noticeable
kids with her. Graham—the quiet one—and I stayed behind, planning to leave in just a couple of hours. We did half of a P90X chest-and-back workout together—Graham doing a modified version, appropriate for age four. And even though my intensity was far from world class, the serotonin was doing its thing. I started feeling pretty happy. I began reflecting on all the people who had given their lives to Christ in our church over the last several days. I started thinking about how blessed I was to be a dad, a husband, and a pastor. I even started singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” stopping only because I had to explain to Graham who Herald was.

By the time I’d thrown the duffel bags into the backseat of my Maxima beside Graham and started backing out the driveway, I was feeling downright jolly. The sky was ominously dark with clouds, and the wind was really picking up, but I was in a good mood—I was making the season
bright
, all right. Then I saw the empty milk jug in the grass, beside the empty shoebox, beside the empty pie tin. And these items, along with at least two dozen others, were blowing around in the wind—not artistically, like
American Beauty
’s plastic bag, and not poetically, like Bob Dylan’s answers. Rather, the contents of an entire Christmas’s bags of trash had been, and were currently being, strewn across our yard.

It looked as if a tornado and a team of fifty raccoons had joined forces to see how badly they could wreck one man’s lawn.

Before she left, Holly had stacked what looked like every single box in our house—each filled to the top with garbage—beside our two overflowing waste receptacles and left them at the curb. Trash collection was three days away, but we wouldn’t be back by then. So Holly was thinking ahead, wanting to make sure we returned to a trash-free home. What she had failed to do was check the weather forecast. And unwittingly, she had left me to deal with this unnatural disaster.

I was relatively irritated by this point. All the nice thoughts were fading fast, and the naughty ones were starting to gain momentum. Nevertheless, this was
a time for action, so I jumped out of the car, unbuckled Graham, and enlisted his help.

“Hurry, boy! Grab the trash as fast as you can, and put it in the garage.”

He complied, and we hustled at it. But quickly we realized how futile this was. By the time we collected a few items and got them under shelter, tropical storm Yuletide had blown ten times more garbage into the front yard, the backyard, and the neighbors’ yards. I saw only one possible solution.

There was a
huge
box that hadn’t blown away yet, and it looked empty. It was wedged between a trash can and some of the other boxes. I made a plan to pick it up and flip it over on top of the other, smaller boxes. I figured it would put a lid on the damage and buy me some time.

But as I was picking it up, I discovered something a little too late. The box that appeared to be empty was half full of packing peanuts. At least it had been half full before I flipped it over. Now the packing peanuts were joining the party on Mount Trashmore, formerly known as the Furticks’ front yard.

At this turn of events, even Graham’s childlike optimism began to give way.

“Oh man, you gotta be
kidding
me. This is gonna take
forever
!” he wailed. “We’ll
never
get done now!
THIS IS HOR-RI-BLE
.”

And suddenly I went from being annoyed at the situation to being
infuriated
with Holly. “What was she thinking?” I screamed. “How stupid could you be?”

“Yeah, what was she thinking?” Graham echoed. “This is
STUPID
!”

Uh-oh. He wasn’t supposed to hear that.

But I was too far gone now to care what he heard or didn’t hear.

Hundreds of packing peanuts were swirling around in an apocalyptic variation of snowfall. And one day I’ll appreciate the humor in how Graham had just told me during our workout that he wished we could have had a white Christmas.

But in that moment, hopelessly overwhelmed by the trash storm, I did the only thing I could think of.

I called Holly. And I unloaded on her.

“Guess what I’m doing?!” I demanded.

She inferred from my tone that I was not finishing off the fudge.

I didn’t give her time to respond.

“I’m
running
around the
yard
like an
idiot
! Because
somebody
thought it would be a great idea to set out the
trash
right before a
storm
! And
now
every piece of trash we’ve ever thrown away in our
lives
is
blowing all over the blasted
[not my actual word]
yard
!”

She explained how the weather was calm when she left and how sorry she was, but I wasn’t trying to hear any of it.

Suddenly I found myself doing something I hadn’t done in more than ten years of marriage. I screamed a stream of profanity—the big ones. I was screaming—not
at
Holly, but
to
her—as if this qualification makes it any better. And without even hanging up, in one last dramatic gesture of frustrated manhood, I slung my iPhone across the yard.

It landed somewhere between a coat hanger and a Diet Mountain Dew can.

I screamed the worst word again, at the top of my vocal range.

I looked down because Graham was pulling on me, and he wanted to know what
that
word meant.

One-two.

The chatterbox had done it again.

I had managed to fully indulge the temptation to throw a temper tantrum. In front of my little boy.

And as soon as I was worn-out from my temper tantrum, condemnation rushed to mount me as I fell to the mat. It was time for a little ground and pound. Sin had set the ball—now it was time for shame to spike it.

Two days ago you were preaching to thousands of people, telling them about Jesus. Now you’re screaming expletives at packing peanuts. In front of your son
.

What kind of dad are you? You’re a lunatic. You’re just like your dad. Look what you just passed on to your son. He’ll remember this for the rest of his life
.

What kind of husband are you? What does Holly think about you right now? What if her family heard you? What do they think?

They probably think you’re a jerk and a hypocrite, and they’re right
.

You’re worse than that. You’re a monster
.

You can’t even pick up trash. You are trash!

In the outward silence and internal cacophony of my own humiliation, it took me about thirty minutes to get the yard as clean as it was going to get. The HOA would just have to fine me or hang me or whatever they do to riffraff like me. I was done, and I was easing out of the neighborhood, heading toward the interstate.

Graham was playing his DS with his earbuds in, and I was desperately trying to divert my mind. But the kinds of thoughts I had in the yard—and much uglier ones—were flying in every direction just like storm-tossed packing peanuts.

I had approximately two hours of drive time ahead of me, and I knew that even if I turned the music up as loud as it could go, the chatterbox would still be my soundtrack. I could have pulled up a sermon podcast or something, but I didn’t deserve to listen to God’s Word right then. It would have only made me feel worse.

Because I had gone from being annoyed with the situation, to infuriated with my wife, to disgusted with myself.

How will I explain this to Holly?
I wondered. And the questions kept coming.
How could she love someone as volatile as me? What should I say to Graham? How can I look him in the eye after he watched me act like that? How can I preach to others when I can’t control myself? What’s wrong with me? “Why can’t I change? Ever? How have I managed to ruin Christmas over something so small?

I started to combat each of these questions with a quick mental argument, even a defense:

It wasn’t really that bad
.

You’re just tired, that’s all
.

Graham’s just a kid, and he’s gonna hear those words someday anyway
.

But none of this was working. I still felt like the worst person in the world. And none of it was driving me toward God. I was only feeling more and more distant from Him with every mile and every excuse.

Then somewhere on I-85 between Charlotte and Greenville, I had a breakthrough moment. It changed the way I heard the chatterbox as it was going off on me.

Suddenly a new strategy occurred:
Go with it
.

After all, it wasn’t as if there was no truth to what I was feeling. It was the
conclusions
that were killing me.

The devil wasn’t telling me outright lies—he was just giving me half the truth.

And the best thing I could do was not to ignore the reality or justify my sin. I just needed to finish the sermons the devil had started to preach to me.

In other words, I needed to acknowledge the substance of my sin. But then I needed to allow the Holy Spirit to take my guilt to a redemptive place.

My attitude
was
terrible. The way I spoke to my wife
was
unacceptable. And I
did
need to apologize.

The example I set for my boy
was
a destructive one, and if I kept modeling this, he would likely emulate me one day in his own parenting.

I
did
need to ask God to change me, and I had to take seriously the responsibilities He’d given me.

But even through all this, I sensed God revealing to me:
The devil is only giving you one side of the argument. He’s singing you verse after verse after verse, but he’s not letting you hear the chorus
.

For example, he’s exaggerating the current reality. Your wife doesn’t hate you. She knows you and loves you, and she will be more than willing to forgive you
.

Your son isn’t now fated to be a sociopath. You’ll get plenty of other chances to show him a better way to handle pressure. You can even talk to him about it. Tell him how you were wrong. Show him what humility looks like. Flip the script on what the Enemy meant for evil—let Me use it for something good
.

In other words, the Holy Spirit was prompting me:
Take the first half of the equation the Enemy is presenting to you, insert grace and truth in the middle of it, and you’ll discover a much different outcome
.

In my heart I began to repent for my sinful and embarrassing debacle in the front yard. But as I did, I also affirmed that God loved me just as much while I was swearing at soda cans the day after Christmas as He did while I was preaching about the wise men from the gospel of Matthew on Christmas Eve.

In the yard my actions didn’t reflect God’s love. But they didn’t weaken it or make it go away, either. Because it’s not a love based on what I do. It’s a love based on what Jesus has done. The Scripture says, after all, that Jesus came into the world to
save sinners
. I definitely fit that category. When you look at it this way, I guess, technically, Jesus isn’t the reason for the Christmas season at all—I
am. And you are too. The reason He came was to redeem people just like us. And He redeems us in the middle of our mess, not after we get it all cleaned up.

I knew all this on a theoretical level. But I needed to apply it personally and presently, not in a sermon to others, but in a sermon to
myself
. It was a sermon the chatterbox may have started, but I was determined it was a sermon God’s Word was going to finish. The Enemy may have
a
word. But he doesn’t have the
last
word. I’d heard that cliché before, even used it in messages before. This time, though, the message was mine to deliver—and receive.

As I evaluated my sin in this light, it didn’t make me feel completely better all at once. I didn’t break out into verse four of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” But gradually I did begin to recapture my appreciation for God’s unfailing love.

And I started to suspect that the devil didn’t like this one bit. With God’s help I was turning the tables on condemnation, reversing its stranglehold on my soul.