Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (23 page)

The first time I saw these excerpts, I couldn’t believe what I was reading—or rather, who had written it. It felt more like I was reading a 3:00 a.m. Kanye West novella-length Twitter confessional than the words of a spiritual hero.

If Mother Teresa, in doing the will of God for her life, never found a way to completely crash the chatterbox, what possible hope do the rest of us have?

Unless—perhaps—we find another way to look at it.

If Mother Teresa never completely crashed the chatterbox yet still found a way to do the will of God for her life, I can do the same
.

Read her words again: “I feel nothing before Jesus—
and yet
I would not miss Holy [Communion] for anything.”

Some have cited Teresa’s dark nights of the soul as proof that her faith was not legitimate. How ironic! I find the fact that she served God while simultaneously dealing with a depression that would have derailed most people an even more convincing proof of her faith than her service itself!

In fact, I wish every spiritual hero were required to publish this kind of journal to Jesus. And they wouldn’t be allowed to fill the margins with hearts and flowers or the pages with clichés and rhetoric. They’d actually have to admit the debilitating discouragement that is part of daily life for anyone who does the will of God.

Unfortunately, very few believers, especially publicly revered ones, are willing to risk this level of vulnerability. So the false perception is perpetuated:
Certain people don’t deal with the kind of discouragement I deal with. That’s why God can use them. And that’s why He can’t use someone like me
.

We don’t have nearly enough records of great saints who were willing to transcribe their actual, unfiltered struggles with doubt, despondency, and discouragement.

But we do have a few.

In the last chapter we looked at this declaration from the pen of the apostle Paul:

Now, that’s some beautiful imagery. The perfect picture of what it means to be a believer. No darkness, only light. No confusion and chaos, only the increasing knowledge of God’s glory.

Maybe some of the recipients of this letter were shaking their heads a little at this point:
Yeah, Paul, you’re
so
next level, but what about the rest of us?

That’s why I love the Bible. Because it doesn’t only post pictures using filters of light, knowledge, and glory. It exposes the rest of the story to encourage the rest of us.

In the verses that follow, Paul dives headfirst into the brokenness and discouragement that were part of his daily experience as a disciple:

Paul isn’t interviewing for a consulting gig by presenting a portfolio of all his next-level accomplishments. He’s inviting the people he loves to open their
hearts to the same glory that produces the life of Jesus in him
even in the midst of
persecution, pressure, and death.

It is not a glory that eliminates discouragement.

It is a glory that overcomes discouragement.

It is a glory that runs full speed toward impending opposition with the confidence that, in the collision, Christ will prevail. Even if it doesn’t look that way sometimes.

Hold up!
you’re saying to yourself right now.
I thought you were teaching me how to crash the chatterbox, not how to live under the crushing weight of insecurity, fear, condemnation, and discouragement for the rest of my life. I can do miserable all by myself
.

Is it too late for me to trade in this book for an iTunes gift card?

Remember, Christ is revealed in the paradox: It
is
possible to hear God’s voice above all others. But it is also possible to hear all the other voices
above God’s
.

The thing is, the chatterbox cannot be crashed once and for all. It has to be dealt with daily.

The people who are called to do great things for God—Mother Teresa, the apostle Paul, and you and me—aren’t called to lives where we never have to face discouragement. We must not expect our lives to be so well watered with thoughts of peace, purpose, and power that our souls will never feel dry.

Sorry, but that’s not what the next level looks like. Instead, it requires finding a source of strength that runs deeper than circumstances and is not cut off by surges of discouragement.

Going to the next level isn’t about graduating from difficult circumstances and dark emotions. It’s resolving to live with the mind-set that declares,
My joy is not determined by what happens to me but by what Christ is doing in me and through me
.

Can I share a page with you from my journal to Jesus? I don’t actually keep such a journal, and I’m not Mother Teresa, although I did grow up in a town that was named after the monks at Mepkin Abbey. The fact that I originated from there should be considered a step toward sainthood, I think.

But I thought you might be encouraged by seeing a glimpse of the personal discouragement I faced while trying to write the book you’re holding. I seriously almost quit. I already told you about my episode on the flight back from Australia, but there were three other times too. The discouragement got so heavy I didn’t think I could bear it.

The first crisis was determining what the book would be about—again.

I had already made the outline for a completely different book on a different topic. As I began to share about that book with different people, I realized that the subject was good but not gripping. It wasn’t dealing with an issue that seemed immediately helpful to people. I think I’m trying to say that people found it boring.

So I trashed the concept, then the chatter took over, and I got stuck. I became convinced that I wasn’t much of an author and that, although I had written two other books, I didn’t have a third one in me.

But I have friends who pushed me to keep going. I also have publishers and contractual obligations. Furthermore, I knew there was a message I needed to get out. I just couldn’t find the hook. Until one day when I was standing on the beach with a friend, watching the waves crash on the shore, cycling through every awful book title I’ve ever considered.

And it hit.

“Crash the Chatterbox,” I said.

“Crash the who now?” my friend responded.

“Crash the
Chatterbox
,” I repeated. “I think that’s the title. Do you like it?”

“I love it,” he responded.

And that was solved.

But the only thing harder than figuring out what to write about is writing it. After outlining the book over the course of a couple of days, I wrote nothing for months. In the busyness of pastoring a church, preparing sermons, and serving as CEO of the Furtick family, I totally lost sight of the book.

By the time I locked myself in a lodge in Montana to begin hammering it out, I literally couldn’t produce a paragraph. For two days. I went on strikes against showers and stayed up until 5:00 a.m. so I could have extra time to stare at my blank screen. But no inspiration came.

Until the very last day of the trip, when all the discarded sentences I had
forced out began to arrange themselves into a decent, readable first draft of a first chapter.

Well, I had a start. I headed home and worked on the book in brief spells for the next several months. And by the time the book was halfway done, I had a plan to finish it on time. I rented a house at the lake where I could take my family for a month and slay this sucker. Away from the daily responsibilities of the church and the weekly pressure of sermon prep, I knew I could knock it out.

We arrived at the lake, I set up my writing porch, wrote my time line on index cards and tacked it to a corkboard, and went to bed, planning to start a serial writing spree the next morning.

That night, around midnight, I got a call from my mom. She told me my father’s medical condition had taken a sudden turn. He had only hours to live.

Dad had been suffering from a fatal disease called ALS for more than eighteen months, so the call was not a surprise. But it came much sooner than we expected.

I returned home to be with my parents, and for the next three days I had the privilege of being by my dad’s side as he spent his final hours in this world. The end of his life marked the conclusion of a very painful yet beautifully redemptive story that cannot possibly be contained in the space of this chapter. But I will try to share a few scenes.

My dad loved Southern Gospel music, so his memorial was a celebratory send-off that would rival any Gaither Homecoming. His name was Larry, but we all called him L-Train. So I preached a eulogy titled “This Train” based on the passage in 2 Corinthians we read earlier in this chapter. He had asked me before he died to make sure his story was told in a way that would give God the glory, so I thought that passage was perfect to show how, even though the L-Train came off the tracks sometimes, he kept rolling.

I wanted everyone to see how my dad treasured Christ in his life more than anything else but also how he carried the cargo of his faith in “jars of clay.” I knew he wanted the story of his life “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

So I testified about how, against all odds, the L-Train finished his life as a man who deeply loved Christ and how he had a family who loved him by his side as he pulled into the station to receive his eternal reward.

I did my best to share truthfully about some of the dangers, toils, and snares that the L-Train had come through—sometimes as a result of his own disobedience, sometimes because of factors outside his control. But most of all, I wanted to show how, by God’s grace, no matter how rough the ride was,
the train kept rolling
. God’s grace never ran out on my dad.

I started by telling how, on his seventh birthday, L-Train found his father dead—a suicide.

And how as a boy he spent two years in a reform school, where he would be thrown into solitary for days at a time.

I shared how he dropped out of school in the eighth grade and became a juvenile delinquent, addicted to drugs and alcohol. This was the beginning of an addiction that he would battle for the rest of his life.

Still, the train kept rolling.

I talked about how he didn’t know what to do when he became a teenage dad, especially since he had no father to show him how it was done. And I shared how, when he was fired by the company he thought he’d be with for the rest of his life, he didn’t know how he was going to feed his family.

But he opened up a little barbershop in Moncks Corner, and somehow the train kept rolling. His family was always well provided for.

I explained how in his forties and fifties he had two tumors removed from his liver, followed by a liver transplant, and then two unsuccessful rounds of interferon treatment for hepatitis C. I talked about how he suffered from diabetic neuropathy so severe that his feet and back constantly burned.

But by God’s grace, the train kept rolling.

And then I shared how, in the last three years of his life, after he’d gone to eight different specialists trying to find out why he couldn’t stop twitching, his greatest fear was confirmed when he was diagnosed with ALS—a progressive neurodegenerative disease that kills most patients in two to three years.

The hardest part of the eulogy was finding an appropriate way to explain how, in the first year of his diagnosis, his anxiety and fear and anger drove him to a point of complete insanity. My dad became volatile—threatening his wife and several others, including me.

Ultimately, he ended up living alone for a period of several months, separated from his family in some of the darkest days our family has ever experienced.

But even when it looked as if he’d lost everything, he never lost his love for Jesus or his family. We never heard him curse God one time, although we heard him curse all of us quite a few times.

Yet even when he was unable to show it with his actions, we all knew his real desire; he wanted nothing more than for his family to be beside him in the final season of his life.

And we were. Because God is faithful and because my dad’s wife of more than thirty years meant her wedding vows, my dad finally made it back to Charlotte, where he was restored to his family and cared for by my mom in his last months on earth.

These would be his most excruciating months. He would never dress or feed himself again. The man who had weighed close to three hundred pounds most of my life would shrink to less than half that. At every opportunity I liked to remind him that I could finally take him in a fight.

The man who had cut hair for more than twenty years and had provided a large percentage of the population of Moncks Corner with bowl cuts, buzz cuts, crew cuts, faux hawks, flattops, high and tights, rat tails, and mullets couldn’t shave his own face or even comb his own hair. We affectionately referred to the season when he stopped shaving as his Charles Manson days.