Lifetime Guarantee (8 page)

Today, the pain being history, Anabel says, “Of course, things like that crushed me. But I’ll tell you one thing. It didn’t destroy me. I came out of it pulling myself up by my bootstraps, vowing that I would improve. Next time I’d do better! I can do better! I’ve learned that I can always do better!”

In this chapter, I want to show you Anabel’s and my flesh patterns and how they came to be. You’ll also see how two very different kinds of flesh tried to coexist in one family. I trust that our example will give you insight into your own situation.

There was the time we were in the car heading for a square dance on Friday night. It was our big night out after a week’s work. Anabel was so excited. She’d tried hard to look pretty to please her husband. But by this time, I had developed new weapons. Whereas before I had been attacking her performance, I now began to attack her person. You may be able to try harder to improve your performance, but how can you try harder when your identity is being attacked?

I directed my attention over to my sweet, twenty-seven-year-old wife of six years and said, “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to square dance with you.” Right out of the blue! Why, if her dad had known what she was living with, he’d have rung my chimes, and I would have deserved it.

One night I found Jesus as I watched Billy Graham on television. It was his first nationwide telecast from Madison Square Garden in 1957. Many things changed about my life after my conversion, but that hostile, chip-on-my-shoulder attitude in my home didn’t change one whit. I call it being “wormy.” I went right on with the red pencil routine, only by this time we had some sons, and they came in for their share of it as well.

Here’s a typical episode. It’s grocery shopping time. Anabel parks in our drive and toots the horn for me to help carry in the bags. By this time in our marriage I had made a shoulder holster for my red pencil, so I could whip it out in a flash. Wyatt Earp had nothing on me. Oh, I was fast, real fast.

So now in the kitchen I’m helping unpack the grocery sacks, and I say, “Del Monte green beans? How come?”

“Well, they’re the best. I just hate to get one of those cheap brands and have it ruin a meal. I don’t mind paying a little extra for top quality.”

“Listen. Sure Fine green beans are good enough for this family, and they’re a nickel cheaper. Hey, we don’t drive a Cadillac! We’re Chevy people. It upsets me that you’re so careless with your spending. You’re getting to where you do things like this more and more. I wish you’d cut it out!”

Stung by such an unexpected outburst when she considered herself to be trying so hard to please, she begins to get a little down about the whole thing. But after a few hours of struggling with feelings of failure, she shakes it off and determines that she’ll do better the next time.

The next time she has green beans on her shopping list, then, she makes sure to get, you guessed it, a six-pack of Sure Fines.
This will please Bill,
she reasons.
He wants me to get Sure Fines.
But guys, she failed to notice a very important event that was taking place across town at Safeway. Del Montes were on sale for six cents off! So what should I do as we’re unpacking the sack and I become aware of this horrible case of poor stewardship?! She has just squandered an extra penny per can for beans of inferior quality! What should I do, men? “Lord,” I prayed, “the woman You gave me has blown it! I try and try to help her clean up her act, but she just can’t do anything right. I guess I’m going to have to tell her.”

I told her, and I told her, and I told her, and I took the finest thing outside of salvation that the Lord has ever given me—a person who loved me enough to give herself to me until death, a person who busted herself trying to be the best wife she could possibly be—and I almost destroyed her. I did it with this thing that lies between my teeth. I reduced her nearly to the point of suicide.

Why couldn’t I change? After all, I was born again. Anabel and I were trying our best to make Christ the center of our home. I was one of the leading soul-winners in my church; I worked like a Trojan, conducted jail services every Sunday afternoon, and attended church Sunday morning and night, and Wednesday night, too. I read my Bible and prayed. But when the door to my own house closed behind me, I was a destroyer, and I couldn’t stop.

What was the problem? I was “walking after the flesh,” my unique version of it. How did I get that way? What could have possibly happened to me during my formative years to turn me into such a tyrant? I know exactly what happened.

I dare not challenge you to come to the end of your flesh trip without first having come to the end of mine. That certainly is not to say that I never fall back and walk according to the flesh, but it certainly
is
to say that I experience 95 percent better victory than I did before I held a good funeral for that way of life.

As each Christian’s unique version of the flesh is heavily, although not totally, shaped by his formative years, I’m going to have to talk about my relationship with my mom and dad. They’re with the Lord now, but I want you to understand something at the start. I love mom and pop. I’m glad they were my folks. I wouldn’t trade my heritage for anyone’s. The way they interacted with me is a vitally important part of my pilgrimage with Jesus. Had it been different, I would not have traveled this route, and, thus, I would not have fit into the niche the Lord had in mind for me.

When I showed up on planet earth, the Lord put me into a male earthsuit. My dad was a Presbyterian pastor, and I was the eldest son. Now, ladies, I am about to make some statements that will come off as chauvinistic. Please don’t write me off as that. I readily confess that I
used
to be, but I’m not now. I am a new man in Christ, and I have overcome that portion of the flesh. So please hang in there with me.

According to the manufacturer’s instructions (the Bible), my folks’ marriage was upside down. Mom was “lifing out” more of the husband’s role in that she was definitely the stronger of the two personalities. When decisions were to be made, she made them. If I wanted to go play with the kid down the block, there was no point in asking my dad, because he would respond, “Go ask your mom.” This held true for major as well as minor decisions and mom often emphasized her position with a marked increase in decibels. We often said she was as “strong as an acre of garlic.”

Pop, meanwhile, was “lifing out” more of a wifely role in that he totally submitted to mom. When mom said, “Frog,” he jumped. Pop avoided decisions. If he ever got pinned down on an issue, he’d say, “I’m out of it,” and he’d split. We facetiously told him that we were going to put this epitaph on his tombstone: “I’m sure ’nuff out of it!” Although pop had many godly traits, in this one he gave me a nonbiblical male role model that blocked my ability to generate male self-esteem by playing Lord of the Ring.

Mom wanted to make me into a pansy-preacher’s-boy type. I had long hair until I was five years old, and only one other guy had long hair when I was a kid—he was the Prince of England. (I wrote him, but he never responded.) She also had me dressed out in knickers. I got my first long pants when I was nine years old. And since all the other boys wore overalls, I didn’t exactly fit into the culture.

A little boy has many needs, one of which is to
feel
like a male—like he belongs as a male. It’s going to cause him problems if he begins to feel like a misfit. He’ll have trouble accepting himself (there’s that word again).

What do I mean when I say a boy needs to feel like a boy? Well, a five-year-old boy needs to believe he can throw a rock straighter than a five-year-old girl. He needs to feel he can handle lizards and toads. They wet on you, and you just slough it off. You might even eat lunch without washing your hands. And when the girls shriek, “You’ll get warts on your hands!” we boys love it! We’ll say, “Aw, rain on that. Let ’em give me warts clear up to my elbows. See if I care!”

That’s a boy for you, right? And you know, I still have a lot of that in me. I’m not into toads any more, but I like to feel that Anabel sees me as strong; that she feels she can depend on me; that I have wise counsel; that she doesn’t have to carry the load of making decisions alone concerning problems that arise in the family. In short, I guess I need to feel as though she sees me as her
husband,
not as a little boy.

Now, as a child, mom represented all femininity to me. She passed the physical. So, if I was ever to accept myself as male, I had to ultimately see myself as being stronger than mom! That looked like climbing Mount Everest! In addition to this intimidation, my male role model was demonstrating behavior contrary to God’s plan, so I had no help, no markers along the path of life to aid me in learning how to “male.” I couldn’t play Lord of the Ring effectively enough to bestow masculine acceptance upon myself. I doubted my masculinity.

The Holy Spirit has shown me through counseling with hundreds and hundreds of people that a boy in an environment such as I have described will respond in one of three ways, although he can combine them.

First, he may become homosexual. He may be so intimidated by his environment that he will come to see the normal male role that God intended him to walk in as impossible. He literally gives up on
being
male and does a 180-degree turn away from it. As Lord of his Ring, he opts to get his need for love met the “best” way he can (with a lot of help from the Evil One). This did not happen to me, although it surely could have. I have counseled many men who were born anew, but who had great struggles with homosexual temptation because they were products of an upside-down marriage.

Second, he may become passive. He just
semi
gives up on being male and begins to journey through life passively getting his need for love met by taking whatever acceptance crumbs the women and stronger males will sweep to him from their tables. His motto becomes, “I’m anybody’s dog who will hunt with me.” He’s afraid to have an opinion because he
feels
that people who disagree will reject him. He can’t stand this, so he defers to their power to get his need for love satisfied.

Tragically, this passes for godliness in some Christians’ perception when, in fact, it’s just chicken flesh. This man operates out of fear of men, and his motive is his quest for love. We’ve got to stop electing this type of man to positions of authority in the church until he gets victory over the flesh. His lifestyle of riding the fence on issues is not Christ in him; it’s the flesh.

I see some of this in me. I have struggled with this aspect of my flesh patterns, especially around strong males. I have victory over this now through understanding who I now am in Christ, but it’s still a temptation for me.

Third, he can go the macho route. He “sucks it up” and says to himself, “I
will
be male. I
can
do it. I desperately
need
to see myself as male. I’ve
got
to make it.”

This is the route I took. I rebelled against my mom’s dominance and my dad’s passivity. I tried awfully hard to “overcome” my past by proving
to myself
that I was male. Do you see that I was being driven by my need for love?

What could a young boy do to help himself feel more like a male? Well, the tack I took was to be vulgar and profane. I took pride in being foul-mouthed, even as a small child. And it paid off. It was viewed as macho by my peers. It wouldn’t work now because women are equally vulgar and profane, but back in my youth it worked great.

Okay, let’s move me into the high school years. What could I do at this level to prove to myself that I was male? I had to keep adding more tools to my toolbox as I got older, see? My “ring” was getting more complex. For one thing, I could become an athlete.

In the little Oklahoma community where Anabel and I grew up (Poteau), we spelled athlete “football player.” So I went out for football. There was just one problem: my earthsuit. It was 5 feet 2 inches tall, and it weighed 110 pounds. It had a size 13 neck and no hair on its legs. If you live inside an earthsuit like that and you’ve got to make that thing play football, your soul is in trouble! But I was out there playing, scared to death. I
had
to play; I
needed
what I perceived it could do for me, which was to help me accept myself better.

I even went out for college football so I could say I played football in college. They nearly killed me!

What else could a high school boy do to build up his masculine image? Well, he could seduce the women. But wait a minute. Back there in Chapter 1, we learned that a small child learns about himself from the feedback he gets from others. And in our house, nobody ever kissed anybody. So at age fifteen, the kid had virgin lips! Mom didn’t even let the dog lick me. So how did I feel about myself? Unkissy. Oh, man, how I longed to kiss the women, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to even try. My feeler was stuck.

You can readily see that I was not into sex. While I was desiring to be sexually active at level 10, I was intimidated by the thoughts that I would be rejected or that I would fail, and that was a 10. Thus, all my sexual experiences took place at the fantasy level. When I ultimately got saved, these flesh patterns were going to haunt me as I tried to walk in a godly manner. I was going to pay a heavy price for striving for acceptance as a male.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered a tool that I added to my toolbox and that proved to be very effective in helping me accept myself. It was more a weapon than a tool. I directed it at the people who were the major threat to my self-acceptance as a male. Who were those people? Strong, aggressive, assertive females. They instantly triggered in me all the frustrations I had experienced since childhood. If I could just get them out of my life, if I could destroy them, that would give me a feeling of superiority, of conquest. I couldn’t do it sexually, as I have already explained, but there was another way. I could do it with my tongue.