This is a good place to start.
This past weekend I was on The Cape that’s Cape Cod camping with my wife and our two daughters in our pop-up camper which is a little house that just folds down and off you go. The “Cape” is a hook-shaped piece of barrier land that stretches miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s narrow and terminates in a point so you can swim in a protected bay and the untamed ocean within a few minutes travel.
We love family camping because we love each other deeply… or as my wife said of me this past weekend… “fiercely”.
I like that.
I like to thought of as a man who love fiercely, veraciously, passionately. I am madly in love with the whole concept of love because I knew it existed but wasn’t in a place where it had a chance to be lived out and once I started to understand what it is I simply can’t get enough.
I first really experienced True Love during a very dark period of my life. I had gotten to the point of near complete debilitation from depression and PTSD. There were days I would text my wife at work begging her to come home because I could not handle life. Other times I would fight to get out of bed… or find myself flying out of my bed in the middle of the night to pace/run in a circle in my living room… or take the keys and drive away.
Here I want to pause and say if this is you or has been you and you never felt safe enough to scream for help those thoughts in your head are lies. You will get stronger. You will not go into abject poverty, you will find help. You will be ok. Get help. You matter. You are loved.
I call my night of desolation.. the night I found myself pounding my head with my fists crying out to my wife begging her what am I going to do my “Jonah Moment”. After my “conversion” or when I saw who was always with me, I began to read the Bible and somehow twisted the story of Jonah into “don’t run from God’s plan because you will end up in the belly of a fish”
That’s not the reality of God. It’s really “even if you do everything possible to run from me and my mercy I will hunt you down and find you. God sent that fish to keep Jonah alive when he would have drowned in his own pain and pride. God was compassionate on a man who had no idea what God and his love were really about even though he was a prophet!
So see, my depression stopped me in my tracks and forced me to sit with God alone, like Jonah did inside the belly of the fish, and pray and listen and heal. He is that good.
The second to last day on the Cape we went to a huge flea market and I came across a wood carver who made this whale… and I smiled, and thanked God for sending my my whale and swallowing me whole when I was drowning.
If you find yourself anywhere in this story, I pray you find the strength and courage to cry out and be still, to heal and allow yourself to be healed.
