The Church with No Name - Part 3
“Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting, before becoming.”
-Victoria Erickson
[Present Day Story] My new bride’s family has a place on a lake outside of town where we spend much of the summer season. A few summers ago, my brother-in-law surprised the family with a much-welcomed addition to our lake life - a surf boat. Brand new, state-of-the-art, this thing was bad to the bone. Only a few short weeks into the season, three of the men, including me, decided to take it out for a cruise. We surfed for a bit and then decided to open her up to see what she could really do. My brother-in-law urged the throttle forward and the three of us laughed and grunted as that massive motor roared, the boat coursing through the water. As we maxed out its speed, something shifted and the boat seemed to surge forward with even more power… moments into this new thrust in momentum there was a loud noise, almost like a gun shot. The engine shut down and the boat drifted to a halt. We removed the seats covering the engine compartment to find chunks of cast aluminum block scattered in the engine bay. Now I’m no mechanic, but I knew this wasn’t good. The engine in this brand new boat had thrown a rod! I believe mechanical types would call this “catastrophic engine failure”.
[Why are you talking about boats, J?]
That boat is a fantastic metaphor for my life in 2012. Everything looked really, really good on the outside, but something was deeply, mechanically flawed. I red-lined my marriage and my family, slamming the throttle forward to see what we could do… Career, church-plant and grad school… And as everything surged forward with thrilling power and momentum, something broke. Catastrophic marriage failure.
What followed was the beginning of my ending. I hesitate to share every detail because they involve loving, well-intentioned and very broken people. What I can share with you is that my entire life unraveled. As things fell apart at home, it became clear that the church plant needed to pause. I met with our leaders to create a plan. The work was in its infancy and still very dependent on me to survive, so we agreed that best path forward would be for us to discontinue our gatherings indefinitely. They wanted to understand, but I felt to open up to them would be to “expose” others for whom I deeply cared, so I left many loving, trusting friends with little to no answers.
The day I closed the doors to the Church with No Name, something inside of me died. I retreated deep into myself and shut out much of the outside world. For weeks, life continued on as usual, but inwardly I was isolated and alone. My soul was collapsing as I watched my life fall apart in slow motion. You know that dream where someone is chasing you, but you can’t run fast enough to get away? Destruction was gaining momentum, nipping at my heels, and I felt powerless to avoid it…