During the summer of 2013, I participated in a small study group through the church I attended in those days.

The group was methodically working through a book titled Who Do You Think You Are? Finding Your True Identity in Christ, by Mark Driscoll.

I’m striving to keep this post short, because when I get started on a topic I generally go on past the limit of anyone’s patience (or at least of my own patience, when rereading it). About that book I’ll just say its chapters explore various facets of a believer’s identity that, stitched together, perhaps constitute a whole Christian. Thus, for example, Driscoll declares at different points “I Am Blessed” and “I Am Forgiven” but also, significantly, “I Am Afflicted.” Because being saved does not mean one’s problems go away.

Twenty years earlier, I had been caught up in a movement that greatly emphasized the practice of spiritual gifts, especially healing (based for example on 1 Corinthians 12). All that is covered in my memoir, What About the Boy?

It was pure foolishness, but the implication was that with the power of the Holy Spirit successful Christians overcame their problems.

I’d been taught back then to confront trouble confidently in the name of God, just as David had confronted Goliath. We were empowered to do so! Only, in retrospect, it seemed to me that Goliath had won. I went in as the married father of a disabled son, and I came out a widower, whose son was still disabled. I had not lost my faith; I was still attending churches and seeking better understanding. But in Driscoll’s book I identified most closely with the chapter on being afflicted.

Even though other aspects of my life were very much to my liking. (I had remarried, now had two healthy kids, liked my job, etc.)

It so happened that one evening the group leader called upon me to expand on my experience of being afflicted. And so I did. I said that affliction never surprised me, and that I tried to be grateful for every outcome that was not a disaster, but that it was a struggle to understand how suffering and unanswered prayer could be part of God’s plan. In summarizing what had happened, I acknowledged that God works in mysterious ways, and said the only available response was humility and acceptance.

Not good enough!

An assistant pastor sitting in on that meeting rebuked me very sternly. No Christian, he said, has any business feeling afflicted. Inconvenience and failure are part of life. God permits such things because they elevate our dependence on Him, but unfortunately some people (meaning me) respond by elevating the problem instead.

Okay, that occurred 13 years ago. It’s still rather fresh in my memory. I didn’t mind the criticism too much. However, given that it was my son who bore the brunt of the affliction (note the title of my book), spiritual lessons for me seemed almost beside the point.

That son died in 2018, so he’s out of the picture. That doesn’t help me to feel good about the blighted life he had, because I don’t.

And so I still have issues.

These days I participate in a men’s group that reads and discusses the Bible, especially focusing on the New Testament epistles. There are passages in which Paul refers to his earlier days as “chief” of sinners, as well as the many trials he’d undergone, and the “thorn in the flesh” still troubling him, although I think he does so reluctantly, not wanting to be the focus of his own writings. Those references prompted one of the guys, who’s in AA, to mention a word that was new to me: drunkalogue. Apparently, a drunkalogue is a recital of one’s prior missteps that goes into too much detail, that seems almost to relish the depths to which one had sunk.

Now, although I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, this caught my attention. Hate to say it, but that pastor was onto something back in 2013. I certainly have elevated the heartbreak of those now long-ago days. I dwelt on it to the extent that it practically defined me.

So now, when I meet people and they learn that I once wrote a book, I don’t really encourage them to read it. It makes people cry, makes them angry or uncomfortable. I have a hard enough time even talking about that part of my life when giving my testimony to other believers. I know the Lord does not like complainers (see for example Numbers 14:27), and it’s all too easy to sound like I’m complaining, or questioning His wisdom.

Lamenting is perhaps okay. It doesn’t necessarily imply criticism. There is a bigger plan. There must be. And I so look forward to knowing it.