Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (17 page)

We sat down in my study and I said, “Mom, this summer when I was home, and Dad came in and we had such a wonderful time together, I saw you crying out of the corner of my eye because Dad and I shared a depth of relationship that you and I have not possessed. Mom, I need to ask you to forgive me for the pain I have brought to your life through the years.”

Immediately the sword thrusts began. “Do you know how much you’ve hurt me?”

“Yes, Mom, I know.”

“You have done this to me since you were 12 years old, and I’ve never done anything to hurt you. How could you treat me like this?”

“Mom, I’m asking you to forgive me.”

“I won’t forgive you until you tell me what I’ve done wrong. I’ve been the perfect mother to you.”

I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. She went on about how she had been the perfect mother, never failing in any way to meet every need of my life.

I just sat there in shock. Ten years earlier I had shut down because I lacked basic trust in Father’s love to meet my need when I was attacked. I had to justify myself, shift blame, and get the focus off me. My heart was closed. There was no revelation of Father’s love. I was living life like a spiritual orphan.

This time it was different. I knew Father’s love and was beginning to embrace a heart of sonship. I knew that I had to become subject to my mother’s mission as a son and acknowledge how badly my closed heart had hurt her.

When I was about eight or ten years old, my mother and father stopped living together, even though they stayed in the same house. Dad moved into the furnace room and stopped speaking to my mother, and any communication between them passed through either my brother or me. Dad turned his attention to other things and people, and it destroyed my mother. She turned to bitterness and medicating her pain with alcohol.

As Dad poured every bit of his life into his oldest son, who was a real champion and one of the best youth league tennis players in the nation in those years, I spent all my time with my mother. I became her only source of sanity and love. But when I was 12, I had had enough and I closed my heart to her. This injured her even more because now all she knew was rejection and pain from every family member. From that time on, the criticism and the bitterness increased until every conversation over the next 36 years was a verbal sparring match. And for 36 years, I justified keeping her outside because of her negativism and criticism. I lacked the heart of sonship. I was subject to my own mission, rather than her mission or God’s mission.

Sitting with her that night in 1999, listening to the familiar barrage and bitter tirade, I knew that Father would meet my need even as my mother was attacking me. Instead of shutting down, I felt something like waves of compassionate liquid love pouring over me, securing me in His love. Softly and gently I said, “Mom, this isn’t about you; this is about me. I’m asking you to forgive me.”

“I’ll not forgive you until you tell me what I’ve done wrong.”

“You don’t know, Mom? You don’t know?”

“I was the perfect mother. I’ve never done anything but love you.”

That’s when I realized that she really had no memory of the abuse I went through. Monday through Friday she was a teacher and sought to be a good mother. Although she was not a nurturer, at least she was there. She would come home on Fridays and all weekend long try to drink away the pain of being rejected by her husband and sons. And when she drank, she became violent, often venting her anger at her husband by taking it out on her sons. More than once, I found her covered in her own blood from self-inflicted falls or wounds.

“Mom,” I said, “tell me one memory you have of one weekend from the time I was 8 until I was 18 and left home.”

She couldn’t. She had no memory of those weekends. She asked me what had happened, and when I told her of nights of being awakened and beaten for no reason, she said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Holy Spirit,” I prayed silently, “please show her.” I picked up the phone, handed it to her, and said, “Call your other son.”

She wouldn’t do it. Then she looked at me and asked, “Did those things really happen?” Right then the Holy Spirit dropped into her mind memories of her beating my brother and me. Suddenly, she started crying as memory after memory flowed. And for the first time she said through her tears, “Well, I did have an alcohol problem.” Then she said the words I never thought I
would hear her say to me: “Would you forgive me?” Just as with my father, this breakthrough with Mom did not come until I got underneath in submission to her as a son. Once I opened my heart to her again and dared to risk loving again, release came for her as well as for me.

That December day in 1999 I became my mother’s hero. Her criticism turned to praise. This was a woman who, up until this time, had never apologized to me, never accepted blame for anything, and never even acknowledged her drinking problem. Now, for the first time in 36 years, I had a mother again. That’s the power of forgiveness. That’s the power of Father’s love. That’s the power of a heart of sonship. Last year, Mom also went to be with the Lord, and I am at peace in knowing that we had closure before she was promoted to glory.

Forgiveness is the first step in moving from slavery to sonship. Without it, it is difficult to take the next one. Who do you need to forgive? Who do you need to ask for forgiveness? Whose mission do you need to become subject to in order to bring healing, freedom, and release into your family and relationships? Do you think it would help your relationship if you went to your mom or dad and asked them to forgive you for the ways you have hurt or disappointed them?

(See Appendix B for further explanation on the ministry of restitution and how to approach someone and ask for their forgiveness.)

D
ealing with forgiveness issues covers the first two truths in our quest to move from slavery to sonship. Extending forgiveness (Truth #1) involves humility in laying aside our hurt and our perceived “right” to hold another person responsible for his or her offense against us. Seeking forgiveness (Truth #2) also involves humility, requiring us to lay aside our pride, acknowledge our sins and mistakes, and open our hearts to the one we have offended with no guarantee of being accepted. Humility makes us vulnerable and can sometimes be the difference between life and death.

Barry was a friend of mine who I had gotten to know in our home church in the mid-1980s. He knew I was a licensed fishing boat captain and loved getting me to tell deep-sea fishing stories. One of Barry’s longtime dreams was to catch a giant Warsaw grouper. In my years as a commercial fisherman, I had caught more giant grouper on hook and line than about any other fisherman on the East Coast. In fact, in the 1970s and ‘80s, I caught over
100 of these monstrous fish, which averaged about 175 pounds; ten were over 300 pounds, and one was a 450-pounder. To catch that one, I used a live 15-pound mahi mahi for bait, on a 300-pound test wire line.

In the early 1990s, Barry started to hound me, “Jack, will you take me out to catch one of those Warsaw grouper?”

There are several good spots for Warsaws right off Myrtle Beach, near where we live; one of them, Georgetown Hole, is 62 miles offshore. As commercial fishermen in the 1970s, we called that place the Devil’s Hole because of the number of boats and fishermen who had disappeared without a trace while fishing there, including some friends of mine. Barry knew that I once had caught 28 grouper that totaled 5,000 pounds in one night at Devil’s Hole. On another night I caught 14, and on still another, 9.

Barry finally persuaded me to go in the fall of 1991, a few years after I had left the sea and was no longer working full time as a boat captain. By that time, the giant Warsaw grouper had been classified as endangered on the East Coast and was illegal to fish for. So, any Warsaw we caught we would have to release, which rarely did much good. These fish come out of deep water and when brought up from 300-400 feet below, they often die from the pressure change. So I was already in violation of governmental authority, which was about to prove to be very unprofitable for both Barry and me.

Barry was and is a great guy, friend, and young man who really loves the Lord. But at that time and all his life up until that time, he had had a problem with abandonment and the results of it. His father had died suddenly when he was 8 years old, and he had never gotten beyond the rejection and shame he grew up in. Barry was a true orphan with most of the orphan characteristics listed in Chapter Six. The abandonment issue left Barry with a fear of trusting and a dislike for authority and anyone telling him what to do. He was independent and self-reliant and had never received revelation to the
truth of submission to spiritual authority or authority at work. Barry was familiar with getting his own way and refusing to allow anyone to tell him what to do. With the orphan characteristics operating in his life, Barry was often right in the center of any discontent that occurred in the church or in his workplace.

The only boat I could find that any of my old fishing buddies would let us use was a 25-year-old, poorly maintained, 35-foot-long tub called the
Bronco
. Supposedly, the
Bronco
was a cursed boat; every person who had ever captained that boat had ended up divorced, bankrupt, or injured. It just sat at the dock; nobody would go near it. Fishermen as a whole are very superstitious, and they thought I was crazy to take it out. But for me, a curse without a cause can’t land. After all, I was walking in Christ. I knew we’d be fine.

So, Barry and I loaded up enough gear for a three-day trip and headed out to Devil’s Hole on the
Bronco
. The weather forecast was calling for mild winds and calm seas, and our outbound trip went fine. That first day we reached Devil’s Hole and caught several hundred pounds of red snapper and grouper, and that night hooked up but broke off one giant Warsaw.

The next day, an unforecast low-pressure area began building off the coast. As the seas slowly built in height, Barry started turning a little green around the gills (seasick), and by nightfall, the wind velocity at Frying Pan Shoals light tower was 39 knots. The rest of the fishing fleet had returned to safe harbor, but I stubbornly remained trying to catch a Warsaw. We were 62 miles offshore; and by evening, seas began running about 12 feet, and here we were in this old 35-foot scow that seemed ready to fall apart.

This was Barry’s first time out of sight of land. He was no seaman and ended up sprawled out on the back deck, puking his guts out from seasickness. He was as sick as he had ever been before in his life, so I finally relented to taking him home. Our course to safe harbor took us almost directly head-on into the 12-foot seas, so we
were really taking a beating. I was in my element, locked into “captain mode” and having a great time. This was the kind of adventure I lived for! Meanwhile, Barry was on the back deck giving up everything within his stomach. He was definitely green, terrified, and wishing he had never come to sea with me.

I finally let Barry come into the wheelhouse once I was sure he had nothing left to up-chuck. While he rested on the bunk on the starboard side (right) of the wheelhouse, wracked with dry heaves, I steered and kept the spotlight shining off the bow onto the waves, so I could see when I needed to back off the throttle to endure the brunt of the larger waves that had no back side to them. I was running about five knots, trying to get us as close to land as possible where the waves weren’t so brutal, but for 40 miles we were hammered with 12-foot waves pounding continuously into our bow.

With over 2,000 days captaining vessels at sea, I knew the ocean well. I’ve lived there and weathered many storms, including 69 mile-per-hour winds with 20- to 30-foot seas in a 44-foot boat. I’m a survivor. So I knew which waves were the most dangerous.

In the early morning darkness, the spotlight now illuminated a rogue wave menacingly forming right off my bow. Every seaman’s nightmare is the “rogue wave,” often formed when two waves come together from an angle and converge into one, increasing their height by up to 50 percent and doubling in destructive power. Rogue waves are deadly and can take a boat to the ocean floor in seconds.

Terror threatened to overwhelm me as it rose to 18 to 20 feet and broke across the bow right into the face of the wheelhouse. There was nothing I could do but scream, “Rogue wave!” It smashed into us with such tremendous force that it shattered the
safety glass in all three forward windows, tearing window framing loose from the fiberglass, and tearing off the starboard wall and windows from the wheelhouse. Shards of glass exploded into me from my neck down, ripping my shirt off. Blood was pouring from dozens of small lacerations, and a fragment of window framing was embedded in my throat and right arm. The impact of the wave threw Barry hard onto the deck, breaking or bruising several ribs and fingers. The wave had washed the antennas off the roof, drowned out our radio, and swept thousands of fragments of safety glass and debris into the engine room, clogging the bilge pumps that normally automatically pump any excess water overboard. We were still 22 miles from land and with the radio disabled, nobody knew where we were or that we were fighting for our lives.

Barry was in agony! I was in agony! And the boat was full of water. Stability was lost, and we were in a fight for our lives! I knew that if we stopped making headway and turned sideways into these heavy seas we would roll over and capsize. In the water, hypothermia would render us unconscious in a few minutes with death soon following—that is, if the sharks, attracted by so much of my blood in the water, didn’t get us first.

Bleeding, wracked with pain, and struggling with every ounce of strength to keep the crippled boat on course, I screamed at Barry in full “Captain Bligh mode,” “Barry, climb below into the engine room and unclog the pumps. We’ve got to get the water out of the boat!”