Pain is universal. It’s something we all face throughout our lives. In chapter 2 of my new book, “Hope Changes Everything” I talk in depth about one of the most painful moments in my life.
It’s a story I’ve never talked about, until now. To read the whole story you’ll need to order the book from Amazon. But as I mentioned earlier this week if you’re still not sure whether to pick up the book or not, I’m posting a preview of each chapter over the next few weeks.
Today’s preview is from chapter 2 entitled: “Here Come The Pain”
If you would like to go ahead and purchase the book now, click here: Hope Changes Everything
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Or maybe you’ll relate to my buddy Matthew, who made a terrible mistake one night that changed his life irrevocably. Matthew was out partying one night, had a little too much to drink, and then decided to drive himself home. Needless to say, Matthew’s alcoholic impairment got in the way of his critical thinking; he was involved in a traffic collision that took another person’s life. Vehicular manslaughter.
The memories of that fateful decision and the horrors of that night stayed with Matthew long after the following morning, casting a long shadow that darkened his future for many years beyond the one that he spent in prison. The results of Matthew’s actions led to a never-ending monologue in his mind: You’re reckless. You should’ve been the one who died. You don’t deserve to be alive. You don’t deserve to be free. You got off easy. You should be locked up for life. You took a life; you should lose yours.
Matthew tried to drown those voices in alcohol, or at least shut them up with the drugs he forced through his body. He did all he could to medicate his shame into submission, spending years as an addict and bouncing in and out of treatment centers in a desperate attempt to find himself underneath all those layers of shame.
He still has trouble. Matthew still, as I write this, deals with the pain of that singular, devastating choice. He has punished himself because of his past pain, refusing to let himself off the hook for that accident. His pain has driven him to do things to himself and to those around him that only cause more hurt. But he’s working through it now, and he’s learning how to find peace in the midst of his pain.
And then there’s me.
I was not the most well-behaved child, which often made things unnecessarily difficult for my father, a respected pastor in small-town Oklahoma. Any time I rebelled against our town’s societal and cultural norms or got even a little out of line, my dad had to hear about it from just about everyone in his church, which meant I heard about it at home. But rather than using these negative outcomes as motivation to “straighten up and fly right,” I continued making choices that pushed against the restrictions placed on me.
Certainly, I was growing up in a flawed culture that placed more emphasis on how things looked to the rest of the world than on what sort of damage they might have done to me. Right or wrong, that was the culture and environment in which I grew up, making it the culture and environment that influenced my choices. And my choices then influenced my parents’ reactions to me, which were in turn informed by their own experiences, the culture and environment they’d each grown up in during their childhoods, and the one which they’d created together in adulthood. That all makes sense, right? Of course it does.
Anyway, this was the world I inhabited when my breaking point came. This was my world when I was eighteen years old and a senior in high school with a steady girlfriend.
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