The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 17


The Everything Fast





He starts at the beginning.

The thing that drove him out to the shed was Jim Shaw’s promise of a megaphone. At The Community, Rick always struggled for more of the coveted “stage time,” exposure in front of the whole church, under the spotlights for everyone to see. And the larger the church grew, the less of a role he seemed to have up front. There were people who’d attended The Community for months, for years, who did not even realize he was on staff. Only the men got to know the Men’s Pastor, and even then, just a fraction of them.

At Jim’s church in Richmond, the stage would be Rick’s. His voice would be the one people heard every Sunday. Instead of shrinking, his reach would extend mightily.

“That was the problem,” he says. “Somebody puts a megaphone in your hand, and you better be sure you have something to say. I didn’t know if I had anything. Jim put me on the spot in a big way. Was I ready for that? To be honest, it scared me.”

One of the leadership blogs Rick kept up with had recently run an article about something called a “digital fast.” You unplugged your phone, stopped checking e-mail, shut down Facebook and Twitter. The idea being, we’re so bombarded by these media and feel so much pressure to stay on top of them that our focus becomes second-by-second instead of eternal. I remember him talking about this, though at the time I wrote it off as yet another trend-of-the-month. But Rick took it seriously and decided to go one better.

“I didn’t want to make this decision on my own. I wanted to hear from God. And to do that, I thought, ‘I need to unplug.’ With all the noise coming in, I was afraid I’d never hear him if God did try to talk to me. So I started with the idea of a digital fast, and the more I thought about it, the bigger the idea grew. I went out to the shed thinking I would keep a vigil, that I would wait until I heard the answer. I laid down on the floor, Beth, and I started praying.”

“I know.”

His eyebrows raise. “You saw me?”

“Honestly? I thought you were praying, but you were really asleep.”

“Ah.” He ponders this. “Can I level with you? I’m being completely transparent here. I’m not sure I know how to pray, not really. Up on stage, under the lights, I can spin a prayer out as long as anybody, but when I tried that night, I just ran out of words. They dried up on me, and that made me more scared. How could I be talking to people about God if I couldn’t talk to him?”

As he speaks, a well of sympathy springs up inside me. I never told Rick about my own struggles with prayer because I thought he wouldn’t understand. The first time I saw him, he was deep in prayer, and ever since he’s always been quick to chat with God like they were best buds, like they were brothers in the same fraternity. Now I know better, and it makes me love him a little more.

“When I woke up that morning,” he says, “I knew the vigil wasn’t enough. You thought I was crazy, and maybe you were right, but when the idea came to me, I had to do it. If I’d gotten anything from God, that was it. Not a digital fast, but an everything fast. That’s what I called it in my head, the Fast.”

Rick’s Fast wasn’t about abstaining from food, though that was to come. It was about abstaining from life, other people, the outside world. The satellite dish, to get reception, must be perched on top of the roof. In the same way, Rick had to elevate himself, get above things, if he was to receive the signal he wanted.

“The thing is, I never expected it to take so long. You were pressuring me about the birthday party, about Florida, and in my mind, I kept thinking all of that might still happen. If I could get this Fast done with, hear from God, and make the decision, then life could go on as normal. I wasn’t expecting the Fast to change things permanently, not like they have.”

So things have changed permanently? I let that hang in the air for now.

Not being the reflective type, Rick wasn’t sure what a Fast like this should look like. At first, he imagined an intensive self-improvement course. He would read books, he would watch videos, he would fill himself with influences in the hope that something would flow out of him in prayer. The first couple of days, he tried his best. He stayed up reading until his eyes hurt, but at the end of a two-or-three-hour stretch, he could remember almost nothing from the books. He started writing things down—“I have a notebook out there full of quotes”—and then, as a form of prayer, he’d read them back aloud, sharing them with God.

“What about the birthday party?” I ask. “I didn’t expect you to show up.”

“I planned ahead. I bought the saddle when I got Eli’s tire fixed. I knew there’d be people there, and you’d feel awkward having to tell them what was going on. So I came. Then I saw that painting. It really messed with my head, Beth. I don’t know what that was all about, but when I spotted it, at first I thought I was going insane. You’ll think I’m an idiot, but I honestly wondered if I was the only person who could see it.”

“That was Deedee’s idea of you,” I say. “St. Rick.”

He nods slowly. “I saw it in the bedroom. You were sleeping next to it?”

“Not really.” My cheeks flush. “Just the once. It fell off the wall and—”

“The wall? You hung it on the wall?”

“Eli did. You must have seen it when you snuck into the house.”

“I guess I didn’t notice.”

“How could you miss it? That thing was staring down at me every time I went up the stairs.”

“Do you think it looks like me?”

“You mean, do I think you’re a saint?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I just . . . it took me a second to realize who it was supposed to be. Then I thought, maybe it was the sign.”

“Yourself reflected back at you?”

“Stupid, I know. And then I went back to the shed and that girl was there.”

“Sam.”

He nods.

“What did you say to her, anyway? She came out of there and wanted to go straight home. Deedee thought it was a miracle.”

“Maybe so, but it wasn’t me. I don’t remember exactly. I think I said something like, ‘You can’t stay here,’ or ‘You don’t belong here.’”

“It must have been a miracle,” I say, “or maybe she was still high.”

He smiles, and again I feel something opening up inside me, pleasant and painful at the same time. Just talking to him again fills me with awkward joy. Don’t let it end. Don’t let me say anything to spoil the moment.

“There was something else,” Rick says. “The flowers.”

“That was Deedee too.”

“I thought it was you at first, then I realized it wasn’t and didn’t know what to think. Deedee, huh? The funny thing is, I had this feeling I wasn’t alone, that someone was watching me. I wanted to believe it was God, though, not the next-door neighbor.”

The daily offerings added something to the Fast. Until then, he had imagined his struggle taking place in private. Now, the larger world was involved. A secret watcher who seemed to be rewarding him for his persistence, encouraging him to go further. When his food ran out, he decided he would go without. And apart from the Bible, he stopped reading the other books. He had already let his phone battery die, but now he unplugged the laptop and let that lose power too. No more YouTube motivational videos, no more sermon podcasts. He denied himself the use of the fireplace and moved his bedroll to the hard floor.

As he confides all these privations, I remember what it was like when Gregory came out of rehab and started talking about his addiction for the first time. Hearing the other side of so many of our family stories, the explanation for things that had never made sense before. Because he’d lived through it, he could narrate the tales with a certain amount of detachment, even highlighting the humor in situations that were, for me, utterly harrowing to hear about. The time he wrecked his car while drunk and wandered off and got lost in the nearby woods. The time he blacked out in the back of a cab and woke up in the emergency room. There were so many, each one more terrifying than the last.

And now Rick is telling the same kinds of stories, sounding like a man fresh from some kind of spiritual rehab. This might be hagiography in Deedee’s ears, the lives of the saints, but for me it’s heartbreaking to think of what he was going through just a few yards away in the backyard.

“You look terrible,” he says. “Do you want me to stop?”

I shake my head. “Of course not. But what happened with Margaret? You heard her calling for help? That’s what ended the Fast?”

“Not exactly. See, I felt like I’d had a breakthrough. What Jim was asking me, really, was to be a big voice in the church. He remembered all the talks we used to have, all my theories, and he said the guys like me are the ones who ought to have the platform. And I agreed with him, Beth. All I wanted was some assurance from God that if I stepped up to the plate, I’d hit one out of the park. When I didn’t get it, boom, the ground collapsed underneath me. All I could do was double down. If God was gonna hide from me, I had to go after him harder.

“And then it struck me, the problem I was having. The big voice, the megaphone, all this envy over stage time. It was ego, Beth. It was Self. I couldn’t hear from God because I didn’t even speak his language anymore. That was the revelation: I’m not going to be a big voice. I don’t even want to be. What I need to be is ‘the still small voice.’”

That familiar phrase. The still small voice. It’s from the Old Testament, the story of the prophet Elijah. When God reveals himself, there’s a great wind that rips the mountain up, then there’s a mighty earthquake, and then there’s a fire. But the Bible says God isn’t in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. No, after all that drama has concluded, in the ensuing silence, Elijah hears a still small voice, a low and gentle whisper.

“God wasn’t giving me a megaphone. He was telling me to shut up. To be still and know.”

Confession: I’m a little disappointed. I was hoping for more. Let me try to explain. You remember the Tom Hanks movie Castaway? The guy’s plane goes down and he ends up trapped on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe for years and years. I loved it right up until the end, when he makes it home and realizes life has kept going without him, and Tom gives a little speech that encapsulates the lessons learned. They should have stopped the movie before that part, because what he says then, his Life Lesson, turns out to be something sappy and sentimental he could have learned by staying home and watching Oprah.

After all the suffering the man went through, you expect him to learn something amazing, something he couldn’t have fathomed any other way. Instead, you get cliché. Stop talking and listen. Be still and know. Was it really all for that? The weeks of insane isolation, what he put himself and his family through. He could have saved us all the trouble. His spiritual self-help books are chock-full of that kind of thing.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“No, really, Beth. You’ve got this look on your face.”

“Never mind my face, just keep going.”

“Seriously.”

All righty, then. He wants to know, so I tell him. I give it to him with both barrels, including the Tom Hanks reference, knowing the whole time this is exactly what I didn’t want to do. I’m ruining the moment. Spoiling our first communion since he went into that ridiculous shed.

Only he doesn’t react as I expected.

He grins a little. Nods. Rubs his chin, which is clean-shaven. No mountain man beard, no designer stubble. He must have taken care of that before he took the boys to the hospital.

“I know it’s not much,” he says. “I didn’t come back because I learned something profound. Just the opposite, really. While I was having this great revelation, how God wanted me to be the still small voice, I went back and looked up the passage. It’s in 1 Kings 19. And I realized I’d gotten it wrong. God’s not telling Elijah to go out and be the whispering prophet. It’s the way God speaks to him, not the way he’s supposed to speak. And anyway, Elijah just brags about how dedicated he is to God, until God has to explain to him that there are, like, seven thousand other guys in Israel who are just the same.

“The point being, I wasn’t listening. Instead of being the small voice, I wanted to hear the small voice. That was the real breakthrough. I want to hear. And I did, Beth. The moment I had that thought, the moment I tried to listen, I heard something.”

“God?”

“No,” he says. “It was Margaret. I didn’t know that at the time. I just heard something. So I followed the sound. When it took me next door, I followed, still not realizing what it was. I went inside and only then, only when I saw her there on the floor, did I recognize her voice. All that time, I still thought it was a kind of signal, some kind of sign. But it was Margaret on the floor yelling for help.”

“That was the message.”

“I didn’t get a message, Beth. The ambulance came, and afterward I was sitting out in the shed and suddenly, it dawns on me: what am I doing here? Just like that, I can’t even remember why it seemed so important, why I thought there was no other way.”

He reaches across the table and takes my hand. It’s the first time we’ve touched, really touched. Intentional, eyes fixed on each other.

“I’m sorry, baby, I really am. I basically abandoned you. Abandoned the boys. And I can’t sit here and tell you there was any good reason. All I can tell you is, I am sorry.”

I squeeze his hand. “You saved her life.”

“Not because of the Fast.”

“You wouldn’t have been here otherwise. We’d have all been in Florida instead of just me. And don’t forget about Sam. Whatever you said, it made an impact on that girl—”

“You’re sweet,” he says, “trying to make me feel better. But I’m a big boy. I can admit when I’ve screwed up royally. All this, and I’m still back at square one. I still don’t know what to tell Jim.”

“Did you talk to him at all? I left the phone out there . . .”

“I told him I was still prayerfully considering it. Those are the exact words: ‘prayerfully considering.’ You can take the man out of ministry, but you can’t take the ministry out of the man.”

“Out of ministry?”

“I’m not saying that, Beth. I’m not saying anything. To be honest, I don’t know what to say. But tell me you forgive me, or at least tell me you’ll try.”

This is a big ask, whether he realizes it or not. Part of me wants to melt, wants to make everything okay again, or at least pretend. But if we start acting like the last three weeks didn’t happen, we’ll be picking up where we left off. We were miserable then. I don’t want to settle for a lesser misery just to avoid a greater one. I’m ready to be non-miserable. Easy grace won’t get me that.

“Beth?” he asks, imploring.

“You promise not to do it again?”

Too easy, I think.

“Never.”

“All right, then.”

He leans over and tries to kiss me. His hip catches the table, which scrapes across the tile and pushes into my ribs. Is that a metaphor or what?

“Oops,” he says. “Sorry.”

He’s gonna give up. Before he can, I reach for his T-shirt and pull him to my lips. He tastes clean, his breath fresh, not at all like a desert father or a crazy hermit. He tastes like himself.

It’s the first time Rick has ever told me he was sorry.

Confession: I’m going to let that cover a multitude of sins.