It’s been a minute since a Drunk Pastor blog post had gone up. The Existential Hangover Newsletter subsequently is waiting for me.
In my personal, daily life, starting and running a business has been a journey. For most of my life, I’ve struggled with Imposter Syndrome. During recovery, I noticed it was shrinking. I avoided starting Stigma Marketing & Development. Stopping avoiding meant also working through resistance to finally feel acceptance. The number of habits over three years of sobriety I’ve had to systematically and painfully be confronted with myself, again and again, was meticulous and ego-crushing. And I’m grateful that everything in my life has led me here – I could not have learned what I have without any of it.
It in some ways triggered and shook my insecurities further. The more I cut off, the more room the remaining dysfunctions could breathe and stretch. But there was that all-in-out, recovering pastor still having to figure this out just to finally come to a point I didn’t anymore. I was also learning how to stop avoiding and just learning how to be comfortable. One trick I learned is to “Do the thing you don’t want to do first.” I remember hearing a version of this from Professor Cornette’s Wisdom of the Day quotes. That one dealt with eating frogs.
I was both resisting it and making myself do it, trying to prove I could. Money was tight, the financial wreckage from before my alcoholic collapse through my early sobriety was what it was and is what it is, there and my problem to fix. The weight and break on my psyche of being comfortable this long and distant from kids had crushed me during the holidays. Trying to put myself out there meant working through the desperate and the grandeur illusions; finally facing imposters of victory and defeat. I had learned a lot from my daily life that our “sin will find you out” (Numbers). Another way of saying that is I learned how we all “make our own reality.”
The Wreckage Within
Radical acceptance finally got through to me in my second rehab. It was one of a few crucial things that worked for getting over alcohol before I walked out. However, I was arrogant, still avoidant, codependent, not centered, and undisciplined, and my old defensive smart-ass loved backseat driving. A decade of drinking trending up to my last drink resulting in the hospital with a BAC of .407 did physical damage to my brain. Alcohol goes everywhere. My toenails were malformed for a while. Ethanol soaks through everything and it kills what it touches. What this means in a boy-in-a-man’s-body, like me, is that it kills the smaller neural pathways off first, leaving the bigger, faster, more used (i.e. “co”depended on) neuropathways behind and also damaged. It becomes narcissistic quickly.
36 years of delusional living, of being right there close to Truth and Vulnerability, but having to understand it all, it felt like it took a lot of doing and practicing to make a real shift. It felt a lot like the pressure I imagined and broke under when my family was asked to start a church in Missoula. I panicked because my ex-wife and I both knew 12 years ago I was dysfunctional. My ex-wife had to deal with it daily. I had to keep my appearance and shame protected. I was having problems with money, starting to drink secretly, and sneaking nicotine behind her back. She caught me plenty. I was pathetic and regret the damage I did to her.
I clearly had PTSD and was codependent. It took me a long time to work through that and I’m grateful for the tools and resources but it wasn’t magic. It was work and sludging through my waist-high crap. There were epiphanies that hit me in the shower and made me weep about my relationships and where those subconscious tendencies arrived. Morning bathroom times sometimes would result in weeping over finally getting something from the bathroom book as I read. Little realizations started clicking and piling up in exponential fashion. Hiding for so long would seem to lead to such an experience.
There are gaps in my early childhood and drinking memory. Enough has come back and more might still. Some of it came back simply by forcing myself to keep asking myself why I did the things I did and sitting in my own consequences. Someone in AA a few months ago said that maturity was just to be responsible for your actions (with a free gut punch about how we overcomplicate everything) and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for two days. If it weren’t for at least understanding radical acceptance, the help and support along the way, and learning from my mistakes in recovery, no matter how much of a hermit or introvert I was, I couldn’t be anymore. There would be no way I would be able to start a business and actually stick to it. Now, I even believe in it as if this was the path laid before me.
The Birth of a New Me
However, this inward “focus” can be unhealthy. This constant questioning of discomfort and insecurity got out of hand, even if I’m grateful for it. Looking in is always where the journey starts. My mistakes in recovery start with me as a father and a husband. I desperately needed to make more money and I was not a good candidate on paper for the types of positions that could pay the kind of money needed to make the kind of progress while getting me as a person back on track finally. There were a few opportunities and GMing at Arby’s wasn’t working for me.
Fast forward to now and Drunk Pastor – this is very much a part of all of this for me. To get to where I am now, a semblance of health, vulnerability, competency, authenticity, and love for others, also took a lot of thinking. I have been dependent on the left side of my brain to control things while my right side was going haywire with facts and people. My central limbic system loved to hijack my prefrontal cortex and make everything more distracted. To be able to live the way Christians lived, and to be authentic to my faith, I knew I had to be authentic about what I believed, start writing, and engaging with real people.
We had earlier in sobriety this Not A Bible Study, going through Genesis. It was a blast but then Arby’s and a girlfriend flipped my schedule around so we paused it. I miss it and the content is so much richer. The friends that have been there for me know this part of me and speak to it. It’s come up a lot in my journey from others. So, if I was going to do this Stigma Marketing & Development thing, I also had to do Drunk Pastor and this unconventional Bible study.
That meant I’d have to have a vision, that I’d have to make it happen, that I’d have to keep it going, that I’d have a lot of work to do before I could get to an equilibrium, and it would break me. It meant responsibility. It has. It’s been awful and great. I used to tease people that part of the way I train is to prep them and if they can swim well enough not to drown, just push them in. Maybe that’s what I did. This all-or-nothing part of me I see in so many things now…and part of me loves it.
An Old Gospel: New To Us
Back in Easter, I had this awareness of maybe how Christians were trying to make the Gospel work but were off. I could see it psychologically and in the narrative. I listened to the messaging and for the tension, individuals feel within Evangelicalism but often lack the words for it. During their gospel presentation, this idea hit me; “Why not do it correctly then?” If I sincerely thought the Evangelical gospel was off and that I actually understood the Gospel, could I dare to be a hypocrite and not then give my life to die to myself and model my life and calling after Jesus? It felt audacious, arrogant in some way as if I wasn’t allowed to. So I did.
It’s been a trip since. My Not A Bible often has weeks with no one there. It’s been like pulling teeth from lions to finally get a guy’s group started (Sept 9, I’m excited). Along the way, in my Drunk Pastor content, I have had times where the recent realities of my life and starting a business just mean I can’t be over here – it’s a maturity thing I just figured out. It’s also been a “What is this?” thing.
I was aware of a lot more that Evangelicals would consider heresy. AAers still make fun of how Evangelicals shoot their wounded. There were things off-bounds from questioning and, what I didn’t realize until about 2 weeks ago, was how much shame and obligation I felt about these things. It was making me avoid being honest in my thoughts and thinking. Coming to Missoula to start a church, I was not sure how far I was allowed to go and to ask questions. Now, I have gone further…just to finally understand I don’t need to understand everything, to let go and be open, and to create and take risks. There’s finally less of me that things work better.
A Call to Action
So, all of that to say, it’s been a few weeks. After some research, more realizing, inner work, and letting go, I’m eager. I have that feeling to start this Drunk Pastor thing over…but that’s silly. Evangelicals are a group I hope to interact with, especially Americans. There have been too many I’ve engaged with over my ministries who have been aware of this tension and ambiguity within American Evangelicalism. They can feel the cognitive dissonance. I’m partly convinced part of my purpose to is give them permission to think, feel, question, and dialogue. Their faith in Jesus need not be shaken but they may need to be if they were to fully engage with him. I honestly think we’ve messed up definitions of words like faith, sin, love, heaven, hell, and salvation for real authentic people and families who are trying to live their lives well but have to do it with “faith” in a lot more things than just Jesus.
The State of the Church
Nihilism is a thing and it has spread into the American church. The political landscape, with around 30% of Americans being associated with Evangelicalism and its undeniable relationship with the conservative party, unfortunately, has produced a king in the image of Evangelical projection. What’s a really uncomfortable truth is that Evangelicals are not winning people but rather are losing people, including their kids. Trump is somehow a “faith” and theological answer while ignoring Jesus’ and the NT’s teachings on being holy, loving, and honest. Do you want to put your faith in that man because you have faith in Jesus? I’m sorry but we should really talk about Jesus then.
For me, it’s about our partners, kids, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. It’s about the people struggling with suicide and addiction. It’s about the single mom with three kids, and the wreck of a baby-daddy avoiding his shame. It’s the friends we can never face again. It’s that people are lonely and isolated behind their screens as authentic, long-term relationships become more fractured and distant. It’s about where we are going as a world and seizing a life of peace and goodness now, so we have a better story we can pass off to the next generations.
A New Way Forward
It’s not a magic pill or formula, other than it feels like magic when it works. It feels the way I used to preach it would. It feels authentic…and it’s humbling AF. It’s alive. I could not stop processing over the last few weeks as my sobriety journey came to…a moment (I hesitate to call it anything) of clarity that I had to rethink my perspective of Scripture, humanity, truth, love, fear, ego, life, philosophy, and then…let go of some identities. My path requires me to keep working on my juggling act and hone myself more. It’s been hard and invigorating; also easier and working.
Writing…getting ideas out there has to be a thing for me. A passion, purpose, and identity in one. I realized that I’ve been a “philosopher” since first taking “Intro to a Christian Worldview,” especially since being sober. Theology is in essence philosophy within the frame of a Protestant worldview. A “biblical” worldview really depends on your view of the Bible. There’s been something like 20,000 words written in drafts and notes – there are charts and diagrams. It’s been a “creative” season with not knowing what to do with it all. The only conclusion I could come to was Seth Godin’s “trickle it out” and “tell your story.”
Anyway, sorry it’s been a minute if you’re one of the poor bastards that keep up on this blog. Also sorry for the lack of social media content. It will be coming back. I just had to work on some things and sit to some conclusions, personally and philosophically, for a while before my enthusiasm subsided. The journey to find my journey might just be coming to an end. No longer looking back and now looking forward, things look different and there are more questions to have fun with. “Even in chaos, there is opportunity.”
