A Timely Message
It wasn’t long after moving into the apartment womb that things began to get interesting. It all started with a note from an old friend, Val, who was responding to a message I had sent her over a year before. A message that had sat unopened in her inbox — waiting, it would seem, for this moment to arrive.
Val was exactly the kind of friend you wanted at a time like this: a white-haired, straight-talking lady with no offers of vague reassurance in a moment of crisis. Someone who would sit and listen to God on your behalf, returning with something concrete and — more often than not — something pivotal.
I read it again, carefully. And then again, just to be sure.
Was she really saying that God’s intention was not to restore my marriage? I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t want to. Surely that was always His plan — or at least His desire?
And what was this other part about being surprised, even shocked? What could God possibly reveal to me that would shock me? I spent the rest of the day turning it over in my mind, but finally gave up, concluding that no amount of hard thinking was going to reveal something that had, until now, been hidden.
The Mountains Are Calling
“going to the mountains is going home…wildness is a necessity” — John Muir
We were now into the latter part of May, when Scotland’s countryside is in full bloom — her lush green mountainscapes bursting with the promise of new life. But of course a global pandemic was still in full swing and the national lockdown remained in force. Leaving your home to visit somewhere within your local area was permitted for a handful of reasons. But venturing beyond that — say, for a jaunt to the countryside — required a level of justification that I simply didn’t have. Not by lawful standards, anyway.
Regardless, a week or so after Val’s message, I broke rank. Taking a flask full of hot, sugary tea and my fishing rod, I fled the confines of the city and wound my way into the mountains to the north-west. My heart yearned to be out there, lost in its grandeur. Instinctively I knew this was the tonic I needed.
My destination was Loch Long: a sea loch — or what the Norwegians would call a fjord — about an hour’s drive from the apartment. Along the way, I had the thought to overshoot the loch and pay a quick visit to the Rest and Be Thankful. A viewpoint famous for its sweeping glen and a fitting place to sit and reflect on life’s matters.
Arriving at the top of the glen, I noticed the pond-sized body of water that lay just a stone’s throw from the viewpoint. I had seen it many times before, but always as a passing point of interest. Still, the weather was so pleasant that day that I couldn’t help but trot down and stick my feet in for a paddle. The water was cool, yet delightful, and the mountains majestic. I breathed in deeply, as if to inhale my surroundings.
And that’s when it happened.
In the stillness of the moment, a soft fluttering sound entered my right ear, as if the air immediately next to it was gently vibrating. I turned toward it to find its source, looking nearby and then toward the mountains in the distance. But nothing. Shrugging it off, I went to leave. But as soon as I did, the sound returned.
I’m sure I must have been quite the spectacle to passers-by in the moments that followed. Standing there, on the edge of the water, twisting my head back and forth, testing my own sanity. Each time the sound faded as I turned right and it met my ear again as when I looked directly forward.
Zeroing in on it once again, I leaned in, as if to listen closer. Immediately, what had been a simple pulsing of air became more structured. A whisper — a voice speaking so faint I could hardly tell if it was audible or just an inner impression. I leaned my concentration in harder:
“Abandonment”
I squinted at first. And then the word came again and this time I chuckled. It was an involuntary, nervous kind of laughter. The kind you get as a kid when your schoolteacher fires your full name across the class in a sharp tone and the whole room turns to face you. For some reason your kid-sized body deals with that sudden, intense attention as if the teacher had just told a joke.
But the teacher was never joking, and neither was God in this moment. That much was clear. That was probably about the only thing that was clear to me as I stood there for several more minutes, hoping for a further explanation. A second part to the message perhaps. But nothing.
Slowly I vacated the scene and made my way to the viewpoint. Maybe the beauty of the glen would help me understand it. But even here there were no further revelations. So, gathering myself, I made my way down the road, back toward the sea. Perhaps a spot of fishing and a cup of tea would clear my head enough for some wisdom to make its way in.
Fishing for Clarity
“Abandonment” — the phrase echoed in my mind as I stood on the edge of the loch, hurling my silver spinner repeatedly into the flooding tide, with the hope of landing a fish. The idea of it didn’t compute. I couldn’t make this word fit with the picture I had of my life. After all, my childhood read like a fairytale: born into a loving family; raised in a Scottish castle, in the bosom of a Christian community; surrounded by a whole troop of kids, with adventure on our doorstep and never a dull or friendless moment. What possible opportunity did I have for abandonment?
In the midst of these reflections I caught a fish — a tasty-looking cod. It was the only thing I caught that afternoon. Later, I gave it away to some teenage boys who were fishing from some nearby rocks. I could tell that they too had fled the city in search of something — some adventure, perhaps. But they had caught nothing for their labour, they explained to me, shoulders slumped. So I handed my cod to their apparent ringleader and smiled. Somehow, the delight on his face and the corporate bragging rights that ensued were more satisfying to me than any prospect of eating it myself.
In the days that followed, I continued to ask God for clarity on what I had heard in the mountains. And He responded, gently unpacking the word that had been whispered. Without pointing fingers or apportioning blame, He began highlighting experiences from childhood that had left their mark on me. Fuzzy, long-forgotten memories, now becoming clearer and more accessible. Nothing overtly traumatic. But moments that had, nonetheless, opened the door for lies to creep in and take up residence in my subconscious. Lies whispered by an altogether more sinister voice:
“You are not enough”
“You make people unhappy”
“You are alone”
“Love must be earned or taken”
Val was right — I was shocked by what I was discovering. Not by the memories themselves, but by the growing realisation of how the lies had impacted me. And not just me, but those around me. I was suddenly seeing my life through a less rose-tinted lens — the broken dynamics of how I had related to people and to myself; the great efforts I had gone to in order to be liked by everyone; the insecure and manipulative ways I’d related to women; and the ongoing quest to find approval from all authority figures.
Most gut-wrenching of all was the realisation that I had carried these things into my marriage. That I had laid them on my wife. Unknowingly, I had expected her to fill the void that these moments had left. And I had lived our relationship from a fear that she would not — a fear of abandonment. A fear that caused me to act in all sorts of ways, whether it was anger, manipulation, or just plain hiding.
God had given me one job and that was to love her. But my own lack of self-assertion had made that almost impossible. I’m not talking about affection here: I’m talking about love, as an verb. I’m talking about what it means to give yourself wholly to another — to protecting, encouraging, and delighting in someone, because you see their worth and it’s worth everything.
But how could I give myself to someone in this way when my soul was a vacuum? When my everyday mode of operation was to take — to try and fill that place in my heart with other people’s opinions, their affection, praise, and approval. As if, by doing so, it might restore me — restore my self-worth and bring me the wholeness that, deep down, I was thirsting for. The wholeness we were all made for.
“My tank is empty and you’re just not filling it”
I winced as I recounted some of the things that I had said to her. I thought about Adam and how he had given his rib gladly for Eve to come alive — given away a piece of himself for her wholeness. I, on the other hand, had spent our marriage staring at the hole in my side, trying to get her to fill it.
I was overwhelmed with grief at these revelations. They brought me to my knees, literally. And then face down on the rug in my tiny living room. From here a desperate cry rose up:
“God, help me. Please help me!”
Something Much Better
Covid walks, as I called them, were a part of my everyday in that season. My way of making the most of government rationed periods of outdoor exercise. I used these walks as an opportunity to reflect on everything that was going on and to ask God questions. Generally, I would take a route that led me down by the Clyde — the large Atlantic bearing river that our city was founded on. This route took me past a number of interesting, modern landmarks, but it was always the water that drew me back to that place.
Three days after the whisper, and now convinced of what I had heard, I was on one of these walks, passing under some railway arches on my approach to the river:
“Okay, Father. I believe You now. And I am starting to understand the problem…. kind of. But what exactly am I supposed to do about it? How do I change? How do I go about fixing something that seems so hardwired?”
A little farther along the river walkway I found a bench and sat down. A steady stream of passers-by accompanied me: joggers, cyclists, and walkers, all making efforts to maintain the advised 2-metre social distance. As I sat there, holding these questions in my mind, I fully expected an answer. But what I hadn’t expected was the way in which it came:
“Don’t try to recapture what’s been lost.
I’ll give you something much better”
The voice was not a whisper this time, but a strong and reassuring tone. As the words passed through my brain, a warm tingling sensation passed into my feet. Subtle at first, but growing stronger as it began to migrate up my legs. I knew this feeling — I’d experienced it before, on a number of occasions. But never on a park bench, by a river, in the middle of a city.
This tingling continued to intensify as it moved up and into my torso, exploding with heat as it gushed into my chest. Overwhelmed, I swivelled in my seat and eased myself down onto the hard metal structure of the bench — my 1.90 metre frame hanging off the other end. Evidently this lying down had signalled some kind of surrender to the Spirit of God, now coursing like fire or electricity up and down my entire body.
Liquid love — a fitting description. That’s what some people call it. An infinite God making His feelings known to a finite human body.
His words moved around inside of me: “Don’t try and recapture what’s been lost”. I knew that its meaning went well beyond my marriage and the loss of all we’d dreamed for. I knew that what had been lost — what every human loses, in different ways — was lost in childhood. And then lost again, repeatedly, throughout life, as the brokenness of this world only came in to confirm and compound the lies.
I could hear His invitation to let those things remain lost. To leave them behind and to leave behind a life of trying to win them back through other people. Trying to undo the abandonment. I could see that He was offering me something else instead — something “much better”. A new start. A chance to be born again, a second time, into His family. To become like a child once more, with God Himself as the perfect parent, sibling, and friend. A whole new set of experiences to inform my inner world.
I was undone. There was nothing left for me to do but give in to this invitation. It was a sweet surrender. My face now soaked in tears, a deep sense of belonging and affirmation overtook me, and I became fetal — an outward posture reflecting an inner reality. A new birth was taking place and its Mother was the Spirit of God.
The encounter continued unabated for I don’t know how long. At moments I sobbed and at others I laughed as if drunk. All the while, the people of Glasgow continued to pass me by. I noticed them, but only barely.
When I did finally pick myself up from the bench, it was only to walk about giddy in a nearby thicket of trees, yelling defiantly:
“I am no longer abandoned!”
Such joy and emancipation filled me. Something internal had shifted, and with it my perspective on all that was happening. Just as Val had said, my external circumstances didn’t change that day — we were still on the road to divorce. But the circumstance of my inner being had been radically altered and that changed my view of everything.
I suddenly had light on the path. I could see what I had brought into the marriage and the impossible burdens I had placed upon my wife. But, more than that, I had tasted of something — of someone — who satisfied those deep longings in a way that neither a spouse, nor anyone else, ever could. Someone eternal and infinitely secure.
All this gave rise to a hope, which in that moment seemed untouchable.
Coming Home
Walking home from the Clyde, the clear blue skies turned to light cloud and the patter of rain. It was a warm, summer rain and it quickly turned heavy. Fat drops seeped through my clothes, but I didn’t speed up or take shelter. Somehow, this drenching felt appropriate, I thought to myself as I wound my way through Glasgow’s streets. And, after all, what was a little soaking — or even a great storm for that matter — to someone who had finally come home.
wondering son 