Those of you who have being reading this blog know how committed I am to this all-volunteer men’s retreat called, “One Year to Live.” The first time I attended this retreat it helped change my life and, I think it’s fair to say, made me a better husband and father.
But now, looking back, it did even more for me. This retreat-experience and the men whom I befriended and befriended me (yes, I can say whom I love and who love me!) help save my life. Why do I say this?
Last summer after thinking that we had control of my wife’s cancer, it came raging back. Within a few weeks of that, one of my sons committed suicide in California. I was a cop for over thirty years. One thing we learned in combat shooting was something called the “double tap.” This came about after some research surrounding the “effectiveness” of shootings. Frequently, an assailant would not be put down with one shot from a handgun – research showed you needed two, and you needed to fire them sequentially within a few seconds of time. This became the “double tap” in combat shooting.
This summer, I got hit by an emotional “double tap” and I went down. My dear wife was a major player in my recovery even though she is fighting an incurable cancer along with my surviving children. But she couldn’t do it alone. She was fighting this cancer. So when I got back home for the memorial service, and after my children had returned home, I needed something else, I needed my brothers in Christ. And they stepped up to the plate. They visited me, they prayed for me and after a few months I was able to fully function again. I was slowly getting on my feet – I was moving from casualty to survivor.
As a cop, I was lucky (blessed) none of the bullets that were fired at me hit me. For that I am deeply thankful. But then there were the emotional hits I took: the multiple fatality traffic accidents and being a member of the police underwater recovery unit and recovering those bodies in the lakes of Minneapolis. For the adults I recovered, I could always “re-frame” the situation as the person had a chance to live into adulthood. But for the children. The children were something else. Having a number of young children in my own home made this an entirely different situation for me. I remember one child I recovered one bright afternoon in Cedar Lake who had fallen out of a boat. And there he was, hands-together as if in prayer, sitting on the bottom of the lake. It took a year of Clinical Pastoral Education at age 56 to work through the grief I had suppressed over the years I was a police officer. And it was love that did it, not more information in my head.
So this morning, after an intense weekend, all this has come back to me again – it’s the love – the love I see absent in so many men today. Generally, men are alone and lonely. Sure, those of us who are blessed by marriage have our wives (and God bless them or we wouldn’t have made it this far).
But as much as I love and need and respect and cherish my wife, I know today that I also need men in my life. And today, more than ever, I cherish these “no-bullshit,” highly-accountable relationships that I have been able to develop. And this has happened primarily through these retreats.
Tired as I am this morning, I look back again to this weekend and the absolute out-pouring of God’s Spirit I saw this weekend -- just as it has in each and every weekend I have attended! As I awoke this morning, I sensed God was giving me a word of scripture. Words that I need to hear and to try and understand. Words of passionate love that God is so desperately trying to say to those people, those new Christ-followers in that small church at Ephesus:
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power… to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. (Chapter 3, v. 17-18).
I am over seventy years in age and it has taken this long to really understand (grasp) that power and how wide and long and high and deep it is. It is a protective power that in the worst of life’s tragedies (those “double-taps” in life) we can survive -- and not only survive, but to live, and grow, and thrive.
Thanks be to God!
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If you are interested, the next local One Year to Live retreats are:
The Mackenzie Center (near Poynette)
March 25-27, 2011
September 16-18, 2011
(the cost is usually under $200)
For more info and One Year Live Retreats see:
http://www.lutheranmeninmission.org/events/oytl.html
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