My Wall Street Journal

In my very early childhood, some of my favorite times were when my parents would take the four of us kids to visit my grandparents, who lived in a little town a couple of hours away from us.  My uncle was a teenager at the time, and he was sort of our unofficial babysitter.  I loved it when he took us to the park.  The park had a wall around it, and my sisters would scramble onto the wall and run around the park on top of it.  I, on the other hand, was too scared to try to climb the wall.  Every time we came to the park, my uncle would have to remind me that he’d helped me to climb it and walk on it before.  He’d give me his hand and help me to slowly step up onto the wall.  Then he’d hold my hand as he walked beside me—me on the height of the wall and him on the ground beside me.

That wall became an important metaphor for me as I grew up.  When I struggled with fear and asthma and the often overwhelming ache to fit in, I would think of that wall and remind myself that I had climbed it and walked on it.  And I’d find some deeply buried courage to grasp onto.  I told Monty about the wall and described it for him.  When we’d been married about a year, we drove to that little town so I could show it to him; my grandparents had moved away so I hadn’t been there since I was a little girl.  We found the park with the wall.  Monty’s first words were, “This is the wall?”  “No,” I said.  “It can’t be.  It’s so . . . short!”  It was short—Monty measured it, and at its tallest, it was a little less than three feet high.  We stood there looking at it, me in disbelief.  “Well,” Monty said, “You were really short then, too.  So of course it seemed high.  Plus, it’s narrow on top.”

Fifteen years later, Monty and I moved to that little town with the short wall.  My parents and brother were living there and had started a family business, and Dad asked Monty to work with them.  I’d been sober for a year and knew I wouldn’t stay that way if I didn’t find a support group.  So I joined a group in a nearby town and began working the twelve steps that would transform my life.  Step Four in the recovery process is to “make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our lives.”  I loved this step.  My soul had been aching for me to put down on paper all of the burdens I’d been carrying.  I spent two days on my inventory, crying through every word I wrote—all eight pages of them.  And then I read about Step Five: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”  What?  I was supposed to share all of that with someone?  No way.  I decided to work on the other steps and skip that one.

But my sponsor knew I’d done Step Four.  And he asked me about Step Five.  My voice shook as I told him that I was ready to do Step Five if he would meet me somewhere and listen.  He told me to meet him the next afternoon at the park in our town—the park with the wall.  When I walked into the park that day, I walked through the opening of the wall.  And as I sat there at a sticky picnic table waiting for my sponsor to arrive, my stomach churning and my hands shaking, I looked at the wall and remembered.  Yes, the wall was short.  But I’d climbed it and walked on it and I’d done it afraid.  The papers in my hands stopped shaking, and my voice never faltered as I read every awful but healing word of those eight pages to my sponsor.  When I walked out of the park, I felt as though I was leaving years of shame behind me.  I patted the wall as I left, appreciating its silent support.

I did not walk out of that park and into happily ever after.  I knew that I was walking into one of the hardest battles of my life as I lived a life of recovery.  And I have battled.  Some of the walls I’ve scaled since then have been as short as the one in the park.  Others have felt like Mt. Everest.  Sometimes God shows me that a wall is coming—that there’s going to be a challenge ahead.  Other times, a wall pops up out of nowhere, and I’m faced with an illness, a relationship challenge, or some other difficulty I never saw coming.

I spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with God about these walls.  I’ve asked Him to move them or shrink them, and on rare occasions, He has.  When I was in the deepest throes of addiction, my thinking was so distorted that I truly believed that the only good part of my life was our beloved cat Ricky.  Many times, when it felt like I didn’t even know what was real anymore, I would hold on to Ricky.  He was real, and for some reason I couldn’t fathom, he loved me.  As much as I knew on a rational level somewhere deep inside that Monty loved me, I wouldn’t let him reach me.  I only wanted Ricky—and there were many, many days when I felt that Ricky was all that stood between me and taking a final, irrevocable step.  And then one day, he stopped eating.  Monty and I looked into his mouth and saw a sore on his tongue.  We took him to the vet, and she called that afternoon.  I answered the phone, and the vet started with, “I’m so sorry.”  Tears streamed down my face as she told us that they had done a rush biopsy on the sore and found cancer.  We asked about options; she said he could have part of his tongue removed, but that it would be very hard for him to eat or drink.  We knew we couldn’t do that to him.  So the sore would grow.  It would grow fast.  And we would lose him.  Through my tears, I asked the vet to check again.  “I can,” she said.  “We can send the sample to another lab.  But. . .”  “Please,” I asked her.  “Please.  Check again.”  I wasn’t doing much praying at that time in my life, but after we got that phone call, I dropped to my knees beside Monty, and together, we begged God to remove that wall.  Two seemingly endless days later, the vet called.  And as she spoke, I saw that wall crumble from a height built of boulders down to pebbles that disappeared when they hit the ground.  She said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.  But the biopsy was negative when we re-tested.”  My legs went limp, and I held on to Monty as I said, “It’s not cancer?”  “No trace of it,” she answered.  “None of the technicians know what happened.”  I knew what had happened.  And with my boy in my arms, I opened my heart the tiniest crack to God’s love, and looked up into Monty’s eyes and saw love there, too.

Usually, God doesn’t move the wall like that.  But He does for me what my uncle did all those years ago.  He waits patiently for me, asks me to trust Him, and offers me His hand.  He listens when I tell Him I can’t do it, then He reminds me of the walls in my past that He’s led me up to, along, and over.  He reminds me, too, that I’ve never fallen when I’ve held onto Him.  I’ve stumbled.  Sometimes I’ve made stupid decisions and jumped.  But I have never fallen when I’ve held onto Him.

So I look up to the wall I’m facing and ask Him yet again to help me scale it and walk along it until I get to my next destination.  It’s never an easy walk.  Sometimes the pain and darkness overwhelm me, and I taste the sweat and tears of frustration as I’m forced to my knees.  But I keep going, crawling my way through doubt and confusion because God has taught me that something better is ahead.  I hear all of my prayer warriors praying.  I make progress in fits and starts.  And the day comes when the journey along the wall I’m on finally ends. I look up, stand up, and from that new height, I look back at what God and I overcame together.  And it all becomes worth it when I stand on that height, my hand in God’s, breathing in the beauty.

Psalm 84:7 says, “They go from strength to strength, ‘til each appears before God in Zion.”  I’m learning that this is the only way to live my life—to ask God to give me the strength to scale my current wall and trust that after that, He will give me the strength to scale the next one.  I know without a shadow of a doubt that over the course of my lifetime, I have not taken one successful step on my own.  Every step that has mattered I took with God.  Every wall I scaled.  Every new height I reached.  From wall to wall, from strength to strength—every step of it has been with Him alone.  And together, we’ll keep stepping until He brings me home.