Nightmares Can Come True, Too

By way of offering up somewhat of an explanation for the lapse in postings, I can only say that 2010, thankfully, is now behind me. It kicked my butt, but now it’s gone. My fervent hope and prayer is that this year will not be quite so tumultuous.

No one died or even came close, so I really cannot complain. And in retrospect, I think the whole of last year was by some grand plan designed to make me put up or shut up. Literally.

I mean, the title of this blog is Testing God. So should it surprise me that perhaps God is doing a little testing of his own? The hits came from all directions—financial, emotional, physical—things that stuck at the core of my beliefs and betrayals by those I thought I knew. Things from out of the blue that I never in my wildest dreams saw coming.

At one point, I told my husband that I was literally afraid to answer the phone, open the door or even poke my head out from under the covers in the morning for fear of what the new day would bring.

But a funny thing happened on my way to the psych ward—I realized that while I thought I had surrendered all to God and was fully relying on Him, truth is, I hadn’t even come close to that. I probably still have a ways to go in being totally reliant, but 2010 brought me much, much closer.

And while I am certainly not saying I’m hoping for more bad stuff to rain down, I can say with certainty that the silver lining is that by turning to God, I made it through. I’m still standing, I learned a lot and I love God even more than in 2009, when it seemed I had the world by the tail and He was giving me everything I wanted.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my wonderful husband and two very good friends, all of whom were never too busy for me, even when all I could do was sob.

As I sought answers to my constant question of “what the heck, God?” a woman who shared a barn with us at the track this summer handed me a book which she declared to be one of the best books she’d ever read. After reading it myself, I tend to agree. Between that book and the Good Book (particularly the Book of Job!) I cried, screamed, cursed and questioned my way through the second half of last year. So, since I have pretty much finished up the material from Rich Toward God, the focus of my Daily Notes will now be geared toward material from Dave Earley’s 21 Reasons Bad Things Happen to Good People. I’ll begin with them next post.

And now, on with the blog:

Somewhere along the line Mark realized that his substance abuse problem and the ensuing financial problems caused by drugs and his agent were dragging down his career and his life, and he worked hard to get his life back on track.

Mark was clean and sober at the time of the accident. I remember him telling us that as he lay on the track for what seemed like an eternity, he called over to Mike, who at that time was still conscious, to offer encouragement.

“I was so cold, laying there shivering in the mud,” Mark recalled. “I remember thinking how I just wanted a blanket and wondering what was taking so long to get help for us.”

By the time he was being transported to the hospital, the pain from his broken bones and other injuries was excruciating.

“I told the ambulance driver, just in case I was unconscious when we got to the hospital, to make sure that the doctors didn’t give me anything addictive for the pain.” The sadness in Mark’s voice was enormous.

“When we got to the hospital, I was still awake so I told the doctors and nurses the same thing. I told them why it was so important that they choose my medications carefully. But when I woke up from surgery, I found out they had put me on morphine, and I knew I was in trouble.”

Released from the hospital with a long recovery ahead and some hard-core drugs at his disposal, Mark went home to recuperate at his mother’s house.

Mark’s battle with drugs was back on, and he wondered if he was strong enough to win it yet again. There were certainly many reasons to give in—a long, painful rehab and a good friend on life support were the two that came immediately to mind.

Mark found himself easing back into his old ways as the pain from his injuries and the anguish of wondering if there was anything, anything he could have done--should have done—differently that fateful night on the track nagged at him.

And then:

Dazed and confused, Mark woke up shivering on the floor of an isolation cell in what he assumed to be a detention center. Apparently the victim of a total blackout, Mark felt his blood run cold when he was informed of what went down the night before.

Mark remembered getting into his car after taking some pain meds and stopping to party with some friends. What he didn’t remember was the police trying to pull him over. Instead of pulling over, he led the troopers (by now there were a few of them) on a high speed chase down a busy in-town four lane road and eventually out a twisted, turning country road where Mark was eventually apprehended, thrown to the ground, cuffed, scruffed and jailed. Mark remembers none of this.