I Can Only Imagine Read online

  The amount I drank should have killed me. My blood alcohol level had to have been in the danger zone, especially for a kid my age and size.

  I passed out on a waterbed (remember those?), and eventually—miraculously—I woke up in the middle of the night and joined a group of guys walking home. But we got caught by one of the dads. He drove us back to his house, and we slept it off there.

  That situation was one of the countless times God’s grace and protection intervened in my life. Somehow, I survived with no harmful or lasting effects.

  The next morning, the dad whose house we’d crashed at said, “Bart, your father needs to know what happened last night. Are you going to tell him, or do I need to call him about it?” I assured him that I would tell Dad, so he wouldn’t have to go to all that trouble. But I lied. My plan was to not say a word about it—ever.

  I thought I had gotten away with it until a few months later. I was going with the same group of friends to the mall in Dallas. When Dad dropped me off at my friend’s house, his father came out to the truck and jokingly said, “Hey, Arthur, don’t worry. I’ll make sure they don’t drink like they did last time.”

  I was so busted.

  Dad’s demeanor changed immediately, and he told me to get back in the truck. I quietly complied. That was a very, very long drive home. Fortunately, years before, I had calculated exactly how far my dad’s arm could reach to the right with his seat belt on, so I sat as close to the window as I possibly could, just in case he decided to get started on me while we were headed home. I knew for sure that when we got back to the house I would get the worst beating of my life.

  After we came in the back door, I braced myself for the rage. But Dad, stone-faced and emotionless, just looked at me and calmly stated, “You know what, Bart? I just don’t care anymore. You do what you want.”

  And the crazy thing was—he did exactly what he said. He stopped caring. That very minute.

  I’d had a growth spurt the year I had lived with Mom and was now much bigger. I also think that, with the black-and-blue beating still etched in his memory, Dad just gave up. He didn’t want to exert the physical, emotional, and mental energy on me, so he officially resigned from parenting.

  If I walked in his room and said something like, “Hey, Dad, I’m going to the movies tonight with Kent,” he would glare at me and blurt out, “Remember, Bart, I don’t care. Do what you want.” Over the years, his bitter words aimed my way always sounded like someone with a horrible grudge. He consistently reminded me that he no longer cared what I did, where I went, who I was with, or when I came home.

  But even then, I still cared about Dad. He was all I had left. I couldn’t afford to not care.

  As a result of Dad’s new parenting style, I could come home in the middle of the night without getting in trouble. There was no curfew. No accountability. No supervision. A lot of my friends said, “Wow, Bart’s so lucky. He doesn’t have to be home at a certain time or answer to anyone.” Little did they know I would have traded all my freedom for the love and care they had from their families.

  I took every chance I could to hang out with other people, especially to be around loving parents. I never liked being alone, because I was already by myself so much of the time. I would go to friends’ houses and stay as long as they would let me. The only warning Dad would ever offer was, “Don’t wear out your welcome.” I knew that was more about not embarrassing him than anything else. For whatever reason, the abuse at that stage of my life went from physical and verbal to silence and indifference.

  With Mom out of the picture, my brother with a driver’s license, and Dad deciding to check out of my life in every manner possible, I officially had no one left. My grandmothers lived on the other side of town. While that wasn’t really that far, someone would have to go to the trouble of driving me there or picking me up. There were nights I would ask Dad to take me to stay at Mammaw Millard’s, and he would just tell me no. Then he would go to his room and close the door, leaving me alone. He didn’t care if I went; he just didn’t want to have to take me.

  Sometimes I would be by myself in the house for several days. I had nowhere to go, and Stephen and Dad were moving on with their lives.

  Strangely, I actually preferred, even missed, the physical and verbal abuse. Having him in my face, whipping me, at least showed some level of caring for me.

  First, Mom abandoned me by leaving; then Dad did it with apathy. At least I never saw Mom. Seeing Dad all the time just constantly reminded me that I didn’t matter.

  Around this time, Dad started going on group dates with other single adults from our church, and he met a Christian woman named Jeri, whom he started dating when I was in seventh grade. Honestly, Jeri was a perfect match for Dad. Stephen and I watched him become the perfect gentleman when she was around, which was something we had never witnessed before. She brought out the good in him, maybe because he was actually happy with her. The relationship didn’t change Dad’s private behavior, but at least he was better with us when she was over at the house.

  Both of them were reluctant to remarry, so they dated exclusively for many years. Stephen and I really liked Jeri, and she was good to us. She became like a second mom because she was around more than our real mom was. Jeri was one of the only adults to be a consistent bright spot in my life during my childhood.

  The Safe House

  To say I was lost in the transition between child and teenager was an understatement. I felt no one would ever find me, hidden there in plain sight among family and friends. I wondered if anyone would even want to.

  But through all that noise in my life, whenever I heard a perfect union of melody and lyric in a song, something traveled from my ears to my heart and made me feel alive. When I felt the wind in my face as I rode my bike down a dirt road on a perfect spring day, I sensed a strange but comforting presence. And oddly, somehow everything I needed in order to create whatever was in my imagination was always in my room at just the right moment. All these amazing points of light told me there was something out there that granted dreams and brought better days. These solitary moments spoke to me, telling me there had to be Someone watching over me. I could just feel it.

  This thought had carried over from when I had gone to church as a small child. In those days we went to the church where Mom’s dad was the pastor. This was back when my parents were still together. My grandfather would be in the pulpit, my mom and her twin sister played the piano and organ, and Dad would be down front as an usher. So my entire family was on the sanctuary stage.

  When the altar call began, I just wanted to be with all of them, so I would head down front. But as the family drama increased at home, I would hear the congregation singing “Just As I Am” or “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,” and I was often in tears, feeling so many confusing emotions. Every time I walked down the aisle during an invitation, people in the church would give me exactly what I was so desperately starved for—approval and attention. I bet I walked that aisle at least a hundred times to “get saved.” My dad used to joke that my grandfather would probably look up and remark, “Uh oh, here comes Bart again.” Dad would even tell Stephen to sit at the end of the aisle to keep me from going down front.

  Our all-in-the-family church gatherings eventually ended, though, when my grandfather left my Mammaw Lindsey for another woman and, of course, also left the ministry. As you may recall, Dad’s dad had left Mammaw Millard and quickly remarried. I inherited a family history with an obviously poor track record for people keeping their commitments.

  While I had gone to church all my life on Sunday mornings, I discovered what it truly meant to become a part of the body of Christ at First Baptist Church, Greenville, Texas, during the summer going into seventh grade, when I became a part of their youth group.

  I’d been looking for a surrogate family—even if only for a few hours at a time—and a safe, secure place to belong. Once I realized such a home-away-from-home existed, I was all in. I mean it’s
church, right? They have to take you! So if the doors were open to the building, I figured out how to get there. If the church bus was running for any event, I was on it. Sometimes Dad would drop me off; other times I asked people to come by and pick me up. One way or another, I was at church when anything was going on. After school, I rode the bus and got off as close as possible, then walked to the church and hung out as long as I could until the last person to leave had to lock up.

  Dad was uncomfortable with my newfound church obsession. Change, good or bad, was really hard for him. But I think in some ways he was relieved I was hanging out with the youth group rather than somewhere else. He did go to church but never to the degree that I did.

  Because of his I-don’t-care-anymore parenting approach, I never had to get permission to hang out at a friend’s house, and there were plenty of times when Dad didn’t know where I was. The only consent he required was anything related to church. Often, if I asked to go to a church event or on some sort of youth trip, he would say we couldn’t afford it. So I became that kid for whom the church had to pay for everything. I took advantage of the scholarships donated by people to help students go on youth trips. On one hand, that created more rejection and alienation for me, but on the other, I wasn’t going to miss out on anything my youth group did. I was grateful to get to go. It was worth it to me.

  You know in TV shows and movies when the good guys have to find a way to hide someone from the bad guys, and they take the person to a safe house? Well, church became my safe house, a place where I could hide away for as many hours a week as I possibly could. I totally related to King David when he said, “A single day in your courts / is better than a thousand anywhere else! / I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God / than live the good life in the homes of the wicked” (Psalm 84:10 NLT).

  I was thirteen years old and about to start the seventh grade when I went to my first summer youth camp with FBC Greenville. That week I began to really understand the gospel for the first time. If I had to pick a single moment in my life when I feel I truly began a relationship with Jesus, it would have been during that week at camp.

  Forgiveness, Family, and a Future

  One evening at camp, the group was gathered around the bonfire, and Rusty, my youth pastor, talked about forgiveness. He told us to find a blank page in our journals and write down: “God, tonight, I choose to forgive . . .” He then told us to finish that sentence. To encourage us, he said something to the effect of, “Now, you may say to me, you don’t know how hard it is for me to forgive this person. You don’t know what this person has done to me. And I say I know it’s hard, but if you have been forgiven by God, then He gives you the power to forgive others.”

  Rusty explained how God gives us His strength and grace to forgive so we can be set free from the bondage that anger and bitterness can create.

  While this was fairly heavy stuff for my age, deep in my heart that message connected, and I knew that God was speaking to me. My dad had hurt me, but I needed to forgive him. I stared hard at the page as tears welled up in my eyes. But I just couldn’t bring myself to write down his name.

  There are times in life when God convicts us to forgive someone and, somehow, we manage to obey immediately. We express forgiveness, we feel it, and it is done. Then there are times when we harden our hearts to the Spirit, which Hebrews 3:15 warns us about. And so begins the long, slow process of recognizing, understanding, and dealing with the pain and hurt of what has happened to us.

  As for me, in that moment I hardened my heart. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust God or want to forgive, but rather that I knew even if I did, my dad would still continue to hurt me. I guess you could say that, though I believed God, I just couldn’t trust forgiveness. But this realization of the need to forgive began then and there. I just wasn’t ready to let go of the pain that was still deeply affecting me every day.

  From that summer on, I was definitely all-in with Jesus. I entered into what I jokingly refer to as my “super Christian” season of life. Anything I deemed to be Christian, I wanted to be involved in full force, and anything “of the world” I wanted nothing to do with. With balance, this can be a healthy decision for a young person, but I didn’t yet fully understand what a relationship with Christ could do in my life. I was just working to be the perfect law-follower. My dad thought my obsession with all this spiritual stuff was kind of corny, but by this point, I was pressing on, no matter what.

  The people at church, specifically the youth group, had become my new family. They didn’t get to choose me, but I certainly chose them! Our youth pastor, Rusty, was like my surrogate Christian dad, even though he wasn’t anywhere near old enough to actually be my parent. I didn’t know what it meant to be affectionate or encouraged until I began to receive and accept these incredible gifts from those people in the body of Christ.

  I embraced the truth that no matter what happened or what Dad did to me, God was ultimately in control. I became more vocal about my faith, less afraid to ask questions about the Bible, and more confident to state what I believed. What I discovered is that there’s personal empowerment that comes with a relationship with Christ, and this, coupled with a newfound identity in Him, brings real healing to suffering people.

  As I grew spiritually, I started slowly piecing together what my life could be. For the first time, I experienced hope for my future. I began to see that God had a purpose and a plan for me.

  Three

  HOLD FAST

  To everyone who’s hurting,

  To those who’ve had enough,

  To all the undeserving.

  That should cover all of us.

  Please do not let go.

  I promise there is hope.

  —MERCYME, “HOLD FAST,” FROM COMING UP TO BREATHE (2006)*

  Starting in my middle school years, next to Jesus and the church, I had five best friends: music, Mammaw Millard, Mammaw Lindsey, Kent, and Shannon. While all five had already been in my life for many years, there was something about the journey into my teen years, dealing with my dad, and my newfound faith that brought a deepening relationship with each of these blessings. These four people’s presence in my life, combined with my love of music, kept me grounded and growing even in the most difficult days.

  The Magic of Music

  For me, music has always been a pleasure, a protector, and my passion. The words my favorite artists sang gave me strength and courage and inspiration and motivation to keep going, to keep living, and to believe something better was around the corner. Music gave me hope when I felt hopeless. Love when I felt unloved. A reason to embrace life when I was dying inside. If a song moved me, then I felt I was alive for a reason. Later I came to the truth of knowing these blessings were all gifts from the Lord. Music was simply the conduit for them to reach my heart.

  In my new faith, I completely immersed myself in Christian music. My Walkman and headphones became permanently attached to my body. (For you young ones, a Walkman was a portable cassette tape player. If you aren’t sure what a cassette is, ask your favorite search engine.) These devices were spiritual and emotional lifelines for me.

  Because of my obsession with contemporary Christian music (known to insiders as CCM), I know everything about my genre of choice. I’m a Christian music nerd, geek, and aficionado. I know way too much about the history, the artists, and the industry. In a strange way, I had a neighbor named Chris to thank for that.

  Chris lived just down the street from us. He was a little older than me, closer to my brother’s age, and was a strong Christian. And—key to the story—I thought this guy was the coolest ever. He was always super nice to me, which made him even cooler.

  One day, Chris invited me over. His room had all these incredible concert posters on the walls. I was instantly impressed and amazed. The one that most captured my attention was for U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. Chris encouraged me to sit still, to fully focus on and truly listen to a song. To take in all the nuances of the m
elody and the lyrics—the lows, the mids, the highs—and the dynamics of the track. He inspired me to tune out everything else and zero in on what the artist was trying to say to me.

  As Chris popped in U2’s Fire cassette and hit the Play button, I sat mesmerized and soaked in every tune. As the last track started, Bono began to sing the ethereal, poignant song “MLK.” (If you’ve never heard it, find it and listen!) When the track ended, I asked him to play it again. And again. I was mystified. I couldn’t get enough. This haunting track had innocence. Passion. Simplicity. There was something special about it. Many nights, I would lie in bed and sing along with “MLK” over and over. In fact, still today I find myself sometimes lying down with one of my kids for a few minutes at bedtime singing that song.

  Music had an effect on me like none other. It could make me forget about anything. If I knew Dad was going to discipline me, I would sing until he walked in. Then I would sing afterward. My catalog of cassettes was literally the soundtrack of my life. And now I was starting to connect the Spirit in me to that same spirit in music.

  To this day, when I put on music, I have to listen and not just hear it. If I want to play you a song and you start talking, I’m the guy who will hit stop and start it over because I want your full attention on what is coming out of the speakers—not your mouth, mine, or anyone else’s. The only other artist I’ve ever met who was as militant as me about that is Kirk Franklin. I know because once he was playing me a song, and I started talking. He hit stop, waited on me to finish, and then started the song over!

  I have always gotten frustrated when people won’t give a song the attention I think it deserves. In high school, after I started driving, I’d often pull over at a quiet spot on the way to drop my date off. She probably thought that was the cue to start kissing, but no. Instead, I’d turn up my latest musical infatuation on the car stereo, lay the seat back a bit, close my eyes, and tune in. If she would cooperate and listen the way I did, and not talk to me, but tune in with me—that was one way I knew if our relationship could go anywhere.