A Dark And Quiet Room

Yesterday, during the sermon, James McDonald discussed a family’s move during last winter. He pointed at it as an example of Christian community, how the church came together to help a family, how it was an encouragement to him.

That was my family.

If you were there for the sermon, you probably knew who he was talking about, but you might not know the whole story. So, for the benefit of my church family, I figured that I would tell our tale.

There’s a lot lying under the surface here which I don’t really feel comfortable laying out in any detail on the Internet. Some of you already know these details, and you understand. For the rest of you, I’ll be addressing a lot of things by implication and suggestion. If you want to ask me, come talk to me, but I won’t be clarifying anything here.

Summer, 2006.

My family has just left our church. It wasn’t a good scene, and we were feeling that. A couple of families left at the same time, but that was it. Our church connections, the relationships that we had struggled to build were suddenly gone. It was just our three families against the world.

I grew up in the church. I’ve always been used to the idea of there being other Christians around you who would pitch in. But now they were gone, and we felt so very alone.

Of course, it couldn’t be a simple thing. We were in the middle of preparing to move to our house on Orange Street. The seller (hereafter known as Brian the Seller) was working on getting the house done, and we were preparing to move. Already our possessions were taking up residence in brown boxes to be ready for the move. We went to a family reunion in Erie and then returned, preparing to make the jump to Orange Street.

Except, when Crystal and I went down to the house, it wasn’t done. It wasn’t even close to being done. We were supposed to be moving in ten days, and we had made commitments to be out of our current home. Now what were we going to do?

God provided. We started looking for another place to stay for the “month or two” that it would take to finish the house. We found a house just up the street, only a couple of doors down from the Lansberrys, owned by a family that we knew. They were willing to rent to us month-by-month, and they gave us generous terms.

So, on the last weekend of July 2006, we moved. On Tuesday, Crystal and I scoped out the house and planned out where everything would go. I took that Thursday and Friday off, and we moved like maniacs.

It was the hottest weekend on record. I recall something like 95 degrees (or more) in the shade. There were only a few people to help us move. As my brother noted, “The next time you leave a church, do it after you move.” It was a Ha-Ha Only Serious moment.

By God’s grace, we made it through. We were into temporary shelter. Sure, our stuff was stashed away in various storage areas around the house and in a friend’s garage, but there was a roof over our heads. Sure, Gabrielle was sleeping in a sunroom that doubled as a hallway, but at least it wouldn’t be that long, right?

One month passed. Then two months. The new house still wasn’t getting done.

And, somewhere in there, we ended up at Providence. In fact, we were there the very first week that James McDonald began to be an elder. It’s at this point that I need to make a brief discursus.

Summer, 2002.

We’ve just moved into the area, and we’re trying to figure out which church we should join. Then, one day, Scott and Janice Price invite Crystal and me out for breakfast. Scott is looking to plant a new church, and would we like to be a part of it?

We talked about it. We prayed about it. And then we said yes. From September 2002 to December 2002, Providence Church was our church home.

I don’t really want to talk about why we left the first time. Suffice it to say that I think we needed to walk another path so that we could better learn mercy and compassion. I do not regret this decision that we made, but I also know that it was the beginning of several painful years.

Praise God that He uses our suffering to our good and brings peace to his people.

Fall, 2006.

We joined Providence Church at the end of September. I found this blog post from that time:

“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean…one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold…do you see what I mean?”

–John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

On that Sunday, the Ben-Ezras, Lansberrys, and Dringenbergs came in from the cold.

But now what? There were all these people. Many I didn’t know, and those I did know had painful history with me.

And we had learned fear.

My father recently commented to my sister, “It’s hard to live like you haven’t been hurt.” When we joined the church, I told the elders as much. “I know that we are going to have problems that we can’t even see right now,” I said. “I know that we are wounded in ways that we don’t even know.”

And so we were. And so we are.

The house saga continued. I began trying to help Brian the Seller work on the house. I’d trudge down the street to the new house and put in work. I don’t know how to do construction; I was just unskilled labor. Even so, most days it felt like I was more interested in getting finished than Brian. I wrote to stave off depression. It wasn’t really working.

It was a dark chapter in my life. And sometimes, I feel like a pathetic Christian for admitting that. I mean, it’s only a house, right? It’s not like I was being tortured for being a Christian or something. But, for me, I wasn’t really at home. I didn’t unpack emotionally, because we were moving “any day now”. And so, I wasn’t at home anywhere. Work was stable, at least, but “home” wasn’t home.

And neither was church.

Church was still all these scary people that I didn’t know, who looked like they had different priorities than me, who were strangers simply because we didn’t know each other, but we didn’t have time or resources to get to know them because we had to work on the house and we couldn’t fit a large family into our current house without spilling out the windows.

Had we really come in from the cold at all?

Winter, 2006-2007.

But in the winter there were signs of life. Our church gathered to figure out if there was anything to do to help us finish up the house. We inspected the house and compiled a list. Plans were in the works.

Then, on Monday, January 8, 2007, Crystal and I took a day trip to Champaign. It was a wonderful trip for a number of reasons, but, over lunch, we discussed the house. Honestly, we needed to put the issue to rest so that we could enjoy the rest of the day. And we decided that we would just settle in for the long haul. We had a mortgage nailed down which would expire in March, so we figured that we had until then. Our deacon was going to check out the house and figure out what the church could do. We would just calm down and prepare for several more months.

So we enjoyed the day, watched a movie of average quality, enjoyed a nifty restaurant, and had some important discussions about the game I was working on. Emotionally, we put down the house.

The next day, everything goes crazy. Tom went down to the house, and suddenly there was all kinds of work done on it. Then I get a phone call from Crystal. Brian wants to close by the weekend. Can we put it together? I leave work early and head down to the house. All kinds of people from the church show up to help paint and finish the last bits that need to be done. Crystal and I are at the house until 4:00 a.m. We get the appraiser through the house, and we manage to close on Friday.

Saturday, the church turns out to help us move. Not just us, actually. Brian is still in the house, so he needs to be moved out, too. So some people are moving our things into the house while others are taking his things out. It was like a giant spatial puzzle, played with my stuff. It was all kinds of insane.

But there were people to help us.

The adult Ben-Ezras were discussing all this last night as we sat around the fire pit in our back yard. Crystal said that she was so very afraid that no one would show up to help move. If no one had, she would not have wanted to return to the church. Because it would have proven that no one really cared about us.

We still struggle with our fears. We still try to live as though we had never been hurt. We sometimes fail. But we can look back on our move as a beginning of something better, and it gives us hope for the future. Helping with a move may seem like a small thing. But sometimes, what looks like a small thing to you may be the world to someone else.

So, people of Providence Church, please accept this story as a thank-you from the Ben-Ezra family.