11 ~ (1996—1998)
Water from the Rock
Good health for twelve-year-old Karis meant she could explore new interests (especially ballet) and invest in new challenges (teaching children both at church and in our neighborhood Bible club). For me, it meant a return to more active life outside our home. I started graduate study in family counseling at a seminary in São Paulo. David, as always, was living at a rate of 100 miles per hour, traveling extensively as his ministry with MAPI took wings. To all appearances, our kids were flourishing, and all should have been well.
Except that, perceived only vaguely even by myself, I wasn’t doing so well. As if to make up for “lost time” while I had been “sidelined” with Karis, or perhaps unconsciously trying to “catch up” with David and carry my “fair share” of our work in Brazil, I took on more and more ministry commitments, on a track that with the passing of months started moving faster and faster until eventually, my life whirled out of control. But I was so in control that for a long time I fooled everyone, including my husband, including myself.
In January of 1996, a year after Karis’ surgery, our family camped for two weeks on the beautiful beach at Marataízes, in the state of Espírito Santo, along with several other families. What a delight! Our family, together, enjoying something so normal, so restful, so refreshing: palms, white sand, beautiful warm blue waves, cool fresh coconut milk from vendors on the beach, fresh-caught seafood, the kids running free with their friends all day and joining the adults in the evening for a common dinner, stories, games, singing to the sound of the surf.
What could be wrong with this idyllic picture, where our biggest worries were too much sunburn and whether or not to rent the banana boats? Nothing—except for what had happened before we left São Paulo, and what awaited us after we got back home. I was sabotaging myself by not knowing how to express to David the distress I was feeling.
The final weeks of 1995 had included the following dynamics between us:
Dave: God has given me a vision for a marvelous new ministry! What do you think?
Debbie: Please . . . no! I know what this will mean—a huge amount of work for me. I can’t do it, not now, not yet. Let’s wait awhile. A few months from now, I’ll finish my study program. Then I’ll be in much better shape for taking on something like this.
Dave: Well, I think we can do this, and there are people asking for it now. Please pray about it and we’ll talk again in a week or so.
Debbie (the next time we talked about it): David, I’m really sorry. I truly believe that this is a marvelous idea. I just don’t think I can handle it right now. Please, let’s wait just a few months.
Dave: Tell you what. Let’s ask God to direct us in the following way: I’ll ask our friend ______ if she is willing to help us, and that will take pressure off of you. If she says yes, we’ll go ahead; if she says no, I’ll understand that God is confirming your desire to wait awhile.
Dave asked our friend. She agreed to help. Dave took that to mean God wanted us to go ahead. He started planning and invited people to the first event, scheduled for a few days after we returned from our camping trip. Dave was excited. I was not. In point of fact, had I allowed myself to recognize and name my feelings, I would have said that I felt betrayed and manipulated, profoundly disrespected and devalued. But, true to form, I did not acknowledge or say any of this. Instead, I tried to discipline myself into being a more selfless wife and servant of God.
But at Marataízes, while everyone else frolicked and celebrated the glorious freedom of summer, I was depressed. And whenever I was not directly engaged in activities with other people, I was working on preparations for the event that would take place so soon after our return home.
Before we left São Paulo for Marataízes, six people had signed up to participate, so we had decided to hold the event in our own home.
By the time we got back, two weeks later, the number of people who planned to come—from cities all over Brazil—was thirty-six. For Dave, of course, this was additional confirmation that we were doing the right thing. For me, it meant scrambling to find housing and a way to feed and care for all of those people, because the retreat sites we knew about were all involved with summer camps.
I worked from early to late. Many others helped. The event was a spectacular success, and launched what became a marvelous ministry that has profoundly helped untold hundreds of people in every region of Brazil and in several other countries. The books Dave wrote to underpin the ministry became national bestsellers. A person I admired said she had never seen a couple work so well together as Dave and me. God clearly blessed. I should have been thrilled. Life-transforming ministry was our reason for being in Brazil, and it was happening.
But I was not thrilled. I was depressed, and confused, and hurt. This was one of few times in eighteen years of marriage that I had tried to express a serious contrary opinion to David’s, and I felt he had not listened to me, had not cared to understand why I felt as I did. Why indeed should he? I had become a master player in the game of “successful, victorious Christian living,” subsuming all personal desire and distress to the lifestyle of service. I was frustrated, but didn’t have the tools to deal with my frustration. I didn’t know how to articulate my own needs. This one time that I had tried, I had been steamrolled. And it seemed that God himself was on David’s side.
I dealt with my confusion and frustration the only way I knew how: I worked harder, ran faster, did more, tried to do it all better. I think now, though I didn’t recognize it then, that in part I hoped to gain my husband’s (and God’s?) respect, so that if I ever really needed to say no, I would be heard.
I fully engaged this crazy way of thinking and behaving, living out the “ideal” wife-mother-missionary thing so intently that I (almost) convinced even myself. Then in the last half of 1996, Karis started getting sick again. Hey, it’s okay, it’s not so bad, we can deal with this, I told myself. As her problems worsened, I contacted Dr. P, and once again tried to follow his advice. I tried not to take Karis’ symptoms too seriously, nor let her illness upset our ministry applecart. I started wishing for a doctor right there in São Paulo, but there wasn’t really time or energy to look for one.
In early 1997, I reached the point in my counseling studies that I needed to choose a topic for my thesis, and quite innocently I chose a topic that I had been intending to research anyway. Within three months’ time, thirteen women had sought me out to talk about their experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Most of them had never before shared this dark, painful part of their lives with anyone. I wanted to learn how to help beyond just weeping with them as they found the courage to speak the unspeakable. Oddly, as I listened to these women, I identified with them and felt over and over that they were telling my story—not the specifics of sexual abuse, but the context of family dynamics that so many, from diverse walks of life, seemed to have in common. The issues became very personal.
As I began my research, I quickly learned that few materials were available in Portuguese. I started raiding fellow missionaries’ home libraries and had books in English sent to me from the US. I read everything I could find, and wrote a 120-page thesis that was essentially a summary of all of this material, with the beginnings of a plan for ministry in this area. I turned it in, and just before leaving for a short furlough in the US the summer of 1997, received back a series of recommendations for additions that my professors wanted, and the suggestion that the thesis could be turned into a book. I left all this behind me as we departed for an intense two months of travel and meetings with our supporting churches in the US.
Before we left São Paulo, though, something occurred which haunted me through our first busy weeks of furlough. I went to the door of our home to greet a woman who had asked for counsel. My nine-year-old daughter, Valerie, ran through the living room shouting, “If you let one more person into this house, I’m leaving! This is not a home, it’s a ministry center!” She ran sobbing up the stairs and slammed the door of her bedroom. After the woman left, Valerie acted like nothing had happened and refused to talk about it. But the message hit home, mirroring an earlier outburst by our adolescent son: “Can’t Dad wait to conquer Brazil until after I’ve left home?”
Something had to change, but I didn’t know how to do it. With a bit of distance from our hectic life in Brazil, I found myself feeling utterly weary. In July, we reached a totally unexpected moment of catharsis. We were in Colorado Springs having a debriefing with representatives of our mission’s administrative team. I had expected to just smile and be supportive of my husband’s glowing ministry report, and indeed that happened. But suddenly the members of the committee turned their attention to me and started asking some very incisive questions. Without forethought, while David sat there stunned, I found myself saying things like, “I feel totally overwhelmed with life in Brazil. I can’t go on with things as they have been. I’m not sure I even want to go back to Brazil. I don’t want to cause problems for David or for our family, but I’m out of energy. I’ve lost touch with God and I feel like a world-class hypocrite. I can’t do this missionary thing anymore.”
Had I ever dreamed of speaking like this, which I hadn’t, I would have expected these mission leaders to respond with exhortations to buck up, not be such a wimp, and get my act together. Instead, to our amazement and consternation, within the next hour, they arrived at a serious, comprehensive treatment plan for burn-out. They considered “grounding” us in the US for a period of R&R, but instead settled on letting us go back to Brazil on the condition that for six months I would withdraw entirely from all ministry other than taking care of myself and my family, and that I receive formal counseling!
This (to us) radical “sabbatical” plan was heartily supported by Dave, our mission team leader in Brazil and the pastor of our church in São Paulo, though it was very hard for the abused women with whom I had been working. The support and encouragement I received to “become a bum” (as I thought of it) gave me permission to embark on some of the most difficult personal work I had ever done. And it wasn’t long before the huge changes in my lifestyle and the things I was learning about boundaries, margin, and connecting the dots from childhood family patterns to our own family life, began to seriously impact my husband. The first six months stretched to a year, and then a year and a half, before our mission leadership felt that I was ready to “go back to work.”
From the vantage point of hindsight, it’s easy to see the immense benefits to myself, our marriage, our children, and our ministry of the hard work of that “time off.” In relation to Karis, it was also providential. We had taken her to see Dr. P in Detroit in June, but he didn’t have much more to offer than he had already been communicating to us. Back in Brazil, as her situation worsened during the last half of 1997, we contacted his office again hoping for some advice, only to learn that he had retired!
I was completely dismayed. Somehow I had thought that he would always be there for us to call on whenever we needed help. The doctor who replaced Dr. P had known Karis since she was small, but did not want to assume care for her. He told us frankly that he did not know how to help her. I could not believe it. Here we were on another continent with no one to help our daughter. I was in a fragile place, both emotionally and spiritually, and this situation seemed to me insurmountable.
I began to search for a doctor in São Paulo who would understand Karis’s needs and be willing to help her. As Karis and I made the rounds of a number of doctors who were recommended to us, each of them excellent in their fields, I grew more and more frustrated. No one knew how to help her. The best we got was, “given her problem, it’s amazing that she’s as well as she is.”
As months passed and Karis got sicker, my personal crisis grew. I couldn’t find God. I couldn’t remember why we were in Brazil, why we were staying in a place where it seemed that our daughter’s life was at risk. And then I would remember that doctors at a major children’s hospital in the US had said they didn’t know how to help her. David traveled constantly, and though he gave Karis a lot of affection, he left her care entirely in my hands. By the time we were referred to Dr. G in July of 1998, I had reached a point of desperation and our marriage was suffering. It was David’s faith and tenacity that held us together through that time.
Dr. G was God-sent to our family. It would be hard to exaggerate how wonderful he was for Karis and for me, both professionally and personally. We owe him a debt of gratitude we can never repay. Dr. G showed us that the practice of medicine can be both science and art.
During the months of searching for a doctor, I had done research on the internet, identified what I thought Karis needed, and had consulted long-distance with a gastroenterologist at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis, Dr. F, who agreed with my analysis. Dr. G in São Paulo had read articles in medical journals written by Dr. F, so there was already the foundation for a long-distance working relationship. Together they cared for Karis, giving us hope in what had become a very discouraging situation.
Meanwhile, though, I had come frighteningly close to emotional collapse. Through the loving help of counselors, of some excellent books (particularly Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend), and the healing intervention of God, I began to find foundation stones for rebuilding my life, our marriage and family, and eventually, my work.
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