We have a funny term in our ministry circle for the way the Lord often operates: Jehovah Sneaky. By that we mean He frequently orchestrates events so that those with certain needs are miraculously paired with those who can meet them. Consequently, He often brings you people to minister to who are going through things you’re intimately familiar with. God knows you speak their language, and you know what they’re going through and how to minister to them, even on the things that remain unspoken.
And lately, God has been bringing Shannon and I opportunities to pray with emotionally exhausted women whose prodigal husbands are languishing far from God. That’s no surprise to me because I know a lot about these types of husbands.
I used to be one.
You Do Your Thing, I’ll Do Mine
I wasn’t always a Christian, far from it; I was a dedicated atheist who used to mock Jesus, persecute Christians, and argue with my spouse about the God she believed in.
She was already a believer when we first got together but she’ll be the first to admit that she wasn’t following Jesus. We shacked up for three years before getting married and lived pretty secular lives up till that point.
Soon after getting married though, she began getting serious about her relationship with God and started going to church again. That was fine by me but I wanted nothing to do with it. To me it was just one of her things, like a weekend hobby, and fortunately she didn’t push me to join her.
At that point she wasn’t exactly on fire yet herself, but she wanted to be, and was working through it even though most of the people in her life, from family to coworkers, weren’t interested in church stuff. And she was getting zero input from her spiritually apathetic husband.
Let’s pause the narrative here.
This is where many of the women we’ve been encountering lately are at: desperately trying to follow Jesus, desiring the full arsenal of His promises, and wanting to elevate the spiritual temperature of their homes.
[Note: Of course this can also apply in the opposite direction, with faith-filled men dealing with back-sliding women, but in my experience it seems more prevalent the other way around.]
They want to equip their children with the necessary tools to overcome the world, and they want to gain greater effectiveness in wielding those spiritual weapons themselves.
The hurdle is that these women are often married to men who want nothing of it—men whose spiritual lethargy exacerbates the struggle to create a God-centered family. Or worse, men who are openly hostile to church and all that goes with it.
Many of these men were once dutifully engaged in faith communities, but owing to church wounds, disgust with bad leadership, trauma, or any number of other issues, they’ve washed their hands of it. I’ve heard more than a few of them express that they’re “just done with church.” Men in this situation often say they’ll just stay home, read their Bibles, and avoid getting burned again.
This is stronghold that we need to break off of our fighting men who’ve been sidelined into inaction, and it underscores a deeper problem:
We are far too easily persuaded by the imperfections of man.
The more they isolate from corporate worship and teaching, the further they tend to drift from the Lord. Eventually their wives are forced to leave them to their own devices and seek spiritual sustenance without their most important ally by their side, their children sometimes wondering why Dad “gets” to stay home. Or maybe Mom just goes alone, and tries not to cry on the way there or back.
What are these women to do? Submit to ungodly leadership in their own homes? Separate or divorce? Should she take the advice of hardened soldiers and just deal with it, carrying on with her own mission until the kids are grown up and on their own? And then…what? Compartmentalize the God stuff as her own special escape—like a twice-a-week bath or massage?
That’s where my wife was in 1999 when she got baptized in her early twenties. Fortunately during this time we were still kidless and in college, and she knew I wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a father. I attended her baptism because I adored her, even if she was in a kooky cult.
Her church friends seemed like nice people to me—delusional, but nice. Even still, they were not the kind of people I wanted to hang out with when I could be watching football or playing hockey with my beer buddies.
I remember attending what I thought was a standard barbecue with some of her church friends. Turns out it was a send-off for a married couple moving out of state.
Toward the end of the evening everyone circled to lay hands on them and pray. I stood off in the corner wondering how long this odd ritual would last (no smartphones back then) and hoped there wouldn’t be any awkward conversation on the way home.
There wasn’t, because Shannon never pressed me into the Jesus stuff. She had handed me over to God to do with me what He thought best, while internally agonizing about my (and our) future.
She would challenge my egotistical assertions with apologetics from time to time, in heated pillow-talk debates that usually ended in mutual frustration, and often, tears on her end.
And she established moral boundaries that were a source of contention for a guy with no fear of God. It was a stressful time for us, with revelations and growth on both our parts, though in different ways and for different reasons.
During this time we were both criminal justice majors, and whereas she had a secondary emphasis on psychology (she worked as a counselor with juvenile offenders), I was on track for a double major in Justice and History. Every day I had my nose buried in books studying about war, corruption, philosophy, death, murder, rape, politics…you know, the general depravity of man.
It was hard to reconcile this onslaught of data with the secularist worldview that says evil is a relative construct. It didn’t square with history, criminology, or the reality I could see with my own eyes — much less the cases studies I was studying exhaustively.
Three things happened during this season that are noteworthy, and I hope they encourage women who long to see their prodigal husbands (or older children) return to the fold and embrace Jesus.
#1: The Gospel of Tarantino
The first thing that happened was that I rented the Quentin Tarantino vampire movie, From Dusk Till Dawn (Shannon was at work). It’s an awful movie nobody should ever watch, but there was a scene in it that God used as a seed He would cultivate later on…when I was ready to process it.
The George Clooney character in the film says this line:
“That thing was a demon from the pit of Hell, and if there’s a Hell, there’s got to be a Heaven. There’s gotta be.”
I finished the movie, and didn’t think much of it at the time.
#2: Epiphanies & Serial Killers
The second thing that happened around this time was that I was often reviewing case studies of killers and investigations. One day I read about two notorious serial killers named Bittaker and Norris. I won’t delve into their stories here but the gravity of what they did so horrified me that I came to a painful epiphany, and it was this: Evil is real.
I don’t know how long I wrestled with this realization, but I recall sitting and thinking on it for some length of time, conducting a dialogue with myself:
…If evil exists, so too must its opposite; one can’t have a framework for understanding cold without also knowing warmth, light versus dark, joy versus despair…
I came upon a hard truth that Shannon’s Bible seemed to echo:
…The propensity of man to perpetrate such evil is unimaginable…
And then God chimed in and reminded me about that scene in From Dusk Till Dawn:
“…If there’s a Hell, there’s got to be a Heaven. There’s gotta be.”
…I guess there has to be a source of ultimate good. Is it Jesus? I guess it would have to be Jesus. I think Shannon might be right. Damn it.
#3 By Their Fruit
As these revelations rocked me, Shannon went about her daily routines oblivious to my inner struggle. This is where the third thing happened.
I watched as she prayed and laughed with her churchy friends—who noticeably seemed much healthier than my spiritually enlightened friends, who passed out at parties and cycled through girlfriends and baby-mamas.
Whenever Shannon wrestled with something, she’d pause and pray, and regain peace. I don’t know if she noticed (she says she had no idea) but I was watching, and she was ministering to me in her simple acts of obedience to Him.
Whenever she got ready to go to church, she’d invite me, and would put on a brave face and keep smiling even if I turned her down. (She doesn’t remember feeling brave or smiling, either.) Inevitably I’d be sitting there, alone on the sofa watching a boring football game wondering what she was up to at church.
…If there’s evil, there has to be the opposite, Vince. If there’s a Hell, there’s gotta be a Heaven…
…and also:
…there are nice dudes over there hanging out with your wife while you sit here watching a lame Seattle Seahawks game…
So every once in a while I’d go with her, and sit there grumpy with folded arms judging the late ‘90’s worship music—which for an L.A. native who grew up seeing every major rock concert that came to town, was grating.
But then I’d look in the rafters and think about movies featuring bar fights and flying vampires, heaven and hell, and the sins and shame I carried.
For me there was no altar call moment when I went forward. No high-pressure moments where everyone was looking around for the prodigal husband to come up and surrender. There were just men and women gathering and singing and speaking truth that I couldn’t deny because it reveals itself in the world around us.
One day I was atheist, the next I reluctantly had to admit that God was real.
It didn’t happen in church and it didn’t happen because I knew the Bible at all. In fact, it would be another year before I even knew that the Holy Grail wasn’t actually in the Bible.
Indiana Jones lied to me. The hell?
There were no magic verses or sermons that broke down my self-constructed walls and “let God in.” No, God was there with me the whole time, inside that isolation ward, my man cave where I thought I was the only god who mattered.
He came to me where I was and used whatever He had to work with—gory vampire movies and nauseating true crime tales, a gorgeous woman who loved me in spite of myself, who put up with me for God knows why or how.
My surrender to Jesus started there, and it can start there for other prodigal husbands too, the burned and brokenhearted, wary of stepping back into their true identity.
Or maybe like I was, they need to step into that role for the first time. It’s never too late.
A year after I surrendered to Jesus, our son was born, the first of eight kids—five boys, three girls. I got baptized on Easter Sunday 2001, and God has been working on me ever since.
We make mistakes but we don’t dwell on them.
We’ve experienced setbacks and betrayals, endured persecutions and attacks, and wrestled with demons we felt unequipped to defeat but we keep moving forward.
We keep pressing the attack and trust God to do His stuff in the hearts and minds of those we love. He knows what they need, and He knows how to reach them where they are.
One of the greatest blessings of being in Christ is that we can surrender prodigals to the Lord. We can surrender the “insurmountable task” to the one who knows every hair on their heads. Our job is simple: Intercede for them as we follow Jesus. When and where the prodigals choose to hop on board is up to them, and God knows how to entice them. He is doing it, even if we don’t realize it. Let Him, because you never know what He’s going to use, and it may be the last thing you could have imagined.
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