I'd like to take a moment to confirm, as you probably already suspect, that not everything I ever did until my conversion at 26 1/2 was bad, or evil. I believe that there was good in me back then- there was a desire to do good things, if not only because of a sense of moral obligation (the notion that mankind is made in God's image, and therefore should do good), then for the reason that it gave me a positive feeling in my life.
The problem was that, although these desires to do good were there, they were so often drowned out, oppressed, bullied down and stamped upon by other desires. Darker desires. I remember finding "doing the right thing" so very difficult. It was often so hard to do a good deed at the spur of the moment, that I'd hesitate about it... and in that moment of indecision, a stronger, more convincing reaction would come racing towards me, and I'd let it take control of me, simply because it was the easier option. It was the more "natural" option for me. Not every time... but MOST times.
What would I call this? Personally, I believe it to be a lack of discipline. I wasn't disciplined enough to resist doing bad things. Every time, I was given the choice: do good, with great effort... or do evil, very easily. One option required self-control, motivation, and determination; the other just needed my compliance. And so, many times I had WANTED to do the good thing... but the easy option had just been so convenient, and I wasn't strong enough to resist it.
And I also don't want you to think that my life up until my conversion was a non-stop tapestry of misery. It would be untrue if I told you it was. I had some great experiences, met amazing people, and had some genuinely wonderful and happy times back then.
But one of the issues I had was that for every absolute high that I had, there was a sharp descent into a cavern to follow it. Simply put; my happiness was far from stable, nor was it consistent. I would meet a girl that I liked, be smitten and love-struck for a few weeks... and then she'd ditch me, and I'd find myself digging in my heels as I tried to avoid being sucked into a pool of quicksand of self-hate, self-deprecation, and self-pity. Inevitably, I'd fall into it to some extent- sometimes just up to my knees... on occasions, up to my chin. How long I stayed there like that would range from hours, to weeks... basically, until the next high arrived to pull me back out...
And it wasn't just true with women. By March of 2009, I was a full-time English as a Second Language teacher, a job which I genuinely loved, and desperately wanted to succeed at. But I desired my boss' approval so much, that my job ended up having a similar effect on me- whether or not I'd received good feedback from my students that month would greatly affect mood. My friends, too, depending on whether they'd remembered to invite me out, could pull me up, or push me down. So many factors throughout my day affected where I was on the "happiness scale".
And I use the words "push and pull", because these words describe perfectly the forces acting upon me. I was either pulled up by something positive happening... or pushed down by a sudden disappointment. Either way, I felt I was not the one in control. My emotions controlled me, and my surroundings controlled my emotions. Always, I was the last to be informed as to where I was, and my opinion was never considered.
This was how things were for me, for the first 26 years of my life. I had highs- yes. I had lows, too... but what was most significant was that it never felt like my emotions were under my control.
So, with this in mind, let's imagine that the 2 weeks that Carla came back was a high point on the roller coaster of my emotions. And it really was- I was besotted with her; she had come back just for ME... and, in fact, she'd changed me a little by showing me her commitment. Once she left, I felt myself less and less attracted by the rat-race of Friday nights. I found myself focusing on the new life we'd agreed upon in New Zealand. I'd just started a 6 month contract at work, and every day, I'd count the weeks until I would leave- around September of that year- to be with her...
They were happy times, those first 2 months after she left. Even though she wasn't physically with me, I found myself growing fonder of her...
But, and without trying to sound too philosophical, life is simply unpredictable... mainly because so much of life involves people. And people are constantly growing and changing, and not in the ways we'd necessarily hope...
The way that Carla changed towards me was, unfortunately, broadcast online. As we reached June of 2009, her facebook profile became more and more full of photos of her at parties, with the same 5 friends... and then more often NEW friends, who I didn't recognise... and then men, hugging her and surrounding her, her face always the same fixed, wide smile on that olive tanned beautiful face, bordered by her jet black hair. Eventually, every week her page seemed to be littered with new photos in a new location, surrounded by new people, and some old. She wore different dresses, different costumes... was having new and different experiences.
We found it less and less possible to speak during the week. She said that, because of her ongoing divorce, she had to keep a low profile about me, to make sure her husband's lawyers didn't have any extra evidence to set against her...
I could feel where these excuses were building up towards... and so when it happened, it wasn't entirely a shock to me. I remember that night clearly, even though I was pretty drunk. I had just got home from a party at my school. It was 1a.m.- an early night for me back then. I sat on my bed, feeling dizzy, and having the acute awareness that what I was about to do would not end well for me. Weeks of shortened phone calls, cancelled phone meetings, semi-responsive text messages, had me under no illusions that we were in trouble. Still, I thought there might be a chance we could salvage our relationship. I picked up my phone, and called Carla's number...
No response. I hung up, the feeling of imminent disappointment growing stronger. I called again.
No response again.
"Come on...", I said aloud. Quickly, I texted her.
"U up? Can I call you?"
After 10 minutes of waiting, trying to stay awake, she called me. The phone never leaving my hand, I answered immediately:
"Hey!", I started off, optimistically.
"Hi..." she responded. I could tell in her voice that this would be the last phone call we would probably ever have...
She wasn't cruel about it, like I've known some women to be. She was wasn't too blunt, but still went almost straight to the point, and was ready to move on...
"So, you don't want us to be together anymore?", I helped her out, to conclude our conversation before it got too painful for either one of us...
"No..." she said. "I think it's best this way".
"OK- bye, then". And I hung up, hoping that she would call back in order to offer me some sort of condolences, or parting words of encouragement. She didn't call back.
I was angry at her at first. For a few weeks afterwards, I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to try to contact me, to give me the satisfaction of hanging up on her. Or deleting her texts without even reading them. Or ignoring her facebook friend requests. "These acts of excluding her from my life...", I thought, "...will be my revenge". I thought they would hurt her, by showing her how much I hated her, and therefore making her feel awful for how much pain she'd caused me... I delighted in the thought of her, having her calls rejected, seeing that her texts remain unread for weeks, months... realising that I'd deleted her as a friend on facebook, and set my privacy to "Maximum", meaning she couldn't see any photos or comments. I yearned for her to try to contact me. But she didn't, and my vengeance went unsatisfied.
Days, and then weeks went by, and I would check my messages. Nothing. No pleading for me to forgive her. No check up to see how I was doing. No word from her. Every time I checked my phone, and saw nothing from her, my pain stirred within me. "She really HAS gone...", it said to me, 8, 9, 10 times a day. And every time it said that, the pain got a little deeper... like pressure on a bruise. A bit more pressure every time.
I remember having to teach through June and July of that year. It was hard- really hard- to keep up my energy in class, to keep it lively and fun, while the feeling of rejection and abandonment ate away at me inside, behind my smile and the jokes I made to keep my classes light and entertaining...Teaching is, I find, one of the most difficult jobs to do well when you're not in the mood for it. It takes years of practise, but fortunately, teaching a good class can actually lift your spirits and send you out better off than when you went in.
I checked her facebook often. She wasn't shy about letting me, and her now ex-husband, know what type of lifestyle she was enjoying. Looking back, it was stupid to check her page so much- it inevitably only caused me discomfort, and raised far more questions than it answered:
"Who's THAT guy? Did she always know HIM? Where is she NOW, in THIS photo? Is this a new photo, or an old one that she's re posted?". I would scan her page, telling myself that I was being casual about it, that I only wanted to know that she hadn't been cheating on me before we broke up... But secretly knowing that I wanted closure...
I kept checking, because I was being fed a lie that it would ease my emotional pain. The lie continued, I kept falling for it, and on and on we went. By mid-August, although I had accepted that she was gone, the wound still felt fresh. It still consumed my mind all day, it continued to drag me down into that dark, gritty pool of self-criticism and blame for being rejected.
"You didn't treat her well enough...", I heard myself say. "You should have gone with her to New Zealand, instead of selfishly staying here..."...
On the other hand, while mental self-punishment grew stronger, my desire for revenge slowly faded. It was still there by mid-August... but it wasn't as intense. I didn't crave it as much. I didn't seek it out. I didn't wish for it with the same passion that I'd done a couple of months before. Don't get me wrong- had I been given the opportunity to hurt her, I would have snatched it up without questions. But I could see that this was an emotion that had very little basis in me. For all the sins that I willingly did, enacting revenge was actually not one that came naturally to me. Even at its very strongest- like in this case- it only really lasted a few weeks. For all the faults that I have- and I had and still have plenty- forgiving people is a blessing that, I thank God, I seem to have been given in order to balance them out. By the beginning of September, I barely thought about Carla at all anymore, and even less about enacting revenge...
She was gone. She had moved on. I had to accept that, although I thought of her frequently, she probably thought about me rarely. Quite possibly, never. I had no choice but to carry on, in the city where I had met her, fallen for her, loved her, got her back for a bit... and finally lost her. That city had seen the whole story, from beginning to end. That city went on like nothing had happened- just another human story that she had to tolerate and pretend to ignore.
...I smiled, thankful that Carla was thousands of miles away, greatly reducing the chances of us bumping into each other, or me seeing her out with another guy.
"That's something to be grateful for, I guess..."... I remember thinking several times, a little more regularly every day. And with that, I started to really get over her. After weeks of painful self-examination and criticism, I, myself, had started to move on, too...Before we go on to the next chapter, I feel I should warn you that you're about to read about what I consider to be the most shameful period of my life, in which I acted in ways that revealed the true darkness within me. Let this be a lesson to you; that, immediately having finally achieved a sense of peace, which took a great amount of discipline and was a huge challenge to reach, I fell. Having made it to the moral summit, I found myself falling into possibly the darkest cavern in my history...
Although I have received forgiveness for what I'm about to divulge to you, there isn't a day that goes by when I don't think about what I did. It is a scar on my soul, but that scar has a purpose, a beautiful function: it's there to remind me of who I am, and what disaster I am capable of without the guidance of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every time I look at that scar, I am determined never to be that man again, and I find my strength to pull myself closer to Jesus is renewed...
It all started in September 2009, with a woman called Eva...
---
I remember finally squeezing through the massive bodies that made up the wall, blocking my view, just as their punishment of the homeless man ended. I think this was more than a coincidence- Tom's friends were not going to let me in until they'd got their thrills. Once they were satisfied, I could do what I wanted.
As they separated from each other slightly, congratulating each other and laughing together about what they'd just done...
"Did you see him trying to cover up?"
"No chance, mate- no chance! What a mug!"
... I burst into the middle of the circle, and was stopped dead by what I saw.
The first thing I noticed was that the homeless man's face was bloody all over. All of it. From several cuts on various places on his face, he was bleeding. The blood trickled across every surface and into every crease and wrinkle.
He was panting heavily, supporting himself with his hands behind his back, and his legs out in front of him. In any other situation, it could have been called a relaxed position- the sort you'd adopt when sitting on the grass in a park on a warm summer's evening, in order to get the most sun on your face. But I realised that it was only his arms that were stopping him from collapsing onto his back.
His legs, his trousers were dirty from being stamped on. You could see clear shoe marks, the dust and dirt being so well imprinted that you could have identified the brand of the shoe used to stamp him if you'd studied hard enough. At this point I was truly afraid. I was in the middle of the men who had done this... I was witnessing what they were capable of...
I turned round, desperate to exit the circle, to save myself from that situation. I could hear the men all around me chuckling, laughing to each other. I felt exposed- I felt hugely out of place.
"I shouldn't be here, in the middle of this circle...", I kept thinking. I tried to push my way through the largest gap I could see- between two of the giant men almost directly in front of me.
"Excuse me...", I muttered, as I tried to get through, panic growing in me, with every second that I spent still within that circle's walls. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I could hear the homeless man's panting behind me. His short, mournful breaths as he sat there, sprawled there, dazed, bloody, beaten and humiliated. I thought I could hear them loudly. Louder than I could hear the men laughing. Louder than the rain. The man's breathing, the sound of his gasping for air, was louder in my head than anything else I was able to hear. This terrified me further, and a new surge of energy came into me, determined to get out through the gap between these two giant men...
"EXCUSE ME!", I shouted, with a mixture of bravado and panic. But the men didn't move. The crowd either side of them was too thick for them to move further left or right. Whether or not they could have made space for me was, in a way irrelevant. The point is that they didn't- either they couldn't, or they chose not too. Either way, my position remained the same.
Having desperately squeezed my way into the circle, I was now powerless to remove myself from it, despite my desperation. The irony hit me, and I tried not to panic at the situation I had placed myself in. I was in the circle. I was not part of the circle- I was not protected from these men by the other men. I searched for Tom in the crowd, but all I could see was unfamiliar, ugly faces- some looking at me with a hint of disgust, some ignoring me... but all unfriendly. I tried to blend into the wall behind me, hoping it would accept me, and I could merge myself into it. But it was even less accepting than when I had tried to get through face first, less than a minute earlier. Every time I tried, I felt little to no give from that solid, merciless wall of giant men. Every time, I was left facing inwards, on the front row... looking at the bloodied and panting man in the centre....
I opened my eyes slowly, creaking them open, feeling the dried sleep that was almost gluing my eyelids together give way. I was back in my cell- the figures of my dream had all evaporated. I went from being surrounded to being alone in an instant. Dawn was breaking. I could hear distant birds, and I realised, with an ounce of relief, that I had slept, at least for a few hours. Maybe 2 hours, I thought, as I waited for the pain in my shoulders to slowly catch up. The cuffs around my hands were ice cold against my skin. A faint, bluey white light was illuminating the cell. In my drowsy, post-sleep state, as I watch the minutes go past, slowly, almost unnoticeably, the light turned to more of a yellow as the Sun rose, and in a few more minutes my cell would take on a whiter tinge. I yawned loudly, knowing that nobody would hear me, or care...
...The lock of the door opening suddenly, sharply, startled me awake again. As its rattle continued, I realised I must have drifted back to sleep again... but for how long? An hour, maybe? 2? As I tried to figure it out, the door creaked open, and I concluded by thinking "What does it matter?" It was a good point- time was becoming less relevant by the day... and besides, something far more urgent was coming my way...
I cleared my head quickly of all distracting thoughts, and straightened up, causing my shoulders to protest and shout out, and my face to wince at the pain they were causing. My captor was in the room.
"Do you know why you are here?"
I blinked, shocked. My captor was clearly addressing me - I wasn't foolish enough to say "Who, me?", and risk his wrath... what shocked me was the causality with which he said it. This was the first time he had ever spoken to me, in months of captivity. Not only that, but it was the first time that I had ever seen him, in plain daylight...
The sunlight streamed into the cell through the bars on the tiny high window. Dust particles could be made out, drifting dreamily across the beams of light, not caring about either of the two people on either side of the room- not aware of the gravity of the occasion. My captor had his back to me. He was still locking the door behind him when he asked the question. He'd looked over his shoulder at me, to make his voice clearer, but the sound of those giant bolts had drowned out some of his words.
I remember looking at him as he continued to lock the door. He was basically dressed like the grim reaper- his head completely shrouded in the hood, his body's shape absorbed by the flowing, dark grey waves of his tunic. He wasn't tall, but his dress, his actions and his stance were all menacing. Slow. Calculated. Unhurried.
I didn't answer him at first. I was too busy studying him to even think about an answer to that question. Also, I was terrified to speak. It was surely a question that I couldn't answer correctly. I was afraid to add the humiliation of being unable to think logically to my list of tortures...
He finally finished bolting the door, and silence ensued. Slowly, with the giant black keys on a ring in his hand, he turned around on the balls of his feet, on that cold, stone floor, bits of dirt crunching under his rotating sandals. He turned to fully face me, and waited for a response.
All I can remember from that moment is staring into that black, slightly larger than a human head shaped hole, where I knew his face was absorbed in shadow. It was terrifying to look at, to have looking at me. Everything else in the room seemed to shy away from it: the wall behind him, the corners of the door that weren't being blocked by his figure... even the rest of his body was blurred in my vision, as I gaped into that hole where his face hid, deep within the cloak, far into the darkness, out of my sight...
"Are you DEAF?", he snapped, a comment which shook me awake. It was rude, and I was surprised that it shocked me. "After all the things he's done to me", I remember thinking, "why am I surprised that he's rude to me?"
"I don't know..." I muttered out, with a tone of misery and self-pity. He didn't move, and I realised that he thought I was mocking him. I imagined his face, twisted and wide eyed with anger in the darkness of that hole. "I mean...", I elaborated, "I don't know why I'm here".
He said nothing. Slowly, to my horror, he approached me... I could see that dark hole growing gradually bigger, and I backed up against the wall behind me, my chains sagging slightly, and ringing as I moved awkwardly. I remember my biggest fear was that he was going to suddenly whip off his hood, and I would have to confront his face... I waited, trying to stay calm and collected, as with each step the distance between us shrank...
Just at the point where he couldn't get any closer to me, at the moment when the unveiling of his face would have been its most horrific, he swerved to my left, and walked slowly into the corner of my cell. Breathing a quiet sign of relief, I watched him go, grateful that he was no longer in front of me, but instantly suspicious and uneasy about his sudden diversion to the corner...
Despite this feeling of insecurity, I looked back at the door. I wondered why he had bothered to lock it. "Surely he doesn't think I can escape, does he?", I remember thinking. As the sound of clanking metal met my ears from the corner where my captor was, my brain was too busy to register their significance. "Maybe he DOES think I can escape...", I thought hopefully to myself. "Maybe he knows that I can get out somehow, and that's why he's so cautious..."... The clinking and clanging was getting louder, and I was suddenly distracted from my thoughts about the door when they stopped...
I flicked my head round, and my optimism died upon seeing my captor, facing me, the morning light from the window behind him causing his form to be entirely silhouetted... with another thick, metal chain laying like a dead snake within his clenched fists.
