The Need to be Needed - Christianity Today

I found my buddy drunk and dazed, parked on the shoulder of a Tennessee back road. It was 2:30 in the morning. His eyes, wild with cocaine and alcohol, darted toward me, then to his ignition. As he drove off, I jumped on the hood of his car and shouted at him through the windshield.

“Mark, we love you! I just want to talk.”

“Get off the car, Rob!”

“Mark, listen to me. We love you.”

“Rob, don’t make me hurt you!” he shouted. “Get off the car!”

“Not till you talk to me,” I yelled. “Stop the car and talk to me!”

“Rob, get off the car! Get off! Get off the car!”

I didn’t think he’d hurt me, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. I slid off his moving vehicle and watched the taillights vanish in the night. I felt the emptiness of the darkness swallow me.

TRAIL OF TEARS

I was Mark’s pastor, but he had become more than a parishioner. My wife and I had taken him into our home to help him overcome his addictions, and for months we watched him grow. He loved the Lord and devoured his Bible, memorizing key verses with the enthusiasm of a child. He became like a son to my wife and me, like a brother to our three daughters.

Then one Sunday he disappeared.

We weren’t emotionally prepared for Mark’s relapse, and when it came, it unearthed a problem in my life that lay buried like a leaking gas line–a tendency to become badly overinvolved.

“I’m unsuccessfully struggling to retain–regain emotional perspective,” I scribbled in my diary. “I spent hours yesterday searching for Mark in bars all over town. Last night I found him, but he wouldn’t talk to me. I actually rode on the hood of his car clinging to the windshield wipers, trying to reason with him through the glass as he drove down the road. A throbbing depression has hit me.”

My journal tracks the next several months:

December 19, 1990–Mark charged from his girlfriend’s apartment last night so drunk and doped and frightened that we feared for his life. Called police to be on the lookout. We knelt around the sofa and prayed through tears.

December 22, 1990–Mark came dragging in today, drunk and high. He’s sitting in his car, trying to decide whether or not to let me check him into a treatment center. It’s our daughter’s thirteenth birthday, and my family is all here. It’s a real mess.

January 15, 1991–Today is the deadline for peace in the Persian Gulf, and war seems at hand. My greater attention, however, is with Mark. I repeatedly awaken in a sweat through the night to pray for him. My heart literally hurts. Katrina and I feel he’s probably going to leave, to run away, to relapse, perhaps to die a miserable, lonely death. I can’t stop him.

February 4, 1991–Mark’s gone again, didn’t come home last night. His girlfriend called about 10:00 P.m., crying. She had found him buying cocaine. My girls sobbed themselves to sleep.

March 27, 1991–Mark’s relapsed again. He comes in to sleep, about four or five in the morning. Spends the rest of his time drinking and drugging. The counselors tell me I’ve got to evict him. I can’t continue to “enable” him by giving him a safe haven.

March 28, 1991–I went to Mark’s room and sat on the edge of his bed. I told him what I had to tell him, and he said he’d be out by April first. I went on to the health club but didn’t have much of a workout. I returned to my office and cried.

March 29, 1991–Mark asked to borrow some money for a deposit on a new apartment. I refused, and he grew furious. He cursed. He told me he’d never again ask me for anything. He said he never wanted to talk to us again. He stormed from the room. I sat on the bed and wept.

April 29, 1991–Mark came back yesterday, exactly one month after bolting. He was humble, hurting, pitiful, broken, and determined to get better.

May 11, 1991–I can’t continue to live like this, always on edge and full of apprehension about Mark. I see another relapse coming.

July 7, 1991–Mark didn’t show up … I have galloping anxiety.

July 9, 1991–Another relapse. When I heard about it, I lay on my office floor in terrible pain. What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with me?

On August 31, I found Mark in a seedy apartment, badly depressed and ready to die.

“Rob,” he slurred, “just look at me. I can’t stop. I’m hopeless. I’m a hopeless reject from society. I’ve lost my job. Lost my friends. I’ve hurt so many people and broken so many promises …

“Rob,” he continued, eyes unfocused, “I’ve got enough cocaine in this apartment to kill an elephant, and my body won’t take much more. It’ll only be two or three days. You’ll forget about me in a month. I read somewhere that when you die, your friends adjust to it in a month or two. It’s just meant to be. Let it be.”

After an hour of pleading, I finally choked back my tears and moved toward the door. Turning, I took a last look at him and walked away. There was nothing more I could do. He would be dead, I knew, within forty-eight hours.

THE PAIN OF LOVE

Looking back, I see that many of my reactions were appropriate. Portions of my agony were legitimately for Mark. We loved him as part of our family. Our tears were like those of the Savior who wept over Jerusalem. How can you watch another person self-destruct–especially a loved one, especially at close range–without anguish?

Paul wrote of his lost kindred, “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart.” G. Campbell Morgan said, “Men only pray with prevailing power who do so amid the sobs and sighing of the race.”

But too much of my grief was for me. I had become a textbook example of overinvolvement. Melody Beattie wrote that those who become overinvolved “aren’t crazier or sicker than alcoholics, but hurt as much or more. They haven’t cornered the market on agony, but they have gone through their pain without the anesthetizing effects of alcohol or other drugs. … And the pain that comes from loving someone who’s in trouble can be profound.”

Somewhere down in my heart, I had needed Mark. He was the brother I didn’t have, the son I’ve never been given. He was siphoned into my soul to fill a hole of unknown origins. I had become dependent on him–on his friendship, his love, his companionship. Our relationship, which began with his being dependent on me, had turned into my being dependent on him.

Funny how that happens.

Beattie continues, “So we become dependent on them. We become dependent on their presence. We become dependent on their need for us. We become dependent on their love. … A certain amount of emotional dependency is present in most relationships, including the healthiest ones. But many men and women don’t just want and need people–they need people. Needing people too much can cause problems.”

FALLEN LINES

My needing Mark caused problems in my pastoral ministry. I became so obsessed, so numbed with pain over Mark, that I wasn’t good for anything or anyone else. I’d grope through each day in a sort of daze, unable to focus, unable to give myself to those who needed me. My study time deteriorated, and I hadn’t the energy for even routine administrative duties. I was a basket case at home, unable to provide emotionally for my family.

Late one night it dawned on me that my obsessive pain resulted from violating a basic teaching of Scripture. I was seeking to draw from Mark the emotional support that should have been provided only by other God-ordained sources.

The psalmist wrote, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places,” and those words assumed new significance that evening. I came to understand that God had drawn a triangle around me, ordaining a trio of friends to meet my deepest needs:

My Master. It’s so tempting, as one writer put it, “to impoverish life at its center for the sake of its ever-widening circumference.” My drive for an ever-growing ministry had fatigued my center, making me vulnerable; and rather than resting in the Father, I was relying on a rickety brother.

A man’s character is often unmasked by observing where he goes to replenish his morale. I decided to view God as my best friend. It may seem irreverent to think of God as a pal, but Abraham was called “God’s friend,” and the Lord spoke to Moses “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” Jesus frequently said things like: “The Son of Man is a friend of tax collectors and sinners” and “No longer do I call you servants, but I have called you friends.” Most shocking, he said, “Friend, why have you come?” to the greatest traitor in history. I reasoned that if Christ could call Judas his friend, there might be hope for me.

A good friendship involves trust, so I began turning Mark’s problems over to the One who can do the impossible. I stopped praying, “Lord, my best friend’s killing himself!” Instead, I learned to pray, “Lord, you’re my best friend, so please deal with our buddy Mark.”

Some problems we can’t solve, despite our best efforts. I shouldn’t destroy myself worrying about problems that only God can solve.

My mate. My wife, Katrina, had mourned for Mark, too–we had wept together for him–yet she was baffled by my preoccupation with his condition. I slowly realized that perhaps Mark had been claiming a lot of time and emotional energy that should have gone to her.

We took off for a few days, flew to a resort city, rested and sunned and shopped and prayed together. I thought of God’s wisdom in creating Eve. Alone in his utopia, Adam could soak up emotional strength from many sources–his divinely given occupation, his animal friends, his physical vitality, his lavish environment–but none of those could compare with God’s gift of Eve.

Not everyone would agree, but for me, my wife–and only my wife–can be my earthly best friend. For me, seeking deep levels of emotional support and intimacy outside of my marriage is dangerous.

For those without a spouse or an intimate friendship with their spouse, I think of my friend Agnes Frazier. For fifty years she and her husband, Emit, had morning Bible reading and prayer at the breakfast table. On the day he died, she went to bed thinking that she could never again start the day with devotional exercises. But the next morning she bravely sat at the kitchen table and opened her Bible to the spot where she and her husband had quit their reading twenty-four hours before. The verse that stared up at her was “For thy Maker is thy husband.”

She smiled and said, “Thank you, Lord.”

Me. There is one other person I claim as a best friend.

Me.

As Mark’s insanity engulfed me, I realized I needed to care for myself, to withdraw for my own protection. H.W. Boreham once wrote, “Very few of us treat ourselves with courtesy. Many a man behaves toward himself as though he and himself had never been introduced. He is at no pains to cultivate his own acquaintance. He never wishes himself a jovial good-morning on waking; he never has a good laugh with himself in the course of the day; he never says an encouraging word to himself when things are going badly; he never shakes hands with himself or pats himself on the back when things are going well.

“He simply tolerates himself. He would not get the best out of a horse or a dog if he treated it in such a way; how, then, can he hope, under such impossible conditions, to get the best out of himself?”

How, indeed?

I’m learning to spend more time alone. More time walking. More time secluded. More time talking to myself, saying, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” I’m learning to take trips occasionally by myself, a night now and again in a lodge on the mountainside–just me, my Bible, my journal, a good book, and my walking shoes.

Solitude in moderation deepens the soul and protects me from the seduction of being needed.

BURDENED NO MORE

Perhaps God brought Mark into my life to show me secrets of emotional health that I’d unwittingly neglected.

God was also at work in Mark–without me.

As I left his dimly lit apartment that bleak afternoon, I left behind the phone number of a trusted counselor. Three days later, Mark called him. That was three years ago, and today Mark is married, sober, and the regional manager of a famous ice cream company.

I still worry about his relapsing? All the time. But I continually commit him to God. Just last week, we rendezvoused in Atlanta for a Braves game. He’s still my buddy, but I no longer encumber him with the burden of my own emotional health.

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Robert Morgan is pastor of The Donelson Fellowship in Nashville, Tennessee.