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giftofshewbread · 6 years

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PTSD Versus My Hope of Forever

: By Jonathan Brentner Published on:November 2, 2018

My expectations of Jesus’ imminent appearing and a joyous eternity with Him are not simply things about which I enjoy writing; they are deeply personal to me. They provide an incentive to keep using my gifts to serve the Lord amidst disappointments, failures, and even fierce opposition.

My hope of forever also keeps my perspective balanced between now and forever by reminding me that eternal realities are so much more valuable than the fleeting things of this life. That, however, was a lesson I learned the hard way!

It took the Lord working through much pain and chaos in my life to change my earthbound outlook on life and through that to put me on the path of healing in my battle with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

I am not an expert on PTSD (far, far from it). I share my experiences so that I might help others who may also be struggling with lingering anxieties and deep wounds from their past.

My Nightmarish Experiences While a Pastor

I am not a veteran of war and I fully realize that survivors of combat experience much more severe PTSD symptoms than I can imagine. My struggles have deepened my empathy for those men and women who bravely served our country facing the nightmarish terrors of war and now suffer the consequences.

My nightmare occurred during my second pastorate. Everything went well for a couple of years, and then everything changed as I encountered harsh criticism regarding my preaching and ministry. Although I tried to improve, it seemed as though, the harder I tried to please my critics, the more mistakes I made and the opposition grew more aggressive.

One of the older women in the church voiced the disapproval of several in the church with these biting words: “You’re ministry is a joke!” She repeated this accusation after countless evening services making sure everyone heard her. Some in the church defended me, but that did not deter her loud outbursts that still ring in my ears.

The opposition at church added financial pressure to my predicament; some stopped giving at the insistence of those who believed I had failed as a pastor. This intensified the pressure I felt to make things happen (never a good motivation to say the least). The harder I tried to bring about the required church growth, the more I failed.

The financial woes at church added considerable stress to an already tense situation at home. My wife had earlier fallen into a deep depression with major mood swings. I tried to encourage her, but my efforts fell far short. I did not understand what was happening or why she had become so angry with me in such a short amount of time.

I felt like a ball in a pinball machine bouncing between angry outbursts at home and hostility at the church. As the clanging of each bounce grew louder, I became increasingly fearful of my future. However, rather than face my anxieties, I buried them deep within me. Somehow I would make everything work and come out on top. That did not happen.

As opposition to my ministry intensified, I resigned from the church and continued working at a factory, a job I had begun over a year earlier as attendance at the church had dwindled.

Although I loved preaching about prophecy, I valued my success as a pastor over my life in eternity. As a result, I barely survived the trauma of being forced to leave the job I dearly loved.

Months after my resignation, my wife admitted to a lengthy romance with my closest friend and my strongest advocate amidst my turmoil as a pastor. He had stopped by many times to encourage me during my turmoil as a pastor, and now he had betrayed me.

This disclosure stunned me as nothing else could have done. I remember long walks crying out to the Lord, nights without sleep but full of tears, and deep, piercing emotional pain I believed would never end. Even at work, I often could not stop the tears from flowing down my cheeks.

I wanted to run far, far away from God, from His people, and from everything life seemed to be. Looking back, I realize it was my unwavering belief in Jesus’ resurrection that kept me from running; I knew I had nowhere else to go to find life.

A Respite from the Grief

As the shock wore off, I returned to school at The University of Iowa the following year to pursue an MBA degree. My emphasis in finance and accounting proved to be a good fit for me.

Through a series of promotions during the next several years, I moved up from a second shift data entry operator to a position as Senior Financial Analyst at the company I had begun working at while in school. I found surprising enjoyment in being a number cruncher; I loved my new career of managing the finances for various government contracts.

I soon forgot about the ugliness of my past as I pursued success in the business world.

My walk with the Lord gradually deepened during this time. I continued to write adult Sunday school curriculum for David C. Cook, something I started during my final year as a pastor (and continue to this day).

During this time of spiritual renewal, however, I remained unaware of the powerful fears that raged below the surface of my consciousness, waiting to ambush me at the worst possible time.

Terrors in the Night

Many years later, I met a woman whom I thought was the answer to my loneliness. She was not. Our marriage got off to a rocky start and never recovered. My wife’s discontentment with me caused a renewal of past anxieties inside me that caused much conflict in our relationship.

My counselor at the time diagnosed my symptoms as PTSD; he said my panic attacks stemmed from unresolved fears from long ago, especially during the tumultuous years of my second pastorate and conflict at home. Remarriage and the problems in our relationship had reopened and aggravated old wounds buried inside me.

It was the perfect storm. I came into the marriage with buried anxieties from my past, and my wife entered with high expectations stemming from deep wounds in her previous marriage. My struggles shattered her trust in me; her angry response to my issues and her frequent verbal abuse inflamed my PTSD symptoms. She wanted what she had with her previous husband, which I could not give her.

She spoke often of her desire to leave me. For more than a year, I resisted her pleas for a separation. Eventually, however, I realized I had no other choice but to go along with her plan that we sell our home and live separate lives.

As the turmoil at home grew, my panic attacks intensified. At times, these assaults sprang up out of nowhere. I remember feeling completely peaceful one night as I fell asleep. Then, at 3 a.m., I woke up overwhelmed in a state of great terror. What was happening to me? How could I feel so fearful apart from any conscious worry or threat?

On this particular occasion, I battled the anxiousness with Scripture and prayer for an hour before I again felt the Lord’s peace in my heart. I also began to recognize the devil’s role in these attacks as he sought to take advantage of my weakness that night.

A Song Restores My Eternal Focus

During this time, I attended a Steve Green concert. As I walked into the auditorium that evening, I knew my life was over. Thoughts of my failures as a pastor and husband plagued me night and day.

I will never forget, however, the way God spoke to me that night at the concert. As Steve Green introduced one of his songs, In Brokenness You Shine, I heard the Lord speak these words into my heart, “Jonathan, this is for you.” After that, it seemed as though the crowded auditorium became strangely vacant and Steve was singing only to me.

The lyrics pierced my soul that evening and ignited the process through which the Lord calmed my fears and healed the deep wounds of my heart. Jesus caused hope to come alive in my heart again just as the words to In Brokenness You Shine said He would do.

My renewed anticipation of a joyous forever seemed more than enough to get me through this life even if my circumstances never improved or even got worse. After the concert, I wrote about my hope of eternity and how that eclipsed my feelings of despair and fears regarding my earthly future.

It was not that any of my beliefs regarding my future hope changed; they hadn’t. However, I learned to give eternal realities more weight than my troubles – something Paul wrote about in Romans 8:18. As I shifted my ultimate hopes to forever, the Lord opened my heart to His healing touch.

It still took time for the Lord to heal the deep wounds of my past that continued to cause the middle of the night attacks. I later read a book written by John Eldredge entitled Wild at Heart. The Lord used the words of this book to give me a strategy for dealing with the devil’s assaults.

Rather than flee from the fears of my past, I stood my ground, asking the Lord for insight into the wounds causing them.

I remember one night in particular when the Lord used a significant panic attack to reveal the nature of my deepest wound: a long-held inner conviction of being unlovable, unworthy of love, and as a result unwanted by others. This wound began during the bullying I experienced in high school and deepened significantly with the betrayal I felt during the time of my second pastorate as everything caved in on me. My attacks were but a symptom of deep wound inside my soul.

This disclosure became a significant turning point as my panic attacks diminished both in frequency and intensity.

A Touch of the Savior’s Love

In the lyrics to In Brokenness You Shine, Steve Green used the phrase “your love surrounds.” He sang of the Lord coming to us in our grief and lovingly staying with us regardless of what others might say or do.

These words came alive for me a few years after the Steve Green concert.

After work one day, I went for a long run listening to songs of praise on my iPad Shuffle. Later, I spent time alone with the Lord in my prayer closet. Because recent events had caused anxieties regarding my future to resurface, I began my time of prayer by submitting my future anew to the Lord.

A few moments later, I asked the Lord this question: “If you were seated right here next to me in this closet, what would you say to me?”

Before I finished the question, I heard his response in my soul: “I love you!” Tears streamed down my face from both joy and amazement.

The touch of my Savior’s love that night vanquished all the remaining effects of PTSD.

My Story

This is my story of how the Lord delivered me from PTSD. It’s not a pretty story; but then again, my life shows how God can use the worst of times for His glory and bring joy out of great sorrow, feelings of hopelessness, and utter failure. The Lord can shine His light on the ugliest of circumstances and make the shattered pieces of a badly broken life shine again. It took time, but He did that for me.

As a young pastor, I could cite 20 reasons why I believed in the pretribulation rapture; but sadly, I placed a greater worth on the success I could achieve than on my hope of eternity. Once the Lord broke my fierce, self-centered pride through failure, suffering, and loss, I learned the importance of valuing my expectation of heaven over earthly success and accomplishments (see 2 Cor. 4:17-18).

The Lord in His great mercy and grace has restored my life in remarkable ways. First, after many more years of loneliness and singleness I married Ruth, who is the kindest and most loving woman I have ever met. I thank the Lord every day for His steadfast love in bringing her into my life. Second, the Lord opened up a writing ministry for me as a blogger and author.

Psalm 30:5 aptly sums up my life: “For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

Jonathan Brentner

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killbaned · 3 years

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hhhh sorry infodump re eddie shepard and my post war stuff but oh man;;;;

i still think it's also funny how the fucking 'eddie shepard adopts war orphans' thing gets started because hackett kind of low key tells him he has no choice but to come to this military/council charity function thing for war orphans for the good publicity.

it's like, a few years after the war, and rebuilding has been harder than everyone thought. a lot of the charity from the elite of the galaxy has begun to dry up, of those that are left living. the ones that made it like, got bored basically as rich people do with helping The Pores once they had their shit in order.

and while eddie doesn't want to go, he understands. he does it as a favor to hackett. he may not be active duty any more, but his Status is still cemented forever.

Commander Shepard making an appearance could mean kids that are stuck in shitty, makeshift foster buildings/orphanages could get somewhere better to be and somewhere better to go. he doesn’t reflect often on his own childhood, it got covered up by too many more things far too quickly, but there’s no denying it’s still there, somewhere.

no one tells him in advance that like, there’s gonna be actual kids there, though. he thought it was gonna be rich people glad handing and the like, but no. someone got the bright idea to parade the little bastards around to try and pull on heart strings.

“whatever it takes, right commander?” hackett mutters to him, at one point. there’s exhaustion tinted with disdain in his voice, and eddie thinks it’s probably the most human he’s ever heard the admiral sound.

at some point during this whole shindig, eddie ends up meeting and interacting with this turian kid. he keeps weaving in and out of the crowd, somehow involved in every conversation and yet completely detached, and the first thing eddie says to him one-on-one is

“not your first battle, huh?”

the kid’s name is terin, he’s 8, and his parents and any extended family have been dead since he was 5. his memories of them are spotty, and he thinks maybe that’s not such a bad thing. you can’t be sad about things you can’t remember, right?

he’s smart enough to know the purpose of this whole party because it is not the first one he has attended. he’s calmer and more put together than he should be at his age, and while it is not the first time the weight of all of the choices, good or bad or just down right viscous that eddie made since the day he landed on eden prime has pressed down on him,

it is the first time he begins to feel it.

he never does figure out if it’s some attempt at assuaging his own guilt, or some spark of kinship that flares up bright and hot, but there’s paperwork set in motion and completed in record time and within 36 hours he comes home from what should have been an annoying, obligated publicity stunt with good press and a fucking adopted, turian war orphan.

he never approaches terin with the idea of ‘all right i’m your new dad now’, and instead approaches it with ‘hey, you wanna get out of here and stop having to come to these fucking things?’

terin’s response is to light up, and for the first time the whole night, actually resemble a child while he softly says he’s had his bags packed since the day he got sent to this place.

it starts with terin, and eddie and evolves into jack and her varren, and within years they end up with a piece of property and a house big enough for all the kids and all the varren and sometimes it feels less like a home and more like a damn boarding school for Shepard and Jack’s Wayward Problem Children and War Beasts.

and neither of them would have it any other way.

#hot space banging #c: promoter of earthbound causes #also i feel like terin and eddie always have a special bond thats just different from the other kids #it's not that eddie (and jack) don't also care for the others there's just something about the time and place #of eddie and terin meeting that makes it DIFFERENT.#the other kids are his kids yes but #terin is His Son.

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