2024-11-23 What I’m Thankful For

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I’ve Learned

This Thanksgiving, we all have something to be thankful for, and I believe as a Christian it goes beyond the scope of something that’s nice to do, and almost veers into the realm of responsibility.

Upon reflection, I have so, so much to be grateful for, even though my outward circumstances would lead people to think otherwise.

Multiple Miracles

God’s timing in the consequences has been utterly impeccable, and there are so many small evidences of Him directly protecting me:

  1. If the event that started this current season was before July, I wouldn’t have had an RV to live in. If it was after November, this would have been a Texas-based issue instead of Iowa, and who knows how that would have gone? If it was any later, I would have been homeless in much colder weather. Even in my sin’s consequences, He still protected me, and that’s more than I deserve.
  2. God has used the marital spat devolving from about June until September to utterly fix a lifelong brokenness. I had resigned myself to the rest of my life to having no direct ability to feel others’ emotions. When the event happened, He shattered the programming my mother had instilled in me when I was age 6 until about age 12. I’ve finally received the heart of flesh God promised in Ezekiel. I’m still getting used to being able to cry openly for others’ pain and being moved by worship music, but I imagine I’ll get used to it eventually. I sincerely wonder what Christmas will do to me now.
  3. God provided me with a working vehicle almost instantly. I have a hard time believing how reliable this old car has been, and I had never purchased a car before in my life. He literally gave it to me as the first one I looked at, and it’s low-mileage enough that I expect it to last me for at least 5-10 years.
  4. He didn’t waste any time giving me a church. A week later from the event itself, I was sitting in the congregation of Des Moines Fellowship, which has been the most biblically-oriented church I’ve been to. Everything, from their church model to their attitude about God, depicts the love and acceptance in Christ. Tori and I had both been wishing and hoping for a healthy church to call home, and I finally found it. They’ve already helped move our entire apartment out, and I’ve already made about five new friends. I look forward to seeing how God will use them to bless first me, then Tori and the kids when the time comes.
  5. I have been blessed with a deferred judgment, which has allowed me to keep my job, as well as protect me from any long-term consequences to my career. The DHS case has been closed, and I’ve paid off my penalties. Once I’m finished with probation, the NCO is the only legal thing remaining whatsoever about this event.
  6. Tori is typically very organized, and even in this hardship remembered to take the legal documents for her and the kids along with the pink slip for our Jeep. In the mix of this, she somehow forgot to take her journal, which somehow got into the only small container that actually went to me in this RV. That journal has given me the courage to trust in her motivations, even while absolutely every reliable connection with her has been completely severed right now.

It’s evident that He loves me, more than I deserve, and more than I could put in words.

God Gave Me A Wonderful Family

God has given Tori and myself to each other:

  • We’re both utterly neurodivergent. She has an IQ of 140, which puts her in the 99.37th percentile. On intelligence alone, she’s outside “normal” and a true prodigy. I’m no slouch either in that department. I just recently discovered that being highly intelligent is an inherent neurodivergence: 110-125 or so will assist in someone becoming a lawyer or doctor, but above that it’s very difficult to have the patience to finish college or contribute to long-term projects, and it can also be a challenge to have conversations or make friends.
  • We both found each other as broken people with very little to show for our lives. Tori and I were both in respective states of feeling worthless when we found each other, raised by mothers who expressed lots of narcissistic behavior, with fathers who took a backseat position on the matter, though I’m convinced she had the worse of the two of us.
  • Both of us have deeply believed in each other. I knew she’d be an effective mother who could raise children, and she knew I’d be a reliable and physically present father that could provide for a family. We also both found each other quite physically attractive, so my conjecture at the time that our pheromones would be compatible was correct. Our meeting online in 2014 and subsequent interactions was no accident.
  • When I decided to drive out to meet her, He delivered me from a very bad accident. I was traveling through Pennsylvania, and had never been in a blizzard before in my life. I hit a patch of ice at 55 mph, slid off the road, and hit the guardrail. It sounded like a machine gun from all the wooden posts I hit, and the claim later meant it was likely somewhere between 48 and 96 of them. I drove away from the accident and was able to safely get back home with about $20 left in my bank account. If I had been a quarter mile back, I would have driven off the embankment into the woods. If I had been a mile ahead, I would have hit concrete-reinforced posts.
  • Shortly after we met, God gave me a job in what I had dreamed of doing and had utterly given up: accounting. It was the means to finance a wonderful dating relationship for several years into the first season of our marriage.

He kept the miracles coming, too:

  • Shortly after our marriage, God called us to a missionary conference. We both faithfully went, expecting to be sent as missionaries. For the first time in my life, I saw the presence of the Holy Spirit in a worship setting, which was necessary to give me any hope that the Church wasn’t a dead institution. I’ve always been confounded on why He permitted us to go when we didn’t actually become missionaries, and it was partly because He needed us to remember that experience.
  • Tori suffered an eclamptic seizure while pregnant as we were driving to church. Its timing meant we received a lot of support from our local congregation through the season of our first child Victor. If it had been any other time, the rest of the members may not have acted so promptly. Tori also may not be alive today if it had happened when she was by herself.
  • God has protected Mia from a previous family curse connected to my complete lack of modeling for disciplining children. He healed her completely, and He used that entire experience to make me a legitimately better father. He also used that experience to begin breaking me, which peeled back a necessary layer of myself that has become completed in this current emotional place. It’s no coincidence that I was convicted of a felony on 2021-10-30, and given my deferred judgment here on 2024-10-30.

We’ve been able to hold together a beautiful home, with me bringing in the money, managing the finances, managing all computer-based and heavy-lifting work, and Tori decorating, mending, designing, and fixing many things. God has been good in giving us the small fortunate events to create that circumstance. Irrespective of what happens next, I wouldn’t trade what we had for any other experience.

My Family Is Probably Safe

Since the event, I know nothing about the well-being of her or my kids, no matter what I try to do:

  • Everyone I’ve tried to contact who may know where my kids are have been intentionally blocking, non-communicating, or otherwise avoiding me.
  • The lawyers basically say they can’t do anything unless I file for divorce, which I will never do.
  • The police and probation officers aren’t much help, and have told me to talk to the lawyers.
  • I refuse to involve the DHS because I still believe in my wife.

At first, this caused me tremendous distress, and I can only assume they are honoring what they understand to be protecting Tori. I’m going to presume she’s telling the truth, and they’re doing everything they can to help her heal. If that’s the case, they’re being a physical hedge of protection around her, and I can only be grateful they’re doing what they think is right.

On the other side of things, if they’re reacting far too heavily to something she’s saying in the violent reframings of what trauma can do to our memories, they’re still doing what they understand to be best. God is a father to the fatherless, even temporarily, and I know He will protect my children from any missteps anyone else takes.

I’ve come to closure on this, though it is absolutely devastating for my flesh. I’ve lived my entire life with some sort of certainty and action plan, but this situation calls for waiting on God. It’s as if I were in prison with no knowledge of them.

This time is the testing block for what we married. We are both responsible to stay faithful to each other in the darkness of not knowing what the other is doing. Since there’s always the chance she has been abducted, I’ve had to lock her out of our cloud storage to protect all our data from misuse, as well as move our money to a bank where I can quickly re-acquire a bank card if I lose it. I’m still going to pay the bills, though, until I hear from her again.

The irony of this situation is that her fear of the NCO and the government is probably exposing herself to more risk wherever she’s at. My experiences tell me that HHS-type agencies are often drawn more to broken homes than “standard” ones.

I’m Thankful For Human Nature

Sometimes, Christian culture implies that humanity is incapable of doing any good whatsoever, especially among the Calvinist circles.

However, that isn’t true at all. God designed us in the first place, and that design was to be in a close relationship with Him. Our goodness would have been inherent if we had stayed faithful in the first place:

  • “Don’t eat the fruit”
  • “okai, np God!”
  • (doesn’t eat the fruit)
  • “Now that you’ve been patient, and taken other fruits, you may now eat the fruit”
  • “Yay!”

The presence of sin, and all of its awfulness, makes us forget that we were lovingly crafted, with beautiful intent, for a beautiful purpose.

One of my old views cast off in all of this has been my sentiments against this world’s power structures. My parental modeling came from a combination of experiencing narcissistic behavior and honoring how a computer works, which created an amalgamated idea that authority figures were to be dutifully respected with complete subjugation, without question, and they were the moral basis for everything. My wife adopted a somewhat similar perspective.

But, that’s simply not true. The law enforcers are people, with all their opinions and bias and experiences. They have families, friends, hobbies, and are (hopefully) part of a community of other people who feed into those opinions and experiences, thereby crafting their bias. My old self saw them as not worthy of respect, but that’s not true either: the law was designed for wicked people, and they reserve the right to be severe if they need to.

I can honestly say, at the doorway of the system, that they do not care about me much. Their job is harsh, but they reserve it for the people who refuse to change, and the photo on my legal safety essay should show that submitting to the authorities and living a righteous life will take you quickly in and out of it if you ever stumble into it. I can attest to that with my experience as well that good behavior goes a long way with authority figures.

And, as a further concept as Christians, God has the king’s heart. We now live in a bureaucratic society instead of under a king (which was once a word interpreted as a good thing as a replacement for a monarchy), but we can still say that whenever there is power to wield, God has the Department of Education’s heart, the Department of Human Services’ heart, the Polk County judge’s heart, and so on.

Further, one beauty of human nature is that time permits us to heal from what has happened, when we use it wisely. We often must consciously release our pain, which is itself painful, and we can only gain that strength through Christ alone.

The Crappy Childhood Fairy course Tori took made a half-baked effort to self-soothe by stating “I am having an emotional reaction”. However, that somewhat vilifies the stress we’re experiencing, especially when connected with PTSD. One of the latest things I’ve learned in the domestic abuse government program is that stress (and the emotions it provokes) can profoundly influence us for the better if we redirect it that way. Here’s a TED talk on that idea.

More scientifically, the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory indicates that life changes create stressors, which can dramatically increase the chances of a health risk. To the degree we can manage stress, we become safer and healthier.

I Thank What God Will Do

Just looking back, I have seen all that God has done, and I haven’t given up hope on this marriage yet.

I’m convinced this event was bound to happen, since we have both received terrible modeling for parenting, and have not sought marriage counseling after when we were first married. I know with complete certainty that, if Tori wishes to continue on this journey with me, we will be able to restore back better than ever before.

We’ve agreed on homeschooling our kids, and we can make that happen again. We were getting prepared to scale up our lives into a vastly connected homeschool and church community, and that promise is still waiting when Tori feels safe enough to lift the NCO.

Nothing will ever be the same, and things won’t go back to what they were. The transformation to my soul has been so complete, so deep, that I would rather be here than where I was six months ago. I was living in a pattern wrought by my unresolved PTSD, and it was feeding into the rest of our family. God prepared us for this season, and my greatest meaning is through in the good works He has prepared for me when I’ve completed this season of loneliness and self-reflection.

With all the miracles, and the fact that I know we were both chosen by God for each other, I can be prematurely thankful for what He will do in helping Tori heal and in restoring our family. He loves Tori and the kids more than I ever could, after all!

More than reconnecting, my primary hope is that Tori is also submitting to God’s work. He can heal the feelings of emptiness and numbness, but we must set aside any belief that we can fix it on our own, which is difficult in proportion to how qualified and intelligent we are. As much as I want to see her again, at this time my deepest desire is that she finds her way to a Celebrate Recovery group, which she can go to with or without the kids. The Holy Spirit moves deeply there, and she’ll find the healing she’s looking for.

I have the utmost confidence that God has her safely somewhere, doing His work on her. We both have family curses to defeat, and He’s not done with our family unit yet!

What I have to do, until we reunite, is continue growing in faithfulness and walking the path He set for me. God has taken them from me, and He will bring them back if He believes I’m ready for them. While I wait for her to reach out again, God will direct Tori’s heart wherever He wishes as well.

What I’m Doing Now

The most beautiful woman I’ve known and the two amazing children we share aren’t in my life right now, but I have high hopes they will be soon enough. She’d have to directly reach out to the Polk County Clerk of Court, either by calling or walking in, to have the NCO removed.

In that absence, I am prioritizing my habits toward moral growth in five domains, inspired by Colossians 3:12:

  • Compassion
  • Gentleness
  • Humility
  • Kindness
  • Patience

Tiny changes:

  • To create a safer place for dialectical thought, I’m changing the word “but” in many of my expressions to “and”. (GH)
  • I’m aiming in my speech to never take more than 1 minute at a time to convey an idea. Other people have thoughts to say too, after all. (HP)
  • Anxiety and thankfulness use the same part of the brain, so you can’t do both at the same time, which validates the effectiveness of Philippians 4:6-7. Whenever I feel anxious, I swap it out with thankfulness. (GH)
  • I’m making general interaction with people a priority, which includes more small talk. (GKP)
  • I will continue to wait until Tori responds, without complaining. (HP)

My daily routine:

  • I have vowed to meditate every day for 20 minutes. I don’t always get to 20 minutes, but I have been consistent every day. (GP)
  • I get paid to insure the worst drivers in Iowa. When I see suffering in that domain, I will empathize with it, even when the person is angry. (CGK)

My weekly routine:

  • I’m taking therapy from two different sources, as well as pastoral counseling. (CHP)
  • Every week, I go to a 12-step group called Celebrate Recovery. (HP)
  • I’m going to a Bible study twice a week. (GH)
  • While I’ve already taken several anger management classes, I’m also going to the Iowa Domestic Abuse Program (IDAP) to fulfill my probation requirements. (GP)
  • Assuming my bodily fluids are generally where they need to be, I go to the gym three times a week. (HP)

Hobbies and projects:

  • I’m just starting into giving functioning websites to more…underclass-oriented ministries. (KP)
  • I’ve picked up playing the piano keyboard. (HP)
  • When I can, I will continue working through content that can go on my essays. (KP)