Carnage & Grace: Confessions of an Adulterous Heart

by Tullian Tchividjian

The Laughing Heart Your life is your life Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is a light somewhere. It may not be much light but It beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but You can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, The more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous The gods wait to delight In you. —Charles Bukowski

But I wanted to do something with those regrets, hopefully something that matters, something that might be helpful, redemptive even—for me, yes, but also possibly for you. I’ve learned that our pains, whether self-induced or caused by others or both, can be redeeming if they’re harnessed to help others find healing. In her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontē wrote, “I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities.”1 So, this is my attempt to put my regrets to good use. Because although I wasn’t for a long time, I’m getting better. And let me be crystal clear, by “getting better,” in no way do I mean I’m becoming a “better person,” whatever the hell that even means. What I mean is that there has been, and continues to be, real healing—there’s more light in my life, more peace, more laughter. That’s why I included the poem by Charles Bukowski (yes, definitely no angel) in this Prologue. I want to share with you my story of crashing and burning—the carnage—and learning through it all to trust more and more that nothing else in this inescapably hard life matters as much as our belovedness, and how in the end that leaves us so very free, at times bordering on giddy. This telling of my story is simply one piece of my ongoing daily work of making a “living amends” for the carnage I’ve caused, something I can only do because of grace.

Our adulterous hearts (and we’ve all got one) will break our own hearts and the hearts of those we love. Those broken hearts thankfully can be mended with time and attention and God’s mercy. But those two movements, almost like inhaling and exhaling, will continue throughout our time on this earth—break then mend, break then mend. But in all that breaking, there’s a thread that runs through our lives if we’ve the guts to see it—that is the thread of a laughing heart—one that’s been forgiven again and again and again.

I’m not sure what all heaven’s going to be like, but I firmly believe it’ll be a place filled with laughter—that deep belly-roaring, utterly humbling hilarity of joy like the prodigal son experienced when his father saw him from a long way off and started running, scooped him up, and said with a boisterous mirth-filled heart, “I’m so glad you’re home!” There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us wh...

Mary Karr. Now, you’re either drawn to Karr’s “black-belt sinner” honesty or you’re not; there’s rarely anyone on the fence. This is how the chapter titled “God Shopping” begins in her 2009 memoir Lit: If you’d told me even a year before I started taking Dev to church regular that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin. One Sunday I’m eating a bagel with a smear and reading the paper when Dev, age eight, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajamas, announces he wants to go to church. I barely look up. Despite my prayer life, organized religion still strikes me as bogus. Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was—as I’ve said before—no more able to commit to faith than to a husband. She quoted Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses. So I’m suspect of hierarchies. Idly asking Dev why he wants to go to church, I’m confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll. But he says: to see if God’s there.

“But nobody I know who’s written a great one described it as anything less than a major-league shit-eating contest.”

You might react to that by accusing me of being a name-dropper, playing the God-card, diluting the wrong in my story with God’s right, what Flannery O’Connor called, “propaganda on the side of the angels.”

My friend David Zahl uses a phrase (coined by his father, Paul Zahl) to describe that uneasy feeling about humans (which is also the title of one of David’s books): “low anthropology.” What David’s talking about is essentially a realistic view of humanity, one that confesses—we’re all broken.

“Despite the upbeat tone of society in general, there is solace in the discovery that everyone else is . . . as bewildered and regretful as we are.”

In fact, the older I get, the more I realize how much my life is one long testament to this abiding truth. I’m not overstating things when I say that discovering the message of God’s one-way love in all its radical glory has saved my marriage, my relationship with my kids, and my ministry. So this is not an abstract subject to me. One-way love is my lifeblood.

No, God’s grace was not entirely abstract, but in that other, visceral sense, yes it was. You see, grace doesn’t really prevail until we run out of steam, and I hadn’t arrived at the place where I was out of aces. I had yet to truly thirst for grace like that psalmic deer panting for water. I had not come to the end of me, with nothing else to hold on to, no one and nowhere else to turn. I really had no idea.

used to be what some would call an influential Christian leader, following in the footsteps of my famous grandfather, Billy Graham. That’s right, Billy Graham. I used to lead a large, famous church in my hometown of Fort Lauderdale—Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. I used to write a book a year, and they used to be award-winning bestsellers. I used to travel extensively across the country to do book tours; to speak at conferences, churches, universities, and various events. I used to be on TV every week around the globe and on the radio every day. I used to be a popular guy, a widely sought-after guy, a “successful” guy. I used to have the world by the tail, as they say. I used to have it all, and then some. In a word, I used to be a winner and, man, it felt good. Used to be.

But then things changed. Used to be imploded, unraveled, and life as I knew it came crashing down. My sins caught up with me; they always do.

my own damn fault.

But loss never happens in a vacuum. Those two monumental losses were the dominoes that tipped a thousand others. The loss of peace and security on my kids’ faces, the loss of close friendships, the loss of purpose, the loss of public (and private) credibility, the loss of influence, the loss of confidence in God’s friendship, the loss of financial stability, the loss of hope, the loss of joy, the loss of opportunity, the loss of life as I used to know it, the loss of life as I used to love it.

In addition to being the cause of my own losses, I caused loss in many other people’s lives as well. First and foremost, I caused loss in the lives of those who depended on me as a husband, a father, and a spiritual leader who would love and protect them. I violated their trust, betrayed their confidence, and injured their hearts. I devastated them. And even though that happened years ago, the consequences remain. There isn’t a day that goes by when I am not reminded in some way of what I did. I could give you dozens of examples, but here’s one seemingly small example of the further collateral damage. I was in a Barnes & Noble in 2016 when I happened to pick up a book published before my 2015 crash; it had been written by a young author whom I’d never met face-to-face. He’d reached out to me after he finished his manuscript to tell me he looked up to me and how my books and messages had greatly impacted him. He told me this would be his first book, and he’d be honored if I’d read it and possibly write an endorsement. I agreed to do it. And here I was, only a few years later, staring at my name on the back cover of his book. In that moment, I was overcome ...

I was not just devastated, or hurt, or ill-used, or broken; I was dead. Unless you have been through such an experience, you may find this overblown; but my life, as I had known it, was over, gone, kaput.

In the years following that death, I’ve met a lot of people like me. People who live with guilt and shame and regret and sadness because of what they did or didn’t do. People who would do anything to go back in time and make different choices but are presently plagued by the realization that they can’t. People who live in fear that they will never hope again. People who have lost everything and wonder whether they will ever enjoy life like they used to. People who battle suicidal thoughts because they’ll never outrun or outlive the consequences of their bad decisions and the people they have hurt. People who endure the painful, inescapable void of broken relationships. People who struggle with believing that anybody (even God) could love them because they have done so many bad, destructive, and hurtful things. I’ve met a lot of people like that, people who used to be alive but now walk around dead. People who used to be found, but then got lost. As Don Henley penned in his haunting “New York Minute”: “But men get lost sometimes as years unfurl.”

Instead of a life with a bumper sticker on my back reading—“stronger every day,” my life has looked more like this: Try and fail. Fail then try. Try and succeed. Succeed then fail. Two steps forward. One step back. One step forward. Three steps back. Every year, I get better at some things, worse at others. Some areas remain stubbornly static. To complicate matters even more, when I honestly acknowledge those ways in which I’ve gotten worse, it’s actually a sign that I may be getting better. And when I become proud of the ways I’ve gotten better, it’s clearly a sign that I’ve gotten worse. And ’round and ’round we go. Some people have always struggled with Saint Paul’s admission that he did the things he knew he shouldn’t, and he didn’t do the things he knew he should. But I know exactly what he’s talking about. The truth is, my life over the years doesn’t look like a strong person getting stronger or a good person getting better—it looks like a weak and lost person who needs the strength and goodness of God.

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

But get this—both sons started out in the house, right? Both were found, so to speak, but then got lost. And that same reality plays out in the two lesser-known parables in Luke 15. In both of those cases, the lost sheep and the lost coin were at one time not lost. The lost sheep was in the fold, and the lost coin was in the pocket. The lost sheep wandered off, and the lost coin was misplaced. Again, the point I’m making is that neither started off lost. So, to interpret these parables as instructional guides on the lengths we “found-people” should go to find the “lost-people” (the way I was taught) is to misinterpret them. Not to mention, it downplays the reality of how quickly and easily we all get lost along the way. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” Rather than these parables being about God’s job description for us, they portray God’s unflagging commitment to constantly come after those who once were found but now are lost. To put it bluntly, these aren’t parables about found people pursuing lost people. These are parables about God pursuing found people who get lost.

To deny that we all get lost is to blind our eyes to the truth about ourselves and others. We often, for example, get lost in our pursuit of meaning or love or success or purpose or importance. We get lost in our dependence on people and things to “save” us from aloneness, insecurity, and a sense of inadequacy. We get lost when hopes and dreams crash and burn—when one of our children goes off the deep end, when our parents get divorced, when a marriage fails, when she breaks up with you, when you don’t get the job you want or get into the school you want. We get lost in anger, hurt, ambition, bitterness, pleasure-seeking, self-righteousness, unforgiveness, pride, lust, selfishness, the thirst for credit, the need to be right, and so on.

But the good news—I’d wager to say the great news—for me and for all of us in the dizzying light of these parables is that God spares no expense to find us in our lostness. He meets us in all our meanderings—seventy times seven. When we foolishly wander off, he comes after us, picks us up, puts us over his shoulders, and carries us home—every time! No matter how far you run, or how stubborn your roaming may be, he will never stop coming for you with infinite amounts of grace at the ready and forgiveness on the house...

The entire cause of the recovery operation in both stories is the shepherd’s, or the woman’s, determination to find the lost. Neither the lost sheep nor the lost coin does a blessed thing except hang around in its lostness. On the strength of these parables, therefore, it is precisely our sins, and not our goodnesses, that most commend us to the grace of God. These parables of lostness . . . are emphatically not stories designed to convince us that if we will wind ourselves up to some acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us; rather they are parables about God’s determination to move before we do—in short, to make lostness the only ticket we need to the Supper of the Lamb.

Two sobering things I’ve learned since my own personal collapse are (1) you are capable of getting lost in a way that is unthinkable to you right now, and (2) God’s love and forgiveness are big enough to cover the fact that your greatest failure may be ahead of you.

And the response to tyranny of every sort . . .must always be this: dismantle it. Take it apart. Scatter its defenders and its proponents, like a flock of starlings fed to a hurricane.

There’s a pivotal scene in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody where a music industry executive is meeting the band Queen for the first time. This was still early in the Queen timeline; they’d not yet signed a record deal. The music executive looks at Freddie Mercury (Queen’s lead singer) and says (and I’m paraphrasing), “So, tell me—what makes Queen any different from all the other bands I meet?” Mercury’s answer was worth the price of admission: I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Reid. We’re four misfits who don’t belong together and we’re playing for other misfits. They’re the outcasts at the back of the room and we’re pretty sure they don’t belong either. We belong to them.

Misfit God? Yes. In parable after parable, Jesus reveals a God who chooses to love all the wrong people: the defiant son, not the compliant one; those who broke religious laws, not those who kept them; the hungover late-day workers, not the diligent all-day workers. We see “bad” people getting rewarded, “good” people getting rebuked, and everybody’s idea of who the winners and losers are being turned upside down. Jesus was always making the merit mongers mad because he befriended, loved, and touched the outcast, the leper, the liar, the cheater, the sexually deviant.

As Mike Yaconelli wrote, “According to his critics, Jesus ‘did God’ all wrong.”

Grace always, always provokes those who think they’re good, those who think they’re better, those with a high anthropology. Jesus loving and embracing the falsely accused, the victim, and the one who is not guilty . . . that’s not scandalous. In fact, that’s expected. What is scandalous is that Jesus loved the criminal caught in the act, the assailant with blood on his hands, the one who reeks of guilt—filthy rich Zacchaeus, the woman caught in an adulterous embrace, even the Roman soldiers blithely tossing dice in the shadow of his dying body. The good news of God’s love and forgiveness is not just for those who are bullied and brokenhearted, but for perpetrators themselves. Not just for theoretical sinners, but for actual flesh-and-blood repeat offenders. You see, what offends us most about Jesus is not who he leaves out but rather who he lets in. The fact that his heart gravitates toward and embraces the immoral, the criminal, the blamable, the scoundrel, the pariahs and dregs of society—that is what makes him such a misfit God.

Grace itself is not expensive. It’s not even cheap. It’s free. A no-strings-attached gift of one-way love. But to practice grace—to love the unlovable, to forgive the unforgivable, to stand with the guilty—well, that might cost you favor and friends. It might just cost you your life. Grace, as Robert Capon writes in the preface to Romance of the Word, is: . . . wildly irreligious stuff. It’s more than enough to get God kicked out of the God union that the theologians have formed to keep him on his divine toes so he won’t let the riffraff off scot-free. Sensible people, of course, should need only about thirty seconds of careful thought to realize that getting off scot-free is the only way any of us is going to get off at all.9 A misfit God indeed.

There is a huge life-and-death difference between religion and grace. Religion focuses primarily on us and how we live. Religion, in this sense, is not about God at all. It’s about me and what I should do (or shouldn’t do). It’s about my performance, my obedience, my faithfulness, my potential, my strength, my improvement, and so on. Religion’s main message is our need to do more, try harder, get better, and climb higher for God. It makes faith all about earning and deserving and getting paid handsomely for a job well-done. It has no room for failure and weakness. It may give lip service to God hanging on a cross for us, but its emphasis is you and me climbing a ladder for him. I’ve found it to be terribly narcissistic, an exercise in spiritualized navel-gazing—slavery, really.

Grace asserts that true faith is not about our half-assed movement toward God, it’s about God’s wholehearted movement toward us. It embraces the beautiful truth that because of what God has done for us, there is nothing we can do—or fail to do—that will ever tempt him to leave us, forsake us, or stop loving us. God’s love for us, acceptance of us, and commitment to us does not ride on our devotion to him but rather on his devotion to us. God’s relationship to us is not grounded on what’s in our hearts for him, but rather what’s in his heart for us. In other words, what keeps us connected to God is not that we hold tightly to him, but that he holds tightly to us even when, and possibly especially when, we let go. We are safe and sound in his love because of his faithfulness, not ours. That is great news because religion’s emphasis on doing good, being good, and getting better is exposed for the unhelpfulness that it is when everything falls apart.

It’s never easy to admit our failures and flaws, to confess our sins and struggles. It’s hard to share our secrets and talk about our insecurities. In a world that values strength, it’s difficult to acknowledge weakness. Telling the truth about ourselves is scary. So, we edit our profiles. We wear masks. We conceal our most unattractive parts. We lie to ourselves, and we lie about ourselves, all because we are terrified that if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us.

Therein lies the beauty of grace. It sets you free to talk truthfully about yourself without fear because the only person’s approval you ultimately need is God’s, and you already have it. You can endure rejection from others because you’ll never have to endure rejection from God. Those who are the most free are those who have the least fear telling the truth about themselves. And those who have the least fear telling the truth about themselves are those who know how much God loves them unconditionally. The good news of God’s grace rings true when we are finally able to admit that we are weak and we need help, that we fail, that we’re not as put...

The god of religion would have given up on us a long time ago: one and done. But the God of grace is the deity category killer: his love never ceases. He indiscriminately accepts us, the recidivist screwups, again and again and again. He’s the shepherd constantly searching. The woman desperately looking high and low. The hope-filled father running wit...

If you’ve made a mess of your life (like I have), then you probably struggle with a lot of guilt, shame, and regret (like I do). And if you’re a parent and the mess you’ve made has hurt your kids, then the guilt, shame, and regret you probably feel is often paralyzing (like mine is).

A quick thesaurus search of synonyms for “making a mess” reveals: blundered, botched, goofed, mishandled, ruined, screwed up. Now let your mind go to the “pointing Rick Dalton” meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the one where DiCaprio sits up, beer and cigarette in hand, and points to the television with a shock of recognition. That’s what I felt when I came across “screwed up.” There, that’s it! That’s what I did. I didn’t make a mess. Oh no, I screwed up.

Never. I screwed everything up. My own damn fault.

Years earlier, I had reconnected with an old girlfriend from high school. We were in touch for a particular reason that had nothing to do with rekindling an old flame. She asked for my help and advice on a project she was working on. It was all business. Even though she had been my “first love,” there was nothing about our communication initially that even seemed wrong or dangerous. We lived in different parts of the country. We were both married with kids and committed to our families. We said nothing inappropriate to each other. From every angle, it appeared harmless, innocent even. After all, it had been over twenty years since we were close. But as the conversations continued, feelings eventually started to flow that made me realize something was missing in my marriage, a kind of conversation and emotional connection that I wanted in a marriage that didn’t seem to be happening in mine at the time. Looking back, I think my marriage had stronger connections than I realized, and I take full responsibility for not seeing them. Perhaps I chose not to see them. After all, I could have asked for a closer connection, worked for it too, but suddenly here it was, ready-made in an old girlfriend, and we could simply pick up where we left off. Delusional? Absolutely. Did it feel real? Yes, it did.

I brought the longing back home, so to speak, and for a while all of that stirred-up romantic energy was channeled to Kim, my wife. In fact, the next eight months or so were some of the best months of marriage I had ever experienced. I even thought quietly to myself that reconnecting with my old girlfriend had reconnected me to my marriage—strange and silly and delusional as that sounds, a variation of what the writer Joan Didion called “magical thinking.” But as time went on, Kim and I resumed our normal rhythms, the way we’d grown accustomed to living with one another. She, of course, knew nothing about what I had done. Nobody did. But the past was now the past, and I felt like I had dodged a bullet. It actually felt like God had rescued me from blowing it big by allowing me to blow it small. I had experienced a divine warning shot, a warning that worked at first, but the magic wore off in time.

That little detail—“But David remained at Jerusalem”—is crucial. In a nutshell, David wasn’t where he was supposed to be. And neither was I. Now from the outside looking in, it appeared I was right where I should be. As I said, it was a winning season. The metrics we most commonly use to evaluate ourselves, especially those in leadership roles of any kind? I was checking the boxes. But don’t forget, I had an adulterous heart. And beginning in the spring of 2014, my prone-to-wander heart was in full swing.

Experts in the field of positive psychology and happiness use a phrase to describe the very human tendency to keep chasing something more pleasurable or better in life, and once we attain it, we become insensitive, or adapt, to the new and then need something more intense than the last in order to scratch that itch. Whatever progress we thought we might have made, we realize (if we have the presence of mind) that we’re back in the same place. We’ve gone nowhere really, thus their phrase “the hedonic treadmill.”

Some spiritual circles speak of “holy discontent” that reflects a restlessness that supposedly spurs you on to do more with your life for God and others. Yeah, this ain’t that. This was unholy discontentedness.

Aristotle put it pithily when he said, “It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it.”11

Observing this phenomenon about himself, Saint Augustine caught this perhaps most famously and succinctly sixteen centuries ago on the opening page of his Confessions, where he prayed, “You made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”12

Twelve centuries after Augustine, the brilliant mind of Blaise Pascal took up this same human predicament. “All men seek happiness,” he noted in his Pensées; “this is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.” He then went on to cite humanity’s endless sighs and groans as confirmation that nobody ever really satisfies this innate desire: “All complain—princes and subjects, noblemen and commoners, old and young, ...

Pascal says, but it’s a lesson we fail to grasp: “And thus, while the present never satisfies us, experience dupes us,” and so onward we stumble “from misfortune to misfortune . . . seeking from things absent the help [we do] not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate . . . because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”

What Pascal describes as “seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present” resonates with me. That’s been me my whole life. Maybe you too. Maybe all of us.

Aristotle. Augustine. Pascal. Percy. All these brilliant minds saw this restlessness within the human condition. But this reality is old, older than Aristotle and Augustine. I mean, this goes back all the way to our origin stories, to the God who dreamed all this, including us, into being. As a Christian, I hold to the story about a garden, one that held everything we could ever want or need. But the temptation for something more was too great to resist, and whether it was an apple or a peach or an ear of sweet corn, the fruit in question was good and pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining autonomy: “You will be like God.” So, we disregarded the warnings, reached out, and took a bite. And that changed everything going forward, for all of us. Ultimately, in my case, the thirst for what I thought I didn’t have caused me to lose everything I did have. And again, to a large degree, I was unaware of what was truly going on. I was not “onto something” but “on something”—on the treadmill, at high speed, blindfolded. Yes, a recipe for disaster.