Chapter 1
The Adventure Begins
When We Pledged In Sickness and In Health Bipolar Wasn’t In The Picture
August 18th, 2002 marked the beginning of Lisa and I’s adventure together. It was a day surrounded by friends and family, marked by laughter and joy, and filled with music, dancing, and the sharing of our wedding vows. “‘Til death do us part” were the words we most intently focused on that day as we both grew up in families that were torn apart by divorce and discord. While divorce was a common thread that we both brought to the table, Lisa and I’s life couldn’t have been any different growing up.
She was a Daddy’s girl who knew the love and stability of a safe, financially stable, and socially engaging household. Lisa’s father was a hardworking businessman and philanthropist who was actively involved in leadership roles within the Shriners organization. Always the life of the party, he demonstrated a care and compassion for people that his daughter grew up admiring and emulating. In high school Lisa would become a self-confident, student body president, captain-of-every-team, homecoming queen who had a passion for people, for life. While most of her friendships were very shallow in nature, Lisa had a natural trust in the good of people and the hope of tomorrow.
I, on the other hand, was raised in home riddled by chaos and fighting and marred by the death of my father. My natural fun-loving, trusting disposition was snuffed out by the presence of a predator in my home and the troubles in my family tree.
By the time I met Lisa at the Baptist Collegiate Ministry of the University of South Florida I was an introspective, insecure, impulsive and ignorant young man skeptical of all men, but desirous to please everyone. Saved at 17, called to ministry at 18, caught up in a duplicitous life of nightclubs & churches by 19, I lived for the moment and was confused about the future. Despite having a quick mind that made school simple, I was miserable.
My oldest brother had wrecked his life and was serving a 20+ year sentence in prison. My second brother was battling schizophrenia and living with our uncle. My third brother was the closest thing to normal that I knew and I moved to USF to be near him. I was at the BCM because club life wasn’t filling the emptiness within my soul. At the core of my convictions and wrestling with God I knew he had called me into ministry.
My first impression of Lisa being “obnoxious” was quickly aligned with the reality that she was “contagious.” She had just given her heart and life to Jesus a few months prior to us meeting and she was on fire for the Lord and overflowing with enthusiasm for all that she was learning during this time. She was plugged in to a discipleship group each week with a local pastor and his wife, she was discovering new things in her personal Bible study, she was planning to go to the Dominican Republic on her first mission trip, and she was coming to the BCM to find Christian fellowship with likeminded believers.
We first connected on our common love for basketball and as Lord would have it we both ended up transferring to Warner Southern to play basketball the next year. Though we had a mutual respect for the other’s desire to reach their teammates for Christ our relationship was scattered throughout the first semester. That is, until Lisa agreed to host one of my girl “friends” from Chicago for a week over Christmas break.
With this friend’s coming and going I began to hang out more and more at Lisa’s apartment and develop more than platonic feelings for her. I knew I liked her, but I was unsure if the feelings were reciprocated, so I attempted to play it cool and grow in our friendship. All doubts about her feeling were removed when one day, seemingly out of nowhere, she said, “Mike, I can’t imagine living another day without you.”
Three days after this “proposal” we began dating. Six weeks later we were engaged. Six months later we were standing at the altar of Burns Avenue Church of God pledging our love for one another. Looking back on the events I see now that my impulsive willingness to jump into our relationship full speed ahead was likely nurtured by my bipolar bend in thought and life.
While the last five years of our marriage has seen us walk through many “bad times together” there is no denying the fact that we have pushed one another toward a deeper love for Jesus, family and the Gospel. My bipolar has not prevented me from becoming the good father that she imagined I would be early in our friendship. I have labored in prayer, encouragement, and much effort to spur her and our children on toward love, faith and godliness, and she has done the same for me.
It is my plan to return to the early days of our “Adventure of Together” to trace the signs and early indications of my bipolar bend and hopefully build a bridge that can help others see how the path I traveled to get to where I am today could have been a straighter one with proper guidance. I hope that my progressive trips down memory lane, and then returns to the 2020 Epicenter of my mental breakdown and subsequent manic moments brought on by job loss and other major stressors will help equip sufferers with further tools to handle future “fires” from spreading further than they need to, avoiding trails they need not take, and keeps them from hurting the people that they love. Next Stop: My Bipolar Breakdown
BIPOLAR PROCESSING: Bipolar is a disease that is progressive by nature in many cases. This mean, for people like myself who first received the diagnosis later in life, I was 38 when I first heard the words bipolar, it can be difficult for them to make sense of an illness they have had for their entire life unbeknownst to them. The hardest part of coming to grips with my illness is realizing that there were many seasons when I went through “ups and downs” that were frustrating to my future. Times when I got healthy riding a manic wave, became very effective in the pursuit of dreams and ambitions, only to be thrust off the wave of progress with some abrupt crash-inducing stress that came my way. Back in 2002 when I married Lisa I was handling my bouts with isolation and introspection with prayer and the pursuit of people’s presence. I didn’t make friendships easy because of my deep trust issues from childhood, but I also didn’t like to be alone. As I think back to this season from the lens of bipolar I can now see that the hypomanic highs enabled me to perform at a high level in situations like sports and academics. The week before I was to meet Lisa at the altar I found myself in Hawaii at a Pete Newell BigMan Camp with 30 NBA players and 30 college players and I remember playing “out of my mind.” This would become my description later in life of how I played when I had a sense of peace and calm in my pursuit of the game that came from playing for a bigger cause. In Hawaii the encouragement of the coaches there made me start to believe, “if I can fix my body physically I have the tools to play this game at a high level.” I also realize that my mindset during these hypomanic moments of achievement were no less unhealthy than the moments of low-grade depressive episodes that I faced. Anxiety was just my lot in life and it was something that I had learned from a mom that suffered with anxiety attacks her whole life. The quality of life I have enjoyed up to this point in my life has been occasionally altered by my battles with depressive and anxious moments, however, in these times of alteration I turned to an altar, a place of humility and honor to hand over my fears and my failures to God. While I likely would have reached higher levels of “success” in sports and my business pursuits without this thorn, I am certain that I would not have developed the depth of fellowship and intimacy with Jesus had it not been for my bipolar mind and traumatic upbringing.
BACKGROUND PROCESSING: From a young age I struggled with a very low sense of self-worth and issues of abandonment. As the youngest of four sons I had to watch as each of my older brothers left me to take on the world. With a very sensitive eye toward my mother my heart would break when I witnessed my older brothers stand in defiance towards her. I was her “Boogety Boo” and she was my “Momma G.” Everyone knew I was her favorite because I obeyed her wishes, listened to her cries, and leaned in for snuggles often. I was a very affectionate kid toward Mom from the jump and I am told by my oldest brother that in my early years I lived up to my namesake, “Mikey” from the LIFE cereal commercial. You remember the line, “Let Mikey try it.” Well, that was me. I loved life and I loved being with people. I used to love long road trips because it meant that my brothers would be forced into close quarters with me. I tagged along everywhere they went and I loved them deeply. As a Momma’s boy and with a love of people I naturally sought to be a peacemaker when times of chaos arose in my house. I still remember the night that my Mom and oldest brother Thom had a knock down, drag out fight in the parking lot of the Taber Apartments (my grandparents owned them in Vero Beach and we were there for the summer). I was unwilling to leave the fray of the fight, watching it unfold from the backseat, praying to a God I hoped was listening, all the while growing in my heart toward both of them. Then it happened, in a burst of rage my oldest brother shattered the front windshield with his foot. The events of the night from there were clouded by red and blue lights and Thom’s removal from the premises. While I was upset at Thom for opposing my Mom, I was broken-hearted that he had to leave. This strong desire to not lose people and to “rise up” to defend others and seek peace has made me a fiercely loyal husband to Lisa, and my upbringing around violence and screaming led me to a place in my journey with Jesus where I resolved, “door slamming and fist flying resolutions were never going to be a part of my children’s story.” As I sit here and type these words I wish that I had the testimony of my friend who said, “I never heard my father raise his voice.” That to me is the ideal. However, I am thankful that my kids will be able to testify, “Outside the 3 times that my father was fired by churches, he never once fought with my Mom, and even in those moments he never raised a hand to her or any of us, and he never displayed his anger through physical violence. He suffered great mental anguish around us, but he never bashed us, or Mom verbally, and he made every effort to resolve the hurts in his heart through channels of writing, retreating and praying.”
BIBLICAL PROCESSING: “You created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139:13-14). The importance of self-worth is something I am learning mightily in this season of life. With my concession that “I have bipolar” has come a deep-seated confidence that “I have a calling.” Prior to my concession to bipolar I found myself in the throes of depressive seasons wondering, “Am I even saved?” I know the danger of fraudulent faith as my own Mom’s testimony a few years before she died was, “Mike, I realize after watching Lisa and your life, that I was not saved” and that day she trusted Christ as her Lord and Savior. In her 60’s this woman of great worth in my eyes stood before thousands of witnesses at Bellevue Baptist Church and was baptized by Dr. Steve Gaines. I know the value of testing oneself to see whether or not you are in the faith. But with my bipolar concession and my recollection of the journeys of highs and lows I am able to not only see the presence of bipolarity, but also, the presence of Biblical faith and a clear calling on my life to be a pastor. When the Psalmist declared “You created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb” he is giving credence to the Divine nature of life, and the default nuances of it. God didn’t knit us together in a laboratory, he knit us together inside our mother’s womb. With a wife that graduated with a Biology PreMed degree and a teacher for over 15 years I have learned a deeper appreciation for the human body. When I learned that the hole in my heart and my third brother’s heart was not hereditary in nature I was amazed at the providential nature of God’s provision. Up to that point I was afraid that our sons might be born with the same holes that John and I had, his needing open heart surgery as a baby, me as a preteen. In all the testing and in the depth of my wife’s understanding I became aware of the fact that the holes in our heart were likely due to the psychiatric medications taken by my Mom during her and my father’s mental breakdowns between 1975-1977. The reason my brother’s defect was so pronounced was due to the closer proximity to the time of her prescriptions. Think about that. Because of my Mom’s medicines, our hearts were impacted. While this isn’t groundbreaking, we hear all the time of the effects of drugs on the children born to addicts, this is weighty in the world of understanding bipolar and other “defects” passed along hereditarily. While God knit me in his divine providence, he used my Mom and Dad’s faulty and flawed DNA. When people say that bipolar people aren’t broken I can’t help but think, “Yes, we are.” Just as mentally stable, physically strong people are broken too. We are all broken. Where I find my self-worth is in the fact that I am a child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made in His image. And when I surrender to Jesus as my Lord and Savior Ephesians 2:10 became a truth statement about me, “For we are His WORKMANSHIP created in Christ Jesus unto good works, that He has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” The word for workmanship is the Greek word, “poema.” Thus, every child of God is a “poem being penned by God and He know the twists and turns, the lessons taught and the lessons learned along the way, and He is working all things out for our good and His glory. Another word for workmanship is “masterpieces.” Praise God that He is in the business of taken broken pieces and turning them into Masterpieces, and when I hand my life over to Him, bipolar mind and all, I can experience the Master’s peace in my heart and life.
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