Early 1991 –

Christmas was over now, the new year was about to begin, and I was a year older.  I was studying the words of Jesus and asking the Lord to answer many of the tough questions with which I had always grappled but had never taken the time to truly seek answers for.  Now I had the time.  Of course, one of the questions that still occupied my thoughts frequently was, “How long, oh Lord?  How long will I have to stay in prison?”

With my appeal now in the hands of the judges, Tammy Faye was hoping and praying for a speedy release.  I was not quite so optimistic.  One of us was about to be proved right.

January 1991 was the beginning of one of my worst downhill slides into one of the worst periods of depression I had known since coming to prison.  Although I had encouraged my family to stay away at Christmas, I missed them horribly.  Despite being surrounded by hundreds of fellow prisoners, I felt alone and abandoned.  It was not my family’s fault that I spent Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and my birthday alone.  Yet it was the first Christmas of my life that I had not celebrated with my family.  It was the first time I had not been with my family on my birthday.  My emotions took a nosedive.

Adding to my depression was the news from Charleston, South Carolina, that I had lost another legal battle and I learned that I would not be receiving “good time” for the work I did in prison on a smoking cessation class.  This was huge to me because “good time” could help you get out of prison sooner.

I did not want to do anything.  I did not want to eat, drink, shave, or bathe.  I began to allow myself to become more and more disheveled and unkempt, making little to no effort to clean up.  I began to grow a beard, not because I thought it would enhance my appearance, but because I no longer cared about my appearance.  Always known as a fastidious dresser – even in prison I wore sharply pressed clothes, with crisp creases in my shirts and pants – my clothes now went unpressed and often unwashed.  With my hair uncombed, my body unwashed, and stubble covering my face, I looked like a homeless person.  Friends and foes alike who were accustomed to seeing me on the set of PTL well dressed with every hair in place would have had difficulty recognizing me.

I was in the pits.

Surprisingly, at a time when I was at a low point in my prison experience, having lost all hope of ever getting out soon, I received one letter after another exhorting me to keep trusting God and to keep believing that He would bring me out of prison much earlier than I anticipated.  As always, their words were a tremendous encouragement to me, and their rich spiritual insights were extremely helpful.  Nevertheless, I could not overcome the desire to simply give up and die.

In a letter I received from Tammy Faye near the end of January, she included a list on which members of our congregation in Florida routinely wrote down their prayer requests, asking for the other members of the church to pray for them.  On the last Sunday morning of January, there among all the other requests on the list, in his own handwriting, was the name “Jay Bakker.”  Beside his name in the prayer request column, Jamie had printed only two words:  My Dad.

When I saw the unadorned prayer request of my boy, I burst into tears.

Looking back, I can see where God always had something to keep me going when all hope was seemingly gone.  This time was no different.

Hansel’s words (and the Spirit of God through them) were insistent.

We cannot overcome loneliness by trying to escape it.  We must lean into it, and thereby transform it into solitude.*  We must not just keep trying to avoid the loneliness by constant distraction.  He is here.  He is here.  He is here.  We must push through the loneliness to joy.

Tim Hansel taught me how to turn my loneliness into solitude with God.  What a difference!  “Loneliness,” says Tim, “parches our lips for the living God, makes us hungry for His presence.  I learned that:

Loneliness is feeling alone.  Solitude is being alone.  Loneliness feels frantic.  Solitude is still and focused.  Loneliness focuses on external circumstances.  Solitude focuses on the inner adventure.  Loneliness relies on what others think and say about you.  Solitude relies on what God says about you and to you.**

At this point in my life Through the Wilderness of Loneliness impacted me second only to the Bible.  No other book has been more useful to me.  The transformation did not come quickly or easily for me.  I still felt as though I had not heard from God in several years.

In early 1980, I had sinned seriously, but when I repented and sought God’s forgiveness, I knew He was there.  I knew He forgave me, whether other people chose to believe that or not, or whether they chose to forgive me or not.  God continued to use my life and seemed to bless everything I set out to do in His name.  The ministry kept getting bigger and bigger.  Then, after the disclosure of my sin and my subsequent departure from PTL, nothing I tried to do in God’s name bore any fruit.  Nothing worked.  I tried to start another television program in Charlotte.  It didn’t work.  I tried to begin again in Florida; that also soon fell apart.  Everything I tried turned to dung.

What do you do when God doesn’t hear you? Where does a person go who feels that God doesn’t want him anymore?

Even though God had blessed me so much in the past, I began to think, Is there no hope for me?  Were my detractors correct?  I relived the words of my accusers almost every day.***  I thought, Well, maybe my sins were too awful.  Maybe I hurt other people and the kingdom of God so badly that my sins were beyond God’s willingness to forgive me.

The words Tammy and I had said so many times at the close of our television programs, “God loves you; He really does!” now haunted me.

Finally, as I read Hansel’s book, I felt like there might be hope.  I renewed my cries to God.  “God, please talk to me! Show me something, anything, just please let me know that You care, and that You haven’t given up on me.”

*Do you avoid being alone?  Are you comfortable spending the day with just you (and Jesus)?

** What has Jesus said to you in your times of solitude with Him?

*** What is the spiritual principle behind Matthew 12:37 “by your words you are justified, and by your words you are condemned?”