Bruce Leiter, 5161 Brant Ct., Hudsonville, MI 49426 (616-209-5078),
JobandJonah7@hotmail.com, offering First Rights for this article
A True Guideposts’ Autobiographical Story About Prayer by Bruce Leiter
Title: God Is My Shrink—Through Prayer!
We sat at the side of Keith’s hospital bed until he, our four-and-a-half-year-old
boy, breathed his last breath. I wept a little as he died.
My wife, Winnie, and I reminisced about the almost three years that Keith had
been sick with leukemia as we drove the Interstate two hours from Children’s Hospital in
Madison to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where we lived.
Winnie said through her tears, “He was a real trooper with that sparkle in his eyes
that charmed everyone. Remember when we were camping? Jim [our oldest boy]
brought back to our tent a friend. Keith’s medication was making him gain weight. But
as kids will do, that boy said to Keith, ‘Boy, you’re fat!’ I just cringed. However, Keith
showed off his eye-gleem, stuck out his tummy, and said, ‘Do you want to see real fat?’”
Keith’s funeral took place in the Kenosha Christian Reformed Church. All I
remember about his funeral is the procession of his little white casket and the song
“Amazing Grace!”
A few days later I went back to teaching, thinking that I was over my grief. Little
did I know.
Up to that point in my life, prayer was not a central part of my life. Of course, I
prayed for Keith’s recovery, which happened about 10% of the time with leukemia
patients in the early 1970s. However, my rebellion against God’s call to the ministry that
I felt strongly in the late 1950s on my father’s farmfield near Gurnee, Illinois, was my
obstacle against dependent prayer. I was like Jonah, who also ran away from God’s call.
However, God changed my heart by using Keith’s death to make me pray
persistently about what God wanted to do with my life, not just to think about what I
wanted to do with it.
That year was my last year in teaching because I did summer work selling World
Book. That winter the World Book manager offered me the district managership of
Kenosha County. For the first year and a half we became the top district in the
Wisconsin branch. The company had large plans for me, their rising star!
However, as I prayed for God’s leading, the teacher who considered an offer to
replace me as the district manager decided to remain in teaching. My sales continued
strong that year, but my “team” sold next to nothing. In my third year my sales fell like
the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6). My new branch manager came to observe my sales
demonstration after I went twenty-five demonstrations in a row without a sale and
declared, “It’s impossible for you to go twenty-five demos in a row without a sale!”
When my district’s sales had been high, I thought that God was going to answer
my prayers by making me a branch manager. The result, I thought, would be that we
could save up enough money to pay for seminary. But God had other plans by allowing
my sales “drought.”
In March, 1976, he began to answer my prayers for his leading. I was out on a
country road in western Kenosha County, when I was preoccupied by a lead someone had
just given me to a minister in a small church who needed a job. I came to a railroad
crossing, failed to stop for the stop sign, and let my front wheels pass over the second
rail. Immediately to the right of my station wagon was a freight-train locomotive roaring
at me at fifty miles an hour. My sudden instinct was to jam on the brakes and shift into
reverse. The car stalled on the tracks. My life was no longer in my hands. Of course, it
never really is.
Somehow my car crept inch-by-inch backward as the speeding deathtrap hurtled
across the crossing. I flinched at the rushing train, which missed my front bumper by
inches! Stunned, I sat there for several minutes and finally said to God, “You could have
easily taken me home, Father. Instead, there must be some mission for me here.”
Succeeding events showed God’s clear answer to that prayer. I announced to the
church leaders that I felt God’s leading to go back to school to be a pastor. One of the
elders replied, “I don’t know how that can happen, since you have a wife and three
children and won’t have a job.”
However, we couldn’t find a minister to preach on Mother’s Day. As a young
elder newly elected in January that year, I was appointed to read two prepared sermons
morning and evening. The congregation congratulated me afterwards. That same elder
then said, “Now I see how it will happen!”
When June arrived, we were planning in three weeks to go to Grand Rapids,
Michigan, where I would attend Calvin Seminary. Winnie secretly prayed a “Gideon’s
fleece” prayer (Judges 6) for the sale of our new house in Kenosha during those three
weeks to confirm God’s call to the ministry. However, the first week I experienced a
staph infection that swelled up my foot. I couldn’t work anyway. The result was that we
decided to leave the next week to look for a house in Grand Rapids.
It seemed impossible that Winnie’s prayer could be answered because the house
went on the market on Wednesday, wasn’t even going to be in the newspaper until that
Friday, and our departure for Grand Rapids was planned for the following Monday.
Winnie told God that she really didn’t mean that prayer, but God meant his response.
On Wednesday a realtor brought a young couple to look at our house, they came
back on Thursday, and the sale of our house was wrapped up on Friday. As a result,
Winnie said to God, “If you want us to make this leap of faith, you’re going to make it
happen. I’ll willingly follow.”
Our trip to Grand Rapids was successful in our discovery of a house that we both
immediately knew was the one that God wanted us to buy. My foot recovered and so did
my sales that summer after we made that running leap that God prompted.
Four busy years later, God enabled me to graduate as a pastor and to have peace,
for the first time, about my vocational choice—all through prayer. However, my prayer
journey centering on Keith’s death was not complete even yet. Let me explain.
During my senior year at seminary, I became tired. My doctor said that I wasn’t
getting enough exercise. However, vigorous walking did not stop that tiredness. During
my first six years in the ministry, my tiredness escalated into exhaustion and also resulted
in two severe anxiety attacks in April, 1986, when I was pastor of my second church in
Oak Harbor, Washington. I found out later that the tiredness and anxiety attacks were
symptoms of depression.
In the middle of one night, I awoke with severe pain shooting throughout my
chest. I dressed as every movement was a stab of pain. The ambulance ride twelve miles
to the Coupeville Hospital continued my extreme agony with every bump. After my
sleepless night of observation, the doctor recommended that I seek psychological help,
since the basis of my pain was not physical. I prayed for God’s answer but didn’t expect
his healing as well.
I found a psychiatrist who diagnosed me as manic-depressive (bipolar) and tried
to help me with lithium, which gave me the shakes. The upshot was that I finally flew to
Grand Rapids to enter PineRest Christian Mental Hospital, where they took me off of my
medication to see my symptoms.
I see now that, up to that point, my prayer life had been largely a matter of my
mind and will, not my emotions. God wanted me to pray emotionally as well. God’s
breach of my fortress of emotion began in therapy group, a situation in which two
therapists sit in circle with four or five patients. Each patient had to tell how they felt
during each session. When it was my turn, I couldn’t express how I felt. Mom had
taught me that big boys don’t cry, a very unhealthy teaching in my life.
At any rate, a therapist asked a particularly-empathetic patient to sit behind me
facing the same way with her hands on my shoulders. She expressed my emotions! “I’m
lonely here so far from my family! I’m angry at God for Keith’s death and for my
dysfunctional childhood family!” At that moment, God broke through my bottled-up
reservoir of emotion as my tears flowed down my cheeks. I took over, “Yeah, God, I’m
mad at you for allowing Keith to die! Why have you allowed me to retire from the
ministry for which you gave me a strong call? Why have you allowed all of the sad
events in my life?” The group offered me a tissue, but I refused it, since I felt that it
would stop the cleansing flood of tears. The bell to end our session rang, but I sat there
for several more minutes having it out with God, who, I felt, came closer to me even as I
expressed my anger at him!
A second kind of session was psychodrama, where patients volunteered to act out
scenes with people whom they had to confront after they went home. Toward the end of
my stay, I reluctantly volunteered to do psychodrama on the stage, which was one step up
from the floor. The first couple of scenes with patients playing people I had to confront
went well, but then the instructor said, “Now, you’re getting too cerebral. Clear the
stage. Bruce, just stand there. I stood leaning against the wall with my tears near the
surface. He broke the silence with the observation, “Bruce, you’re mad at God, aren’t
you?”
I immediately shouted at the ceiling, “Yeah, I’m mad at you, God!”
The middle-aged instructor asked, “Where is God right now, Bruce?”
I knew where he was and instantly answered, “He’s right here beside me!”
He asked in return, “What’s he doing?”
I shot back rapidly, “He’s hugging me!”
Stunned, the instructor asked patients to volunteer to represent God to me. Three
of them volunteered, hugged me, and said three times, “I love you....I love you....I love
you!” I sensed that it was God—my Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—the one true God
expressing his unconditional love to me through those three patients even as I railed at
him!
The instructor said as the session ended, “I’ve never experienced anything like
that drama in all my years of teaching psychodrama.”
Another one of God’s personal-prayer breakthroughs was the night I came to
chapter twelve of a book that the chaplain had given me about anger. The chapter’s title
was “Anger at God.” I could not finish reading that chapter before I shared my anger in
prayer to God with tears.
After those amazing experiences at PineRest, I continued my lamenting prayers
three or four times a week. At the same time, I would confess my self-centeredness in
wanting my plan instead of God’s plan for my life. After seven and a half months, my
depression left me. After one more month, God’s gift of the peace that transcends
understanding of Philippians chapter four came into my life on January 6, 1987. My
anger about the past was gone. God changed me through his power using my prayers to
enable me to accept God’s plan permitting those events in my life for my good!
Since those dramatic experiences, every time I get a little tired, I ask God what
I’m getting depressed about. Shortly, an idea will pop into my head, and I grieve and
confess in prayer until God gives me his peace again. Bruce Leiter.
Very Brief Biography: I became a Christian at 16 in a Baptist church before
joining the Christian Reformed Church. I was an English teacher eight years, a sales
manager three years, a pastor twenty-eight years.