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Have you ever heard of a whammy? Basically, a whammy is something that happens to a person that is powerfully negative and highly unpleasant—like an unexpected blow to the side of the head.
How about a double whammy? Have you heard that phrase before? Yes, a double whammy is two whammies that occur together like on the same day receiving a bill for taxes and a letter from the city informing you that you owe $8K for a street assessment in your neighborhood.
Today we will look at the dreaded Triple Whammy that crushes the spirit of many people who have turned their backs on God. What are the ingredients in a Triple Whammy? Keep on reading below about the life of Emily and you will find out. . . .
Emily Johnson grew up in a Christian home. It was more than a nominally Christian home. It was one where Jesus was experienced not as a religion but as a personal God one could know and love. Every night, her parents prayed with her, read Bible stories, and sang songs to Jesus with her. Her father prayed with her to receive Jesus when she was quite young.
The family was happy. The parents loved each other deeply and their children were treasures in their eyes, gifts from God. The Spirit of the Holy God lived in their hearts.
Yet, they were imperfect. They still bore residues from the Tragic Fall and their fallen parents and grandparents and great grandparents.
Emily’s parents, Sam and Deb Johnson, had one concern about their beautiful daughter: she was an anxious little girl. She feared storms and was extremely shy in social situations. It was almost as if she had social anxiety at the age of four. Her parents took steps to protect her from overstimulating anxiety-triggering stimuli. They assumed that Emily’s fears were a passing developmental stage and that their daughter would soon grow out of her fears.
There was one thing that Emily’s parents did not know and could not know, namely, that Satan had planted a lie in their little girl’s heart. The enemy of God inserts a lie into every child’s heart when they are young—maybe even when they are in the womb. Possibly, the lie is a predictable part of the hard-wired legacy trickling down to all the descendants of the fallen Adam and Eve.
The lie planted inside Emily was that she had to be good to be loved. We’ll encounter the dark impact of that lie later.
As Emily grew up, she attended youth group regularly, went to summer camp, traveled on several mission trips and summer-long projects where she was challenged to grow and share her faith with others. Her family and those who knew her experienced Emily as a good girl who loved God. She was a stellar example to her siblings and everyone around her.
Some of her peers saw her as extremely naïve, innocent. A babe in the woods.
No one knew it, but dark clouds were boiling over the horizon of Emily’s life even as a fifteen-year-old. Being a good girl and naïve to a fault were liabilities that would progress from hairline fractures to massive fissures one day.
At seventeen, Emily certainly knew a lot about Jesus, but on some deep level, she never surrendered to Him. As noted, she was, however, committed to being a good girl. Moral. Compliant. Her parents directly but mostly indirectly taught and modeled for Emily the value of being nice to everyone. They did not fully understand the difference between being nice as opposed to loving. Something both in Emily’s DNA as well as in her parents’ DNA believed that being nice and good were synonymous with love.
The problem with teaching a child to be nice is that she grows up to be soft in a hard world. This softness would later impact Emily in extreme ways. She would not develop the boundaries necessary in a world where people often cross lines to get what they want even if there is a No Trespassing sign displayed–but especially if none exists.
Henry Cloud and John Townsend write in their book, Boundaries, When parents teach children that setting boundaries or saying no is bad [not nice], they are teaching them that others can do with them as they wish. They are sending their children defenseless into a world that contains much evil. Evil in the form of controlling, manipulative, and exploitative people. Evil in the form of temptations ~ P.52
The authors go on to mention that to be safe in an evil world, children must have the power to set verbal boundaries with others like, I disagree with you, or My answer is no, or I don’t want to do that, or Leave me alone.
Cloud and Townsend assert that when parents teach their children that saying no is bad (don’t hurt anyone or make them angry), they are raising their child to be compliant. Emily’s parents would never have knowingly taught their daughter to be compliant. They would never have sent their daughter into the world without the protective armor of boundaries and assertiveness.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what they did. By modeling for their daughter the art of niceness (never hurting or disappointing someone–something they erroneously viewed as a Christian virtue on the same level as love), Emily’s parents sent her into battle without armor or weapons.
Remember, Satan planted the lie inside of Emily’s soul that she had to be good to be loved. Her parents unknowingly colluded with that lie by communicating that to be a proper Christian she had to be nice to everyone.
Compliant people have fuzzy and indistinct boundaries; they “melt” into the demands and needs of other people, Cloud and Townsend say. They can’t stand alone, distinct from people who want something from them. . . . They minimize their differences with others so as to not rock the boat. Compliants are chameleons. After a while it’s hard to distinguish them from their environment.
The authors go on to say that not only does compliancy prevent someone like Emily from refusing evil, it also prevents her from recognizing evil. Many compliant people realize too late that they’re in a dangerous or abusive relationship. Their spiritual and emotional radar is broken; they have no ability to guard their hearts (Prov. 4:23) ~ p. 53.
Why didn’t Emily’s parents know the difference between niceness and love? Why didn’t they teach their daughter healthy boundaries? Part of the reason was that Emily’s father, Sam, grew up in a home with a rageaholic mother. Living in a minefield where he never knew how his angry parent was going to react, Sam soon discovered that being nice was the best way to avoid frightening consequences.
If Sam ever set boundaries with his mother by challenging her opinion or saying no to her, she would explode and verbally slash her son until he was emotionally annihilated. How much easier it was for Sam to be a compliant, good son.
Emily’s mother, Deb, on the other hand, grew up with parents who simply did not communicate via emotions or touch. For some reason, these were not languages that the Webster family spoke. They leaned more toward being stoic people who withdrew to their fortresses when the emotions of others threatened their fragile psychological integrity. When people outside the family hugged a Wester, it was like embracing a board.
The unspoken family rules were to be nice and to not be emotional because emotions were perceived as dangerous by the members of the Webster clan. So, even though there was deep love in the hearts of every family member, the expression of that love was muted, as it were.
Since neither of Deb’s parents experienced emotional intimacy in their family of origin, they did not know how to pass that closeness on to their daughter. So it was that Deb, sadly, did not know how to be emotionally present and comforting for her little Emily who had a very sensitive spirit and needed lots of love.
Few members of the Webster family had accessed the art of emotional intimacy in the last two centuries. They were nice people but unknowable beyond a certain level. Hidden.
The hiddenness continued into the Johnson family. No one ever knew Sam and Deb’s hearts; and Sam and Deb never really knew the hearts of others. When emotions cannot be tolerated, intimacy is off the table.
In summary, the coping skills Deb and Sam developed to survive their childhood did little to prepare their own daughter for the world. Sam modeled for Emily that the best way to deal with others was to be nice so as to avoid rage and shame while Deb unknowingly passed down to yet another generation the Webster pattern of avoiding emotional closeness.
When Emily left home and went to college, she was vulnerable. No one saw this vulnerability—at least not in her family system. Possibly not even Emily herself. Emily was hungry for emotional presence from a mother figure and bereft of boundaries to protect herself against men or women who might use her for their selfish wants during her quest for love.
The combination of hunger and squishy boundaries was a bad combination for this good, innocent girl.
A new friend at college introduced Emily to alcohol within weeks after her arrival at the university. Unknown to her, Emily was born with a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction–another vulnerability for the young woman in the fallen world.
After her first drink of liquor, Emily knew immediately that alcohol was what she had been missing all her life. She did not recognize it in the moment—maybe she would not allow the thought to rise to the level of conscious awareness—but she was instantly addicted. The liquid comforter made her feel so good—even warm inside. It was as if someone was holding her internally.
Tragically, alcohol abuse plus the party scene that Emily soon was invited into made her vulnerable to men who were at minimum, selfish, and at maximum, evil. Not long after she began mixing Vodka with men in a type of unholy union, she found herself in multiple sexual relationships that lasted only weeks at a time. Eventually, she was raped by someone she had trusted.
The good girl was now sullied. The innocence was gone. Emily felt guilty, dirty, confused, and bad. She believed that her parents–who had chosen at a young age to never drink alcohol and who had never had premarital sex—would be ashamed and angry with her. She could never tell them about the sinful path she had chosen.
So, Emily drank more and even tried different drugs to escape her deep sense of shame.
Emily found herself trapped in a terrible new world. She could never return to the previous world of innocence and niceness and godliness. It was no longer an option for her. She had blown hundreds of stop signs and burned the bridge with her past self.
At the same time, she hated the crushing feelings of guilt and shame that had become the new normal in the new world. What was she to do? Her identity of innocence was lost forever only to be replaced by an ugly self who wanted to forget yesterday every morning.
For a brief season, Emily attempted to pull back from the friends who had invited her into the dark world of addiction and unbridled passion. She even spent the summer on a mission trip where she rededicated her life to Jesus and made one last attempt to regain her good identity.
A few years later, she graduated from college and found herself separated from all her Christian friends. Suddenly, she felt extremely alone, lost, and depressed. It was not long before she was pursuing new ways to fill the emptiness within her heart and to numb the shame.
Emily slowly drifted away from Jesus altogether because of internal dissonance. She could not maintain a relationship with her husband, as it were, and cheat on Him at the same time with other people. Someone had to go. Jesus was the one she divorced.
Years passed and Emily’s path through the new world she had chosen at seventeen brought her increasing pain and shame. She was bitter with her parents for not fully embracing her choices; she was angry with those who had promised her intimacy but then abandoned her; she despised herself because she could not return to the old world of her childhood. At the same time, she was experiencing increasing depression and rejection in her new world.
What was she to do? She seemed to have only one option—to remain in her current state that looked darker by the day.
Deep inside her jaded heart, God began to speak to Emily. Maybe His words were louder than a whisper, but all the other clamoring voices in her head reduced His to a barely audible voice.
Never to be frustrated, God began to draw Emily to Himself, calling her to repentance, to come to her senses, to come back to the God she had been taught about as a child and seemed to know for a while in college. But . . .
Here is where Emily ran into the Triple Whammy—the three lies that held her hostage in the trap of Satan (2 Timothy 2:26). The first lie that reverberated in her head was that she was unlovable.
After everything I’ve done, she thought, how can I ever be the good girl again that my parents loved so much? Here is where the ancient childhood lie that had been planted in her soul raised its ugly head and reminded Emily that if she was good, she would be loved. But if she was bad or did bad things, she would then be unlovable. Since she had been doing bad things for years, there was no doubt that she was now unequivocally unlovable.
The second lie was that others were unloving.
Emily had rewritten her past reality and had come to believe that her parents and her old Christian friends had never loved her back in the old world. Not really. They were judgmental people who wanted to control her and would only allow her to be around them if she was the good girl. Their apparent love was only conditional acceptance. If she was vulnerable to them now, they would just look at her down their long righteous noses and curtly tell her that she was on the road to hell.
Emily did not know that much of her perceived judgment from others was her own projected condemnation that lived inside of her judging her constantly. Satan poured gas on that fire day and night.
The final spoke in the wheel of the triple whammy was that she had gone too far down the wrong path. It was too late for her to turn back. Long ago she had crossed the point of no return. It was far too late for her to quit the path she had been hiking on for so long.
How about you? Do you feel like it is too late for you, or does someone you love believe that about himself or herself? Do you believe that you are unlovable and that others will not love you and that it is too late to turn back? Do you think you have out-sinned God’s love? Is the triple lie so loud in your mind that God’s voice is almost undiscernible?
In the middle of the Triple Whammy, there is good news. In God’s economy, it’s not about the bad things you’ve done or the good things you didn’t do. No, never. It’s about turning away from the darkness and running toward the throne of God where you will receive mercy and grace.
Do you remember what Designer Therapy for Life has said in earlier blogposts? It’s not about do, do, do. It’s about DONE! Jesus has already paid the price for your rebellion and sin and is knocking on the door of your heart to invite Him in so you can receive the Good News of salvation.
Yes, there is bad news in the Good News. Humans do rebel against God and exchange Him for idols that are no gods at all.
Jeremiah 2:13, 21, 22 say, For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. . . . Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God; the fear of me is not in you . . . I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine? . . . The stain of your guilt is still before me.
But there is also great news in the Good News of the gospel.
Jeremiah goes on to say in 29:11ff, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you . . . and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Apparently, the Triple Whammy is not eternally binding on you in God’s eyes—only in the eyes of the evil one who strives to convince you that you are separated from your Creator forever. So, come back to God. He will rip off the three chains wrapped around your soul and set you free. He will remind you that you are loved and that you may freely return to Him. No questions asked.
I suppose you could settle for the Triple Whammy that tells you that you are unlovable, and that no one can or will love you, and that you have sinned far past the grace of God. There are many who do, sadly.
But why settle for that depressing reality when you can run to Jesus and receive His Triple Promise that you have died with Christ so your sins are forgiven; that you have been raised with Christ so that you have access to the throne room of heaven; and that on the day when Christ appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory ~ Colossians 3:1-4.
Lost child, return to the One who made you, justified you, and has prepared a place for you in His home. He will wash away all your sins. As Corrie Ten Boom said, God takes our sins—the past, present, and future, and dumps them in the sea and puts up a sign that says, NO FISHING ALLOWED.
Parents, be sure that you do not teach your children to be nice, lacking in boundaries against the evil one and the temptations that writhe in this fallen world and in their own fallen hearts. Raise them to know that God did not create them to please other people. And parents, remember that you are loved right where you’re at and that no mistake you made, through commission or omission, is beyond repair in God’s kingdom. But–choose to grow, even if you’re 89 years old.
As a believer in Jesus, it is all about growth. Don’t ever settle for less. Remember 2 Corinthians 3:18.
Model for your children the love of God that hates evil and says no to the enemy hunter who seeks to ensnare humans and take them captive to do his will. There is no love in being nice—just an avoidance of anger and conflict and a tolerance of other humans. To tolerate is to put up with someone. To love is to be willing to die for someone even though they be your enemy.
So, have wise eyes to identify the Triple Whammy in your life or in the lives of others around you. Remember that if you believe this threefold lie that crawls up from the pit of hell, you will fight to defend your position of sin because there is no other position you can inhabit in the universe. There is no going back and no going forward. You are stuck in the quicksand of sin and darkness and must embrace it as your identity (unless you turn your back on sin and step into God’s Light).
Anyone who brings news of your sin and God’s love, you will hate. The messenger of these truths will be shot.
Instead, embrace the love that hates sin but loves the sinner; the love that flows out of the experience of first being loved by the heavenly Father with an unconditional love that is never contingent on us being good enough for Him.
Return, child. Return to the One who died for your sin and lives to be your defense attorney forever.
Jesus crushes every whammy to smithereens and replaces it with joy.
But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ ~ Ephesians 2:4,5
The Son of Man . . . a friend of . . . sinners ~ Luke 7:34
And Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, since he is also a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost’ ~ Luke 18:10