The Double Cure

Chad Bird is one of the last people you would expect—especially within Christian circles—to write a self-help book. 

His life travels too many miles in the wrong direction for some readers. The plot twists of his story include adultery and divorce. The course turns for the worse before it gets better, takes a downward spiral staircase instead of climbing the ladder of upward mobility, and forsakes what looks like spiritual riches for what smells like filthy rags.

Thankfully, Bird didn’t write a self-help book—he wrote a “God helps those who can’t help themselves” book. Last year’s Night Driving refreshes as much as it rattles. With a pious picture of himself shattered and little left to lose, Bird literally drives straight into the dark night of the soul—only to find the darkness lasts much longer than a night. 

The disgraced preacher takes to the road as a trucker, and readers ride shotgun while he alternately flees from God on the highway and searches for God at every rest stop, only to realize God has been in the cab the whole time. 

A welcome change from much that calls itself Christian literature, the book acknowledges just how amazing grace is—and how slippery it can be between our fingers. Bird’s song sounds like redemption, but takes longer than is comfortable for the chords to resolve. He sings much of his verse in an “I’ve been everywhere, man” baritone á la Johnny Cash, but occasionally finds notes that float in a hopeful Jeff Buckley tenor.

I winced through certain passages, yet Night Driving felt like kneeling before a stream, cupping water in my hands and cooling my chapped lips. Turning the last page, my palms opened and my spirit whispered, “More like this, please.”

Rejecting the Spiritual Placebo

In journalism school, we studied the formulae most lifestyle magazines stamp across their covers. Take a number, combine it with an action and a body part, and you have checkout-stand gold. Ten exercises for firmer abs. Twenty-five ways to shape your legs. 

Throw in the word “secret” and you’re printing money. Five secrets to hotter sex. Hollywood stars reveal their secrets for turning back the clock.

As both a creator and consumer in the Christian marketplace, I fear we haven’t deviated far enough from that formula. We wouldn’t word our texts quite the same way, but many of them boil down to the same fashion-is-passion equations. Ten exercises for firmer doctrine. Seven sins to avoid on the way to marital holiness. Five secret prayers God will always answer.

Breaking the Christian life down into numbers and action verbs, into direct, digestible language, isn’t inherently wrong. We need imperatives and ideas we can wrap our heads and hands around. 

The trouble comes when we hope in our ability to follow the steps. Our orientation toward action and outcome waters down spiritual steeps, creating slip-slide slopes toward false gospels and half-truths. 

Bird’s book flies in the face of all that. He offers no easy answers or algebraic equations. He makes assurances, but not the variety that immediately inspire or bring relief. His promises sound hard but good: 

You’ll try to outrun God, but you can’t. 
The wounds of a friend bring healing. 
You really do have to die to yourself to reside in the kingdom.

“Christianity has far too many voices that would have us believe in a God that doesn’t wound us,” Bird writes. “. . . But the hands that wound us—they themselves bear the stigmata of grace.” 

We need voices and stories like these. More books like Night Driving, more songs and poems reminding us that green pastures, still waters, and the valley of the shadow of death are part of the same psalm. 

Pleading for a Grace That Saves and Keeps

Flimsy gospels make grace only a means when grace is also an end. Left to ourselves, we easily operate as if grace saves us, but our works keep us. God is big enough to redeem, but we need to take matters into our own hands, thank you very much.

When we see the full spectrum of grace—as the means and the end—we won’t run ahead of it or fear a false stride. We can feel safe even as we grapple with God.

“There’s a time for Hallelujahs, and there’s a time for ‘Where the hell are you, God?’” Bird writes in Night Driving. 

Nothing less than the full gospel abides sentiments like these, or stays cool when we sweat and seethe and doubt. Nothing but the true gospel allows us to endure the dark night of the soul, knowing it is a way station on the road to something better—and that God is administering mercy all the while. 

Gospels of behavior modification leave us looking pretty, but rotting on the inside.

Prosperity gospels bankrupt our hope. 

Gospels leading to license are only as good as the pleasures they afford. 

Gospels built on works stop working the minute we do.

As Bird reminds us, nothing but the gospel of “I keep getting what I don’t deserve” can last. 

“To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another,” poet Christian Wiman wrote. “What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates.”

I crave that integration too. Like David, I want a united heart. I long for a life in which grace resides not in the past or in the future, but animates the present and binds all my chapters to each other.

I want grace that moves my feet and settles my soul. I want to speak grace like a language that explains me to myself, yet marvel at my inability to express the goodness of the gift. 

I need eyes that see grace as the thread that holds everything together, ears that hear grace as a song I can’t get out of my head. Grace, the reason I can show my face in the morning; grace, the reason I can sleep sweet at night.

Chad Bird chased integration through Night Driving—and he’d be the first to say it caught up to him.  

One of my favorite hymns pleads with the water and the blood which poured from Jesus’ body on the cross: “Be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure.”

Reading Bird and knowing what little I do of life, it seems right to turn the phrase ever so slightly toward grace. Be the double cure, the means and the end. Save and sustain. Wreck me and repair me. Rescue us from our natural selves, yet make us more like ourselves than we’ve ever been. 

In all our night driving, grace is the truck and the wheels, the road and the destination, everything all at once.