Circuitry

On memory, movement, and the beliefs we inherit before we know they are ours

“There is a power in letting go … guess I didn’t want to let you know.” — Brandon Flowers, Between Me and You

The baggage carousel sat still. Empty. Its metal plates fitted together so tightly you couldn’t see how they would ever move. I remembered, when I was small, trying to climb onto one — the plates expanding around the curve, contracting on the straightaway. No matter how I positioned my hand, the gap never caught my skin.

The absence of injury made me wonder: Had some small mercy been built into the machine?

I was picking up my dad from his first trip in months. He had spent his adult life in Christian ministry, moving through crowds to deliver messages to strangers in faraway places.

He had started missing connections, forgetting to check the notifications on the terminal monitor and on his phone, sitting at an empty gate, the plane boarding elsewhere and leaving without him.

His performance on this trip — about a two-hour flight east — had been painful. Or so I’d been told. He could still tell old stories vivid enough to hold a room. But he repeated them. The intervals between repetitions were getting shorter.

I hadn’t checked his flight before I left. His plane was late. Another sign that I was in fog, too.

Mediation. Splitting up assets. A parenting plan that needed drafting.

I collapsed into a faux black leather chair beside the carousel and pulled out my phone.

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An article appeared in my Google feed. It was about grip strength. Researchers had found that people in the early years of psychosis often showed weaker grip strength and lower well-being.

The interesting part wasn’t the hand but the circuitry behind it — the motor system, the cingulate, the cerebellum, the brain’s network of self and memory.

The systems governing the hand were tied to the ones that kept a person oriented.

Train one, and you might train the other.

Grip strength wasn’t a symptom. It was a window. The hand mapped onto the mind.

I read the article twice.

I looked down at my hands.

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How was grip strength measured? What counted as strong? I didn’t know. Only that it could be tested. Given a number. Placed against a range.

Faith was harder to isolate. It passed through memory, language, family, fear, longing, and love before I ever knew to call it belief.

I thought I was mostly finished with the religious world of miracles and prophecy I had known as a child. But the past was being pulled into the light. Clergy sexual abuse. Coverups. Labor exploitation. Financial misconduct. Failed accountability. Old stories that refused to stay buried.

Men once believed holy were exposed. Desperate. Finished.

Their followers had believed their words for decades. The words had gone into them — into who they married, how they raised their kids, what they did on Sunday mornings. Now the words were not true.

What had been real?

What had been fabricated?

How could they know?

Several of the ministers involved had been close friends and ministry associates of my father. He promoted their ministries from the stage and in his books.

They turned the Good News into a siren song.

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Last week, I listened to an interview with Sue, a woman who said Bob Jones had sexually violated her during prayer.

Jones was not marginal in the charismatic world. He was treated as a prophet of unusual authority, one of the men around whom whole communities learned to hear God.

Sue described an atmosphere of sympathy around Jones and indifference toward her. People wanted him restored. She became the burden.

Her story, told more than thirty years later, undermined the official account: that Jones’s misconduct had been a single “bad slip,” confined to one incident involving a woman and her minor daughter.

I stopped listening for a second.

What?

I thought everyone knew Bob had additional victims.

I did.

How did I know that?

Then, a memory.

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Christmas break, 1996. Mike Bickle’s living room in Kansas City. Four or five years after Jones’s clergy sexual abuse had been found out.

My father, Bickle, and Paul Cain were talking about whether MorningStar, an East Coast charismatic hub, was returning Jones to ministry too soon.

Cain and Bickle were treated as men of unusual spiritual authority. Both would later admit to secret sexual misconduct that, by their own accounts, was already underway at the time.

My father occupied a different role. He was helping bring prophecy into the evangelical mainstream, lending theological credibility to a world many Christians would otherwise have dismissed.

Bickle casually mentioned what I understood to be a confrontation with Jones about the two known victims.

He said Jones had admitted there had been “more.”

How many others fit inside that word: more?

No one asked.

The conversation moved on.

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Later, scenes like that made it impossible to separate the faith that formed me from the men who had made it plausible, or from the beliefs that gave them authority.

Belief was a force. To reduce it to conscious choice seemed absurd. Much of therapy, after all, was built around uncovering beliefs people didn’t know they had — beliefs that shaped how they saw everything.

They weren’t chosen.

They were just there.

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A man who believes he’s not worth much doesn’t decide that one day.

Maybe he was battered. Maybe neglected. Maybe he learned to feel valuable only when he performed. Maybe worthlessness was simply the most coherent message childhood gave him.

No one had to say it. Children are always reading the room. They learn what keeps them safe, what costs them love, what earns attention, what makes the air change. Over time, the messages become a story. The story becomes an identity.

The man doesn’t think of it as belief because he never chose it. He just moves through the world that way — second-guessing himself, assuming the worst, reading everything through it.

It feels true. He calls it reality. It shapes his life.

If belief takes hold through parents, environment, repetition, the language you were given before you knew what any of it meant, how much of it was really yours?

If you didn’t choose the belief, can you really call it faith?

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At baggage claim, I kept watching the escalator beneath the “DO NOT ENTER” sign where passengers descended from upstairs.

Fluorescent light bounced off the pale terrazzo floor while daylight poured through the side windows, turning the room into glare and reflection.

People came down one after another, briefly visible between shoulders and rolling bags before disappearing into the waiting crowd. I kept searching for him anyway.

The grief came at an angle. Not only because he was fading. Because the part of him I had spent my life pressing against was fading too.

As a child, I watched him field the most difficult theological questions without fear, sometimes before crowds. Pastors who seemed certain in the pulpit became students in private. I learned early that words, given enough weight, could change the faces of grown men. I didn’t know how it worked.

It just seemed like he knew that he knew.

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Once, on a road trip, I declared that I had followed Reformed theology to a troubling conclusion:

God created evil.

If God exercised sovereignty over everything, it only made sense that evil led back to him.

If Adam and Eve hadn’t put the serpent in the garden, who did?

And if the serpent was Satan, who knit Lucifer together in his celestial womb?

“You don’t want to be a hyper-Calvinist,” he said.

A warning. Not an answer. I kept pressing.

Eventually he offered something more complex about the inability of any one theological system to contain God.

That was how we bonded: through high-stakes metaphysical ambushes I improvised from the passenger seat.

I doubt he received the same benefits from the sparring that I did.

Those days had ended.

I looked back toward the security opening.

Still, no him.

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The study on grip strength gave me something concrete to latch onto.

I found an online calculator. Entered my weight, my age. Pull-ups. Dead hang time. Rounded up. Made sure the mistakes were in my favor. Rough conversions appeared. Probably off. Close enough.

The ranges put me somewhere near the upper end. But who cared? A much larger world was waiting to be explored.

The study was a data point. A node in a larger network. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of other connections had to exist between muscle and mind.

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I had been walking for hours at night to burn off worry. Head down. Eyes slightly to the right. Arms tucked into my sides, shielding my chest.

A therapist had told me that the foundation behind EMDR had been discovered that way.

On a walk.

A psychologist noticed her thoughts shifting as her eyes moved back and forth across a path. Later it became a treatment: bilateral stimulation, guiding the eyes from side to side while recalling difficult experiences, as if the movement itself helped the mind process what it couldn’t otherwise resolve.

I had taken that and run with it.

The more I read, the more my walking looked like the problem. The walk was the rumination.

So at 49, I re-trained myself to walk.

I picked a point in the distance and held it. Shoulders back. Arms loose at my sides.

I set a timer. One minute. One minute of doing it right. Eyes up. Relax everything that didn’t need to be working. Let the arms swing. Breathe. If I clenched up during the minute, I’d scan for any tension in my body, let it go, return my gaze to the horizon and keep moving.

A minute turned into two, then three, then five.

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Boxing drills kept appearing in the research. Footwork. Balance. Distance. Breath. The position of the hands. The movement of the head. Heel, hip, shoulder, fist. Drift too much, the movement falls apart.

I was staying in a condo in downtown Memphis while the details of separation were being worked out. The building had a gym on the first floor — dry sauna, pool, weight room, punching bag.

I pulled up a YouTube video on the right cross. Feet set. Guard up. Right heel lifting. Hip turning first. Shoulder following. The fist arriving last.

I tried it slowly.

Then harder.

The bag bounced back.

Pain shot through my wrist. I pulled my hand back and flexed it.

My youngest daughter, then eleven, was trying to figure out how the treadmill worked and it was making me nervous. I called her over and showed her the video. Told her to watch the hip. Told her to mind the wrist.

She watched once. Then again. Then she tried it.

Heel up. Hip turned. Arm loose until the last moment.

Had it down cold.

That night, in the living room of the condo, we were getting ready to watch a movie. The Mississippi moved outside the windows, dark and wide below us. I thought about the punch again. I got curious.

I offered her my shoulder.

Her fist landed so hard I couldn’t swallow the curse before it came out.

The bruise lasted for days.

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I had been told the official division of a household was imminent. This week. Next month. Any day now.

The end of liminality was only that matter of ink on a soon-to-be-produced signature page.

The dates moved. The pressure didn’t. A mediation failed, partly, I suspect, because two lawyers needed to leave early that day.

My practical strain remained: delayed medical procedures, parenting schedules, money I could not reach, decisions about a house we had just purchased still hanging over everything.

So I walked.

Often during the day, along the downtown riverfront, following a route I had worn into myself. I took the dog down toward the water and let her run. Then I put in music and matched my steps to it.

Past basketball courts. Past parks where children sat in strollers. Past gardens arranged against the city’s concrete edges.

Always beside the Mississippi, its chocolate-colored water churned with an indifference that was oddly comforting.

But a few days after the bungled mediation, I went to bed late and woke up at 4 a.m., panicked. I couldn’t see a good way out. Only suffering without end.

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Fear leaves no room for anything but itself.

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The idea of shifting my mindset felt exhausting. That muscle was worn out. But the body had become less metaphor than lever. So I went to the floor.

I didn’t have to move much. Enough to roll out of bed. Enough to get face down, staring at magnified dirt and dog hair on the hardwood.

Eyes up. Shoulders back. Breath steady.

Thirty seconds, I told myself. I stared at a spot a few feet in front of me, keeping my spine straight as I pressed into a full plank.

Two and a half minutes passed. I hadn’t expected that. The plank didn’t solve anything. The house was still unresolved. The money was still unreachable. The mediation was still a mess. I still questioned how anyone could earn a law degree without knowing how to use a calculator.

But when I came down, my attention had moved.

Not away from the problem.

Toward the girls.

They didn’t want to move.

I reached out to their mother, so we could find a way to soften the blow.

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Airports are places to kill time, not experience it. But certain moments, if left unattended, sneak up on you.

People gathered around the baggage carousel. Reunions began in fragments. Couples hugged, briefly mistaking each other for arrival, before remembering the bags had not come. Everyone kept waiting: for the orange light, the warning beep, the first metallic squeak of the plates beginning to move.

Suitcase wheels clicked over the seams in the floor. The black rubber flaps at the mouth of the carousel hung still.

I searched the crowd near the escalator. He moved slowly. Back hunched. A degree or two more every few months. He could take a while.

The waiting opened into something else. My prayers had scattered. When I opened the Bible, I let the pages fall where they wanted.

My eyes kept being pulled to a couple of verses in Ecclesiastes — the runt of the wisdom literature, the book that almost didn’t make it into the canon, the book whose legitimacy rabbis debated for centuries because they couldn’t reconcile it with scripture’s other consolations.

“I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” — 3:10-11

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The version of Christianity I knew rewarded black-and-white thought. It couldn’t handle color.

The Baptists had the Book. The Reformed had the System. The Charismatics had the Voice. NAR had the Power.

Different forms. Same promise.

Answers for every existential ache. Order for the chaos of contradiction. Dominion to overpower the helplessness of being human.

The illusion of resolution in exchange for the appearance of righteousness.

Might as well be offering the world.

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The past was never quite what I remembered. The future never turned out like I thought. Only the present was close enough to touch.

I lived inside a story where I felt like the main character. I wasn’t. A story I sometimes mistook for a plot — a plot whose contours appeared in slivers when I wasn’t looking.

It had an ending, and it went on forever.

That was the burden. That was the beauty.

Face it.

Or bury it.

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The orange light finally flashed. The warning beep sounded for ten seconds. Somewhere beneath the belt, metal squealed against metal. Then the rubber flaps opened and the bags began pushing through.

He emerged from the crowd wearing the old stage smile, the one that made him seem younger for a second, still in command of himself and the room.

Then he came closer, his eyes testing the terminal as if it had become unfamiliar.

“Thanks for picking me up,” he said.

“How was the trip?” I asked.

He said he thought it had gone well. The amount of the honorarium would be the true test.

I watched the metal plates for his black Samsonite — scuffed and scraped, its hard shell marked with pale scars from years of being battered in the bellies of jets. Somehow it had survived.

When it came around, I lifted it from the belt. The suitcase was heavier than it looked.

We rolled it past the construction toward the parking garage, through orange light, temporary barriers, and concrete dust. At the exit, I lowered the window and fed the ticket into the machine.

While the gate arm lifted, he thanked me again.

I remembered being seventeen in Texas and pulling up late to the curb at DFW. He stood in the Texas heat after an international flight, shirt damp, face tight with exhaustion, landing in what felt like hell. He gave me a stern lecture about what travel did to a body, then later apologized.

Now he was apologizing for not driving himself.

There had been a few ordeals, he admitted. Forgetting where he had parked.

He thanked me again.

And again.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

I almost got irritated. I thought about correcting him. Thought about it some more.

Why interrupt this cycle?

He wasn’t only forgetting what had he said moments earlier, but also what prompted it — the recognition that someone cared enough to show up, wait for him, and take him home.

He was losing what made gratitude possible.

Then finding it again.

Like something new.