“After ignoring months of warning signs, I suddenly could not get out of bed,” Terry Looper writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.
Terry was thirty-six years old.
“It felt like the oxygen had been turned off in my brain, making it impossible for me to even lift my head from the pillow,” he recalls. “This was more than just a physical sensation. It was emotional, spiritual, and mental. A shutdown on every level.”
Terry was a hard-charger. An overachiever.
“I’d accomplished almost everything I set my mind to,” he writes. “Not by brilliance, but by determination, country ingenuity, and a knack for sales.”
“That is, until my overloaded neurons short-circuited,” Terry explains. “Then everything slammed to a halt and went blank, and I was brought to my knees. . . My predominant feeling was that my brain had quit—just like that—and I was having a nervous breakdown.
“Fear and dread taunted me,” he remembers. “What if this was permanent? What if I hadn’t simply run out of gas but had pushed myself to the point that my internal machinery had worn out—with no hope of repair?”
Terry remembers being scared for himself and his family.
“I had no one to blame but myself. I insisted on speeding ahead, ignoring every limit, listening only to myself.”
2: Terry had embraced the mindset of the final rule of competition: “You cannot quit until you cannot walk at all.”
“But at what cost?” he reflects.
His bedroom was pitch-black. Terry’s wife, Doris, kept the door closed and the curtains shut.
“A frantic Doris called my sister to come over on that fateful Saturday,” he notes. “They talked through whether to proceed with the next day’s plans,” Terry notes, “when I was scheduled to be ordained as an elder at our church.”
“They also discussed what no wife imagines: Which mental-health facility to choose.”
3: Later that morning, Terry managed to crawl out of bed. Feeling “more scared than I’d ever been,” he knelt beside his bed and cried out, “Lord, I can’t go on like this. I’ve done a miserable job of trying to run my life by myself. You need to take control, because I’ve screwed everything up.”
Looking back on the events of that day, Terry reflects on being “a guy who was less than twenty-four hours from being installed in a leadership position in my church—barely knew Him at all.”
Explaining his views at the time, “I’d never doubted that He was Creator and Ruler of the universe; I just hadn’t wanted Him to be my God because I had a god already: Money.”
Terry sees himself in the rich young ruler from Mark 10, who said, “Jesus, I’ve followed Your commandments my whole life—never murdered, stolen, or defrauded anyone” (vv. 19–20, Terry’s paraphrase) but was unwilling to become a real disciple because, as John Piper described, his ‘fist [was] clenched around his wealth.’
It was clear to Terry that his way of doing things had failed.
“Now that I’d caught my money-god and courted my mistresses,” he observes—acceptance, people pleasing, achievement—I found myself facedown on the floor of my blacked-out bedroom, taunted by the harsh reality that I’d stood my ladder of success against the wrong wall, and that wall had collapsed.
“I’d made a wreck of my life,” he recalls. “A complete crash and burn. It was the worst day I’d ever known.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where in my life am I pushing past limits I know I shouldn’t ignore?
Action: Identify one area where you need to slow down, reset, or ask for help—and take one step toward doing it today.
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