Spiritual – “How could a Christian do something like this? How can they read the Bible, hear teaching, go to Bible studies and then act like this? I don’t understand how this is happening!”

Anger:  Secular - "Why me? It's not fair!"

Spiritual – “I have given so much of my time and heart to this and now these so-called Christians have ruined it. How could you let this happen God? How can the church let these people do this? My blood pressure sky rockets everytime I think of them worshiping on Sunday and talking about me and others on Monday.”

Bargaining: Secular –  "I'll do anything, can't you stretch it out a few more years?"

Spiritual – “God I feel so guilty that I feel this in my heart. Maybe if I study harder, pray more and get deeper in the Word you will bring reconciliation and forgiveness. When I get better and do more for you I know you can make this better.”

Depression: Secular - "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"

Spiritual – Pretty much the same. I reached the point where I simply got tired of striving and trying so hard to feel better and make the situation better. And then, to quote the very non-spiritual Bill Murray character in Stripes, “depression set in”.

Acceptance – Secular – "It's going to be OK."

Spiritual – It took me a long time to get through the denial and a particularly long time to get through the anger stages. Does that make me a “bad Christian”? Maybe. But I am, at least, an honest one. I went full force into bargaining and doing all I could to become “godly man” so that this could get fixed. But there was one huge problem. That was all about my effort. I hated the depression stage most of all. It wasn’t the sleep on the couch and watch Judge Judy kind of depression. It was the very sad feeling that this was not really working and probably would not work. I still believed in Jesus but maybe the best there was to this existence was hanging on until heaven. I was still functioning but really tired and spiritually dry. That is when the message of the book TrueFaced poured the jolting bucket of grace over my parched soul. I was ready. Ready to believe that I could do nothing about my sin. Only God could. I began to understand my identity in Christ and how God saw me. I accepted who I was and I accepted that those other people were also flawed saints who sometimes sin (some more than others). And I began to heal.

I also realized that not everyone is ready in my tidy little Dave Burchett world to received this message. My friend wrote this in his note to me.