When I reached out to Garrett in December 2021 to see if he would sit for a People of Communion interview, he was hesitant to do so because he felt like many people in our church knew enough about the goings on of his life circumstances that they didn’t need another story about it. But he eventually agreed, believing that sharing some personal and little-known elements of his story might be helpful to others as they also attempt to faithfully navigate life in times of difficulty. One of the ways Garrett has processed the recent heart-rending season of his life has been through writing, and some of it will be shared with the church here. Garrett and I collaborated over the last year to put this piece together. What follows is some of Garrett’s story and poetry that he wants to share with our church.
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more. | from “In Memoriam A.H.H.” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Garrett and Katie Johnson have been part of Communion Church since its planting in 2011. Garrett served as an elder for six of those years. A lot has happened in his life between 2011 and now but, for the sake of this project, we’re only going to look at a couple of recent years and how Garrett navigated that particularly difficult season of his life. Events in 2020 set a figurative landslide in motion that would alter the landscape of Garrett’s and Katie’s lives. It would result in, among other things, Garrett choosing to resign from eldership, Garrett and Katie stepping away from serving as licensed foster parents, and Garrett resigning from his engineering career of 14 years; all those changes in a six month span of 2021.
I sat with Garrett in his small woodworking shop one evening and listened as he talked through it all. We were surrounded by family photos, excerpts of poetry and literature, and other significant reminders of what is important to him hung upon doors and walls. I couldn’t miss the prominent display of the painting “Ship on Stormy Seas” by Ivan Aivazovsky. While we sat together, he reflected on the process of stepping into, serving in, and stepping out of foster care, eldership, and being a lead project engineer in the aerospace industry. The conversation was heavy, emotional, jarring, upsetting, and real. There were tears from speaker and listener.
Before we get into the big changes of 2021, here is some relevant background information: Garrett started his engineering career in 2007, and started working for a local aerospace company in 2010. Garrett was installed as an elder at Communion Church in early 2015. A few months later, Garrett and Katie brought a five-day-old baby boy, Titus (this is a pseudonym to protect his identity), home from a nearby hospital as their foster child. The Johnsons raised Titus as if he were one of their own until he was two and a half years old, when Titus’s biological dad gained legal custody of him. This was devastating to the Johnsons. It was during this time that Garrett started to receive counseling, working through deep grief for the first time. Over the next year, Garrett would start understanding and processing his deep grief of Titus leaving, which allowed him to deeply re-engage with his family. After Titus left their home, Garrett and his family eventually adjusted to a new normal, staying in touch with Titus and his dad on occasion. During that time, Garrett even felt like he eventually hit his “parenting stride,” something he profoundly struggled to do before then. Life wasn’t perfect, it never is, but it was harmonious and sustainable for Garrett.
This peaceful season was shaken in January 2020 when Katie’s brother, Jordan, died suddenly from a stroke at the age of 33. And later that year, dangerous events led to Titus re-entering foster care and coming back into Garrett and Katie’s home. This was the event that set in motion a series of decisions in 2021 that would take Garrett’s breath away.
When Titus came back to their home in late 2020 he was, as Garrett described him, “traumatized, disoriented, and in utter upheaval.” Titus was not doing well in school, he was volatile at home, and sometimes hurt Garrett and Katie’s daughters. His presence, understandably, dominated the environment of their home.
Katie poured herself into helping Titus during this time. She pursued legal assistance to represent Titus’s interest before the court. She wrote to social workers and their supervisors, to attorneys and judges involved in the case, trying to help them see the big picture of what Titus had been through since birth, and what she believed would be good for him. Katie worked with Titus’s school office, counselors, and teachers. She enrolled Titus in martial arts and supported him in it. She sought child therapists and state services. Katie was a fierce advocate for Titus, but all her efforts were, or at least seemed, fruitless. Garrett puts it this way, “Those were wasteland months. It was a relational wasteland in our house…Healthy rhythms at home were constantly upended by his presence…my parenting stride was destroyed.” It was a demoralizing time for Katie and Garrett. Hopes with respect to Titus seemed to be perpetually and painfully dashed.
By that time Garrett previously felt like he had found his niche in the eldership. He settled into his role not as a publicly-visible front man, but as one who quietly and faithfully served where he was needed in the background. He says, “I took great joy in it, I loved it, I found my place in the church and in the eldership. I felt like my most significant contribution was simply the example I set in how I navigated my life.”
Garrett had also recently been promoted to Lead Project Engineer at work, and went from leading his own projects to leading programs and a team of Project Engineers leading their own projects. Garrett was good at his job. He had a combination of “technical acumen and people skills” that made him an effective leader at work. He could do, teach, and mentor.
As early 2021 ground along with Titus and related chaos in his home, Garrett’s mental capacity, emotional capacity, physical energy, and health began to quickly deteriorate. What was needed of him in all the realms of his life at that time was more than he had to give.
Understandably, these personal realities started to affect him more and more at work. While at work, his mind often wandered to Titus and his case, church matters, and things at home. And when he went home at the end of each work day, he was stressed out, and in what he called “survival mode”, simply doing what was necessary to get through each day. Garrett could see the health of his family relationships withering. Garrett recognized that his life’s loves were deeply suffering as a direct result of bad decisions that someone else had made. The implications were rocking his home and his world. The cascading effects of that brokenness, which were out of Garrett’s control, seemed to be destroying everyone and everything that was important to Garrett. His anger smoldered within, eating him alive from the inside out.
Big change was brewing. Garrett found himself figuratively looking around, taking stock of his life, relationships, and priorities. He didn’t think he could go on much longer like that, but he didn’t know what to do. For weeks Garrett agonized over options. And in January 2021, Garrett told Jim and Andrew during an elders meeting that he thought he should step down as an elder because he no longer had the capacity to shepherd the church well. He felt hardly able to shepherd his family while working full time. Jim and Andrew agreed. Garrett wept in their presence. His life circumstances were changing so quickly. It scared him to death.
Garrett went away by himself for a weekend to write his eldership resignation letter, and to process life’s difficulties and changes. Here is his letter to the church from the time and the email message the elders sent to the church. And as so often happens, God provided unexpected help in a difficult time. While away that weekend, Garrett had an experience that was as profound to him as it was unexpected. He said this:
The weekend I got away by myself to write my resignation letter, I happened to pick up an Elizabeth Barrett Browning book; she was a poet and the wife of Robert Browning, who wrote the poem that inspired Stephen King to write the Dark Tower series, one of my favorites book series. Incidentally, the Dark Tower series had actually helped me understand Titus’s dad better, among other things. I had just finished the seventh and final book in that series in early 2021 when Titus lived with us. Anyway, the first thing in the E.B.B. book was a poem about deep, deep grief. The language it used was expressive, beautifully terrible, and clearly written by someone who knew about grief. I was struck by it. There were things written in there about which, for the first time, I thought, ‘Yes, that’s it! Or a piece of it, anyways! That’s exactly how I feel, but have never known how to say!’ That was the first time that poetry ever resonated with me.
Garrett got a glimpse of a new way to process and express deep emotions. And he had a lot to process: leaving the eldership, stepping away from shepherding people he loved. There was no doubt it was the right decision, but it hurt a lot. And it filled him with uncertainty. His role in the church was changing. What was next, aside from doing his best at home and at work? He didn’t have answers.
Garrett continued to throw himself into family life and work life. On the home front, things were turbulent. At work, a big program Garrett was leading was increasing in scope, complexity, and challenges. He and his team of limited resources were struggling to stay ahead. Garrett knew what needed to be done on the program, but he didn’t have the time or the team sufficiently resourced to overcome the issues. Everyone at work was understaffed and overloaded at that time; he and his team just had to do their best.
The wasteland months continued through the winter and spring of 2021, and into that summer. Even with the load of eldership removed from Garrett’s shoulders, he eventually recognized that he still didn’t have the capacity to healthfully engage with everything that was going on with Titus, his own family, and his work. Garrett was not growing any family relationships. Forward progress, as far as he saw it, was stopped. He and the family were simply surviving the impacts of beloved, traumatized, distressed, and difficult Titus being in their home. Their family rhythms at that time would not be sustainable.
In the summer of 2021, the state informed Garrett and Katie that Titus would return to his biological father’s home and custody. In spite of the Johnson’s objections, the court planned a summer-long transition from their home to his dad’s home. Transitioning a child from one home into another home, whether to a biological family or not, is always incredibly difficult, confusing, and distressing to children. It is hardest on them, but it creates an immense burden on their caretakers, too. Garrett and Katie knew that their family could not survive three months of Titus transitioning back into his father’s home. They had experienced the reality of transition with Titus in the fall/winter of 2017/2018, when Titus originally left their home. It had been brutal and traumatizing.
As we sat together in Garrett’s shop, talking about Titus’s situation at the time, he said, “We had zero power or influence in Titus’s case. Our only power in the situation, as it related to our family, was our choice to be involved as a foster family. In July 2021 I told the state that our family would not survive a summer-long transition, and that they had a week to come up with a different plan for Titus, because we couldn’t keep him any longer than that. I had no idea where he would go when he left our home. It was during this time that I had to accept that Titus’s good was completely out of my hands, that it wasn’t being pursued by the state, and that I had different responsibilities to my wife and daughters than I did to Titus, even though he had been as a son to me all those years. This was the odious decision that I had, for years, dreaded, and begged God to save me from having to make. But there it was. The decision needed to be made, nobody else could make it, and I believed that God equipped me to make it for my family.” Garrett made the decision, and it tore his heart to shreds.
After Titus left the Johnson’s home for the second time, in the summer of 2021, Garrett became simply focused on his own family and his vocation. The number of people and concerns warranting and receiving his attention were necessarily continuing to shrink, as much as he hated it.
In the weeks following Titus’s departure from the Johnson’s home, the difficulties, constraints and roadblocks on Garrett’s program at work reached a crescendo. There was a particularly painful day at work which was, in Garrett’s words, “Without a doubt the hardest, most humbling day of my engineering career.” Sparing details, Garrett simply stated that he recognized on that painful day that he didn’t have what it took to do what was needed at work and stay mentally, physically, and relationally healthy. It was going to be one or the other: stay at the company and get the job done to the detriment of his health and family, or stay present for his family to the detriment of work. He chose the latter, and decided that he would resign from his career, despite its unprecedented (to him) and enormously counterintuitive nature, not knowing what was next. He just knew that if he stayed at the company and did what was needed on the program, his family relationships were not going to make it. So, Garrett resigned two weeks later.
Garrett has a keen sense of duty and responsibility, and it has a mighty influence on how he navigates life and interacts with others. His decision to leave the company was onerous to him, because he knew it would mean leaving his team at the height of their difficulties. He knew and deeply cared for his team. He had worked for their good and wanted their good. But he knew that his leaving would make their already difficult jobs more difficult. He also knew that the health and survival of his relationship with his wife and daughters were more important than those of his team at work. His priorities to his family relationships exceeded those of his work relationships. Of leaving his company and his team in the midst of the height of difficulty and need at work, Garrett simply said, shaking his head and looking at the ground, “It was excruciating.” He knew it was ultimately the right, faithful, decision, but it further pummeled his already tattered heart.
Through it all, Garrett said he was never angry at God. He trusted God, because he knew God’s character, as described and shown in the Bible. But he had no idea what was next. It all happened so fast. Massive changes in family, church life, and work. “Years in the building; weeks in the undoing,” is the way Garrett put it. These challenges didn’t just change things, they affected Garrett to his core. He grieved. He questioned. He struggled. He cried out. He shook his head in bewilderment. His faith was seriously challenged. Think of psalms that question God and lamentations that grieve over loss. That was Garrett’s mindset through all this. And it still is, to some degree.
The decisions Garrett made in 2021 were difficult to make and implement, and their significance, combined with the relative swiftness with which they occurred, confounded Garrett. But God led Garrett to and through that uncomfortable and disorienting time for a reason.
Shortly after Garrett resigned from his career, Katie stepped back into the career she had before she and Garrett had kids. She went back to work full-time as a nurse in the ICU of a major hospital. She is thriving there and doing well. Garrett has been the stay-at-home parent since the fall of 2021, and is the teacher of his three daughters in their blended instruction regimen, something that he never envisioned his role being, and one which he never pursued. But it is clear that, for now at least, it is where he needs to be.
Garrett’s faith and identity were not in his work, not in his role as a foster parent, not in church leadership, and not in career success. Already, long before these challenges, he had established his identity in Christ through the gospel. He could go through those “painful changes without experiencing a hit to my worth or value.” The decisions that needed to be made had been clear, and he made them. Though why they happened, or what God was or is doing through them, has been, and continues to be, unclear. But for Garrett some things are crystal clear:
God’s character, embodied on the cross.
His identity, not in his roles, but in Christ’s imputed righteousness
The foundation of his faith, laid ahead of time.
The Lord’s Prayer, the backbone of his prayers.
He can trust God in the throes of a spiritual struggle.
He can write this lament…
Lacrimosa
I.
I’m near to collapse. My spirit is bowed.
What now is a burden once was a load
That I supported, along with the rest
Of these blessed loves I bear in my chest;
Not by my own strength, but what He supplied,
He guided my steps and I hit my stride.
I finally felt like I knew my place
Among all God’s fam’ly, running this race.
The roles that I’m in bring joy to my heart;
I’m honored to fill them and play my part.
And God’s sov’reign hand, in this, is displayed,
‘Cause not on my own would I have obeyed
A call to step in to all this entails;
To sail on these waters, and in these storm gales.
II.
But then the earth shifted, and dread became real.
Shock waves racked through pyroclastic flow.
Pain cried out, gasped, then roared into rage.
Righteous anger roiled downhill,
Gained momentum and
Became a lahar.
Heat, fire,
and fury.
Hatred.
Indignation
and contempt.
Rivers that once ran peaceful,
Turned turbid harbingers of destruction.
Ash choked and darkened in the hot wind.
Hopes were scorched, uprooted, and carried downstream.
Obliteration and chaos. The landscape was forever altered.
III.
“This can’t go on.” Me, with soundless short breath.
Change must be made, and it scares me to death.
Because it’d be aimed so near to my heart—
in for Whom I work, for what, and wherefore—
I ache to be spared the ghastly thing’s start.
“My God, I don’t know what to prepare for.”
(“…a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away…”)
A choice will be made if I like it or not.
Proactive? Passive? It here, differs naught,
As both will result in ends, that’s assured;
But only one can, through time, be endured.
For, choosing no change will bring the demise
Of all that I love, and this I’d despise.
But if I do choose one love to let go,
The rest, from ruin’d, be spared by that blow.
But all will be touched, all that I hold dear:
Ev’ry person, ev’ry role, ev’ry peer.
At this grim surety I weep, and I groan.
“Will in this release, faithfulness, I disown?”
The answer’s not “yes” when reason’s applied,
But still, in my hands, my wet face I hide.
I wish that this choice were not mine to make;
Hearts will be broken for my choice’s sake.
Onerous to me is what I must do;
“God, I’m in anguish! I’m tearing in two!”
There’s no happy way out of this;
Ahead are loss and pain.
The throes of keeping first things first
Pit heart against the brain.
I undertook risk, high stakes at great cost,
Now, all of a sudden, I’m feeling lost.
You said a grain will bear much fruit
When it falls to the earth and dies.
So, from this ground soaked by my eyes,
Reap bounty from this seed, minute.
IV.
Relinquishing that which we rightly hold dear,
When it keeps our loves ordered faithfully
In line with God’s Word, perhaps painfully:
A bold act of trust is belief sincere,
When after much prayer the decision’s clear.
“Lord, with them and me, please deal graciously.”
Daunting, at times, to head and heart marry.
Releasing our hold on what God calls good,
And up until now that we’ve understood
Has been ours to love, steward and carry
Can feel unnatural, wrong, and scary.
“I’ll do [blank] no more. O, would that I could!”
It’s hard to look a love in the eyes
The moment you let it go.
God, give us the means to act upon truth.
Protect us from drowning in Second Guess,
And please cause good to emerge from this mess.
Your ways, which aren’t ours, can seem so uncouth;
Our myriad fears and doubts may you soothe.
On you may we stand, and into you press.
V.
Three times in six months, I chose to lay down
A part that I knew, and joyfully held;
Each like an old fir, sent crashing, when felled.
I relinquished roles I rightly held dear:
Shepherding, fostering, lead engineer.
O God, would you save me from vainly wept tears? | Garrett Johnson
