Review of the book All But Normal: Life on Victory Road
Disclosure: I have known
the Thornton family since the early 1970s, attending Twin Branch Bible Church
with them for years. While never experiencing first-hand the chaos of the
Thornton household, I was blessed by the personal lives of John and Bev
through the years, especially Bev's encouragement in my own ministry. I
was licensed to the Gospel Ministry at Twin Branch in 1997. This review was recently published on Examiner.com.
Growing up, Shawn Thornton had no
idea how God was going to use his chaotic home life to shape his future. The
story begins before he was born. His parents, John and Beverly Thornton, had
just begun to get acquainted when the seventeen year old son of well-to-do
parents agreed to take the girl of fourteen on an expedition to Goldblatt's in
the new Town and Country Shopping Center. John didn't see the truck as he
negotiated his new 1962 Corvair into Miracle Lane. He woke up in the hospital
later that evening, and his parents took him home. Bev would remain there quite
some time, at first in a coma, and then facing some grueling physical therapy.
John continued to see Bev, and even
picked her up for school when she was eventually able to return. However, beside
the obvious physical disabilities, Bev's mental state had been permanently
affected, and it was soon obvious she would have to drop out of school. John
decided to join the military, but corresponded with Bev while he was stationed
in Korea. They married when he was on leave in 1966.
After the honeymoon, John
was deployed to Vietnam, where he was when Shawn was born. (A brother, Troy,
would come later.) His term of duty ended in June of 1967, just before the
North's major escalation when the U.S. suffered its worst casualties.
But a war was already brewing at
home. After the accident, Bev was prone to outbursts of anger since the day she
awakened in the hospital. As the years progressed, her tirades escalated,
involving salvos of both physical objects and vulgar profanity. There were even
occasions when she tried to throw herself from the car at highway speeds.
However, as the back cover of Shawn's new memoir puts it, "this same woman was also a devoted Bible
reader, Sunday school teacher, and friend to the elderly, the poor, and the
marginalized wherever she went. How the same woman could be a saint one minute
and a nightmare the next was a constant source of frustration for the
family."
It all came to a head one night as
the police knocked at the door, and after a brief conversation, led Bev off in
handcuffs. In one of her fits of rage, she had thrown nearly every loose object
in the house, leaving broken glass everywhere. She would spend several weeks in
the hospital mental ward. While she was there, she did learn some techniques to
help calm herself, and John firmed up his commitment to do everything he could
to keep peace, enlisting his two sons to help as much as possible around the
house. Despite the changes, Bev was still prone to her outbursts.
As Shawn trained for the ministry,
he was becoming sure he understood his mother's problem. He was convinced it
had to be a problem with sin in her life she wouldn't let go of. During one
Christmas break during his junior year of college, he confronted her. "As
long as you have sin in your life like cussing and irrational anger, throwing
things and threatening to kill people, you will never be right! Never!"
[p.265]
At this point, his father burst into
the room. "If you think this approach is going to help your mother, you're
dumber than I thought you were. And you will never talk to your mother that way
again. It's time you got off your high horse. You are not going to fix her with
this stuff you're bringing back here. Now get out of here and never talk to her
that way again."
As Shawn walked up Victory Road
where they lived, he began to cool off, and started to change his tune.
"God impressed on me that the issue was not just the combative spirit in
which I approached her, it was that I was wrong," he
writes. "Confession and repentance would not 'cure' Mom. Her
problems were more complex than my simple formula." [p.266]
On another occasion, John shared
with Shawn some research he had been collecting over the years about
TBI—traumatic brain injury. At the time, this was a subject that was just
beginning to be understood. We know now from research on NFL players more about what such injuries can do. Shawn was
beginning to understand her mother's case was not a problem with willful sin,
but had a physical cause. This knowledge has served him well in his ministry as
senior pastor atCalvary
Community Church in Westlake Village, California, affecting the way he deals with people. Combined with his
experiences growing up, he is able to empathize and help people in a way he
wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
It is so easy for those of us who
call ourselves followers of Jesus, who try to order out lives by the words of
the Bible, to get on our "high horse" like Shawn did that December
day. We think we have it all figured out. But things are not always so simple
as we think. Shawn's story will hopefully speak volumes to those who read it.
The book has a Foreword by Joni
Eareckson Tada and an Afterword by Nick
Vujicic. Joni and Nick are both Christians
who have what seem devastating disabilities, but have been greatly used by God
to encourage others. Add Beverly Thornton to that list.
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