The seven-year-old was gripping his bed sheet like his life depended on it. The failure he experienced nearly every single day was much worse on this particular morning. He needed to lie still and keep quiet. Maybe no one would ever know what he had done during the night, another failure that would put on display the fact that he was really broken. Broken beyond fixing. Normal people didn’t wet the bed. No one else in his family had the problem. But today it was worse than that. He thought he could hide the mess, but he could not camouflage the smell.

Mom was the first to notice the stench when she opened the bedroom door. She shooed his brother out of the room and told him to be quiet. Then she left to run a bath. That was when dad looked in, and the little boy’s life was changed forever as a wave of shame crashed into his heart. Dad never said a word, but his eyes did. Seven-year-old Craig thought his dad was wondering what was wrong with his third son…

I felt broken. Devastated in a way I had never felt before. It was bad enough that my pee-stained sheets hung outside on the line every day. A white flag with yellow suns signifying that a broken kid lived in the house. The rubber sheet beneath my sheet reminded me without words that I was a loser.

Fifty–five years later, God brought healing to my little boy’s heart.

Ten years before this, I had a revelation that showed me my mom was not hanging my sheets outside to embarrass me; she was serving me, not shaming me. But my little-boy heart did not comprehend that truth for years, choosing instead to live my life based on a lie.

The bigger lie, however, the one that impacted so many desperate decisions was the one I believed about my daddy’s eyes that day while I hung onto my sheets. God chose to make known to me the truth. My dad was thirty-seven at the time, and the look in his eyes, which I thought was casting judgment upon me, cutting me off from his love, was, in fact, eyes of affection from a man not knowing what to do to help his son.

Sure, maybe a few words would have changed everything, but how do you speak when you don’t have the language? What do you say when you don’t have the words? He chose silence instead of scorn, which was a blessing. But, as it turns out, the silence spoke just as loud to my broken heart.

I am so incredibly grateful that God woke me last fall in the middle of the night just to tell me that my father loved me—he just did not know what to do. He never had a son who slept so soundly that he could not hear the signal from his bladder until after he was thirteen.

I knew that my dad loved me later in life, but we never talked about what happened that day. He passed away peacefully as me and my family prayed over him. I thought we were good. God knew I needed to know a little bit more so I could understand some of the lies I had depended on. This is a healing I will never forget.

I am so incredibly grateful for a Savior who loves me so much.

God is invested in healing your heart much more than performing some behavior modification trick. Seek Him. He loves you that much.

‍