Glen Campbell Is In Heaven
How faith
and prayer saved their marriage—and his life.
Glen
Campbell is gone to Heaven, but his songs will stay with us. My favorites is
Try A Little Kindness
Here are his
many successes: http://theboot.com/top-glen-campbell-songs/
by Kim
and Glen CampbellFrom 
- Posted on Oct 15, 2014
- Posted on Oct 15, 2014
Glen: In 1981 I met Kimberly Woollen
in New York City while I was there performing in concert. She was beautiful and
I was smitten instantly. I didn’t know it then, but in little more than a year
I would marry Kim.
Kim: I guess they’re right when they
say love is blind. I was 22 when I met Glen, and naive. I had been living in
New York for two years, working as a dancer at Radio City Music Hall.
I was proud
of my career yet rarely a moment went by when I wasn’t terribly homesick for my
family back in North Carolina. “Lord,” I prayed, “please send me a nice
southern gentleman to take me away from it all!” Then I met Glen.
I knew after
our first date that Glen drank. And I found out later that he sometimes used
cocaine. This bothered me, but Glen promised he would quit.
As I said, I
was in love, and I thought I could change him. Plus, Glen told me he was a
Christian, and I’d seen him pray. I believed that settling down into a marriage
would make his problems go away.
Glen: It was during the 1970s that I
had begun using cocaine, and I became addicted almost immediately. This may sound
strange, but the worse my drinking and drugging became, the more I prayed and
studied the Bible.
Some would
say I was a hypocrite, and I guess I couldn’t blame them. But I felt like a
drowning man grasping for a life preserver. Somehow I knew there was only one
way out of the mess I had made of my life. I was searching for that truth to
save me.
I grew up in
a Christian home back in Delight, Ark. Even though Daddy and Mama got us to
church regularly, I had never been baptized. So in December of 1981, about a
year before Kim and I were married, we flew to Arkansas, where I asked my
brother Lindell, a Church of Christ preacher, to baptize us.
It was
freezing cold, four days before Christmas, but I wanted to be baptized like the
Christians of old—fully immersed. I stripped down to my blue jeans and waded
into Saline Creek, my childhood swimming hole.
Once, when I
was two, I fell into a slough and nearly drowned. It was Lindell who
resuscitated me on the muddy red bank.
When the
baptism was over, Kim and I sat in Lindell’s truck, shivering under a mound of
blankets as I sang “Oh Happy Day.” I couldn’t help thinking back to when
Lindell had saved my life as a little boy. Now, so many years later, I was
hoping to be saved again.
Kim: God had indeed sent me a
southern gentleman. I never knew a kinder man or better father than Glen—when
he was sober. When he drank there was no telling what kind of mood he might be
in.
I did all
the things a spouse in my situation usually does. I tried to keep liquor out of
the house. I stopped drinking, though I had never had a problem with it.
I made Glen
promise to stop. He would too, for periods of time, just to prove he could do
it. Then it would start again with a glass of wine at dinner or a beer on the
golf course.
I was angry
and frustrated. Why wasn’t God answering my prayers? Glen and I had joined the
North Phoenix Baptist Church when we got married, and I learned to lean on my
church family for support. I asked for prayers whenever Glen was drinking, though
he didn’t know that.
He would
have been embarrassed because he has a great deal of pride. Old friends of
Glen’s used to say, “You’ll never get him to quit drinking, Kim.” But I had
come a long way since I had first met Glen, and now I understood that I could
never change him.
I was as
powerless over my husband’s drinking as he was. Only God had the power to
change my husband.
Glen: I had promised Kim that cocaine
would not be part of our marriage. I tried and prayed, but I didn’t keep that
promise. One night shortly after our first child, Cal, was born, some musician
friends were in town, and I stayed up till dawn doing cocaine with them.
When I got
home Kim was heartbroken and furious, and I was afraid she was going to take
Cal and leave. I can’t say I would have blamed her but I think it would have
torn my heart out.
As I had
done so many times before, I begged the Lord to deliver me. I don’t understand
why, but that day it was as if Jesus reached down and pulled my hand back from
the cocaine. I never touched the drug again.
Kim: When Glen stopped using cocaine
it showed me what God could do. Okay, Lord. We’ll take this one step at
a time. Glen’s drinking continued, and got worse in fact. I kept
praying, especially for my faith to remain strong and to trust in God’s
timetable.
I’m not
saying I didn’t get angry when Glen drank. Once, he stayed late at the country
club, playing cards after a round of golf. I couldn’t get through to him on the
phone, and dinner was burned.
Outraged, I
scooped up our daughter Ashley Noel, who was still in diapers, got in the car
and headed for the club. I stormed into the Men’s Grill, where women were not
allowed, and there was Glen with a drink in his hand.
I couldn’t
believe that this was the same man who stood beside me in church on Sunday and
sang praise so beautifully! I went up to him and thrust Ashley into his arms.
While everyone was laughing and cooing over Ashley, I burst into sobs and
locked myself in the rest room. Glen came home pronto.
Sometimes
Glen mixed sleeping pills with liquor. I stayed awake all night listening to
his breathing to make sure it didn’t stop. Those were long terrifying nights
when I asked the Lord to sit up with me.
Sometimes
Glen didn’t even make it to bed; I would find him passed out in the bathtub.
People kept telling me he was never going to change, but to say that is to deny
Jesus’ power to transform lives.
I was
stubborn. Glen was too good a man to give up on. He read his Bible nearly every
day. I knew there was spiritual warfare going on inside my husband.
Glen: I used to argue with my pastor
about how much wine they drank in the Bible. “Jesus turned water into wine,”
I’d remind him.
He’d look at
me, shake his head and say, “Glen, when you can change water into wine, then
maybe you can drink it.”
One day Kim
handed me a cassette tape and left me alone to listen to it. She had recorded
me while I was drunk, so drunk I didn’t remember her doing it. Lord, is
that what I sound like? I told Kim never to record me like that again.
Even so, she did—twice.
I was more
embarrassed than angry. Every time she saw me pick up a drink she burst into
tears. My guilt was eating me alive.
In August of
1986 I was in Hawaii for concerts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. After
one of the shows I went out for drinks with friends. I don’t know that I had
any more to drink than usual, but the next morning I awoke with just about the
worst hangover of my life.
The sun was
streaming through the curtains, and it was all I could do to roll out of bed
and get on my knees. “Lord,” I prayed, “get me off this stuff. Help me find a
way.”
This time I
wanted to surrender everything to Christ—my pain, my drinking, my whole life.
Again, I don’t understand the mystery of why he chose that moment to save
me—but he reached into my life and took up the burden.
Kim: Glen is flesh-and-blood proof
that God can change a life. Throughout those troubled years, my faith grew by
leaps and bounds; for the first time in my life I got my relationship with God
right. When that happened, everything else fell into place.
Glen: When God lifted my obsession
for alcohol it was as if he raised the curtain on a whole new life. He changed
me in ways I never could have changed myself, and that is the key. Kim and I
have a real marriage now, an honest marriage.
Today I
truly have a peace “which passeth all understanding.” I really don’t understand
it. But I thank the Lord all the time. I am a man richly blessed, despite
myself. For all that God has given me, there is nothing for which I am more
thankful than Kim.
I recently
recorded a song called “The Boy in Me.” The chorus starts, “Oh, Jesus, bring
back the boy in me.” The song reminds me of sweet times back in Arkansas, when
life was hard but simple.
I was never
happier than when I was with my daddy. Daddy’s been dead a while now, but I feel
as if I’ve found a Father again. He is in heaven and I am his boy.
Did you
enjoy this story? Subscribe to Guideposts magazine.
Comments
Post a Comment