The Magpie

When I was in fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mr. Constantine.  He was a stubby, red-headed man with a thick mustache.  The other teachers called him the “Old Red Fox” and he taught shop and science.  He also happened to be the “D” hall teacher.  “D” hall was short for “detention”, but in our eyes it was synonymous with “hell”…which made Mr. Constantine the Devil.

I can’t remember what my crime was that sent me to hell on this particular occasion (seems I experienced a few trips to hell and back as a fifth grader as I recall).  It was probably something like running in the hall or being late to come in from recess or chewing gum in class – me coloring outside of the boundaries as I was prone to do.  Whatever it was, I was sentenced to a brief stay with Satan in hell.

I don’t remember all of the times I went to hell (“D” hall), but this one stands out to me.  For whatever reason, Satan wanted to make me pay so he ordered me, “Mr. Wilcox, go up to the blackboard.”  I got up from my chair and stood at the blackboard in front of 8 or 9 other of my fellow hell-mates.  “Mr. Wilcox, do you know what a magpie is?”  I stood there glossy eyed, sweating, feeling like if I didn’t get this right I was going to spend eternity there with the Devil.

     “Uh…isn’t that like…a crow?” I muttered.

     “Yes, Mr. Wilcox.  A magpie is like a crow.  And YOU are a magpie.”

     “I’m…a magpie?”  I didn’t understand.

     “I want you to write on the blackboard, ‘I am a magpie’ one-hundred times.”

And so I did.

I read this to my wife and she replies, “Oh my gosh!  That really happened?  That’s AWFUL!”  Yes, it really happened.  My fifth grade teacher labeled me a magpie and humiliated me in front of my classmates.  That event required counseling in my later years and Mr. Constantine definitely showed up on my “resentments” list when I did my 4th step of recovery.

My mid-life crisis was serious.  Flash forward 30 years or so and I find myself married to the most wonderful, beautiful woman in the world (truly, my best friend), four beautiful daughters, a good job, a good church, great friends, a house in the suburbs, some money in the bank – everything looked great on the outside.  But on the inside and in my secret, personal life, I was drowning in addictions, fear, anxiety and shame…and virtually no one knew.  Sure, there were signs and the tensions were mounting in my marriage due to my excessive drinking habits and bouts with pornography, but those were just the symptoms of a deeper disease and even other, much worse behaviors.  Inside, I believed awful things about myself.  On the outside, I worked 24/7 to keep up the façade that all was good with Tony Wilcox, but on the inside I believed I was bad.  A magpie.

Things came crashing down in 2012 and the beginning of 2013 and I was forced to deal with my addictive behaviors or suffer losing my wife, my family, my business, my health…even my life.  I sought out help for the addictions and found a place that definitely got me headed in the right direction and probably saved my life.  It started me on a path of emotional and spiritual health.  It was during this time that I met Dr. Gunther Reiss, a lecturer with Loma Linda University Medical Center.  It was in one of his lectures that I had my moment of clarity.

Dr. Reiss was lecturing about “self-talk” and how our behaviors are products of our beliefs about ourselves.  He was discussing how our self-talk reveals our true beliefs and asking us to share what our own “self-talk” sounded like.  In the middle of all of this, I asked him…

“So what do I do if, for my entire life, my self-talk has been bad?  Inside, I believe I’m a piece of crap.”  I asked.

“Do you really believe that you’re bad?”  Dr. Reiss responded.

“Well, no, but some of my behaviors would prove differently.  I don’t know.”

“Let me ask you a question.  Where do you think you came from?”

“I believe I was created, by God.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes, I do. Absolutely.”

“What do you believe God thinks of you?”

“I believe he loves me.”

“Really?  What makes you think that?”

“He sent his Son to die for me.  I believe his love for me is that great.”

“OK then.  So here’s my question; If you really believe that God created you and that he loves you that much…WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THAT YOU CAN TELL GOD HE CREATED A PIECE OF CRAP?”

The room was silent.  God’s spirit welled up inside of me and confirmed that he DOES love me and that I am NOT bad.  I cried and from that moment on, I understood at the deepest level that my behaviors do not define me anymore.  It was a moment of clarity like no other.

Now, I’m not blaming my behaviors on teachers like Mr. Constantine or my parents or anyone else.  I made the decisions that led me to my crisis and I take responsibility for my actions and behaviors.  I believe we have an enemy that is hell-bent on a “steal, kill and destroy” mission (John 10:10).    But these false beliefs (read: lies) were killing me, literally and the only way I was going to be redeemed was by knowing God’s truth about what he thinks of me at the deepest level of my heart.  God literally had to bring me to a life and death crisis to get me to understand this.

A few weeks ago, my wife, Celeste, had to take a personality test for her work – a Meiers-Briggs MBTI test.  It’s designed to “make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives. The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.” 

(http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/)

She thought the test was interesting and said that once you determine your personality type, they have a chart that associates that type with an animal.  Her personality type was associated with a green mouse.  She wanted me to take it and see what my personality type was.  I agreed, and one night over dinner, she started grilling me with all the questions on the test (40 or more?).  After we finished, we were sitting in the car and she was grading the test to find out my results.  I grabbed the page from her that had the chart of all of the different personality types (there are 16 of them) and started looking through all of them.  I told her, “I bet I can tell you which one of these I am just by reading this chart.”  Before she was finished with her calculations, I told her, “I’m an ‘ENFP’.”  According to Meiers-Briggs, the ENFP personality type is described as…

ENFP – Warmly enthusiastic and imaginative. See life as full of possibilities. Make connections between events and information very quickly, and confidently proceed based on the patterns they see. Want a lot of affirmation from others, and readily give appreciation and support. Spontaneous and flexible, often rely on their ability to improvise and their verbal fluency.

She pulls out another page and on it are the four animals that the personality types are associated with: a green mouse, a white buffalo, a bear and a golden eagle.  “Which one is an ENFP?”

“You’re the Golden eagle.”

I liked that.  A golden eagle.  That’s something I could identify with.  I immediately did some research and found that the golden eagle is one of the largest of the birds of prey, a “raptor”, capable of taking down animals as large as 150 pounds…even wolves.  They are massive birds with wingspans that can surpass 9 feet.  They are hunters, graceful, swift, beautiful, regal.  They are associated with courage, wisdom, strength and royalty.

I chose the photo to the right because it shows the eagle’s strength and courage as well as its size in relation to the wolf it is taking down, but more importantly because of the bird that is fleeing on the right hand side.  See that?

 That would be a magpie.

I began this post with Psalm 103, but I intentionally only quoted through the first half of verse 5. Verse 5 in its entirety reads:

“…who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”

So the truth is, both the Meiers-Briggs personality test and God say that I am an eagle.  It took 48 years and a mid-life crisis for me to finally break the lies I had believed about myself and see myself clearly through God’s eyes.  God works in mysterious ways.   My life is completely different now.  I am no longer in the grips of addiction, but I’m a recovered addict…my life is centered around my wife, my kids and helping others – almost 2 1/2 years sober today as I write this.   My marriage has never been better.  Work is good.  My kids are awesome.  I am forgiven, redeemed.  Jesus is Lord. My youth is in the process of being renewed…like the eagle’s.

Magpies are scavengers, takers.  They survive off of roadkill, nuts and rotting fruit.  Truth is, a magpie was probably a pretty good symbol of the kind of person I had become before my moment of clarity.  Today, I am learning to be a giver, a protector, a leader, a friend – qualities much better symbolized by the golden eagle.

Sorry Mr. Constantine, you are wrong.  I am not a magpie.  I am an eagle.  Write that on your blackboard a 100 times.

Footnote: I also found an image of an “Old Red Fox” tangling with a Golden eagle.  Wonder how that all worked out?