There is something wrong in America. A great, unseen vibration is shaking this country in ripples and then waves going across it of anxiety and stress, anger and shame. These waves sweep across boundaries of race and gender and class and education into the lives of almost everyone. Even those who apparently are protected by wealth and power are not immune to this vibration. The vibration that threatens to shake us apart is fear.

We are a nation of people who are afraid we are not enough. We wake up in the middle of the night having made a mistake and are afraid somebody will know. We live in a constant fear that our shortcomings will be exposed to family, to friends and to the world.

What we have done is to take every area of our lives and try to make them controllable. We have even taken time and tried to crunch it to get more done in a day, or an hour, than anyone ever thought about getting done.

Eons ago, it used to be that God gave us time, sort of like a river flowing through history. We floated or we hung onto a log or we were in a boat and we floated down the river. If a dog barked on the bank, we would look and see it or a bird chirping in the tree, but in this technological revolution, as we have tried to get more done than anybody ever did in an hour, we have created a giant speed boat.

We are going down the river at a terrific rate. If a dog barked on the bank or a bird chirped, we couldn't hear it. We have disconnected ourselves from nature. Amazingly, our mind can go this fast. All of this computerized communication is tearing us apart, but our feelings can't go that fast. That is why it is tearing us apart. They go the speed of the river. What happens when we can't get our minds and our feelings in line? We disconnect from our feelings.

Couples may live together; couples sleep together but they pass each other in the halls and are numb and can't feel. People we work with, our families, are not very happy campers. There aren't very many happy campers in the life of a controller.

There are two kinds of controlling. There is the obvious macho control that says, "This house is a pit. You aren't doing it right. You are spending too much money."

Then there is the person who controls, like we Christians and other religious people often do, with hints and suggestions. We control by helping you. We tell you how to run your life and every area of your life.

Have you ever been controlled by a loving, religious parent? Have you ever been a loving, controlling, religious parent? I am talking about this because I discovered it in my own life several years ago.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it. He used to take him hunting and fishing. I would cry and want to go along. I would grab him by the leg and sit on his foot and he would shake me off at the door and say, "You're too little."

I cried and asked my mother, "What is the matter with me? Doesn't daddy love me?"

She was embarrassed. She said, "Yes. Five years from now your brother will go play baseball and then it will be your turn."

I waited and hoped. Five years from then, my brother did get interested in baseball and so did my father. I never got to go with him.

Something happened to me inside. I made some kind of decision to go for achievement because it was easier than love at our house. Inside I felt shame. There was a part of me that was a child who was a good boy. He wants to do it right and always has.

Then there is another voice and it is a shaming voice. It says, "You're no good." I look in the mirror and the voice says, "Your nose is too big. You are not broad enough across the shoulder." When I make a mistake, at night I wake up and cringe. It says, "You see, you did it again. You blew it."

This is a warfare between this child inside me who wants to be somebody and these voices that say you are no darned good. This is the warfare that has controlled my life.

I grew up and I became very successful at what I did as a young man. I became a work addict because this was the only way I could get any relief from this pain. So I began to work all the time.

When I was about 28 years old, I ran out of gas and burned out. I took out a company car and by the side of the road in East Texas, I thought about God and I said, "God, I commit my life to you," because I didn't have anything else I could do with it. My life changed.

All of a sudden I felt happy and had some hope in my life. I began to teach a class. People started asking me to come and speak. The first time I ever spoke outside my own Sunday School was between a man named R. G. LeTourneau and Billy Graham. I had never heard of either one of them.

As a matter of fact, in those days I was so far from Billy Graham and evangelical Christianity that when some of our friends got converted in a Graham Crusade, we called them the Graham Crackers. It was not too sensitive but that was where we were. When I suddenly started speaking, people would come and say, "Come and talk to our church."

I began to travel everywhere and tell my story which I understood later was my witness. I wrote a book finally. I started a retreat center and we couldn't find a book. The books then said that you give your life to Jesus and give Him all the credit and praise and then, "Praise the Lord. I don't have any problems any more."

I gave my life to Jesus and had a whole new set of problems. I couldn't find a book that said that since Augustine in the fifth century. So what I did was I wrote one. It was called The Taste of New Wine and it sold a couple of million copies. All of a sudden in a little way, I was famous and I was asked to speak all over the world.

I began to see my family as not behaving very well for a real religious speaker, so I started controlling them, trying to get them under control. My addiction had turned into a religious work addiction and it is hard to catch that because they call it sainthood in the evangelical church. What happened was I did the same thing to my family that my father did to me -- I deserted them emotionally, only I did it in the name of Jesus. It was a very serious thing and I wound up getting a divorce. When I did, I was crushed because the church rejected me totally. They just zipped me up in a body bag.

I had a group of people I prayed with and I just threw myself in the arms of these men and said, "I'm lost, help me." I had never asked for help before.

They prayed for me and held me. I was just wandering around the street not knowing what to do. I found a book that said that the church is the only army that shoots its wounded. I said, "Yeah. That's right."

I went home and a little voice said to me, which I assume was God, "Miller, don't you blame your sin on your ex-wife or the church or anybody else. You take care of your control issues and your sin and I will take care of my church."

So I did. I got some help from a counselor who told me to go to a Twelve Step Meeting. All of a sudden, I began to realize that I was okay as a person. I wasn't a bad person.

As I looked at these Twelve Steps -- I'm a theologian -- I went back and read the Bible. I saw this is the same story that is in the Bible. When you look back at Genesis it says that a man and a woman were walking naked in a garden with God. Well, that just means they were intimate; they were not hiding anything. As the man and woman tried to take control from God, which was their first act, that separated them and the separation is called by theologians Sin with a capital "S".

The whole Bible is the story of men and women trying to get back to God, to overcome that sin with sacrifices, good works, sermons, prophesy, witnessing, giving all kinds of things. It never worked.

Finally, in the New Testament God ripped open His chest and showed us His Precious Child, Jesus, that part of God that is like the little child in each of us. When Christ left, He said, "I've got to go because the Spirit that you have seen in me, this personality, is the personality of God. It is going to come inside you where I can't get and it is going to lead you out of your caves of hiding and put your hands in other people's hands and that will be the church of Jesus Christ. That will be the family of God."

I began to realize that this was the story I was learning in a Twelve Step Program and it was also the story that was given to us by Jesus Christ, that as we become intimate, as we share our lives, as we do in these Twelve Step Programs, then people see us and hear us and they don't shame us and they don't say we are awful. They say we are good. Come back. Keep learning.

As I began to do that, I began to get in touch with the fact that because I am a precious child of God, God loves me as I confess and receive forgiveness. Then I don't have to control my family any more. I still do, but I have a place to go and some tools to work with.

I want to close this with a story because why would we talk about pain when we have so much joy? Some years ago I was in a small group and we were talking about where we had come from. There was a woman there who said, "I came from an orphanage. When I was eight years old, my parents told me that they didn't love me any more and that they were going to give me to an orphanage. They did and never came back. I was just shocked and finally, when I came to and began to wander around in this place, I noticed people came and took children home. I was dancing around hoping they would take me. One day this couple came and the matron said, 'You have been chosen to go home. You are going to get a new home.'"

She said, "I was so happy that I cried."

The matron said, "You are only on trial. If you are a very good girl, they may keep you."

She said, "I knew I was going to be good. We went to this little town in West Texas. It was out on the plains. It was the biggest house in town. It was an old ramshackle place but it was big and it had one of those Scarlett O'Hara stairways that went up from the hallway, no carpet. The screened porch on the front was sagging, but it was a princess home for me because I had lived in a shack. Every day I ran home from school. One day after I had been there about eight weeks, I ran home and opened the door and said, 'Anybody home?' I saw my little cardboard suitcase with the coat thrown over it in the middle of that hall. I knew they didn't want me."

We were just stunned. Then she said matter-of-factly, "That happened to me seven times before I was thirteen years old."

We were devastated. She saw us trying not to cry and she said, "Don't. You see, I needed my past. It brought me to God."

There are many of us who are wrestling with the pain of our lives and are realizing that it is that pain and the control issues that cause it that may lead us to God in a new way.

Floyd Brown: Keith, let me say I certainly enjoyed your talk tremendously. It opened up a great area of questions for me and I would like to begin with identification. How does one know that they are a controller?

Keith Miller: One of the easiest tests is this. When you try to help people, does it make them mad? If I offer you $25.00, you don't get mad about that, but when I talk with my kids and try to straighten them out, they get mad at me. Why are they getting mad at me? Why is my wife getting mad at me?

Well, it is because I am doing something besides sharing. I am trying to adjust their reality and fix them. Inside of a controller, it feels like you are helping, so it's really hard to catch.

Brown: Those are my thoughts entirely, but anger is the first clue. Suppose you are doing it for their good.

Miller: That even makes them madder. Think about your own parents, Floyd. When someone tells me they are doing something for my own good, that really bothers me. They are using leverage. You see, they are controlling me with leverage. I did this with my kids -- it's just terrible. I am to give my children structure, as I understand it, but not control.

The first time I ever talked about this, a policewoman in uniform out in Phoenix stood up. She said, "What about me? I am a traffic controller. They pay me to control. What have you got to say to me?"

I said, "Do they pay you to do it at home?" She sat down like a stone.

A lot of us have jobs where we need to give people structure but that is different from controlling. You are controlling because I want you to do it, not because of the situation or what needs to be done.

Brown: In today's society where crime is rampant -- we have gangs; we have all of these negative things that concern us very much -- a great number of the people say that we don't have the proper kind of control in our homes or in our schools. Probably at another level, you could get into the control of the church. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Miller: We religious controllers control in the name of Jesus and it is really painful to people. We go out and try to fix them. It is no wonder people don't like us very well out there because we assume that they are bad and we are going to fix them.

Jesus didn't do that. Prostitutes and bums felt comfortable with Him. When we go out with the idea that we are going to fix somebody, then it communicates to them that they are inferior and it shames them. You remember the shame voices I talked about?

Brown: Sure.

Miller: With control, you trigger those shame voices.

Brown: You talked about the Twelve Steps. I don't know the Twelve Steps. You know them far better than I because you are a part of them. Is the first one identifying what the problems are and then pursuing a method of clearing them up?

Miller: The first one is to realize that we are powerless, that we really don't have control and that our lives are unmanageable. That is hard to take. It is an ego insult. Our shame voices say, "Don't do it. Don't admit you are powerless."

We are in denial. The primary symptom of a controller is denial, that is I can't see its symptoms in myself. I can see them perfectly in you if you are my friend or whoever you are. This was the Pharisee thing. Jesus said, "You Pharisees are the smartest psychiatrists in any generation. You can see the tiniest speck of sin in someone else's eye and you can't see the log in your own."

That is a classic biblical picture of denial. They were controllers and He caught them and they killed Him. Controllers do not have a very good record.

Brown: How should we approach our family? Give them a set of structures; give them the Ten Commandments and say, "This is the way you go?"

Miller: No. I started with mine by confessing that I have controlled you all your lives and I am sorry I didn't know I was doing it. I don't know if I can stop but I want you to know I am in a program and I am learning how to face myself. I hope you can forgive me.

Brown: That is a wonderful step and I think we should all learn from that and move forward. Keith Miller, this has been wonderful. We thank you so much for being with us. I look forward to hearing from you again.