I’m often plagued by insecurities, inadequacies about work, relationships, income, decisions, indecisions, and forgetting to put the wet laundry in the dryer. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a rugby pile on. I think I’d be okay if there were no people–no one to impress or hurt or misunderstand or fear. Hermits must be the happiest folks on earth… except the people they carry around inside their heads. Many think well of me, but that’s no reassurance. Their approvals are light as air–they’re nice, but they don’t decrease the heavy weight of judgments (imagined or real). If you do everything right in a surgery, but make one mistake, you screwed up. You don’t get points for the positives. Success is what ought to happen, so there are no accolades except for super-human efforts. I can’t beat the game by having more wins than losses because the losses always blot out the wins.
The worst is when I feel I’ve hurt someone, whether I’m guilty or not. Even their forgiveness does not relieve my self-judgment if they are still in pain… in fact, their kindness can make me feel worse still. So feeling bad about their hurt as well as my guilt makes it twice as hard, and I feel guilt even if my motives were good and my effort strong. I could have done better–I know this is true because I look back and see it. I can point out each misstep. I should have known, should have expected, should have listened, should have should have should have. I need to stop shoulding all over myself… yes, I should stop that!
My father tried to save us children from this stinging shame of not being good enough by giving lots of advice for improvement. He was just trying to help us be better… always better. He wasn’t harsh or mean about it, but he was relentless. So I learned from childhood that if things go badly, it was my fault for not thinking or planning or performing better. The only smidgeon of relief was to figure out how to make sure I didn’t screw up again. Failure feels terrible and any means to escape it feels intensely important, and our strategy was to try harder.
The only other way to relieve my sense of awfulness was to blame someone else. I learned as a kid that someone is always to blame for a failure, because if no one is to blame, it can’t be fixed. and fixing it is an urgent necessity. We had the wrong address… whose fault was it? The bill was paid late, who was to blame? If the fault was someone else’s, it relieved my shame. It was then my duty to make the guilty one see their fault and take ownership so we didn’t have to face this shame again. How well I remember the hard-faced disappointment of my father who was waiting for me to express the intensity of my shame through hanging head and muted words with a promise to never repeat the failure again. Even then he expressed coldness and distance for some time, perhaps to let the full weight of my failing settle into my determined commitment to never repeat that wrong. It felt like forgiveness was earned by self-abasement. This particular memory, common enough, came from my sneak-reading a book in class the teacher had told me to put away and who called my father to complain even though I had apologized to her.
In my dad’s dedicated campaign of betterness, the key ingredient missing was grace. In my family, grace was the leniency offered the weak. You did as much as you could, and if you truly were unable, grace was offered… somewhat grudgingly. It was basically pity… a suspicious pity, concerned that you were “taking advantage” of grace, pretending to be unable to do something you were quite capable of doing. By its very nature, pity is demeaning, which is the opposite of grace, thinking badly of someone because of their limitations. This pity was grudging because if I couldn’t pull my weight, he had to pull it. If mom couldn’t remember, he gave her suggestions for remembering, but in the end, he had to remember for her. If I did it wrong, he corrected me repeatedly, and then he had to do it for me. It didn’t really matter how big or small the matter was because a failure is still a failure, and often the failure was simply doing it too slowly. The impatience at someone’s shortcomings always proved that “grace” was not really grace.
This week as I reflected on this deeply hurtful upbringing, the reason for my sense of inadequacy became clear to me once again. Of course I struggle with this! How could I not find myself in this continual battle against the deeply engrained views and values of my childhood? It is like my mother tongue–if I speak, it is in English. Heck, I even think in English and feel in English. “Just Do It Better” was more deeply taught than colors and shapes and I learned it before I learned the alphabet. I am on a slow and staggered journey away from this land of betterment into a land of unconditional acceptance where love is no longer a reward for beauty but a nurturer of beauty. Love comes first. Always. I am fully embraced with all my shortcomings.
Check out this song:
Janathan Grace Reflections 
Janathan, we grew up in similar households at a similar time. I hear you. One bit from a favorite Author, “If it were true, I would tell you that age makes us wise. What I will tell you is that each of us makes the best decisions we can with the information and time we have. And that those who love us will forgive our mistakes.” I pray that you can believe that. We are in a relationship with Someone who loves us. Dion
Thank you
Janathan, this is Terry Powell, Fac. Emeritus at CIU (now 74 years old). Hope you and your bride are well. You express yourself on difficult things very well and I urge you to keep writing–it will minister to people! I am sorry for the lack of grace your experienced. I wonder if part of the reason Robertson had difficulty with giving it is that he might have seldom received grace himself as a child…though I never knew your grandfather, of course. But something your dad told me once made me think his dad was quite strict.
My mother (only a 5th grade education) was an extremely anxious, worry-prone person who negatively impacted me in areas of anxiety and depression. Long after she died in the 1990s, I realized that she had never received any good type of parental blessing. Her grandpa back in the 1930s made her quit school and work in a cotton mill in her early teens and give him whatever little money she received. It helped me a bit to understand the negative influence she had on me, but that didn’t remove the scars I still bear.
In the 1990s, in a private session with him, your dad expressed to me the awesome respect he had for you and your ministry. Perhaps you were still in India then, I am not sure. But he felt that he would never be the man you were, spiritually speaking.
Keep on serving strong, Janathan! Terry on 2/15/24
Hi Terry. I’m quite sure dad did not receive much grace. His dad was very often gone on preaching tours or at work and his mother was very strict and punishing. Sadly he was never able and willing to work through this childhood experience. Like most people, his coping mechanisms (primarily working hard to feel good about himself) kept him far enough from his feelings of inadequacy that he was quite content to never exam them at any depth. When I started realizing the damage I had received, I repeatedly invited him into this journey of self-discovery, but he was unwilling to go there. He derisively called introspection “navel-gazing” and deliberately avoided it, wanting me to just “forgive” him and “move on” without any indepth processing or any real understanding of me and my journey. So in the end I had to grieve the genuine relationship he was unwilling to step into with me. He avoided his own inward journey at the expense of all his children. I have not been angry at him for the last twenty years, but I continue to need to work through the legacy I received.