The Author’s love story of me is beautiful, but there is still an inner resistance to that narrative. My brain accepts it, but my feelings cannot. I believe enough to choose grace, but I cannot relax and rest into it as something settled, reliable, and safe. Why is my own narrative so much stronger than God’s? Because it is not my narrative, I suddenly realize. This storyline I have always believed is so deeply rooted because it did not spring from me as I supposed but was handed to me fully developed, like an owner’s manual. I see now my trust in an overriding love is not so much thwarted by the harm I did (see my last two posts) but the harm done to me, the disapproval stamped on my heart, the disappointment leveraged against me in childhood and beyond.
My identity was fashioned by my parents as surely as my language was. My mother tongue is English. I was not given an option to speak in Chinese. I did not know Spanish existed. A tree was “tree.” It was not up for debate or question. It was so settled that doubting it would only show my ignorance. My parents knew language and I simply had to learn it from them. As everyone agreed on “tree,” it was a universal reality. In the same unconscious, inescapable way, I absorbed my sense of myself from my parents. I was who they said I was. It was no more up for question or doubt than my being a son, but it was rooted more deeply than language because their beliefs about me were handed down by God, they said, and how could I ever question Absolute, Eternal Truth?
My parents actively judged themselves and ran from their own shame, so they were poorly placed to teach anything else to their children. They believed about God what they were raised to believe just as surely as I did, and it shaped their whole view not only of themselves, but of me. When I disobeyed, my father grew stiff and cold. Even after I showed my shame and remorse, he slow-walked warmth and affection, as though acceptance shown too quickly would undermine his pressure of disapproval. He was suspicious my shame was not deep enough to make a change. This created the meaning for me of “repentance” towards a God who was often disappointed and aloof because of my behavior. My mother’s response was not cold, but hot, quick anger. And so I grew up believing that love and acceptance is a reward for good behavior and that I often was unworthy of it.
How incredibly difficult, after this molding, to grasp a grace that is never conditional. How could I even begin to construct such an imaginary world? No one I knew spoke the language of grace fluently. How can I now settle peacefully into a life built on grace when I am surrounded by a world of people who see unlimited grace as dangerous and delusional if not incomprehensible? The religious in particular persuade me to distrust grace. Seeing the universe through the eyes of grace changes everything. It not only fundamentally changes my perception of myself and everyone else and God… it changes my perception of “tree”… of “spider,” “comedy,” “hot,” and “superfluous” since it changes at core how I am present in the world and how I see the world.
It is a slow work to learn to see myself as graciously as God sees me, but he is the true Father who declares me precious beyond all counting. My work to redefine myself must begin where it first got derailed as a child, to challenge that origin story with a new way of being fathered, almost like an adolescent suddenly discovering they were adopted and needing to rethink their whole history. May I let go of my allotted image given by shame-reactive parents and see myself as beloved beyond all comprehension.
Janathan Grace Reflections 
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