Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category
Me: Kimberly and I read a short segment on the benefit of moving from hope (about results) to hopelessness. I understood it to be similar to my moving from evaluating my journey based on success of whatever kind as taught by dad to understanding that my own soul is your whole focus. When I settle into that view, success becomes incidental and things falling apart around me… do not undermine my ability to live into the good because I AM the good regardless of my context. So like the reading, I “lose hope” in results or I give up on trying to bring them about (or focus on just surviving in disaster). I’m called to move more deeply into love regardless of the context. I’m trying to learn to just let my hard feelings be. I mean I need to listen to them as they tell me of needs I have, but often I don’t know what I need. I think unhappy feelings are usually (always?) alerting us to something we need, but I am coming to think that they are doing something of value even if I can’t understand them… for instance, helping us be better listeners to our spirits or slowing us down or helping us be empathetic.
God: I’m sad that you were so deeply scarred in your view of me as some harsh, hard-nosed master. I’m sad not just because it hurt you, but because it so deeply hurt our relationship. I hate that that happened. But as you know all things can be redeemed, so the end will be better than if you had not had that terrible struggle. The kitchen garbage makes the soil rich for growing beauty of all kinds. All your pain I will compost into beauty over time. I hope you can trust me with that. Even our relationship is going to blossom far more and go much deeper than it would have without your long suffering. Thank you for letting me in to transform that for you because nothing fills me more than sinking deeper into relating with you. You are my joy!
Me: Thank you. That is very encouraging. Help me rest more often in that view that you are constantly doing good in me, dwelling more intimately within me. How amazing!
Life drains away my peace and I lose hold of what I most deeply need. So I’m reminding myself and you:
God is so gentle. He does not force or manipulate or rush us. He does not ignore or dismiss or abandon us. He is always present, wooing us and inviting us and waiting patiently for us. He knows our pain and woundedness. He sorrows with our grief and fear. He speaks kindly to our hearts and never gives up. He never gives up no matter how misguided or confused we are, no matter how stubborn or withdrawn we are. He treats us like a kindhearted foster treats a dog cowering in the corner of the kennel. He knows our struggle to trust him does not come from ill will, but from the many times we have been hurt and frightened in this unsafe world. And we keep getting hurt, over and over. We are judged and rejected, misunderstood and mistreated in so many small and big ways. Our plans fail. Our heart gives out. Our hope dims. But God is always offering us his gentleness and acceptance, his empathy and love.
Kate DiCamillo tells a beautiful story that resonates so much with the little boy inside of me:
I was standing in the grocery store checkout line, and a small boy walked past me—once, twice, three times.
When he came back the fourth time, he was holding his mother’s hand.
“That’s her,” he said.
He pointed at me.
“Don’t point, honey,” said his mother.
And then to me she said, “My son’s class is reading The Tale of Despereaux. He thinks that you’re the author of that book.”
“I’m the writer!” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “How lovely. Is it okay if he asks you a question?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Go ahead, honey,” she said to the boy.
This child looked up at me and said, “What I want to know is will it be okay? Will the mouse be okay?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Oh,” he said. “Good. Now I can relax my heart.”
“Yes,” I said again. “You can.”
Oh, his heart!
Oh, my heart!
Oh, all our hearts!
When the world around me feels like it is fracturing apart, when I feel lost and confused in my own journey, when terrible news strikes home or the fear of terrible news, I need the author of my story to put a hand on my shoulder and say, “You will reach home at last.” As Julian of Norwich wrote, “All will be well and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” That is not to say that nothing will go wrong, perhaps terribly wrong, but I will reach the other side of all that is tragic and miserable and frightening. On the other side is an inescapable, unstoppable hope.
Kimberly and I are quite resistant to shallow and easy optimism or “toxic positivity” which minimizes struggles and shouts down suffering, but we recently stumbled on a delightful idea called “ominous positivity,” and I have had a lot of fun writing up memes for that genre. “If I have to tell you one more time, you’re going to get an earful of how wonderful you are!” or “You can’t get away! I’m going to chase you down and dump blessings all over you!” or “You are forever condemned to a life of being extravagantly loved!” The idea is that we can do nothing to escape the good God is directing our way like a Niagara of love. It may not lessen our suffering, but it promises to redeem suffering into something awesome.
What I want to know is will it be okay?
Yes!
Oh, good! Now I can relax my heart!
Yes, yes you can!
Continuing with my list of a reconsidered faith.
6) I thought some feelings like anger and fear were wrong and God judged me for them. I believed I must override those emotions, talk myself out of them, and stop feeling them. I discovered that all feelings were created by God and were good, as vital to listen to and pay attention to as the gauges on the dashboard of my car. I don’t “like” that my gas gauge is near empty, but I’m really grateful that it is telling me so. They are the royal road to self-understanding and relational bonding.
7) I thought some feelings like love, joy, and peace were commanded by God and a sign of spirituality. After all, these were the first three “fruits of the Spirit,” not considering that fruit is an organic result not an intentional effort. I worked hard at pumping up these feelings with self-talk, worship songs, inspiring readings, and prayer. I discovered that God does not command feelings, he animates feelings by loving us inordinately. Our feelings are just responses to the good he pours into us. I am invited to just sit under that sun and soak it in, bury myself in that embrace, fill my heart with that sweetness. My goal now is not loving God, but receiving God’s love for me. Then loving God is as natural and spontaneous as laughing at a good joke or saying “mmmm!” over a good dessert.
8) I was taught that love is not a feeling but an action, so it was measured by behavior. If I did what was good for someone, I was acting in love regardless of how I felt towards them. I could be angry and critical of them, but if my words were kind, I was being loving, perhaps even heroically loving. But kind words, for instance, might come from pride or fear or manipulation, which are contrary to love. Seemingly caring actions might come with resentment or disdain. This shaped in me a fear that God might say loving things through clenched teeth, undermining my trust in Bible verses expressing his love. He might bless me even if he were angry enough to slap me. I’d rather he just slap me and get it over with. His self-control seemed a very poor substitute for love. I wanted his loving acceptance far more than his good words and actions towards me. I now believe that love is a motivation, the reason why we do what we do, and that God is always and wholly motivated by love, the kind of love a mother experiences when looking into the eyes of her newborn. There is complete coherence between his heart, his feelings, and his words. He is enthralled with me.
Every year I discover how very different God is than I thought growing up, different in the best ways. Each year I learn new aspects to his gracious self that I had misunderstood from my upbringing. I thought I would begin a random list of those grace-transforming views. Feel free to add your own discoveries in the comments!
1) I thought God wanted to “use” me. In fact, I begged him to use me. I felt he valued me commensurate with how much I accomplished for him. I wanted to be one of his heroes. I found that God instead wants to love me… extravagantly. I am not a tool for his love, I am the object of his love.
2) Similarly, I thought God’s goal on earth was his “mission” that he wanted me to focus all my energy away from myself and towards his mission only to discover that God’s mission is me. His end goal is an ever deepening relationship with me. I am not a means to an end, but I am the end in myself and in my relationships.
3) I thought God’s will was opposed to my will, that my will was selfish and I was called to reject my own desires and ignore my own feelings in order to meet his plan for me, only to discover that God’s whole heart was in fulfilling my heart’s deepest desires, and he was fully attuned and validating of my feelings.
4) I thought God directed my life by telling me what to do, and I was to do it. If I was confused or unsure, it was my fault for not listening better, and I should fast and pray until I got “guidance.” I’ve discovered that God cares way more about being with me whatever direction I take. He’s not worried about my taking the “wrong” direction, that there really is no wrong direction (even the harmful is redemptive), and just being with him in my genuine self is life’s fulfillment.
5) I thought shame was God’s way of prodding me to do better, the “conviction of the Holy Spirit” was to push me to better myself, get on the right track. Shame was pressure to bring compliance since I would stop feeling shame if I just worked harder at being good. I see now that such a mindset cripples grace. Shame, like physical pain, is a cry not to work harder but to rest and restore. Something has gone wrong, and what has slipped is not my behavior, but my grasp of God’s love. I believe shame is God’s invitation to stop trying to earn his love and to simply rest in it as an accomplished, unalterable fact. True goodness springs from being loved, not from being shamed.
God: “Who made dogs to have such intense joy in their owners? Who made them to bond so deeply that even a few minutes separation is cause for dancing delight at the owners return? I just molded my heart for you into a creative expression so that you could see me reflected in my creation. You are my delight! I watch you with delight as you sleep as any mother of a newborn, and my heart jumps when you awake, longing for you to find the good in the day that hides like little Easter eggs all around.
“I ache with you with every fear and burden you face. I feel more pained by your pain than even you feel. I agonize with you and long for the day when I can take it all away. I hate that your healing and growth requires so much suffering. I know you are doing your best even if you doubt and judge yourself. And really there is no “best,” no perfect response to life, no path that is better than all other paths. It is like an art gallery that can be explored at any pace in any direction. Each path has its own experiences that offer its goodness and pain. I wish you could worry less and trust more, but that cannot be “fixed” any more than spring can skip to fall without passing through summer. It is a long, twisting journey and I only hope you can find me along the way to walk it with you.”
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.
I offered a sweet retelling of my story in the last blog, but I am still snagged on the tragedy of the harm I have done. I can’t rewrite that. Love embraces me in my failures, but how can I feel relief when I know others still suffer for my failings? Even were I faultless, doing the best I could with my limited capacity, others are stabbed by my inadequacies… and can I ever claim to do my best—using every ounce of energy and intensity of focus and purity of motive? How can I be at peace in the face of their pain? I realize now that I have been secretly writing their story as well as my own, controlling the narrative, telling myself that the harm I did or good I failed to do is irreversible, scribbling whole chapters describing their continued suffering. In fact my suffering continues long after theirs is over–Taiho died many decades ago. Quite possibly I have suffered more from my harming others than they have suffered from my harm, and my self-torture has helped no one. It drains away my energy to do good. But how can I be okay if they are not okay because of me?
I can only trust a loving retelling of my story if the Author of my story is busy writing everyone else’s story as well. Grace must be not only big enough for me, but big enough for them. What if the Author took the harm I did to others and rewrote it for their good as only grace can do? Then I would be free of this weight of regret. Might I believe that grace is constantly at work reclaiming their hearts and lives, that their story is one full of grace, though not painless as no one’s is? What if I really believed that my wrongdoing was not simply overcome or counterbalanced by grace, perhaps by a kinder, healthier person in their life, but that my harm was actually leveraged into goodness, an instrument of grace to awaken or enlighten or invite into a more beautiful story in their lives? After all, this is my core belief, that Grace is always at work through all the ups and downs to invite us into deeper places of the heart.
Perhaps many through hurt have closed their hearts to grace, but I believe that grace will keep chasing them, even passed the veil of death, for love’s longing is never abandoned. Our evasion may be tenacious, but grace is more persistent still, never giving up until it has won us over. All that we suffer is an invitation by grace into deeper healing, understanding, and relationship. Pain will come. I may cause it. And grace turns it into a pallet to paint something amazing and beautiful, not only in me but in all those I touch. I may not yet see it but grace is always vibrantly present and at work. We cannot escape grace. It is the river we all swim in, immersing us from birth, surrounding all we do and fail to do with love. I write a false narrative of others when I leave out grace. I need to put down my pen and listen to grace’s telling.
All my life my mind has secretly been constructing an autobiography, pulling together all the tangled pieces of my past and turning it into a coherent storyline that defines me. Sadly, I am not kind to my protagonist. My mind narrates the time I joined with neighborhood kids in grade school to call our friend Bobby “Roto-rooter,” laughing at how mad it made him, and I wince with sadness and shame. I recall scolding my dearly loved collie Taiho, who had done nothing wrong, just to see the cute look of remorse on his face, and it seems so mean. The older I got, the worse I did, and in my retelling, the good that I did weighs lightly against the heaviness of my perceived failures. I become my story’s villain, a cautionary tale.
Most novelists are kinder to their protagonist. As I read, I find myself hoping good for the main character, even if she is a scold or he is a criminal. I am sad when she loses her best friend or when he ends up under a bridge in the rain. I am sympathetic to their failures and losses, understanding of their vices, and whispering to warn them against harmful choices. Just show me their humanity, and my heart is all in for them. What would it be like if one of these writers told my story? If they showed the good generously and the faults compassionately and made the reader love me like a dear friend? Would I be able to accept such a telling of my story or would it feel undeserved, even untrue like the overindulgent words of a doting mother?
Just yesterday it occurred to me that I do have a flawless Biographer of my story who writes with the kindest, most gracious heart ever known, a retelling of my life that is perfect and trustworthy in a way my own memory and judgment could never be. Imagine if my life were told from the perspective of boundless love–every failure told from pure sympathy, every wrongdoing wrapped in understanding, every flaw traced with caring fingers. What if the Author of my story, while clearly seeing my shortcomings, was my cheerleader who found deep joy in who I am in every moment of my life. What if Love defined me? That is the story I long for. I believe, help my unbelief.
My last journal entry (on perfectionism):
I start out with the idea “I could do better” (in this case about counseling). I think of what possibly went wrong, and how I could “fix” it in the future. “I could do better” becomes “I must do better,” turning hope and potential into standards and judgments. The way to fix my sense of failure and self-criticism is to be sure I don’t repeat the mistakes I supposedly made and so escape future shame—forgiveness earned through perfection. This is a never-ending gerbil wheel.
Even though I might approach the issue as mere problem-solving and try to avoid self-criticism, the judgment hangs around the edges just waiting to pounce and drag me down. And the longer I dwell on ways to improve, the heavier it weighs on me. Driven by fear of repeating my failures, I come up with some good corrective plans and wish I had used those in what has already transpired. And then “I could do better” becomes “I should have done better.” After all, with just more reflection I figured out a better approach. Couldn’t I have done this before if I had just been more observant or reflective, more thorough and careful?
Of course, this self-judgment cripples me, gives me less freedom and flexibility, makes me defensive and self-protective, makes me fearful and insecure, and in the end I am less present, open, and vulnerable, more tired and distracted because the good is overwhelmed by my attacks on myself. My very desire to flourish becomes the knife that severs my flourishing.
Janathan Grace Reflections 