Archive for the ‘God’s love’ Tag
In the Shadows
I was pushing my grocery cart slowly down the aisle this afternoon when I felt my soul stabbed. This was one of those emotional spasms that spring without warning or excuse… sudden and sharp, making me feel physically ill or out of breath or as though I need to double over and grab my stomach from a knifing. When your psychic energy is chronically low, even small things can cause a short-out.
Just now as I write, I stop to recall my shopping and identify where I got jumped. At the entrance to Food Lion, I picked up the sales leaflet and wended my way through the produce and baking sections, making the cheapest selections and asking with each item, “Can we do without this?” My conscious mind was sorting through ounces and labels, but down below that, economic claustrophobia started squeezing my heart. Then I saw the ground beef. After 5 p.m. meat is marked down, sometimes as much as half off (depending on how old it is). At a 50 percent discount, hamburger was still $2 a pound.
That shock connected viscerally to my concern over whether I can make enough mowing lawns this spring and summer, whether it really was a good financial choice to buy a truck and mower (what do I know about lawn care anyway?!), whether Kimberly or I might have some major medical issue now that our health insurance has lapsed. These worries intermingle with fears of inadequacy, poor planning, stupidity, limited energy… a hundred whispered concerns babble in the backroom of my mind, and when I don’t recognize the source of my anxiety, it is difficult to calm the muttering. At least now I see what the clammer was about. Why the fear?
I know God can be trusted, but living involves my (faulty) input. It seems that however good and great God is, I can screw things up, make bad decisions, miss a turn. God has his hands full to keep me from driving into the guardrails, and I never know when God might see fit to let me “learn my lesson.” I tell myself that God is not like that. He is full of grace and patience and protective care. And I believe it… mostly… for now. I snuggle up next to my wife, scratch my dog’s ears, and find the shadow lifting.
Light In The Forest
I married off my sister-in-law today and gave this message.
The Third Strand Makes All the Difference
They say love is one long sweet dream and marriage is the alarm clock. I can testify to the truth of that. But waking up is not a bad thing unless you want to spend your life in a coma. Erin & David have been through a lot together already and gotten to know each other pretty well. I’ve been impressed to see them work through major decisions like buying a house, employment changes and relocation. Still marriage always brings in new dynamics.
Before marriage there is always a question, you have to have a backup plan, you can’t really trust the future. Marriage is a commitment for life. It gives the safety you need to work out personal and relational issues, strength and courage to engage in difficult endeavors, and instead of a place to call home, you will have a person to call home, a resting place for your heart.
No longer I and you, but us: as the song says, “Me and You Against the World”. Everything that happens to you happens to the other as well. Every relationship you have becomes part of the marriage (as you can see here today). No decision you make will be for you alone, but will involve your partner in some way. You start thinking about “us” instead of “me.” What does “our” future hold is a very different question from what does “my” future hold.
In Ecclesiastes, a cord of three strands, is about three persons: husband and wife, and the third I am inclined to believe is God himself. But I would like also to consider the three strands of love, three crucial expressions of love, the dynamics that hold the strands together. I call them “graces” to emphasize that to work well, they must flow not simply from you, but from God’s heart through yours to your mates—loves 3 strands.
Grace of Acceptance
Love is full of delight, so accepting one another should be easy, right? But you are human, you will fail and hurt and misunderstand each other. All marriages have these struggles, but healthy marriages acknowledge and face them honestly. This does not mean detente where you just sidestep issues, but a real effort to understand, respect, and make room for your differences. Learn to recognize and respond to one another’s true needs, the needs of the heart.
I can’t tell you how much personal healing and growth I have gained from Kimberly accepting my weaknesses as well as my strengths. It is scary. It may feel uncomfortable to cry in front of your wife, for instance, but if I do not let her in, I stay locked inside myself. When you are given permission to be yourself, to bring all of who you are into relationship, and be embraced as a whole person, it gives you the safety and strength to accept yourself and grow into the beautiful person God designed you to be.
The problem comes when your spouse is just “wrong.” How can you accept that? Trying to settle who is “right” and “wrong” will probably make matters worse. Accepting them is not agreeing with them–it is rather trying to understand where they are coming from, what their needs are, and how those needs can be met. Where do you get the strength to love unconditionally? Only from God.
Grace flows from Him into us before it flows out from us to our spouse. We need to discover ourselves as loved unconditionally before we have the strength and security to love another truly. Author and minister Brennan Manning says, “God loves you as you are and not as you should be! Do you believe this? That God loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity, that He loves you in the morning sun and the evening rain, that He loves you without caution, regret, boundary, limit, or breaking point?”
Grace of Trust
Giving someone your trust is a great act of love. You can only be vulnerable with the deepest parts of yourself, those things you want to hide from everyone, to the extent you can trust the other person. But you can’t order trust for overnight delivery. It is a life long intentional process. You can’t make someone trust you and you can’t simply choose to trust another. A deep level of trust is never simply granted to someone, even the one closest to you, but is earned step by step as you share your inadequacies and receive empathy in return. Everyone doubt’s their own loveliness. You can each be the reflection of God’s loving eyes to the other.
There will be stumbles and falls along this journey of building trust. Expect it. The pressures of the world blast against you and blow you off course, but this is the bedrock to which you always return, this commitment you make today and every day after: to live in integrity–being honest, understanding, and accepting, out of a heart growing in love. I have seen that you two have such a commitment to being honest with one another, that you are willing to show each other your emotions, even the difficult ones.
Nothing is more powerful a support than someone knowing your failings and loving you regardless, I don’t mean the failings that are obvious, but the ones you have hidden all your life. Out of fear of rejection you covered them up, you felt unlovable because of these shadows. But how can we ever feel secure until we find someone who will love us after knowing us completely? God does this for us, but we need someone to show us this, someone with skin on, with a voice and smile and hug we can really hear and see and feel. Having experienced this with Kimberly, I can say this has been the truest revelation of love to me.
Grace of Sharing (Listening, Understanding, Respecting)
Set aside regular times when you turn off the TV, turn off your cell phones, forget your To-Do lists, and concentrate on listening to one another. It will take hard work and a lot of time. I can tell you ahead of time that you will need to learn a new language and culture, become an anthropological researcher.
Erin, you women are complicated creatures. You understand each other by some magic telepathy. Please remember that our brains don’t tune to that channel. If the man asks, “How are you?” and you say, “Fine!” he will take your word for it, give you a peck on the cheek and sit down with the remote. You have 49 distinct meanings for ‘fine’ depending on your intonation, your eyebrows, your lips, your hands, your posture. You are so eloquent… but we completely miss your subtlety. We can only understand what you say plainly with words.
David, never assume anything. You don’t know women, not even Erin. The good news is you can learn, the bad news is it will take a lot of effort and patience. You have to ask questions repeatedly. You probably won’t even know the right questions to ask, which is okay because Erin already knows what she wants to say. You just have to open the door. Even if you don’t understand at first, but really listen, she will feel better. By listen, I don’t mean nodding and saying “uh huh” as you watch the Colts fumble. The DVR was invented to save marriages.
Kimberly and I come from different families, backgrounds, experiences, and personalities, and when she shared bits and pieces of her perspective with me, they didn’t fit into my worldview. It sounded like Chinese.
We all have unique perspectives, which seem normal to us. If my point of view is normal to me, then your point of view has to be abnormal. We all stand at the point we think is the correct balance. To the right of us are conservative tightwads and to the left are profligate spendthrifts. To the right of us are workaholics and to the left are lazy bums. On this side are the messy and on the other are the clean freaks. Where you stand is always “reasonable” (otherwise you wouldn’t stand there). This means the other person’s position is “unreasonable.” So you will always grudge yielding.
Kimberly wanted me to vacuum behind the sofa where no one could see the dust, not even us. It was “unreasonable.” Many of you say “Your wife is right, that is very reasonable. What is unreasonable is cleaning behind the hot water heater.” But those who clean behind the hot water heater see that as normal, it is the people who scrub their driveways that are bonkers. Whatever your position, it is what it is. Erin, your view is entirely legitimate. David doesn’t have to agree that you are right and he is wrong, but he needs to respect your perspective and make room for it as much as he is able. And the same for you Erin. That big scrap of metal he wants to keep looks like trash to you, but to him it is a little piece of a dream. Let him have a shed to stack his dreams in.
The source of these expressions of love, these graces of trust and vulnerability, listening and understanding, respect and acceptance, the source is God, the strand that keeps the cord from unraveling. It is crucial to your marriage that each of you individually and as a couple develop a deep, honest, trusting relationship with God, find in him the grace you need for yourself and one another. His love is limitless as the sky, constant as the sun, deeper than the ocean, eternal and unconditional as only God Himself is. In Him you will find life, and through him your marriage will be a little taste of heaven (with a few quarrels mixed in).
My sister Mardi emailed me this a few years ago:
On NPR I heard a really sweet story of a Dad and his little boy. The little boy had had a serious illness, had nearly died and had a long hospitalization and lots of surgery and treatments. Through it all he had clung to his Teddy Bear, Toby. Even after he had gotten better, he carried Toby with him everywhere. Then when he was 7 the family was on vacation and when they got home, Toby was missing. They told him and he said “I don’t know how I can go on without Toby” and then he said “I feel like I’ve lost my soul”!
Well, his Dad promptly got on the next plane back to Anaheim and went straight to the hotel. The hotel people looked and looked and asked the staff and found that the bear had been found by a cleaning person, but it was in a trashcan and so they had thrown it out. Undeterred, the father asked where the trash was put. They showed him the large (size of a semi truck) dumpster in the back. Good news, the truck had not yet come to pick it up, it was scheduled to pick it up the next day….bad news, it was completely sealed with no way of getting into it. But, as they were talking about it, the truck drove up! The father convinced half a dozen of the hotel employees to go with him and help him look for Toby. He said that they were all parents and understood why he needed their help. He also offered $100 to the person who found the bear. So they all get in a van and follow the garbage truck to the recycling facility. (at this point I am crying in the car as I am listening to the story unfold) Now, this facility is not just a city dump; it is a huge building with many bays where the trucks pull up and cranes lift off the dumpsters. Inside is an area the size of an airplane hanger with all sorts of equipment and vehicles and people working. The people at the facility are not going to let them go in there. But after a lot of talking they agree to shut down the equipment and let them look for Toby….but only for 15 minutes.
Well, when they empty out the dumpster on the floor, he said it was a huge mountain of garbage, bigger than he could have imagined. It was all runny with a lake of brown garbage liquid with all these plastic bags sitting and floating in the brown goo. The hotel people jump in and start tearing open bags looking for the bear. The father is overwhelmed by the enormity of the task but begins tearing open bags too. Then a number of the employees of the facility put on their gloves and begin wading through the muck tearing open bags too! (I’m bawling in the car). There are now about 18 people looking through the mountain. But as the father looks at the size of the pile and the number of bags, he realizes in despair that it will be really impossible to look through it all. And in his heart he just says “Toby, we’re not going to be able to find you unless you somehow show yourself”. He said that he is not a particularly spiritual guy, he’s an accountant and auditor…. a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of a guy. But as that thought went through his mind, he tore open a bag, and there was Toby, dry and clean. Everyone, of course was jubilant. The father immediately calls home to tell his little boy that he had found Toby. He said his little boy was happy, but seemed kind of matter-of-fact and the father realized that for the little boy it seemed that his father had just gone and gotten his bear back. The child had no idea of the super-human effort that had been accomplished for him.
Much of my life’s darkness metastasized from this one seed thought: I felt inadequate because I accomplished so little for God and I feared his disappointment. If I just did a little more, I could please him at last. And so I drove myself to extreme lengths–choosing celibacy, relocating to a city of misery, sleeping little, fasting and praying weeks at a time. But I could never do enough to feel secure in his love, because I used my fruitfulness or effectiveness to measure his blessing and pleasure, and the results did not speak well of me. I subconsciously assumed that God’s love for me was based on my usefulness to him. In this way, my success was fundamental to my well-being.
I lived 40 years out of that false assumption, building up a whole network, a fully functioning system based on that foundation. It required a long process to break free. For the last ten years I have applied the salve of grace to my deep wound of worthlessness. Given time, grace works effectively for me when I can identify my specific need and saturate it with mercy. So for a decade I worked on delinking God’s love from my success, even from my behavior or choices. I was determined to rewire my thinking, conscious and unconscious, to ground all my well-being in the unconditional love of God. Though I did not focus on my heartbreak in India, I did focus on those underlying issues, so when it came to opening myself to that shrouded past, I found the weight had largely lifted.
It was not fully lifted because there are always new aspects of that one great confusion of grace which I need to identify and work through. As I planned for the trip, my wife warned me against a determination for good results, but rather to do my best and leave the outcome as it came. She knows me well, and it was good counsel. Still I felt dragged down too much by a sense of responsibility to succeed.
I have a long way to go, but I am moving in the right direction. I always thought I was responsible and therefore in control of my own success. As each string tying me to that assumption snaps, I find growing relief and peace. Results matter, matter profoundly, but I am not responsible for results, only for motives and actions. My heart is slowly embracing the unconditional love of God… even, amazingly, when my motives and actions are faulty. God is always packed tight with grace bursting to be free.
July 4th Kimberly and I visited her Aunt Pam on the lake. It had been a nice day, but started to rain an hour before we left. As we drove home on a two lane road, I came around a curve and spotted a car stopped in front of me with a car passing it in the oncoming lane. Because of the rain, I knew I could never brake in time, but there was no shoulder. I swerved onto the sloped wet grass and the tires slid uncontrollably down the embankment into a row of spaced wooden pylons at the bottom. Bump! …Bump! …Bump! …Bump!
Thankfully, the window-high logs were not buried or cemented in the ground, so each one went down successively and did what my brakes could not. We ended up just short of a side street, gently enough that the airbags did not deploy. It was a close call. The plastic front bumper was torn badly and we had a big dent in the fender, but after I strapped up the broken bumper with 3 bungee cords, we managed to drive home okay, though we were both shaken up.
When anything bad happens, especially with a potential repeat, the “if” question starts flashing like a warning light. If I had been more alert, I may have been able to stop in time… if my tire treads were better… if I had been driving slower… if Kimberly had been driving. Identifying the crucial “if” and finding its answer seems to be our voucher to a safe future, especially for us fix-it types.
For those of us who are also shame sponges, our very worth seems to ride on these answers. The “if” must not point to me. I must prove that I could not have foreseen or planned or reacted any better than I did, even when it means, sadly, that I find someone else to blame. When I’m unarguably at fault, then a second defense to my worth is to fix the results, make sure there is no cost to anyone but myself. When this also is beyond my reach, then a weak third defense is to settle on a solution that will prevent this incident ever recurring.
Unfortunately, these three steps of unhealthy self-protection can look very spiritually mature, even to myself. I can pass it off as self-examination, restitution, and repentance. I think I am fleeing from shame into rectitude, but I am actually running from true forgiveness and grace into the apparent safety of legalism. I cannot believe that there is complete forgiveness and reconciliation without some payment from my side… a payment of promises, of sorrow and groveling, or of corrective action. The smaller my failure footprint, the easier it is to forgive me… at least that is what I picked up from interacting with fellow humans.
Once thoroughly trained in this relational dynamic, it is very hard for me to change the way I see God. Unlike us, he never finds it hard to forgive me and isn’t suspicious that my confession is contrived. He never lets the injury I have done him constrict his compassion for me or his desire to relate to me. I should not have said “never lets” as though his forgiveness was an act of his will to override his natural inclinations to retaliate. His love for me is always on full, regardless of what I have done.
Sara Layman’s “Alleluia” posts were part of the inspiration for my new blog.
“Alleluia Day 106: Once, for a few weeks, my eldest daughter went to sleep-away camp. When I picked her up we went to the craft cabin to pick up her artwork. She couldn’t find her work. I found what looked like her initials on the back of one plaster of paris Jesus but she said it wasn’t hers. “No, Mom! When I painted my Jesus’ eyes, the paint ran down his cheeks.” The craft counselors spoke up, “Oh no, don’t worry about that. We spent all day touching up the paintings and fixing them!” I couldn’t believe my ears. Seriously, I did not want someone else’s painted Jesus in my house (at all!) the only value that piece had was that my child worked on it, was proud of it, and wanted me to see it and have it. They removed the value (for me). My child didn’t want the edited piece either. Why is it that I want to edit my efforts to try to make them appear perfect to others? Did Jesus reject those who washed his feet with water because it wasn’t expensive perfume? Of course I’d like my work and art and efforts to be perfect but if they aren’t – after all I’m not perfect – isn’t it better to have the honest, heartfelt efforts rather than the manipulated and contrived results? Will I, in response, accept all gifts without strings or criticisms? Alleluia!”
I love this post of Sara’s, which she gave me permission to use. How rich to think of two kinds of worth for any creation, the inherent worth and the worth derived from the heart of the creator, and the second has no real relationship to the first. If it is a genuine expression of the individual’s heart, and I see it as such, then it cannot be poorly done, then it is more precious to me than all other creations, no matter how grand and glorious they are. Whatever we offer to God hangs now on his refrigerator door.
I do not know the source, but here is a story of diehard love:
Some years ago on a hot summer day in south Florida a little boy decided to go for a swim in the old swimming hole behind his house. In a hurry to dive into the cool water, he ran out the back door, leaving behind shoes, socks, and shirt as he went. He flew into the water, not realizing that as he swam toward the middle of the lake, an alligator was swimming toward the shore.
His mother in the house was looking out the window and saw the two as they got closer and closer together. In utter fear she ran toward the water, yelling to her son as loudly as she could. Hearing her voice, the little boy became alarmed and made a U-turn to swim to his mother. It was too late. Just as he reached her, the alligator reached him. From the dock, the mother grabbed her little boy by the arms just as the alligator snatched his legs. That began an incredible tug-of-war between the two. The alligator was much stronger than the mother, but the mother was much too passionate to let go. A farmer happened to drive by, heard her screams, raced from his truck, took aim, and shot the alligator.
Remarkably, after weeks and weeks in the hospital the little boy survived. His legs were extremely scarred by the vicious attack of the animal, and on his arms were deep scratches where his mother’s fingernails dug into his flesh in her effort to hang on to the son she loved. The newspaper reporter who interviewed the boy after the trauma, asked if he would show him his scars. The boy lifted his pant legs. And then, with obvious pride, he said to the reporter, “But look at my arms. I have great scars on my arms, too. I have them because my Mom wouldn’t let go.”
You and I can identify with that little boy. We have scars, too. No, not from an alligator, or anything quite so dramatic. But the scars of a painful past. Some of those scars are unsightly and have caused us deep regret, but some wounds, my friend, are because God has refused to let go. In the midst of your struggle, He’s been there holding on to you. The Scripture teaches that God loves you. You are a child of God. He wants to protect you and provide for you in every way. But sometimes we foolishly wade into dangerous situations. The swimming hole of life is filled with peril – and we forget that the enemy is waiting to attack. That’s when the tug-of-war begins – and if you have the scars of His love on your arms be very,very grateful. He did not and will not let you go.
Janathan Grace Reflections 