Archive for the ‘Growth’ Tag
Me: …Anxiety is not a failure. It is just informing me of what needs attention and care…. I think anxiety is inviting me to notice my inner trouble and encouraging me to then lean into grace which has somehow gotten away from me, and to trust your grace to come through for me whether my anxiety is lessened or not. Oh “come through for me” can be confused with fixing. Really the form of grace I need most is compassion, to believe you care deeply for my pain. Like a little kid who would run to his supportive mom, not mostly to fix the problem, but to receive that understanding, validation, and comfort. I used to think quite [strongly] that you were primarily into my character building, making me a better person. That looks similar enough to be confused with grace, but it is the opposite. Now I believe you only wish for me to grow into all the beauty that is seeded in my soul. I thought I was the gardener and now see I am the garden!
God: What a wonderful way of seeing my love and delight in your unique beauty! And it is truly the responsibility of the gardener to foster the natural beauty of the garden. I love that you trust me for that. I know that is a struggle and has been your whole life, but look how much you have grown! You have overcome major challenges to trust, and really it is all about the direction, not the speed or attainment. In fact, looking at it as attainment pulls you away from my grace and turns our relationship into legalism. The key to close connection is in walking the journey together, not achieving some goal. I love that you are walking the journey with me. How delightful!
Me: So we read together [Kimberly and I]. Rohr said that the only way we can connect with what is outside of us is if there is some correspondence inside us. So God planted all his goodness in us in unique ways. We are not originally evil. Evil is an accretion. I always thought good was something to acquire and impose on my bad self, but this idea invites us to embrace all the goodness within us and foster its growth. It is not about bringing the good in from outside, but finding resonance within us to that good. So what do you think about that?
God: Yes, creation, all of creation, reflects me. How could it not if it sprang from me? I made you. I made you good. I made you to show my goodness in your own unique way. That goodness in you can never be killed, but is eternally beyond your ability to destroy. It is the diamond that might be covered in mud or rock or ocean, but is still a beauty beyond expression. Were I to write down all the unique good that is in you, it would be larger than the encyclopedia… it would take a lifetime to read. Eternity will be spent discovering and growing all the beauty within you. I want you to see your own beauty as much as you see the beauty of nature, of dogs, of all that you take joy in. I want you to see your beauty as much as I see your beauty.
Me: I wish I could too! The barnacles that block my good from expressing itself also block my view of my good. I see the barnacles and think they are a reflection of the true me. I also see all that I am designed to express and realize how far I have to go, how immature I am.
God: But I hope you understand that your growth in beauty is something that will unfold through all of eternity. There is this false sense that “mature” is some stage that everyone should aim for and eventually “arrive” and that immature is somehow inadequate or something to get passed. Imagine a sapling being upset that it is not a tree. Growth is just a continual process that never ends, and varies dramatically for many reasons (note the rings on a tree!), and the growth of one cannot be compared to the growth of another. A sapling in the desert will take a very long time to grow. Softwood grows fast, but hardwood is stronger, and cactus is resilient, and … everyone is unique and beautiful in their own way. When you use future beauty to shame present beauty, the whole concept of unfolding beauty is turned on its head.
I was raised in an environment of revivalism. My grandfather taught a spirituality called “the victorious Christian life” which asserted that a Christian could surrender so fully to God that they would stop sinning. He died well before I was born, but my father carried on that legacy, shaping all of my childhood environment through his presidency at the Christian college campus where we lived as well as the all-summer camp and private high school we attended. My father, who was more aware of his shortcomings, could not live up to his father’s standards and trimmed the spiritual expectations down to match his own sense of moral accomplishment: living without intentional sinning. He continued to call it “the victorious Christian life” and constantly challenged others to recommitment to this higher level at his college and summer conference center (similar spiritualities were labled “higher life,” “deeper life,” and “Spirit-filled living”) His reimagined theology commonly resulted in followers either doubting often their status as a victorious Christian or downplaying their failures as unintentional (so it didn’t “count,” and they did not lose their status or need a life recommitment). Dad had various ways to label a failure as unintentional. So if he were wrongfully angry, he marked it unintentional until he recognized it as sinful, then he could choose to stop being angry and keep the status of “victorious Christian.” He could snap at his children unintentionally (“in the heat of the moment”), but then “come to himself” and make it right and so not lose his standing as a victorious Christian. Lack of self-awareness in this framework became subconsciously a bonus rather than a flaw. Making right choices was naturally core to this theology as was the laser focus on right behavior rather than the underlying causes over which one had little direct control.
My father was quite limited in his self-reflection, both by temperament and by choice–I expect that was necessary for maintaining his sense of spiritual success. However, I was born with a reflective temperament. I had no means of escaping deep self-awareness. Knowing all that went on below the surface, I had no way to separate “intentional” from “unintentional.” When I was angry, I was fully aware from the start that I was angry. Respecting my own feelings would have required me to regularly choose for myself, which was called “selfishness.” I therefore had to learn to ignore, minimize and override my feelings, to basically learn to reject and hate who I was. God who created my feelings judged me for having those feelings–fear was a lack of faith, sadness was ingratitude, anger had to be “righteous.” This was terribly dis-integrating for me, but with many years of intense effort, I finally pulled it off, successfully outrunning my shame… until it finally caught up with me. The fake god who shamed me overplayed his hand, crushing me, and so drove me into the arms of the God of all grace. I finally realized that “growing in grace” was not about meeting higher standards, but about embracing unmerited love.
But one’s childhood is not so easily outgrown. I know this from the judgments that still claw at my heart after 25 years of opening myself to grace. Naturally my temperament (what the old Greeks would call melancholy) inclines me towards this. It is a long journey of learning to foster the unique beauty that springs from this DNA, to embrace what troubles me until it rises into the glory of its creation. I wish us all hope on this difficult, rewarding journey and may whatever spirituality you embrace be a sail and not an anchor.
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.
Dad died a year ago last Friday. His passing was not an emotional jolt for me since I had spent a decade grieving the loss of our relationship. My father could not follow me on my journey of genuine self-discovery over the last twenty years. He tried as best he could to understand me, but always on his own terms, trying to fit me into his mental constructs with slight alterations–a more melancholy and ardent version of himself perhaps. He instinctively knew, I think, that really opening himself to see things from my perspective would require a complete re-orientation of his own perspective and that was too radical for his carefully organized worldview.
His is a common human problem. The first year of marriage was a huge struggle for me for the same reason–that my worldview made sense and Kimberly’s did not. I tried listening to her and incorporating aspects of her perspective–trying to be more gentle and supportive, less critical and angry, tweek my worldview with cosmetic changes without moving any load-bearing walls. I kept listening to her explain her struggle in our relationship, and I kept trying to adapt my behavior and avoid or use certain words while hiding certain attitudes. I was basically saying to myself, “My worldview needs no adjustments, but out of love I will accommodate her weaknesses.” It didn’t work.
Relational accommodation, making room for someone else’s differences, is much more loving than rejecting them as somehow “wrong,” but it is a truncated love. When I continue to see others from my own perspective rather than trying to see with their eyes and understand them from within their experience, I cannot understand them in any deep way. The relationship cannot be fundamentally supportive or transformational, but only touches the surface. Our interdependence “being members of one another” is so much more than sharing our spiritual gifts. Our interdependence goes to the core of who we are. We need the corrective of the other’s point of view.
Most of us are willing to tweak our life map, add a street or railroad that is missing. “Oh, I didn’t know that,” we say. It is the natural process of learning. As long as no one fiddles with the major features of our map, we won’t feel too defensive when they suggest changes because we basically have the “right” orientation. But if the differences in our maps are profound–mine shows a grid of city streets where yours shows winding country roads–then we have no easy solution. My initial reaction, emotionally and intellectually, is to reject your map, to assume you are wrong, confused, or misguided. When my father first heard I was struggling with depression, he was concerned and sent me a book that stated in the introduction, “Depression comes from a lack of faith.” Thankfully, he did not stick with that perspective.
The next step in a positive direction is for me to stop rejecting your map as defective and simply assert that our views are incompatible and so we cannot understand one another. The third step (with a smidgen of humility) is to see how I might learn from you, fit some features of the your map into mine, add a river here or a corner store there… but a river going through the center of a city, polluted and obstructing traffic, is very different from a river that is bordered by meadows. When I squeeze this element into my map, the whole essence of it is changed. I have distorted your view to fit my own, and though I may speak of a river, we see it so differently that we still cannot understand one another. How you experience that river is completely shaped by your overall map, and until I can see that, I am blind to who you are. “Okay,” I say to myself, “He likes pollution and traffic jams. To each his own.” Dad came this far with me on my journey, acknowledging that it was possible to be full of the Spirit and still suffer depression, though he could not conceive how that fit into his own theological framework, he at least allowed for it, a kind of exception to the rule.
But he was never able to get past this stage with me. I spent years trying to explain to him my own experience and how I was coming to realize that his map of life did not work for me, but he always saw my experience as an aberration from the norm. He was convinced that his theology and spirituality and values were spot-on and needed only slight tweaking to accommodate people like myself, maybe add a mission hospital to his map for that small segment of broken people like myself. He instinctively knew that to open his worldview to my experience–using it to challenge his worldview instead of adding it as an addendum–would mean a complete revision of his thinking, a worldview that he had spent a lifetime perfecting and promoting through his preaching, teaching, and writing. And thousands of testimonials proved that his worldview worked… at least for those who found it beneficial.
So I spent the last years of his life slowly accepting the painful reality that my own father would never know me, that our relationship would never get past the superficial. In many ways it was like my mom’s slow decline into Alzheimer’s when she eventually did not know who I was or even that I was in the room. Trapped inside her own mind, she could not relate to us. That long grieving process seems to me more gentle on those left behind than a sudden death of an intimate. Truly here “we see in a glass, darkly.” We let them go with the joyful expectation that when we embrace them again all the obstacles to our relationships will be gone, and we will “know even as we are known.”
Postlude: Kimberly tells me no one will understand what I have said without an example. So let me very briefly point out one serious difference in our maps. Dad, being a choleric, grounded spiritual growth in behavioral choices and made God responsible for his subconscious mind–if he was not aware of it, he was not responsible for it. As a result, he tended to see emotions as secondary to our spiritual lives. This might work for people who are less self-reflective, but it is a scheme that is largely unworkable for us melancholics who are in touch with a great part of the tides of our hearts. If dad had been able to fully accept this discrepancy, he would have had to rework his whole paradigm of spiritual growth, either suggesting different processes for different people or working out a new approach that fully incorporated the processes of those different from him. This is a very tall order for anyone, especially in the latter part of our lives, so I do not mean to fault him for it. He quite possibly did the best he could with what he had–and we cannot ask for more. I only share this as an encouragement for us all to work at broadening our viewpoints.
Today between the rows of stoves in Home Depot’s appliance department, I asked a couple if I could help them. They told me they had just moved from out of town, were buying a new house, and needed appliances. I soon discovered he had jumped mid-life from the business world into repairing musical instruments, which is his first love. They had moved here two weeks ago, and he had a fully functioning business up and running. I was astonished—how did he build up a clientele so quickly?
“Oh,” he replied, “a local man was retiring, and I saw his ad—a full shop of tools and a full client list of customers. That’s why we moved here. I didn’t even have to pay for the business. The man was retiring and just handed it over to me!”
He had been looking all over the country, but this shop just happened to be in the town where his wife grew up, so the couple was staying with her father until they could buy a house. I asked if it was hard to get a loan for the house since he was self-employed in a new business in a new location, which might seem risky to a bank.
“No,” he said, “my wife has been working an internet job for 15 years (which she can do from anywhere) so the bank gave her the loan.”
Having recently moved here myself, our contrast was sharp. I have a part-time job for which I have no love, which doesn’t pay enough, and which can’t possibly support a bank loan for a house. Everything fell into place magically for this couple while Kimberly and I struggle to make ends meet in jobs neither of us want, making do with an over-priced, under-sized rental in a bad neighborhood, and without friends or family with whom to connect. Where’s our magic?
Such sharp contrasts do not make me angry or bitter, but they often make me hopeless and depressed. I don’t know how to make life work for us. But this time I knew God was punking me. He’d set me up for this by giving me just the insight I needed this morning to trust him in what he was dragging me through. I knew that our tough road was creating a unique work of God in my soul. His magic wand was out, not pointed at my circumstances but at me. I was the magic he was making, and sometimes a magic brew calls for frog toenails and lizard poop.
We humans are deeply flawed. The Bible calls it sin, the evil and brokenness that infests our whole world, right down to the roots of our own heart. It not only distorts our hearts, but our minds, our volition, our self-understanding… it taints every part of who we are. One of the primary ways this plays out is to make each of us the center of our own universe, both perceptually and morally. We have a default to justify ourselves while blaming others.
Self justification may at first glance seem like self compassion, being on my own side, but it is really a Trojan horse, the gift that keeps on taking, because it is rejection of the truth, and that never leads to health and strength. Fleeing our shame makes us no freer than the prison escapee who is running for his life. Our only hope is to embrace our shame, our failings, our faults, with the arms of grace, to openly confess our flaws from within the safety of God’s unconditional love.
I’m sorry to say that I often find it easier to see the failing of others than my own, and to then fault them for it as a moral flaw. But fixing that tendency to blame others by trying instead to justify them leads to equal disorder in our minds and hearts and relationships. Grace ceases to be grace when it avoids the truth. Being generous-minded (assuming the best rather than the worst) certainly has its place, especially if our default is to blame (as mine sadly is), but our aim is to seek out what is true, not what is nice. Flattery is deadly, especially when it is sincere.
Our response to our parents often falls into this unfortunate dichotomy–we either blame them or exonerate them, justify ourselves or justify them, and both responses are equally damaging. In the complexity of processing through our emotional entanglements, we will likely go through stages of both blaming and justifying, I certainly did, but these should never be an end in themselves. We seek to know ourselves through the dynamics of our early upbringing so as to find truth and freedom in which to grow forwards. Things need to be unlearned or re-organized or re-evaluated or put into perspective. Getting stuck in blame or justification cuts off true transformation.
One key tool in growing into a gracious outlook towards others is to separate the impact of someone’s behavior from its sinfulness. To say that my father or mother impacted me in a certain way is quite distinct from saying that they are to blame. They may have been doing the best they could. We do not ultimately know what internal resources they did or did not have, the motivations for their choices, and so on. “To his own Master he stands or falls.” However, we have the emotional and spiritual obligation to carefully evaluate behavior as itself beneficial or harmful, otherwise we will mindlessly carry on those relational patterns into our own families by adopting them or by reactively adopting their opposite.
It took years for me to accept my own ostrich-ness without embarrassment, recognizing and not running away from the disappointment others held towards me. I was sharply reminded of this at my dad’s funeral as I re-connected with acquaintances from long ago, the many who stood in line to offer me their condolences and politely inquire: “Where do you live now?” and “What do you do there?”
The simple answer is, “I work at Home Depot.” There is nothing simple about that response. It is freighted with cultural and religious baggage, and I immediately saw it in their faces when I answered, sudden flickers of questions and doubts tugging at their cheeks and blinking their eyelids. The middle-aged son of a college president working a minimum-wage job? Should they leave it alone and move on or ask me for clarification… and how could they do that circumspectly? Since I wasn’t sitting down with them for coffee, I started adjusting my answer to relieve their discomfort.
I understand their consternation. When I started working at Home Depot two years ago it took me a couple months of building courage to share the news on Facebook. As a culture, when we hear of a college-educated person in mid-career working an entry level job, we feel sure there is a tragic story behind this mishap. Selling hammers is one step above homelessness. I was going to say one step above unemployment, but actually an unemployed professor ranks far above a working stiff–he hasn’t given up on himself yet.
Of course the heavy cultural implications are double-weighted with the religious ones. It is true that Jesus himself worked with hammers and saws, but that was in his youth, just an apprenticeship for what really mattered, we think. The highest accolades in my family and alma mater go to missionaries, secondarily to pastors, thirdly to those in non-profit work, but instead of working my way up that ladder, I slipped down it, one rung at a time. Oddly enough, my soul was gaining depth and strength and wisdom with each lower step.
It seems the Kingdom of God is much less predictable and straightforward than I assumed most of my life. I guess that is why we walk by faith.
Kimberly spoke at length with a friend today by phone and afterwards sent her an email. I found the email so insightful, I wanted to let you in on it:
I thought I’d share the things I was reminded of during our conversation today:
1. Growth doesn’t offer immediate rewards in terms of good feelings. In fact, it usually feels worse at first! Humans don’t like going into unknown territory, especially areas they’ve been avoiding their whole lives! So it feels bad at first, which makes us think we are doing something wrong. But be encouraged. Difficult feelings don’t mean bad things are happening. Growth is very challenging to our comfort levels, and often other people don’t like it because they are comfortable with the old ways, too. Which leads us to #2.
2. Being a good Christian doesn’t mean everyone will always be happy with us. We do have to be responsible, and that means for our own well being as well as others. We cannot always choose to make others happy over ourselves. That is a way to create toxic and dysfunctional relationships that don’t honor God…but instead make others walk all over you and become selfish because they always get what they want. God doesn’t want us to enable others, but often asks us to challenge them by being honest about our own needs. Then it offers them the chance to grow by having to think about being more generous themselves!
3. Anxiety usually means we are entering new emotional territory. We all have fear and times of being insecure, but when anxiety becomes a regular and strong experience, it does mean something new is happening and it is so important to learn what it is and nurture the growth aspect. But again, anxiety doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. It actually means your spirit is open in a new way that makes something new possible. We aren’t anxious when we are doing the same old comfortable thing. So think of it as being pregnant with new life. Anxiety…the “labor pains” of growth… comes when we are ready to give new life to something in us. Something is trying to get born…like labor pains…and it hurts! So we need to go with the labor pain and encourage it to come. In your case now, I think that is being willing to make a decision that others aren’t happy about (being willing to choose your own needs even when you know someone else won’t like it) and also allowing for grace when something you decide turns out to have a negative impact on people you love. Yikes! Hard stuff!
These are all my own issues, also! I am still trying to get more comfortable with the idea of challenging others rather than always trying to make them happy. Challenge is a part of love, we need to remember. People need the chance to make better choices, to become better than they are by coming up against the needs of others. They do need comfort, too, which you and I are good at… but our growth area is challenge.
When we face life honestly, bravely, and resolutely, it slices us with a thousand little deaths: truths we are loathe to admit, securities that have blocked our growth, long-fostered hopes that end with a sudden blowout or gradual leak against every effort to re-inflate them. As Kimberly and I prepare to move to Asheville, NC, we are “downsizing,” a smooth word corporations use to put a positive spin on frantically casting everything overboard to save a sinking ship–more like foundering than streamlining.
I had no trouble giving away excess clothes and unused dishes, but when I sold my weight set, it went out the door with my dreams of a buff body still draped over it. To my wife it was a dust-collecting eye-sore, but when I sold that bench, I gave up on a promise and hope. It was my final concession that this frumpy body is the one I will take to the grave. I finally admitted honestly that it was a wasted dream, sitting idle for so many years because my real values lay elsewhere. And that’s okay… it’s even good. I want to live out my true values and not be distracted by false ones. But the good road often forks away from the desirable one. Being good and being happy are often incommensurable.
Stripping away possessions can be a stripping off of dreams and securities, groundings and trajectories, plans and expectations. This morning as I drove my pickup filled with ministry books to donate to a local college, one phrase pounded through my head: “I hate my life!” Those particular books sat in boxes in my basement for ten years, waiting, full of hope for a revived ministry of preaching or teaching or leading, some role to play in bringing God’s goodness into the world. They hung heavy with past joys long gone: the delight in studying and sharing truth with others, the deep satisfaction of experiencing spiritual usefulness by sharing gifts to benefit others.
I have pursued the truth as relentlessly as I can, and it has brought me so much more insight and freedom, self-knowledge and character. I know now that much of what I did before was streaked through with blindspots and immaturity and ungodliness. I had a deeply flawed understanding of God. I am in a far better place personally and spiritually because of all the breaking, but I had hoped to come to the other side of the struggle, to rediscover joy and peace and fulfillment at a new, fuller, more meaningful level. But I am only tired, deeply tired, and crushed and broken-hearted. I feel as though I am on a death-march, lifting one foot after the other in my hopeless, stubborn faith.
If this rings true for your own experience, may you be encouraged that you are not alone. Let us call out to one another in the dark.
Janathan Grace Reflections 