Archive for the ‘Growth’ Tag
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.
I woke up today with a sweet dog snuggled up to me and a loving God looking down on me with a good-morning smile. I lay there talking with Him for some time, and then sat up and all the good feelings drained away like cascading water. This is a regular occurrence, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
I’m like an emotional preschooler, unable to understand my own emotions–what I feel and why I feel that way. I have the emotional theory down pretty well, but like passing a written driver’s test, knowing the answers on an exam doesn’t help much behind the wheel. Trying to interpret the principles into practice is still largely a conundrum for me. I’m not sure approaching it like a science is the best route anyway. If I thoroughly studied gravity, balance, muscular response and tried to apply that knowledge to learning to ride a bicycle, I think I would find it more a hindrance than a help.
But that analogy fails to capture the complexity and variability of emotions, and the experiential feedback I get is not like falling off a bike—it is not immediate, clear, and simple. Occasionally I know straight off that I got it right–that my gentle response to a harsh retort came from a healthy place and felt emotionally rewarding. But that immediate and clear reading of my heartbeat is rare and comes after a great deal of struggle, trial, and slowly growing insight into some facet of my heart. Often my response is partially unhealthy (which part, and how?) and my emotions are conflicted–a dash of fear, a sprinkle of false guilt, a slather of confusion, a pinch of hope.
We all ride bikes the same, but our emotions play out uniquely for each of us. So we learn basic principles about emotions, but using them to understand ourselves (and others) is a complex skill that must be learned the long, hard way by practice, regularly skinning our knees and running into things in the process. It takes fearlessness, tenacity, and commitment.
Had I been taught as a child to notice, validate, understand and respond affirmatively to my feelings, I think I would have learned the process and developed the skills by now. In our inescapably fallen world, I was rather shaped by society directly as well as through its influence in my family and playmates to ignore, judge, and control my feelings. Anger was forbotten, sadness was curtailed, fear was mocked. Meanwhile love, hope, and joy were pushed as the acceptable feelings to manufacture and share. And in turn I too became a spinner of these lies. In short, a great deal has to be unlearned and long-ingrained reflexes untaught, in the process of discovering what is true and good for our hearts. So we misplace our true selves early in life and get further lost with our borrowed and faulty compass and map.
What might come naturally, like learning to walk, now requires much deeper insight to untangle our confused legs, clear up our bleary eyesight, and reorient our backwards direction. Unlearning is far more difficult and involved than learning fresh from scratch. The whole outlook must be re-oriented before individual bad habits can be addressed and a healthy direction taken, and all of this must be done in the face of constant opposition from the world around us.
Society says, “Don’t worry, be happy!” and ostracizes us when we frown. The church agrees with “Worry is a sin against faith!” and judges us if we share our fears, especially tenacious fears. How then can we find a way to validate our own experience and feelings, to be understanding and empathetic with ourselves? It often feels as though we are on our own, swimming against a very strong current.
So I write this to those of you on this long journey with me because it is so easy to get discouraged and lose hope. The road to recovery seems to be so hard and take so long. Weariness and doubt and confusion drag down our resolve and steal our hope. Let those of us who wish to take this way encourage one another. I believe in you!
All my life I have tried to pursue God and his ways. I’m just now waking to the possibility that this was working against my very nature. A rose does not set out each morning doing rose exercises, studying rose botany, planning how best to scale the trellis at its leafy tips. It has within itself the seed of becoming, God has placed it there, and it simply becomes, living out of this true center until it slowly grows into the fulness for which it was designed.
My approach to spiritual growth was far more rational, organized, and disciplined. I analyzed God into various character traits–patience, discipline, purity (a long list)–and then, seeing that I came up short, I worked to gain those virtues, add them to myself like so many prosthetic attachments. Instead of understanding my own impatience and what drove it and why and how and discerning the particular shape patience might take were it to grow naturally from my own sanctified perceptions, inclinations, history and personality, I tried to adopt wholesale the patience I saw in others, force it on myself. But like transplanted organs the body rejects, my soul did not know how to incorporate these foreign traits.
I didn’t realize that the meekness in Jeremiah is dramatically different than the meekness displayed by Moses or David, so I kept trying and failing to squeeze my soul into a shape not my own, find a champion of each virtue and imitate that rendition. Learning to play another musician’s song is quite different from finding one’s own song, even when they are both acoustic ballads about love. I can certainly be inspired and instructed by their example, but I must find my own voice.
I always understood Paul as saying, “Be not conformed to this world, but be conformed (to godliness)” and never noticed that his change in verb not only changes the goal, but changes the means to that goal: do not be conformed, but be transformed. And this is effected not primarily by force of will (discipline), or miracle of faith (prayer and hope), but by a renewed understanding or insight (Romans 12:2). Surely it takes focus and work to refine who I am and scrape off the accretions of sin that deform my true, God-given self, and it takes faith since I am completely dependent on God’s intervention to bring my soul to fruition, but this process integrates with who I am as a unique creation of God. It is an affirmation of who I truly am, not a rejection of it. I am discovering that spiritual growth is about becoming rather than adding, understanding my true self and setting it free into God rather than squeezing it into a virtuous mold.
A video on bullying I watched today sparked memories of my own childhood spent running from troublemakers at recess. Only once was I seriously punched and had to go to the emergency room for stitches (my right eyebrow still has a slight split on the outside corner). But harassment was constant during gym class and recess–I was pushed, punched, threatened, chased, tripped, mocked. There were other danger zones as well: the lunch room, the hallway, the breezeway waiting for our school bus, and the bus ride itself was tormenting, bad enough that I started riding my bike the 10-mile round trip to middle school. Among boys, the only mark of prowess was aggression… and girls were liked for their looks.
Kids reflect the values of a culture with a clarity unobscured by the social camouflage that adults master. That’s why I like children’s books–bold, plain, and real. Because of family values, I admired intellect as a boy, but that was the stuff of nerds, not heroes. The lead actors from all my favorite TV shows punched and shot and muscled their way into glory… and they always got the pretty girl (first prize). Of course, their violence was validated by the justness of their cause, though that cause was usually self-defense, an arguably selfish motive were it not juxtaposed against the villainy of the other. The “other” was evil, right down to the color of his clothes.
Aside from the cowboys and cops and colonels, we had a few “nice guy” actors, but no one aspired to be Andy Griffith–you liked him but didn’t want to emulate him. Pacifists were cowards, courage was in the fists. The hero never picked a fight, but always finished it by beating his opponent into submission. Be it kung fu or fighter jets, we all admired the warrior, not the lover, who was just a wimp if he showed up without his six-shooters. The ultimate virtue was conquest, not love… even love was gained by conquest.
And so I set about life as a loser determined to fight my way into the trophy circle. My goals slowly shifted from physical prowess to spiritual prowess, but success was still my path to prove my worth. I focused all my energy to become a champion for God, which is to say, having a wide impact on others. Success is just as strong an addiction as gambling, even if you’re not a winner… especially if you’re not a winner. But unlike other addictions, it reaps praise, not shame, and moral validation, not warning, both from the world at large and from the church itself.
Cultural values that co-opt religious faith are the most pernicious and blinding of our defects. When church and society link arms, escape is nearly impossible, and far from looking for an exit, us losers are desperate to launch ahead. Unfortunately, as success grows, it clogs up the opening for grace. Success would have obviated my need for grace, a pitfall of all self-made men, even those who ostensibly credit God. But grace blocked my chase after success. It shackled me to loser-hood until I was forced to admit that my accomplishments don’t validate me. Apparently God doesn’t need my efforts any more than a father needs the help of his 3-year-old to change a tire. The toddler is not valued because of what he does, but who he is–a son.
Success still holds a little place in the corner of my heart–just in case–sort of like the spot reserved for a Porsche convertible that someone’s rich uncle might give me. Both daydreams would likely be a burden rather than a blessing. I trust God’s path for me, and I’m content just to hold his hand… most days anyway.
Janathan Grace Reflections 