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Have You Been There?

May 9, 2013 in confession, faith, grace, lessons, Life, wound with 0 Comments

Have you been there? You know–that place.

What place?

The one where you’re maligned and misunderstood by those closest to you.

There are ways, and there are ways, to deal with this.

One way is to shut down, hide within. Which means putting on a false face–a facade. But it hurts to hide who you are from those closest to you.

And the self will find a away out.

So what do you do when it doesn’t feel safe anymore to be you?

Like I said, you can hide. But this has a way of festering. Resentment is bound to grow whether you’re conscious of it, or not.

How do I know? I’ve been there. Dealt with that rejection.

I’ve been in a men’s group, and made the mistake of sharing my (personal) convictions about the age of the earth. The group imploded. Made me not want to have friends anymore. Made me want to skip the risk.

I’ve done it with family members, too. When my motives were called into question, when I’ve changed my mind about something… and was rejected. When something in social media spheres happened that was both unlocked, and unasked, for.

Somehow it was my fault.

When a friend of a friend questioned my salvation, and family members didn’t step in to defend me, but rather gave credence to it.

So I learned to hide.

And in hiding, I became vulnerable. When it was no longer safe to be me around those closest to me, I found an outlet via email. At first, it was just this fun thing where I could let my hair down, be me.

That was refreshing.

What I didn’t realize at the time was how much of myself I was investing–how much time, thought, life was going to this unreality.

Because it came to the place where I was constantly refreshing my email, looking for a message, a word, a something to…

Make me feel like me. Because I didn’t know who I was anymore.

I ask you: have you been in that place?

Take it from me: it’s far better to face your fears, risk rejection, and have the difficult conversations. (Consider this: Jesus himself spent his whole earthly life being rejected by his own. Yet in it all he did not sin).

If you’re hiding from those closest to you: take your mask off. Lay down your rapier wit.

It’s time to be vulnerable. For it’s in being thus open that, yes, we risk rejections, but at the same time paradoxically find grace.

Are you wearing any false faces today?

The Deadly Game of Shame

April 22, 2013 in church, Culture, depression, grace, shame, wound with 19 Comments

It’s not bad to feel ashamed when we’ve done shameful things. There is such a thing as a healthy regret. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.

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This post is not about that kind of shame. But rather about the shame that we, the culture, and church project. The kind that makes us worry more about our reputations, than about getting the help we need.

Continue Reading…

The Big Power of Little Words

February 8, 2013 in confession, introversion, lessons, Life, sharing, wound with 2 Comments

Yesterday was hard. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. In my quest to achieve a better today (all that each of us truly has anyway), I’ve been delving into the root causes of some my habitual behaviors.

Those patterns of relating that are borne of the intersection of nature, nature, and inclination.

What I’m finding is sobering.

I’m finding that seemingly innocuous, well-meaning words have the power to shape the course of a life.

Don’t believe me?

Consider this: as a small child, when I got a scrape, a bruise, a “boo-boo,” in an effort (I suppose) to toughen me up, I was told to say “I’m alright.”

Thing is, scrapes hurt. There wasn’t the “Are you okay?” Rather, I heard “You’re alright.”

Repeat something enough times, and it gets internalized. Becomes a part of our inner monologue.

So it was, on a visit to my grandmother’s house, and while playing hide-and-seek, I fell through the well cover. Did I cry out “Help?” Or “Help me?”

No.

Louder and louder I shrieked “I’m alright! I’M ALRIGHT!!! I’M ALRIGHT!!!!”

But of course I wasn’t–I was a small boy on the verge of falling into a well, with the very real possibility of drowning. Fortunately, my grandmother found me, and kept me from falling down the well.

“I’m alright” became my modus operandi, my life philosophy. Even when, especially when, things were most decidedly not alright. Here’s the thing: rather than toughen me up, prepare for the harsh realities of life, this little phrase served instead to crush whatever empathy my burgeoning soul possessed.

To this day, I have to work at feeling with, and for, someone. Because they, too, are alright.

Even when they’re not.

And that is the big power of little words.

God help me.

Practical Atheism

September 18, 2012 in Culture, faith, family, grace, Jesus, lessons, Life, wound with 2 Comments

I’m an adult child of divorce. It’s a part of my story. A large part. If you are familiar with the New Testament, you know the story of Jesus’s wilderness sojourn, and subsequent testing. What did Satan tell him? “If you are the son of God…”

He went after Jesus’s identity. He does the same still. For a child, especially as I was–an adolescent, entering high school–a divorce does much the same: strikes at the core of who one is. I was already struggling, casting about for answers, wondering who I was, when the divorce hammer fell.

As dysunctional as my family of origin was, it was my family, and as Fiona Apple sings it was “all I ever knew of love.” Tolstoy says that all unhappy families are dissimilar; even so, it was my unhappiness–it was a known commodity.

The coup de grace came from a family member who lobbed this bon mot: “It’s always the kids’ fault” into the powder keg.

As if such things never go “Boom!”

The net effect of that explosion was that Satan played my heartstrings like a harpsichord. He had me believing that I was alone, that life was up to me.

I had to take care of myself.

This is a terrible leitmotif to carry into life–let alone a marriage–because it is so isolating. It is bound to leave one, or both, partners feeling like they are entirely unnecessary to the union. “You don’t need me.”

It is a terrible, terrible lie, and is merely another assault on one’s identity. In my case, even coming to the Lord at almost nineteen, it meant that I lived a kind of practical atheism. God had saved me, but I was on my own, adrift, free to live as I pleased. It meant, really, that God was the same kind of Father as my own dad: distant and uninvolved.

Such a lie! And yet my childhood, and my parents’ divorce, set me up for it. Yet I prayed, sought him, and.. didn’t seem to have the same kind of victories I saw in others.

Didn’t seem to have the same depth of relationship. I got jealous, and shut down even more.

The plain fact is that God had been trying to break through for years, but I didn’t hear it–because I didn’t believe I could! That he didn’t, or wouldn’t, speak to me. I belived he was obligated to save me, because he said so…and that was about all.

In the midst of this struggle, I read a book–a well-intentioned, well-researched book–Decision Making & the Will of God, that essentially confirmed my core convictions: that God is not a personal god, and as such has given us all we need in his book, the Bible. Nowhere in its pages did I glean any notion of God desiring a relationship with me. To my soul, it was akin to me saying to my kids: “Here’s a book telling you everything you need to know about life, and me. Why do you want me to speak to you–it’s all written down!” Where is the relationship, the surrender, the trust, the faith in this?

It is just served to confirm what I already believed: God was sterile, distant, cold, uninvolved.

Because, in my heart, I still believed I was entirely on my own. And there’s a thing about such core convictions: they are laid down in pain. According to John Eldredge, such can only be removed by pain.

For years, I just didn’t want to go there–didn’t want to follow Jesus there–into my deepest woundings. Why would he want to hurt me so, to expose these things?

Because he is faithful. And in his fidelity, he is faithful to wound us in the places of our deepest hurts, because he wants to heal them! In order to do so, he has to bring them to light. If you think on it, if you ask him for insight, there is a theme common to your greatest hurts, issues that keep coming up over and over again.

God is the one bringing those things to light–because he loves you.

Will you let him into those places today?

When I Was 11, I Read The Shining

September 12, 2012 in family, forgiveness, lessons, Life, sharing, Uncategorized, wound with 2 Comments

When I was eleven, I read Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. It is a harrowing tale of haunted hotel, and a father’s descent into madness. Though it’s been over thirty years since I read it, I remember look of the book–a silver and grey New American Library paperback. And I remember the opening chapter with Jack Torrance being interviewed, calling his interviewer an “officious little prick” in his internal monologue.

Jack Torrance was a man setup by the demons of his childhood to fall prey to possession by the haunted hotel. In the fight for his soul, the cards were stacked against him (as they are all of us, really). He was a man who wanted to be free, but couldn’t get there. In that sense, though he became the victimizer, he is a man we can pity.

Even more than Jack’s story, I remember his son, Danny, who fell prey to his wrath (Jack at one time dislocated his young son’s arm). Danny had a special ability–the shine–he could see things. The hotel’s chef, Dick Halloran, mentored him in his gift (Dick had it, too–just not as strong as Danny).

I read that book, devoured it really, and despite the abject terror of it, the monstrous heart of evil bound within the Overlook Hotel, I wanted to be Danny. I wanted to have abilities–to see, and to know, things. It’s explained in the book that Danny was born with a caul. And that this covering, this caul, was the fount of his gift.

I asked my mom if I, too, had been born with a caul. Although she couldn’t have known it, in my heart I was asking “Am I special?” She answered “No.” (Unfortunately, my dad wasn’t available to take my question to. Would he have answered any differently? There’s no way to know with any degree of certainty, but his unavailability spoke volumes. Like the Overlook of the novel, it haunts me still).

The thing is, I would have endured everything Danny went through in King’s story to know that very thing:

That I was–am–special.

It wasn’t until many years later that Jesus whispered it into my soul. He told me that God is my Father–the father I’d always longed for–and that he, Jesus, was my friend. A friend that sticks closer than a brother. Like Robert Frost’s divergent path, “that has made all the difference.”

Do you know that you’re special, too, and loved more than you can fathom? That God is your Father, and Jesus is your brother?

You can.

Look up from wherever you are–Jesus is coming for you.

Where do you see Jesus moving in your life?

Did you ever want to be a character in a beloved book?

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