No Additional Words Necessary

I'm longing for . . .

A place like this.

Tolkien describes it this way in the Fellowship of the Ring.
Frodo was now safe . . . The house was as Bilbo had long ago reported, 'a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or storytelling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mix of them all.' Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.

Oh, how I need a place like that right now.

Process

I love novels because they help me to understand how truth can be lived out in real life. One of my favorite novelists is Susan Howatch. Her books about the Anglican Church in England have been used over and over again to give me a picture of God's love and acceptance of me.

It sometimes amazes me how I can get the truth of grace so right some days and other days I feel as though I know nothing of God's love. Last night was such a time. I went to bed thinking, "I do NOT want to blog ever again." I felt as though I had nothing to say, that I was a horrible person who did horrible things. This time I think I'm up to my nose in the shame pool.

In the light of day, I don't feel much better. There is an ache deep in my heart that just won't go away. So I picked up my journal to find some words for today. Today you will hear less from me (although I've already revealed far more than I had intended), and more from Susan Howatch.

This quote comes from a priest who is helping an man who has been deeply wounded through spiritual, emotional, and sexual abuse. He's struggling on the road to healing and frustrated with the slow process. God's agent of grace says to him:

You can try again later. It's not an all or nothing situation . . . One should think of health as a journey towards a cure, a journey punctuated by healings . . . And anyway one can argue that a complete cure is never possible because no one can be completely well in mind, body and spirit. Such perfection simply doesn't exist in this life. It's the journey towards the cure that's so vital. (The Heartbreaker, p. 462).

These words are a comfort to me today. I know that in Christ I am chosen and dearly loved. He doesn't expect me to do everything right every day. That's Room of Good Intentions living. Instead he invites me to trust him with my sin issues. I'm struggling with the trust today, but God can handle that. He invites me on an honest journey towards healing and freedom. My journey will be filled with peaks and valleys. But God knew that when he chose me, and he chose me anyway.

Hiding

One of the first lessons I learned in the Room of Good Intentions was hiding. I learned to hide my sin, my weaknesses, and my feelings -- especially my feelings. I suppose it was okay to be sad if something really bad happened, like a friend died or your son got cancer, but even then I was taught to say that "God works all things together for good", thus encouraging me to quickly move through that sadness to the joy that all Christians are supposed to feel. Other feelings, like anger, hurt, or disappointment were rarely, if ever justifiable. Jesus could get angry at the money changers in the temple, but there weren't any occassions that I thought merited that kind of anger in my life. I was wrong, of course, but since I wasn't talking about my pain no one was able to point it out. So, as I was hurt, I stuffed the pain. As people disappointed me, I buried it. As I faced abuse, I endured it.

As I left the Room of Good Intentions for the Room of Grace, I began for the first time to allow myself to feel. Yikes and Ouch! Those emotions can really sting. I was tempted for a long time to head right back over to the Room of Good Intentions, but as my good friend Richard was so fond of telling me "This genie is not going back into the bottle." To this day I love him for holding my feet to the fire when I so desperately wanted to jump ship.

Since I have been through so much to get where I am today, you'd think I would have this no hiding thing down pat. But I don't. And yesterday was a great example. I was deeply disappointed by someone yesterday who cancelled an apponitment we had made. Initially I didn't feel that I had a right to feel disappointed and so I stuffed it as I tried to get busy with other things. But there was a nagging in me that just wouldn't go away. So I began to sit with the feelings of disappointment. After awhile, they turned to hurt and very quickly then turned to anger. The funny thing is that I was less angry at him and more angry at me. I felt that I wasn't deserving of his time. I began to believe that NO ONE would chose to be with me. They would love me if they HAD to, but would never actually chose to do so. Intellectually I knew this to be false, but my emotions had taken over my brain.

Then . . . DING. DING. DING. My shame meter started to go off. I realized that I was neck deep in a pool of shame. The reaction that I was having was hugely out of proportion to the cancelled appointment by this trusted friend. What had been triggered were my deep feelings of shame that I could never be lovable. While the cancellation was not rejection, I had translated it into that.

So much for feeling my feelings, right? I struggled with wanting to go into hiding. I was suffering shame about my shame. Ugh. The only way out, I knew, was a path I didn't want to take. But somehow I made a commitment to truth and to trust. I would be honest with myself about how I was feeling. I would stay present to those feelings. And I would tell this friend how I felt.

Was I ever scared! I didn't feel any right to share my feelings, but I did it. And guess what? The world didn't collapse in on me. He didn't yell at me or get defensive. This relationship was and continues to be a place of grace for me. But I didn't feel any better.

I got off the phone and wondered why I still felt so awful. I continued the evening with this deep feeling of rejection, even though I knew that I hadn't been rejected. After some time and lots of tears had passed, I realized that I still hadn't trusted God with who I was in this moment.

This incident had tripped off a major area of my shame. As I'm learning, only love can heal the shame that is buried in me and I needed the love of my Father to begin to heal the ragged edges of my shame. So, I left a meeting early to get some space to be quiet. And in the stillness, I said these words:

As I've noticed and reflected on these feelings today Papa, I am really hurting. I ask that you would do the work of healing. I am climbing on your lap and accepting your gift of unconditional love and acceptance. I can hardly believe it, but you do love me freely, by YOUR choice. And your love is the only thing powerful enough to root out the shame and pain in mylife.

I heard these words in return:

Yes, I do love you Melissa. I accept you. Right now, in your pain, in your tears, in your fear that you will never be lovable. I am here, come cry on my shoulder. I will protect you.

At last I was able to be carried out of the pool of shame. I couldn't have done it, though, had I stayed in hiding. Hiding was my first response. And my second. And my third. But as I allowed the process to work, I found a bit of healing that never would have come through my clumsy attempts at dealing with my shame by myself. The subtitle to the book TrueFaced contains these words: Trusting God and Others with who you really are. One of the important words in this sentence is that little word AND. I need both God and a community of other grace-living people to live in the room of grace. Part of my healing came from being honest with this friend. The other part came from God. I needed BOTH. The truth of this was very evident to me yesterday.

I knowthis is not the end. I'd love to have the happily ever after that could claim that my shame is gone, healed, never to return. But I am continuing to learn to trust the process which involves staying out from behind the bushes I try to find to hide the real me.

Why What I Believe About Myself Really Matters

It’s been over four years since Jonathan had his last dose of chemo and to look at the kid, you’d never know he had been sick. He no longer defines himself by his cancer. When we talk about his times in the hospital, I realize more and more that it is my memory that is fueling his. He will turn 13 this year and the only thing he loves more than being with people is fishing with people. He is equally at home with adults, peers, and little kids.

Moms have better memories for this sort of thing, I think. At least this one does. “Your son has cancer.” Those four words have power to do incredible things. The reality behind them changed me in ways that I still struggle with. Jonathan was recently hospitalized with pneumonia. While we were there, I had ample time to reflect on Jonathan and the history of his illness. I realized that I am very quick to define myself as “the Cancer Mom.” I don’t feel bad about this tendency; I think it is a normal reaction to that very stressful period of in our family’s history.

As I looked at his blood tests and saw how elevated his white blood counts were, I started to panic. Yvonne, one of our dear nurses, saw the fear in my face and came over to explain. She showed me what was excellent in his lab report and helped me to see that his body was having a normal reaction to the infection. His body was doing its job. Several hours later as I helped Jonathan try to stop a bloody nose I remembered her words and realized that there has been a subtle shift. It was just last year that I cancelled a trip because Jonathan had a bloody nose and I wanted to rush him to the doctor to check his platelets. This time, in the hospital, I didn’t have that same rush of fear. The reality was that the room was dry and Jonathan was sick. Yvonne’s words came back to me – “This is just pneumonia, not matter what your body responses might be telling you. I know you are scared, but we are here to help you.”

As I thought about this, I realized the same is true with my relationship with God. I have my own sinful past that can trigger a shame spiral as the memory of my sin attempts to convince me that I am completely unlovable. But the reality is that I am chosen by God, holy and beloved (Col 3:12). The more I can live out of this truth, the more I am able to do the things listed in Col 3:13-17 – showing compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. I am able to forgive and I am able to love. But first, I must live in the truth that I am holy and dearly loved. This is the truth about me. And some days, just like I need reminders from nurses that Jonathan’s blood tests look good, I need reminders from my community just how much God loves me. I simply cannot remember on my own how loved I am.

My TrueFaced Testimony

I just returned from a fantastic trip to Phoneix where I spent three days basking in an environment of grace put together by the guys who wrote TrueFaced. It was wonderful being with others who are desperate for grace. When I returned, I decided to do two things (well actually more than two). First, I'm going to start blogging again. I've been doing quite a bit of private writing the past eight months and I think I am now ready to start sharing more about what is happening in my life. Second, I rewrote the story of my journey to incorporate some of the language that I believe more accurately describes what is happening in my heart. Often times words are not enough to describe the inner life, but I also know how much I benefit from hearing other people's stories towards grace. Here's mine:


I was THAT girl. You know . . . the one that your parents compared you to. The one whose name you learned to hate: “Why can’t you be like HER?” You see, when I was a teenager, I was completely sold out to God and everyone knew it. I carried my Bible to school, preached the good news to my friends (and anyone else who would listen), arranged prayer meetings, led Bible study groups, fought the school board when they tried to fire a teacher for teaching creationism as an alternative theory to evolution, went on mission trips, and had devotions every day. My nickname in the youth group was “Missionary Miss”. Everyone knew that I would turn out great, because I had such a heart for pleasing the Lord. I even skipped my senior prom because I was convinced that such things were an abomination to the Lord.

I went off to Bible school, got married, and headed for the mission field. I spent two the best years of my life living among the Kazakhs in Central Asia. It didn’t matter to me that we didn’t have heat all winter or that I had to wash my clothes in the bathtub with a plunger. I was glad to try the unusual foods presented to me, which included sheep’s head and horse sausage. And while I didn’t enjoy the fermented horse’s milk or the intestines that were part of the local cuisine, I was glad to try them for the sake of Jesus. I was willing to do anything to please my Lord.

But God had something else planned for me. If anyone had told me in high school that there would come a day when I no longer believed in God, I would have been shocked. I was very much like Peter before he denied Jesus. I was confident in who I was and that I would never be brought to a place of disbelief.

Things happened in my life that I was not prepared for. Serious relationship struggles, my son’s cancer, a cloud of depression and anxiety that would not go away. No one told me that life would be like this. My life was filled with shame over the way I had failed. And worst of all was God’s silence. I was very angry with God, but of course I could not tell a soul because the truth about my failure of a life might damage the gospel message. And so I went on doing my Christian things, hoping that if I tried hard enough, God would be pleased with me again. But instead I got worse. Until finally I found myself asking a trusted friend how on earth that he could believe that God was real. At last the floodgates opened and my angry heart found a voice. And it was a loud one. Read Job, read over half of the Psalms and you’ll find my words to and about God. Except I don't think the English translators put in the swear words.

I stopped striving and for a time, I stopped believing. Everything about my faith seemed toxic to me. I spent at least five years in a fog between belief and disbelief. They were very painful years.

But God never stopped loving me. Never. He was there, in the background – through friends who didn’t judge me, but didn’t stop praying either. And God gently wooed me back to himself as he showed me a different way to live. Not the room of good intentions where everything was Fine. But rather the room of grace where instead of living out of a desire to please the Lord, I live out of trusting him.

The difference is subtle, at least to some people. I still read my Bible, I still pray, and I still serve others. Mostly the difference is in the honesty that I have with God and others. When things aren’t Fine, lots of people know about it. My prayers sound very different. When I deal with sin in my life (and oh, yeah, I still sin) it is me and God working on my sin together – he stands with me, with his arm around me as we face those things.

Some times, okay lots of times, it is difficult to live in the room of grace. To be honest, I’m a bit more comfortable in the room of good intentions, because there I feel a measure of control. However, the problem with the room of good intentions is that as a human being, I was not created to handle my own sin. I don’t have anything in me to manage it. I’ve learned that I cannot resolve my sin by trying harder, going back to the basics, or by getting rid of all my stuff. I might change my behavior for a time, but sin is still there . . . it is just hidden.

My journey in the room of Grace is not done alone, nor is it meant to. We need each other, fellow travelers on this road to help us live this way. I frequently need reminders from others that it sounds like I’m trying to please God.

And so now, even on my worst day (and I still have them) I can imagine God looking down at me and saying to a nearby angel, “Hey did you see that girl down there, Melissa, my righteous one? I sure do love her. I love it when she talks to me, even when she uses those angry words. Did you see that crazy thing she did the other day? And did you see her bravery? She’s talking about it! She is learning to trust me!

The Gift of Others

"Our prayer, our fasting, and our almsgiving is to be done before God and not for the approval of one another -- although we can give and gain support from each other in our Lenten efforts. So at home, in school, in whatever company you keep, encourage each other to mark this Lent as well." ~ Archbishop Vincent Nichols

I'm observing Lent this year. Not as a way to try to make God pleased with me, but as a constant reminder of my desire to continue to surrender to God. I'm using a small book, Small Surrenders, by Emilie Griffin to help guide me in this journey. The above quote was in the reading for yesterday.

I was struck by the words "give and gain support from each other." Over the past year, I've faced a radical shift in the way that I view God. In many ways, I believe that God has enabled me to tear down a number of false beliefs. This has been incredibly scary for me; at times I didn't know how I would survive some of the feelings I encountered as I began to shift my understanding of God.

But God (one of my favorite phrases, by the way), placed people in my life to give support for my journey. These people, none of them perfect, walked along side of me. They encouraged me to rest, to wait, to be patient with myself. They reminded me that God loved me passionately, even on the days when I felt my worst.

And to my great amazement, they are still here. They've seen me, the ugly me, the one I try to hide. And they love me, too. I can't quite believe that, but there are too many signs that say it is true.

So as I entered into this season of Lent, where my primary desire is to consciously let down my defenses against the grace of God, I want to invite others to join me in in the conversation. What defenses have we built up to protect ourselves from the fear of a life lived out of who God says we are? I know I have many . . .