Falling Into Love (Part 2 of 3)

I told Kirk the other day that I couldn’t see what trading in my dancing shoes would do. I know what they say—that God’s fixing to help us find His valuation as our greatest treasure, the truth we hold most deeply in our inmost being. And I know some people can’t help but weep at the invaluable grace of it all—the relief of this highest prize—their hearts blowing wide open that this captured hope was poured out into the world and over us for no apparent reason, other than that He rendered it good.

But I don’t see it that way yet. If God doesn’t change—if His love is always constant and can never go any higher—that means I can never wow Him or be held higher than I am right now, even if just for a moment. It means, ultimately, relinquishing my addiction to that skyrocket high that comes when someone thinks I’m great, a high I get to shoot into anytime I want, up to 10 times a day, even, just to feel I’m alive and good. A high that’s akin to standing at the sheer edge of a mountain’s starkest ledge, shocked into momentary madness at the marvel of its 4500-foot-drop and the massive roll and tumble of hills and sky just within reach, I can almost reach out and touch them.

Who wants to give that up? Not me. Because what do I get in return? Absolutely nothing near it. Just the constancy of God’s love. Just the same old me when I wake up, day after unending day, never getting to be thought even better. Compared to the thrill of being thought to be the bee’s knees for something I did, this life of constancy with God just doesn’t sound that exciting.

After sharing this thought with the friend from my last post, I said, “So, what do you think?” It seemed that they got it when I shared it, them nodding their head in all the right places, that they got how the high is such a rush and such a hard, hard thing to give up, and maybe not even worth it. But after thinking for a minute, they said, “It makes me sad.”

Why? Because I’m such a mess for being addicted to it? No, they said. For the fact of this never resting. For having to generate to get results. For not realizing the deepest love is experienced in our weakest, most vulnerable moments.

Our weakest, most vulnerable moments, I protested—who wants that? Why should our weakness be the connecting point for love? Isn’t weakness what caused Adam and Eve to fall? Why would God want to reinforce that? Drawing us into love through our weakness couldn't possibly be what He has in mind—right?

Well. I’m beginning to think maybe it is, but it’s going to take one more post to untangle this web of questions. I hope you stay tuned.

Falling Into Love (Part 1 of 3)

This isn't a post on how I met and fell in love with Kirk, though such a post would be fun and, I think, redemptive to write at some point. Rather, it’s about learning to fall—and be caught—by the billowing pillow of love that exists right behind us all the time, if only we could learn how to fall into it.

Someone recently observed that I seem to let other people govern what’s true about me, and I have to admit that I do. If I receive a compliment, some skyrocket high kicks in that believes I’ve been rendered immortal and can now do no wrong in this world. If I’m judged or criticized, then I burn in shame and condemn myself for valuing or representing the thing that’s been judged. If I turn around and happen to impress someone, then I believe again that I can accomplish anything and that no hope is too high for me to capture. And if I fall short in someone’s eyes in the next day or hour or minute, my stomach jumps into my throat and I can’t breathe too well, and I believe I’m beginning to die a burning, scorching, slow, humiliating death.

This seriously goes on in me every day, for as long as I can remember.

What stopped me up short was when this same person followed up the observation by saying, “I don’t actually want that kind of authority in your life. It’s not why I’m in relationship with you.”

Really? I’m embarrassed to admit this was an actual shock to my system. I’ve been walking around all this time believing people actually want this power—that they want to judge and praise and condemn and coo and see people run in a windswept frenzy to meet their preconfigured sense of reality. I have danced that dance every day. But could people—mature, compassionate, loving people—actually want something different?

I’m coming to see that living at the whim of other people’s valuations makes you crazy. You can’t win. You never rest. You inevitably fail. You’re left running and jumping and dancing for life, just to keep up and not die.

How does one let it go? If you’re a trained performer, how do you become untrained? Can a ballerina unlearn the five positions? Can a pianist unlearn the width of an octave? My next post will be an attempt to answer this question, primarily based on the new belief it's all about this falling into love business.

In Which God Finally Wins the Battle of Wills

I’ve been gone for a while, I know. God and I have been having a battle of wills about who is in charge of my life. For the past week and a half, I’ve been trying to convince Him I am. This, as you probably know, is a battle lost from the beginning. But I guess my humanity convinced me otherwise, because we really got into it.

Over the course of the past week, I have learned how much my heart is full of itself. I’ve been made aware of how much I plan for, well, myself. I’d stitched together quite a nice plan, I thought, and was quite sure God would follow along with it.

But I became increasingly aware that He wasn’t following along, and didn’t seem to have any plans to. He seemed to have other plans in mind, in fact, that were in direct opposition to mine. And that really got me riled.

Eventually, I got to a place where I could talk it out in a mature way: “God’s doing something with me,” I’d say. “I’m trying to follow along. It’s tough.” I didn’t really believe it was true, though. I tried to believe it, but not really. But deep down, I knew it was true, and that’s what really peeved me off. I wanted to be right, and I wanted it my way.

What’s interesting is how even things that don’t seem grievous on the surface—the death of our plans for our lives, for instance—still take stepping through the grieving process to be rid of them. I walked through them all in this past week: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.

Because at first I ignored it was happening at all. I was convinced I was in the right, that God would get in line with my plan eventually. You know, that He would go along, of course, because I’m one of his good kids. Or at least, if He wasn’t on board right now, after a while He would be. (That’s the bargaining part, obviously.) When neither of these things panned out—when I came to the slow, dawning realization I wasn’t ever going to win in the match against God for my life—I got angry. I told everyone around that I didn’t think God got it, that He couldn’t possibly have my best interests at heart, that He was, in fact, stingy.

After the anger and bargaining wore itself out, then came the depression. I limped along for a couple days. I didn’t have it in me to do much else. I couldn’t even think about God and what He might be trying to do. Couldn’t even fathom the truth of His words. What was the point? I was going to have to give up on what I knew about how to operate well in this life, and that seemed too large a task. How could I possibly do it? And how could He possibly expect me to pull it off? It depressed me that He didn’t seem to care. I couldn’t find His care in this whole thing.

I got to a point where I had to ask Kirk to pray for me because I could sense something was wrong. I believe in the whole Galatians 6 thing, that there’s a supernatural realm existing all around us and that it’s our part to assist with the angels in fighting for God’s side. I say this because I believe at one point spiritual warfare got involved—that the enemy actually tried to keep from happening what eventually happened.

Because what eventually happened was an intense, all-out battle of wills . . . that, in the end, I lost.

I began duking it out with God. I could actually feel Him trying to take my own will from me, but I could also tell He wouldn’t take it without my glad offer of it, and I sure wasn’t racing to do that! The thing is, my own will was all I had. It was how I’d learned to operate—my instinctual coping mechanisms for life. I knew how to make life “work,” how to be good at it, even if that didn’t seem to be working now. I was sure it eventually would, at some point. It always had before, if I just tried hard enough and pleased enough people.

No such luck. He kept at me. I don’t know why. Like I said, I could actually feel Him inviting me to hand over my will, and it felt like a huge, football-sized mound of a rubber band ball, like the kind you find underneath the top felt layers of a tennis ball. A big old mound of will, and mine was the size of a football. I was clutching it to my chest, and He was putting one hand on the ball and one hand on my arm, and saying very quietly and calmly: “Come on, Christianne. Come on. You can give it to Me. Will you let go and let Me have it?”

The thing is, when we’ve found a way of operating in the world that works—even if it is from a wrong place, like the power of our own wills—that’s something like a death knell on our souls. As Kirk and my friend Sara both like to say, the worst thing about the false self is when it actually works. My false self—the power of my own will to exist in this big world—has been alive and well for years, and has done its job very well. It had convinced me that it worked.

God, however, was going ever deeper in His plans for me. “Won’t you let it go?” He wanted to know. After about a half-hour of this literal tug-and-war fight one night, what can I say? He finally won. God won my life—at least for one new day. Will He win again today?

The First Time

I woke up one day—
today—
and believed,
finally,
for the
first
time,
finally,
that,
finally:

you hurt me.

There it is
in words:
your deed.

Can you contradict
it? Would you even
try to contradict
it? Can you
even
know,
ever,
really?

I don’t
believe
you can.

If you could,
then maybe you
would see the way
it stands
with me
forever.

It stands
with me
forever:

the first time:

it never changes.

Penetrating the Circle

I am working on forgiveness.

I confess I do not know what this means when it comes to the big stuff. In my life, this is the stuff that has been most painful to look in the face. It is the stuff that makes me walk around like a scared and abuse-ridden dog, still waiting for the next beating that will surely come when I least expect it. It is what keeps me jailed to the ground, far from free and childlike joy.

Most of you know whom this concerns.

In three years’ time, I have still not uttered the words, if even in my head, “I forgive you for what you've done, and for all the things that have happened.” I just cannot bring myself to do it.

I am very aware of this fact.

The truth is, I don’t know what it means to do it. I’m afraid it means letting the person off the hook, which is not okay. I’m afraid it means saying it’s fine it ever happened, which it isn’t. I’m afraid, even worse, it means forgetting it ever happened, which I can’t imagine could ever be a good thing. Wouldn’t that eradicate all the beautiful things I’ve learned and received, too, directly or indirectly as a result?

Someone recently told me that you can only pave the way for forgiveness if you identify what needs to be forgiven. This means moving beyond the ambiguous, formless, and colorless space of generalized memories into the actual memories themselves. It means picking them up, entering back into them, and remembering what your soul felt in that exact moment. (Or, if you’re like me, giving yourself permission to feel those feelings for the very first time.) It also means identifying the messages you ingested as a result, so you can begin directing those messages by way of the Truth. Then it means setting that memory back down, eventually, in new forgiveness.

This probably has to happen more than once.

It has been almost three weeks since I received that person’s words and agreed to give it a try. I’ve been walking around that 10-year circle of my life ever since -- walking around it, mind you, not into it. Circling it like a wary and cautious animal. Sometimes, I confess, walking away from it completely.

But here I am, on this Sunday sabbath morning, finally brave enough to begin. I think.

Come, Lord Jesus, come. Save and rescue me. Conform me ever more into Your likeness. And protect me from this storm of fear and pain. I love and ever trust You, Lord. Amen.

Thoughts on Love, Somewhat Muddled

I think the whole point of life is learning how to love. And the object of our love can be broken into two categories: God and others.

One way (but not the only way) God helps us love Him is by meeting us in our need. What I mean is, deep down inside of us, each of us have very real hurts. Some of us don't like thinking about this, and others of us like to think and nurse on this too much. Either way, they're there. They exist. We are broken people.

We can be broken from big or little moments, in an instant or over a lifetime, in moments seared deep into our memories and moments we've now long forgotten. Those moments, from the instant they take place, affect the way we live, whether we know it or not. And once we get real about this with ourselves and with God -- face who we really are and what we really think and how we really feel in the most sincere moments of our lives -- God can finally get to work in a true and powerful way. In a life-transforming way. In a way that's far beyond and far more effective than what He can do -- and will do -- when we're unaware of what we need and He has to do all the work Himself.

I learned this in a very real way last year when I was all tied up in knots at work. It took every ounce of power in my body to get myself out of bed and out the door on weekday mornings. The pain of perfection and the fear of rejection was, quite literally, going to kill me. But at the root of it all was one big spiritual mess He'd been working to clear out of me for years.

A lot of what I'm sharing is nothing new. Everyone has hurts, like I already sufficiently covered a few paragraphs up, and everyone is dealing with something that pretty much boils down to thinking their value has been reduced to the mere function they perform -- that what they do is more important than who they simply are.

I know a lot of this, again, sounds like pop-culture mumbo-jumbo. But the thing is, it's my story. And it's what God used to eventually grow me into loving Him more, and into loving others more truly.

Some mornings, the only thing that would give me the strength to face the day was to picture in my mind that I was that woman in the crowd who touched Jesus' cloak and received His healing power because of it. Except instead of being in a crowd, I would picture myself the privileged and private audience in His throneroom in heaven, and that I was -- and am -- His beloved daughter. In this picture in my mind, God's cloak was a deep red velvet, and it extended far down from around His throne and onto the ground, closer and closer to me. In that image, I would reach forward, having been bent and huddled over in pain and shame, and I would clutch at the cloak that beckoned me to touch it.

And that was enough. As I sat huddled on the floor of that throneroom, totally broken and weak and unable to get myself up off the ground, I felt God gently watching me. I felt His invitation to touch His garment. His love extended down to where I was, so patient and involved. And once I touched it, I heard Him saying all He had to offer was all the strength I needed: His love, His sufficiency, His determination of my value. Not the determination of others or even what I concocted in my mind.

Somehow, that helped me get up and out of the door. And on my way to work, Kirk would talk and pray me through it. On lunch breaks and odd moments in the day, he would talk and pray me through it again, reminding me of that throneroom and ushering me back into the presence of God.

Somewhere along about that time, Hannah spoke those words I mentioned a few entries back about my being and bringing "color" -- bringing a life and vibrancy to places where life and vibrancy didn't previously exist, simply because of the heart He had given me to feel and care and listen and love from a place that understood the kind of questions and pain and confusion others were facing themselves, simply because I had been there.

Soon after all of that, something finally clicked. The panic attacks and the anxiety and the terror went away. I spent the next 6 months feeling free and resourceful and beautiful and alive and able to love those entrusted to my care, without reservation.

God began to use me, more than He ever had before.

And this is what I learned. Somehow, in the middle of all that mess, He was forming in me a heart that deeply loves. And feels. And grieves. And prays. And trusts. And, eventually, heals. And then passes it along to others who need to love and feel and grieve and pray and trust and eventually heal, too.

I met with more students in the past academic year who were dealing with their own trust and love and acceptance and parent and future and God and growing-up issues than I ever imagined possible. For some reason, they started coming out of the woodwork. A group of them even asked me to visit their morning Bible study one week, and all I could think to share was what I've attempted to share above: that the only thing that matters in life is who we are to God. That is what saves us, and that is what then propels our lives to helping others see this truth about their impenetrable and ever-esteemed value from God.

Nothing can change the way we matter to God. The only thing that can change is whether or not we really get what that means, and what happens in our hearts as a result. The only thing that can change is whether we will keep living for the approval of others or start resting in the real truth -- that we are more precious to God in our plain and true existence than we can even fathom, and He wants to care for us and fill us up.

To sum up, I guess all I'm trying to share in this whole long-winded post is one of the most precious gems of truth I've learned so far on this journey.

And that truth is: When God meets us in our need, we grow in our capacity to love both Him and others. We love others with the love He has accorded unto us, and we love Him with both great gratitude and utter acknowledgement of His magnitude and sufficiency for all our bodily and spiritual needs. He becomes intensely personal, and, as a result, so do we.