from a riven place
Musings from my Perth hotel lobby:
I started my day with an article in Relevant Magazine called "The Most Damaging Attitudes in our Churches". It's about a few different things - one being how to love others well without first analyzing or correcting them - behaviors, choices, thought-processes - or as Bob Goff puts it "loving without agenda". We have the freedom to do this because it's not up to us as people to draw people to Jesus - he draws people unto himself.
So, I can let go of the reins. I can walk in freedom, knowing the work is done. Life is a whole lot more joyous without the disappointment of failure in this area. I simply need to believe that loving the person in front of me is my call, and with the strength of the Holy Spirit, I engage with the removal of my “ability”-covering - like taking off a cloak of expectation to perform well or make something happen in my own strength when it was never imparted to me to do so in the first place. Creation never needed Rachel to save the day. That impartation came from people - thwarted interpretations of scripture or the mistakes of the church - or perhaps my own insecurities. Maybe, even, my character or personality has been constructed intelligently, with purpose, to just be exactly who I am (at my truest, God-called form, which is another conversation entirely) and meet people there. With my given face. The constructed one is my doing, and of course there’s grace at that ongoing removal process. Going after God’s heart to find peace in this unending effort to be free from anything outside of his purpose, is messy, gnarly, painful work - but it is the only work worth doing in the scheme of spiritual practices. Swallowing the bitter bill of humbly accepting when we get it wrong needs to happen - the alternative will always taste like shit after the sugary coating wears off.
I want to be this person desperately, but I must admit I fall short. Often. Actually, I eat “falling short” for breakfast these days. Pain from both unjustly damaging experiences as well self-inflicted wounds will do that to a person. With me, it’s fear. Call it Satan, or the Enemy if you don’t give evil a name - call it Resistance if you’ve read Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” and identified with any of his points. It’s good to identify evil - but it’s tricky. As Astrid’s homicidal mother so poignantly put it in Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander,” of the nature of evil, “Just when I think I understand it, it changes it’s form. Learning it’s nature takes a lifetime of study.”
My mother knew a lot about fear, and therefore I was taught that fear is not of God. This has saved my life. For me, fear strikes the most in my battles when the iron of insecurity is hot. I am good at many things with my hands and feet - I can love a stranger with a fierce determination but give up on my husband when I no longer fathom a life together. Obviously these are two polar ends of a spectrum, but the facts haunt me.
They show me what my flesh is capable of. Living for what I can see and feel instead of what I know to be true in the cloud of unbelief.
I can hang off of the edge of cliffs, perform as someone else in front of thousands of people, swim in dark oceans, climb untethered to safety, but the fear of being less than, of coming up short or not knowing enough or embodying enough of this or that - despite my best efforts to get it right - directs and manipulates my God given ability to create with a tongue of fire to instead use it for lashing and cutting. I know I can act self-righteous and say mean things on my worst days and on my best days see my flaws with a lens of grace. These moments make me acutely aware of how much I don't know and how grateful I am that God is patient and kind with me. He is a gentleman. I am a force of nature and I don't deserve his grace, yet here I sit - contemplating his goodness while recognizing my acute depravity.
How beautiful it feels to be loved unconditionally by God - that he chooses me as his beloved, despite myself. There is unmerited favor on me simply because I have faith God is exactly who he says he is, which means I am exactly who he says I am.
Thinking back on my younger years, passionate disputes have been a companion of mine since I was little. Get to know me well - don't just meet me after church for a lunch - and you'd think I were a hot-blooded Mediterranean, though I have argued that my Irish and Native American blood attribute to my strange heat. First with my parents, God bless them for suffering through my dramatic and exasperated attempts to be heard and understood throughout all those delicate teenage rendering years - as well as my siblings, cousins and friends in those tender developmental years where changing hormones eagerly drove me to burst into years or shout with slicing self-righteous dialog with whomever I found myself cross.
Sometimes I can't even get out of my own head long enough to even see what another person sitting in front of me may need in the moment. To actually listen well in this state - forget about it. Often I am thinking this proverbial person needs something I have so therefore I should find a way to accommodate that need... and it doesn't just come from a place of kindness. It comes from a place of purpose - from a place of commission. Thankfully God's grace is big enough for my poor attempts at pointing out the divine DNA of Jesus on everything I see and experience. How could anyone ever conceive of that? It's in a whole other realm entirely and let's be real - it's probably coming across like an agenda. Instead of thinking "I am here for such a time as this" when I'm sitting across the table at Chipotle with Daniel I could just be thinking "eat your chips and salsa and tell this man how wonderful he is in one way or another." Get over yourself, Rachel. You are not God. The angels aren't singing when you summarize the Jesus-pitch-gospel in fifty seconds flat.
The Earth of Rachel shifts and opens, waiting for an opportunity in these types of thoughts - as if my entire worth is in what I can do - or be - for them.
When I was sixteen and got my license, I used to go to high-school parties on the weekends and talk to all the drunk people about anything from existential ponderings, to the mysteries of the celestial, to the piety of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and sex - and oftentimes I'd fit Jesus in to the conversation since I whole-heartedly believed it would have an impact on them. I wanted them to know they were loved and they were masking that love with acting like idiots. When midnight cerfew would roll around, my car became the designated sober ride home for many. It felt good to not care about drinking or doing drugs - I didn't need it. My United Methodist youth group leader told me once I was a "role model" and to be aware of it, so here I was, living up to the standard set before me. I wanted to help these lost people - and though at the time I genuinely thought it was an overflow of Christian servitude, I am realizing now a part of me may have needed them to need my help. A by-product of helping people is that we, in turn, get healed - I think the part of ourselves which is drawn out of us with compassion exists because of a previous understanding of that area, be it our own personal experience or actively participating in the emphatic nature of just being human. Isn't that what I means to care for one another? Though, it's quite possible I loved my sixteen year old self more than my high-school classmates in these mentioned rescue attempts because I most often loathed the moments of existing as my sixteen year-old self. And I was good at it.
This commission is a difficult one when you’re having a miserable day. When my divorce still punches me in the gut at the realization that I gave ten years to someone I am no longer speaking to. A man whom I loved and hurt deeply - too deep to restore what was broken. By choice, of course. Choices that cost me my marriage, my home, and the life we built together. Failed relationships are always a series of choices that either take two people in the direction of unity or the direction of division.
Sometimes I sit in the bathtub, staring at my chubby knees while the water turns tepid, and I think about every choice - every moment - when I could have chosen differently. When the road was freshly paved with all things shiny and gold and I chose the cutting gravel one, broken by dead, gnarly root trees. Jesus is the only supply of true restoration in those gaps. I forgot this for a while.
Now in my riven heart is a poured seal of binding gold and a stamp of his majesty.
Why is it my default to see through a corrective lens? Is it because I watched my parents do this and I absorbed the pattern?
Unveiling flaws outside of ourselves requires little to no personal sacrifice. Examining the depths of my own brokenness, and I hesitate to say I am "broken" because in Christ I am made whole and am a completely new creation. I may feel broken but I am spiritually whole. I am no longer a slave to the things that enslaved me before - I am a new creature, regardless of my past) requires vulnerability and risk, both of which are essential for growth. Identifying problems is easy. Following Paul’s call to focus on what is good, lovely and admirable takes intentional work, and it breathes new life into our relationships.
If God can choose to no longer look on our sin, we can choose to stop focusing on the things we would change in others and get busy loving them instead. The problem is, I often think loving someone looks like fixing them or taking control of a negative situation with my self-righteous ideas on what God thinks is probably the best thing to do.
I started my day with an article in Relevant Magazine called "The Most Damaging Attitudes in our Churches". It's about a few different things - one being how to love others well without first analyzing or correcting them - behaviors, choices, thought-processes - or as Bob Goff puts it "loving without agenda". We have the freedom to do this because it's not up to us as people to draw people to Jesus - he draws people unto himself.
So, I can let go of the reins. I can walk in freedom, knowing the work is done. Life is a whole lot more joyous without the disappointment of failure in this area. I simply need to believe that loving the person in front of me is my call, and with the strength of the Holy Spirit, I engage with the removal of my “ability”-covering - like taking off a cloak of expectation to perform well or make something happen in my own strength when it was never imparted to me to do so in the first place. Creation never needed Rachel to save the day. That impartation came from people - thwarted interpretations of scripture or the mistakes of the church - or perhaps my own insecurities. Maybe, even, my character or personality has been constructed intelligently, with purpose, to just be exactly who I am (at my truest, God-called form, which is another conversation entirely) and meet people there. With my given face. The constructed one is my doing, and of course there’s grace at that ongoing removal process. Going after God’s heart to find peace in this unending effort to be free from anything outside of his purpose, is messy, gnarly, painful work - but it is the only work worth doing in the scheme of spiritual practices. Swallowing the bitter bill of humbly accepting when we get it wrong needs to happen - the alternative will always taste like shit after the sugary coating wears off.
I want to be this person desperately, but I must admit I fall short. Often. Actually, I eat “falling short” for breakfast these days. Pain from both unjustly damaging experiences as well self-inflicted wounds will do that to a person. With me, it’s fear. Call it Satan, or the Enemy if you don’t give evil a name - call it Resistance if you’ve read Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art” and identified with any of his points. It’s good to identify evil - but it’s tricky. As Astrid’s homicidal mother so poignantly put it in Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander,” of the nature of evil, “Just when I think I understand it, it changes it’s form. Learning it’s nature takes a lifetime of study.”
My mother knew a lot about fear, and therefore I was taught that fear is not of God. This has saved my life. For me, fear strikes the most in my battles when the iron of insecurity is hot. I am good at many things with my hands and feet - I can love a stranger with a fierce determination but give up on my husband when I no longer fathom a life together. Obviously these are two polar ends of a spectrum, but the facts haunt me.
They show me what my flesh is capable of. Living for what I can see and feel instead of what I know to be true in the cloud of unbelief.
I can hang off of the edge of cliffs, perform as someone else in front of thousands of people, swim in dark oceans, climb untethered to safety, but the fear of being less than, of coming up short or not knowing enough or embodying enough of this or that - despite my best efforts to get it right - directs and manipulates my God given ability to create with a tongue of fire to instead use it for lashing and cutting. I know I can act self-righteous and say mean things on my worst days and on my best days see my flaws with a lens of grace. These moments make me acutely aware of how much I don't know and how grateful I am that God is patient and kind with me. He is a gentleman. I am a force of nature and I don't deserve his grace, yet here I sit - contemplating his goodness while recognizing my acute depravity.
How beautiful it feels to be loved unconditionally by God - that he chooses me as his beloved, despite myself. There is unmerited favor on me simply because I have faith God is exactly who he says he is, which means I am exactly who he says I am.
Thinking back on my younger years, passionate disputes have been a companion of mine since I was little. Get to know me well - don't just meet me after church for a lunch - and you'd think I were a hot-blooded Mediterranean, though I have argued that my Irish and Native American blood attribute to my strange heat. First with my parents, God bless them for suffering through my dramatic and exasperated attempts to be heard and understood throughout all those delicate teenage rendering years - as well as my siblings, cousins and friends in those tender developmental years where changing hormones eagerly drove me to burst into years or shout with slicing self-righteous dialog with whomever I found myself cross.
Sometimes I can't even get out of my own head long enough to even see what another person sitting in front of me may need in the moment. To actually listen well in this state - forget about it. Often I am thinking this proverbial person needs something I have so therefore I should find a way to accommodate that need... and it doesn't just come from a place of kindness. It comes from a place of purpose - from a place of commission. Thankfully God's grace is big enough for my poor attempts at pointing out the divine DNA of Jesus on everything I see and experience. How could anyone ever conceive of that? It's in a whole other realm entirely and let's be real - it's probably coming across like an agenda. Instead of thinking "I am here for such a time as this" when I'm sitting across the table at Chipotle with Daniel I could just be thinking "eat your chips and salsa and tell this man how wonderful he is in one way or another." Get over yourself, Rachel. You are not God. The angels aren't singing when you summarize the Jesus-pitch-gospel in fifty seconds flat.
The Earth of Rachel shifts and opens, waiting for an opportunity in these types of thoughts - as if my entire worth is in what I can do - or be - for them.
When I was sixteen and got my license, I used to go to high-school parties on the weekends and talk to all the drunk people about anything from existential ponderings, to the mysteries of the celestial, to the piety of abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and sex - and oftentimes I'd fit Jesus in to the conversation since I whole-heartedly believed it would have an impact on them. I wanted them to know they were loved and they were masking that love with acting like idiots. When midnight cerfew would roll around, my car became the designated sober ride home for many. It felt good to not care about drinking or doing drugs - I didn't need it. My United Methodist youth group leader told me once I was a "role model" and to be aware of it, so here I was, living up to the standard set before me. I wanted to help these lost people - and though at the time I genuinely thought it was an overflow of Christian servitude, I am realizing now a part of me may have needed them to need my help. A by-product of helping people is that we, in turn, get healed - I think the part of ourselves which is drawn out of us with compassion exists because of a previous understanding of that area, be it our own personal experience or actively participating in the emphatic nature of just being human. Isn't that what I means to care for one another? Though, it's quite possible I loved my sixteen year old self more than my high-school classmates in these mentioned rescue attempts because I most often loathed the moments of existing as my sixteen year-old self. And I was good at it.
This commission is a difficult one when you’re having a miserable day. When my divorce still punches me in the gut at the realization that I gave ten years to someone I am no longer speaking to. A man whom I loved and hurt deeply - too deep to restore what was broken. By choice, of course. Choices that cost me my marriage, my home, and the life we built together. Failed relationships are always a series of choices that either take two people in the direction of unity or the direction of division.
Sometimes I sit in the bathtub, staring at my chubby knees while the water turns tepid, and I think about every choice - every moment - when I could have chosen differently. When the road was freshly paved with all things shiny and gold and I chose the cutting gravel one, broken by dead, gnarly root trees. Jesus is the only supply of true restoration in those gaps. I forgot this for a while.
Now in my riven heart is a poured seal of binding gold and a stamp of his majesty.
Why is it my default to see through a corrective lens? Is it because I watched my parents do this and I absorbed the pattern?
Unveiling flaws outside of ourselves requires little to no personal sacrifice. Examining the depths of my own brokenness, and I hesitate to say I am "broken" because in Christ I am made whole and am a completely new creation. I may feel broken but I am spiritually whole. I am no longer a slave to the things that enslaved me before - I am a new creature, regardless of my past) requires vulnerability and risk, both of which are essential for growth. Identifying problems is easy. Following Paul’s call to focus on what is good, lovely and admirable takes intentional work, and it breathes new life into our relationships.
If God can choose to no longer look on our sin, we can choose to stop focusing on the things we would change in others and get busy loving them instead. The problem is, I often think loving someone looks like fixing them or taking control of a negative situation with my self-righteous ideas on what God thinks is probably the best thing to do.
Comments
Post a Comment