I'm currently reading a book called "Honestly" by Sheila Walsh. It is truly an amazing book, and has brought about a lot of healing for me over the last couple weeks.
Tonight's chapter was on shame. Wow, could I relate! I have lived most of my life in shame, believing that unless I could perform perfectly, I was worthless. And so I performed, and boy did I look good!
I was both a pastor's kid and a missionary kid. I started the first Bible Study at our High School. I graduated as Salutatorian in High School, and helped lead youth group during college. I spent a summer on a mission's trip in the inner city of Philadelphia, and lead short term mission trips to Mexico and Toppenish (an indian reservation). I worked in a lock down treatment center for juvenile sex offenders. I graduated with honors from a Christian college with an international studies degree so I could go to the mission field. I started and lead a meals ministry at a large church, and headed up the clothing ministry for a large homeless ministry. I looked GOOD, actually not just on paper. I had also worked hard to lose fifty pounds and looked and felt really good. I was at the top of my game, looking good to any church member I wanted to impress. Then my world fell apart.
Everything that I put my
value in was gone. I was stripped bare, and one thing after another
broke me more and more and more until I realized that I had nothing
left. I lost friends, dignity, ministries, health, both physical and
mental. I was truly broken, shattered with
nothing left to show off to the world. I titled this blog "This treasure
in a jar of clay" but even then, I had no idea what I was talking about. I still
saw my jar of clay as a bright red, smooth, varnished jar of clay, but
now I realize that my jar is actually brown and lumpy and crooked. The lid doesn't
even fit on right. But inside that jar sits the most beautiful treasure
you will ever see!
I won't tell you the whole story of my demise. Let's just say that for two years my squeaky clean self went from bad to worse. I toyed with sin, trying to get as close as possible to the line without getting burned. I questioned my faith and nearly turned my back on God. I almost lost my marriage. I used and hurt people I called friends. I literally lost my mind, spent time in a mental hospital and now have official paperwork proving that I am mentally ill. Not only did I lose my mental health, but I lost my physical health as well. I lost my ministry, my friends and all the things that made me feel like I had value. I was no longer squeaky clean. As a matter of fact, I wasn't clean at all! When I got my breast cancer diagnosis, I was a filthy mess, broken, sick, rejected and rotten.
We started attending a new church, where people showed us the unconditional love of Christ. The staff knew most of the garbage that had brought me to where we were and they loved me anyway. They embraced our entire family with open arms and started helping us heal. People from all over sent cards and gifts of encouragement and I began to call my cancer the cancer that healed me.
When my chemo ended, I hit the road running again. I was determined to be worth something again, to prove that my life mattered. I started handing out waters at West Side Park and I would push myself on those hot days to reach out and make my life count. I NEEDED to matter. I had to prove that I was worth something, that the world needed me. What I didn't realize is that I was still focusing on MY life. I wasn't focusing on HIM. My focus was not on making sure that He was shining through me. It was on making sure that I was shining. Through all of the muck I had gone through, I had learned a lot about where my value comes from and what grace and redemption mean, but I still hadn't quite gotten what my life needed to be all about, and then I got sick again.
This time I was mad. Really mad. I was ready to make my life count again and here I was, so drugged up because of my mysterious spasms that I could barely spend time with my kids, let alone anything else. I was worthless. I had to cancel every ministry I had involved myself in. It was worse than when I was on chemo. I had literally nothing to offer.
Tonight, as I read through Sheila Walsh's chapter on shame, and on how hard we try to impress others to make up for how little we think of ourselves, I realized that my pride had kicked in again.
I am God's masterpiece (Ephesians 2:10), fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), adopted as God's child (Romans 14:16). Andy Stanley, one of my favorite preachers, said in one of his sermons: "Who has the right to label you? Only the one who made you and the one who owns you. No one else." So what are my labels? Redeemed, Beloved, Forgiven, Valued, and these have NOTHING to do with what I have done or haven't done. They have to do with who made me me and who owns me.
So yeah. I'm a wreck. Not worth much on paper these days and won't be chalking up many deeds for the Kingdom while I lay in bed, doped up, trying to find out what is physically going on with my body. But that's ok, because He loves me still, just as much as if I were delivering waters to the homeless or building houses in Mexico. I don't have to earn His love. I already have it.
I have a problem, or so it may seem. I can't grovel before God. I just listened to a sermon by a well-known preacher that I highly respect, but this time, I just couldn't agree with some of what he was saying. He was talking about being careful about how we approach God, that when we pray, we need to make sure we are not being flippant, but that we are giving God the reverence He deserves. Now, I fully believe God deserves our complete adoration and respect. I am in no way saying that we should take for granted what He has done for us. However, for most of my life, I have prayed the penitent prayers over and over and over again, thinking that the sorrier I was, the holier I would become. I felt like I needed to cry repeated tears over the price that Christ paid for me, or I wasn't genuinely penitent and thankful. I don't believe that any more.
No one can compare to God, not by a mile! In and of ourselves, we are too tarnished to come in the presence of a holy God. If we try to approach God in our own strength, then yes, we should grovel. We should shake in utter fear!! BUT I am not tarnished any more!! I've been paid for, washed clean, purified and stand blameless before God! I am not approaching Him as a condemned sinner but as a redeemed saint! If I grovel, if I weep and moan and cry about how evil I am, am I not spitting on the very blood that has cleansed me?? Am I good enough to stand before God? YES! Because I've been redeemed. I've been bought. I'm not a slave anymore, so why should I continue to act like one? How in the world does that honor the God who gave His own life so that I could stand confidently before Him?
I stand in awe of God, but I can no longer live afraid of Him. He is not out to get me. He is not measuring each and every one of my thoughts and deeds to see if I'm good enough to claim as His own. He's already measured me, found me lacking, and paid the immeasurable difference so that I can be His. No amount of weeping, begging and/or self loathing will make me any more His child. That's why I can approach Him with confidence, trembling not in fear but in awe of His majesty, crying, not in pain or remorse, but in joy at the incomparably deep, deep love of the God of the universe, who loves me enough to call me His child.
I've spent the majority of my life fighting realities that I didn't like. If something didn't go my way, if things didn't turn out as I had planned, I would get incredibly upset and do everything in my power to make things "right"! As you can imagine, this used up an incredible amount of energy and was often completely and utterly pointless, resulting only in a great deal of frustration and wasted effort.
I'm learning that some things we just cannot change. Good, bad, or indifferent, they are what they are and nothing will change them. I was talking to someone about some of the events of the last couple years and how they are impacting me now and he told me the story of a time in his life when blunt honesty set him free. I can't remember the exact words of the conversation, so I hope I'm doing it justice as I recount it. Basically, when he was seventeen, his parents divorced and he carried the weight of that heavy on his shoulders. He knew that they had stayed together because of him, and when he moved away, they split. He felt guilty for not being able to keep them together longer. It wasn't until someone acknowledged to him that yes, they HAD stayed together because of him, and yes, they split because he left, but that they would have ultimately split anyway that the burden of guilt lifted and he was able to move on. At the time of our conversation, I thought that I had been viewing my past honestly, and didn't dwell long on what he had said...until yesterday.
I'm not sure what it was about yesterday that brought it all home to me, but as I thought back over the past couple years, I admitted to myself that I was a lousy wife, a horrible friend, and that I hurt a lot of people. Simple as that. No excuses. No explanations. No rationalizations. Following that admission, clear as day, came the thought: "Welcome to the human race."
I had to smile, not making light of the pain I brought in any way, but because after spending months and months and months trying to fix something that I have absolutely no control over, there was genuine freedom in finally surrendering and saying: "Yes. I failed." I can't go back into the past. I can't undo the damage I did. I was not a nice person. I was not a good person. I messed up big time and people were hurt because of me. No matter how many times I beat myself up for that, the past will never change. It is what it is. I cannot undo it. I am deeply sorry for it, yes, but I cannot sacrifice the present on the altar of penance for the past. It was what it was and it's time to move on. So I place my humanity in God's divine hands, covering myself in His blood, and I move on. Welcome to the human race.
