I’ve come to the conclusion that knowing how to love others comes WITH, is born ALONGSIDE, knowing how to love yourself. Jesus himself said it: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” As people we love ourselves when we allow ourselves the freedom to be who we are while still leaving room for who we MIGHT be—when we allow ourselves the freedom of stillness and the freedom of transformation. The freedom of growth. Of trial and error. We love ourselves when we can accept that AT THIS POINT IN TIME we think like THIS and feel like THAT and dress in THAT MANNER but tomorrow all of that may change and you know what? It’s perfectly okay! We’re constantly evolving. We’re creatures sensitive to stimuli and no one is so set in his ways that he’s never changed by external phenomena like time and age and education and new environments and unexpected relationships with unlikely people. We love ourselves when we recognize that “ourself” isn’t static. Sometimes we have more to give and sometimes we have less to give but no matter what we deserve the same grace we show others. We take all our strengths and all our weaknesses and all our good hair days and all our bad hair days—we take what’s good in us and what could use some improvement—and we call it all lovely, beautiful, ACCEPTABLE, simply because it’s all of that TOGETHER, all the pretty and all the ugly, that makes us who we are.
We’re called to do the same with others. If I once believed in the existence of a perfect OTHER—a perfect friend or a perfect parent or a perfect leader—I now know better. Jesus never demanded perfection—the Pharisees did. Jesus demanded only authenticity: an authentic willingness to take up a cross and follow Him. Give like Him. Serve like Him. LOVE like him. When we love someone (note: LOVE and not IDOLIZE), we see both the parts that are lovable and the parts that are not; we see the wounds that have scarred over and the ones that still need healing; we see who they are when their hair is styled and their makeup is done but we remember who they were at 2 am the night before when they woke up sick and they weren’t presentable and nothing about them dazzled our eye. Being able to love another means letting go of the “should” and embracing the “is”—we stop foisting our own ideas and likes and convictions upon them and accept that they come stamped: their experiences and their circumstances and their prior relationships have irrevocably shaped their interior.
And the interior belongs to them. It’s an area over which we exert no control, no matter how much we’d sometimes like to change (note: FIX) their rough and rocky emotional terrain. That’s what grace is (the same kind Jesus lavishes on US): THEIR freedom to choose. THEIR freedom to make mistakes; to live imperfectly. OUR God-given ability to love DESPITE instead of BECAUSE. That’s why self-love is so critical. If we can’t love the lessons our mistakes taught us we won’t tolerate the mistakes of others; if we can’t love the growth and strength our scars represent we won’t understand or empathize with someone else’s battles. If we love ourselves only under flattering lighting we’ll never, NEVER, be able to see her darkness and still call her beloved. Because we are. Beloved, that is. All of us. That’s what’s so beautiful but so challenging about the commandment to love others as we love ourselves: we need a heart like God’s. It’s a choice that contradicts instinct. Loving like that—both ourselves and others—requires recognizing that grace is sufficient. We all come as we are. A little broken, a little jaded, a little unpolished and rough around the edges. We come and sit at the feet of the One whose love informs our own; whose love makes ours POSSIBLE. There’s no need for perfection there. His love—and by extension, OUR love—is enough.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
On a Wednesday, in a cafe, I watched it begin again
I’m finally ready. Ready to close an old book; ready to buy a new journal at Target (maybe I’ll buy one of those expensive sparkly ones!) and write something new. I’ll sing a new song. I’ll dance in the rain for the first time and let myself rejoice just because I believe there’s something to rejoice about no matter what comes my way. So I write this as both prologue and epilogue: a beginning disguised as an end, something beautiful that could only grow in the dark.
I’m closing the book on a past of what-ifs; should-have-beens; if-onlys—a past, in essence, viewed from a biased lens, much too riddled with disappointment, heartache, and the kind of sad, grey reality that shatters every fairytale you once believed in wholeheartedly. The past is a place I’ve dwelled in for too long. A place I’ve longed for with the unrealistic expectations of a child frozen in time. I’ve lived most of my life looking always backwards, see? In retrospect the landscape of my past is like a battlefield: there were victories and there were failures and ground was gained and loved ones were lost but all I see from this vantage point is barren terrain and monuments that are meant to bear testimony to everything that was seen and felt and experienced—monuments I erected so that I’d never, ever forget. It’s not a very pretty view. It’s definitely not a place where new dreams can blossom or new love can grow or new beauty can emerge. There’s nothing left there but the memory of what once was, and my yesterday is no longer a place I wish to revisit.
I no longer want to rehash everything—all the events and people and make-it-or-break-it moments—that happened or didn’t happen, that went according to plan or fell apart instead. What’s done is done; no amount of wishful thinking can alter the facts as they now stand. Looking back at that battlefield for the last time I can say this: there was pain. Unspeakable, I-feel-like-I’m-suffocating pain. There was joy too. Love like I’ve never, ever known. Tears that left me nauseated; laughter that induced hysteria; moments that were precious, that made me feel more alive than I thought possible; moments that left me aghast at the cruelty of the world; there was sorrow and there was love and there was disillusionment and there was friendship and there was anger and there was hope and there was fear—there was LIFE. Life lived to the best of my ability. Life at its peak: messy, feral, full of tragedies I didn’t expect and rewards I didn’t earn.
Was life unfair to me? Absolutely. Has anyone managed to live life and come out the other side unscathed? Not that I know of. Everyone has a story to tell. We all have our scars. We’re all, at best, DAMAGED in some way; pockmarked and wounded and left at the side of the road with broken limbs and broken wings and broken hearts. There’s always, always the person we were SUPPOSED to be and the person we BECAME; the person we should, could, WOULD have been and the person we’ve settled for. And, like me, too many people spend an infinite amount of time and energy wishing AWAY the life that happened to them, or willing away the scars that branded them, or rewriting the events of yesteryear so that they feel less cheated. Or maybe we do this so that we feel more vindicated. So that the blame will never, ever be cast on us or the decisions we make on a daily basis—it’s always pinned on our history. We’re guarded and selfish and unyielding because history taught us not to trust; we’re everything we hate and nothing we’d like to be because history told us it’s better to not try than to try and fail. Such a sad, broken world we come from. And we’ve inevitably been shaped by it, so without really realizing it we become sad, broken people.
The kind of people doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity because we never dare look forward. How can we when we’re always looking behind us, casting either longing, wistful glances at the good that somehow turned sour or disenchanted, disbelieving glares at the bad that overtook what was once good?
That’s my problem with modern-day therapy. Most of the time the past is remembered and revisited and reenacted, as if answers will suddenly come to us when we’re forced to recall Events A, B, and C; Person X, Y, and Z; Tragedy #4 and Heartbreak #2 and Disappointment #8. Most of us believe this is true, I think. We soul-search and delve through our pasts with magnifying glasses and a deposit-box of self-help jargon, trying to identify the point at which everything went wrong so that we can bandage an old wound and fix what was broken. As I see it, though, it’s not quite that simple. When you break a bone or crack a rib or puncture a lung the healing process is pretty straightforward—the damage can be precisely located, seen with an x-ray, and then it can be dealt with in the most obvious and effective way. Healing can occur. There’s often even little to no evidence that the damage occurred: a bone will set; a wound will scab and then new skin will emerge; a damaged organ can be operated upon and, if not healed entirely, at the very least be made functional. The damage is dealt with and then rarely thought of again. A once-fractured femur, for instance, doesn’t continue to ache and throb long after it’s been set and restored to its former usefulness. Broken hearts, unfortunately, DO. Broken spirits hurt even after the source of the pain has been removed. A broken sense of self—because your dad abandoned you or your mom didn’t affirm you enough or you came from a broken home and never went off to school with a warm brownie in your knapsack—leaves us crippled in a way a broken foot never does: it changes us. Forever.
When we break emotionally we’re changed by the experience permanently, for better or worse—with every heartbreak and every blow we’re dealt the trajectory of our life changes; the way we see the world changes; our belief system changes; the very world we inhabit CHANGES. I don’t think there’s a cure for that. I don’t believe it’s possible to sit on a therapist’s leather couch and “become” again that six-year old child who was dumped on an aunt’s doorstep and find healing in that place. It’s true that doing this might bring clarity to some of the “whys” of our past—but does understanding something ever change the fact that it happened? Does it lessen the hurt, soften the blow, act as a shield against the damage? I once spoke to a psychiatrist who told me the most honest thing I think I’ve ever heard from a health professional’s mouth: “Psychotherapy is fine. It might bring some understanding to the difficult and painful things of your past. But, to be honest, healing is a CHOICE. You have to wake up and say, ‘This is bull****.’ And you have to move on.”
Moving on, as I see it, doesn’t mean pretending the damage never happened. It did. It happened, and you didn’t deserve it, and you didn’t do anything to cause it, and it changed you because every fire does; every time there’s a discrepancy between “should have” and “was”, between “the ideal” and “the reality”, something happens inside us. The thing about the kind of damage we take medication for or see a shrink for is that it can’t be FIXED—it can’t be undone. That might make the situation seem hopeless, but that’s only the case if we equate fixing with HEALING. I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. Fixing something is making it like it was before, so that it operates in the same way it did before…we fix a damaged tire by either patching it up or replacing it altogether if the damage is severe…when we’re done the tire looks and functions the same as it did before the incident.
HEALING, on the other hand, just means that we learn to function, to THRIVE, even, in spite of the damaged parts. Think about what a scar looks like. It’s essentially DAMAGED SKIN, flesh that will never, ever look like it did before, that will never, ever BE the unmarked, unblemished thing it used to be. Think for a moment about what a scar IS. It’s a wound, some sort of DAMAGE, that HEALED. Can a wound be fixed? No. Healing, however, is not only possible but wholly inevitable. A wound will heal even if not actively tended to—as long as it’s kept clean and free of infection. In most cases nothing fancy is required…a simple cleaning or dressing of the wound will suffice, and then time does what it does best: it heals the hurt. Makes it go away, even if the scar remains. Our emotional wounds can be tended to in much the same way. As with a physical wound, the damage must be acknowledged—even when it’s ugly, even when it’s hard to look at, even when it’s in a place we’d rather others not know about. Secondly the wound must be cleared of all debris—all those macro- and microscopic foreign substances that may, if left, cause the wound to fester and decay.
This is where it gets challenging. In our lives someone or something hurts us and debris comes flying in from a million different directions, from a million different well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning sources: we’re told we should hold a grudge; we’re encouraged to do that and act like this and harden our heart and put up more walls; we’re told of a plethora of devices and attitudes and dispositions that might ease the pain and make us forget. When we’re hurting somewhere it’s hard to just let the wound be—so it’s sometimes easier to deal with the debris. To get lost in the junk; in the excess stuff that, if we really think about it, is as far removed from the damaged sight as it is possible to be.
Pain is how we know something isn’t right. It’s how our psyche tells us that something went amiss—and a wound is the evidence that we were affected; that, despite our best efforts, we got caught in the cross-fire. Healing is THERE, I believe. In that place where a hurt is self-sufficient, where it isn’t sandwiched between a thousand theories and quick-fixes, where it’s simply allowed to BE. Healing is found in that place where we’re hurt but don’t seek to understand or categorize or fix it; where we strive to accept only that something happened and we’re different people because of it and we still, NO MATTER WHAT, have an obligation to be all that we can be. Our wounds will scar. We still won’t understand, and it will still be unfair, and the evidence of the original wound will still, ALWAYS, be there…but the pain will no longer exist in the present. And, perhaps most importantly, it will no longer define our future.
I’ve lived too long with the misguided idea that I need to rectify the past in order to heal in the present and thrive in the future; that healing comes in retrospect rather than in progress. I no longer want to subscribe to that mindset. I am no longer interested in what happened yesterday—I am no longer concerned with trying to make sense of a past that evades tidy, concrete labeling. I’m realizing, slowly but surely, that I’m NOT the person I would have been had life not happened to me; I’m NOT the person I imagined I’d be when I was five; I’m NOT unmarked and I’m not without scars and I’m not unaffected by the events of my past, good or bad. But I’m nonetheless responsible for today. And for tomorrow. I can’t evade my responsibilities—my life, my SELF—simply because I didn’t get the fairy-tale life I thought I had to a right to. The truth is, fairy tales only exist in our imaginations. A life without struggle, without pain, isn’t life at all, because life is about the challenges that test our mettle; the scars that give us character; the horror stories that made us humble when we were arrogant, flexible when we were unyielding, compassionate when we were self-centered. Yesterday is no longer my responsibility, but I AM responsible for embracing life fully in the present moment. After all, the present is God’s greatest gift to us. The past already happened. The good, the bad, the disappointing—it’s all done with. The future is uncertain. It’s determined in part by circumstances and forces outside our control, but it’s also set in motion by the choices we make NOW. In the present moment. The future is shaped by TODAY’S decision to GET UP, get moving, and get on with it. Enough is enough. We have only THIS moment, THIS day, THIS opportunity to do THAT thing and love THOSE people and make a difference THERE. So don’t waste it. Don’t spend your life trying to understand yesterday or fearing that tomorrow will follow the same broken pattern as the past—close that book and begin writing your story NOW. Accept that your history changed you, shaped you, and believe that you can alter history on a bigger, grander, more universal scale if you choose to inhabit the present and fix your gaze forward rather than backward. God has called you, after all. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.
I’m closing the book on a past of what-ifs; should-have-beens; if-onlys—a past, in essence, viewed from a biased lens, much too riddled with disappointment, heartache, and the kind of sad, grey reality that shatters every fairytale you once believed in wholeheartedly. The past is a place I’ve dwelled in for too long. A place I’ve longed for with the unrealistic expectations of a child frozen in time. I’ve lived most of my life looking always backwards, see? In retrospect the landscape of my past is like a battlefield: there were victories and there were failures and ground was gained and loved ones were lost but all I see from this vantage point is barren terrain and monuments that are meant to bear testimony to everything that was seen and felt and experienced—monuments I erected so that I’d never, ever forget. It’s not a very pretty view. It’s definitely not a place where new dreams can blossom or new love can grow or new beauty can emerge. There’s nothing left there but the memory of what once was, and my yesterday is no longer a place I wish to revisit.
I no longer want to rehash everything—all the events and people and make-it-or-break-it moments—that happened or didn’t happen, that went according to plan or fell apart instead. What’s done is done; no amount of wishful thinking can alter the facts as they now stand. Looking back at that battlefield for the last time I can say this: there was pain. Unspeakable, I-feel-like-I’m-suffocating pain. There was joy too. Love like I’ve never, ever known. Tears that left me nauseated; laughter that induced hysteria; moments that were precious, that made me feel more alive than I thought possible; moments that left me aghast at the cruelty of the world; there was sorrow and there was love and there was disillusionment and there was friendship and there was anger and there was hope and there was fear—there was LIFE. Life lived to the best of my ability. Life at its peak: messy, feral, full of tragedies I didn’t expect and rewards I didn’t earn.
Was life unfair to me? Absolutely. Has anyone managed to live life and come out the other side unscathed? Not that I know of. Everyone has a story to tell. We all have our scars. We’re all, at best, DAMAGED in some way; pockmarked and wounded and left at the side of the road with broken limbs and broken wings and broken hearts. There’s always, always the person we were SUPPOSED to be and the person we BECAME; the person we should, could, WOULD have been and the person we’ve settled for. And, like me, too many people spend an infinite amount of time and energy wishing AWAY the life that happened to them, or willing away the scars that branded them, or rewriting the events of yesteryear so that they feel less cheated. Or maybe we do this so that we feel more vindicated. So that the blame will never, ever be cast on us or the decisions we make on a daily basis—it’s always pinned on our history. We’re guarded and selfish and unyielding because history taught us not to trust; we’re everything we hate and nothing we’d like to be because history told us it’s better to not try than to try and fail. Such a sad, broken world we come from. And we’ve inevitably been shaped by it, so without really realizing it we become sad, broken people.
The kind of people doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity because we never dare look forward. How can we when we’re always looking behind us, casting either longing, wistful glances at the good that somehow turned sour or disenchanted, disbelieving glares at the bad that overtook what was once good?
That’s my problem with modern-day therapy. Most of the time the past is remembered and revisited and reenacted, as if answers will suddenly come to us when we’re forced to recall Events A, B, and C; Person X, Y, and Z; Tragedy #4 and Heartbreak #2 and Disappointment #8. Most of us believe this is true, I think. We soul-search and delve through our pasts with magnifying glasses and a deposit-box of self-help jargon, trying to identify the point at which everything went wrong so that we can bandage an old wound and fix what was broken. As I see it, though, it’s not quite that simple. When you break a bone or crack a rib or puncture a lung the healing process is pretty straightforward—the damage can be precisely located, seen with an x-ray, and then it can be dealt with in the most obvious and effective way. Healing can occur. There’s often even little to no evidence that the damage occurred: a bone will set; a wound will scab and then new skin will emerge; a damaged organ can be operated upon and, if not healed entirely, at the very least be made functional. The damage is dealt with and then rarely thought of again. A once-fractured femur, for instance, doesn’t continue to ache and throb long after it’s been set and restored to its former usefulness. Broken hearts, unfortunately, DO. Broken spirits hurt even after the source of the pain has been removed. A broken sense of self—because your dad abandoned you or your mom didn’t affirm you enough or you came from a broken home and never went off to school with a warm brownie in your knapsack—leaves us crippled in a way a broken foot never does: it changes us. Forever.
When we break emotionally we’re changed by the experience permanently, for better or worse—with every heartbreak and every blow we’re dealt the trajectory of our life changes; the way we see the world changes; our belief system changes; the very world we inhabit CHANGES. I don’t think there’s a cure for that. I don’t believe it’s possible to sit on a therapist’s leather couch and “become” again that six-year old child who was dumped on an aunt’s doorstep and find healing in that place. It’s true that doing this might bring clarity to some of the “whys” of our past—but does understanding something ever change the fact that it happened? Does it lessen the hurt, soften the blow, act as a shield against the damage? I once spoke to a psychiatrist who told me the most honest thing I think I’ve ever heard from a health professional’s mouth: “Psychotherapy is fine. It might bring some understanding to the difficult and painful things of your past. But, to be honest, healing is a CHOICE. You have to wake up and say, ‘This is bull****.’ And you have to move on.”
Moving on, as I see it, doesn’t mean pretending the damage never happened. It did. It happened, and you didn’t deserve it, and you didn’t do anything to cause it, and it changed you because every fire does; every time there’s a discrepancy between “should have” and “was”, between “the ideal” and “the reality”, something happens inside us. The thing about the kind of damage we take medication for or see a shrink for is that it can’t be FIXED—it can’t be undone. That might make the situation seem hopeless, but that’s only the case if we equate fixing with HEALING. I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. Fixing something is making it like it was before, so that it operates in the same way it did before…we fix a damaged tire by either patching it up or replacing it altogether if the damage is severe…when we’re done the tire looks and functions the same as it did before the incident.
HEALING, on the other hand, just means that we learn to function, to THRIVE, even, in spite of the damaged parts. Think about what a scar looks like. It’s essentially DAMAGED SKIN, flesh that will never, ever look like it did before, that will never, ever BE the unmarked, unblemished thing it used to be. Think for a moment about what a scar IS. It’s a wound, some sort of DAMAGE, that HEALED. Can a wound be fixed? No. Healing, however, is not only possible but wholly inevitable. A wound will heal even if not actively tended to—as long as it’s kept clean and free of infection. In most cases nothing fancy is required…a simple cleaning or dressing of the wound will suffice, and then time does what it does best: it heals the hurt. Makes it go away, even if the scar remains. Our emotional wounds can be tended to in much the same way. As with a physical wound, the damage must be acknowledged—even when it’s ugly, even when it’s hard to look at, even when it’s in a place we’d rather others not know about. Secondly the wound must be cleared of all debris—all those macro- and microscopic foreign substances that may, if left, cause the wound to fester and decay.
This is where it gets challenging. In our lives someone or something hurts us and debris comes flying in from a million different directions, from a million different well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning sources: we’re told we should hold a grudge; we’re encouraged to do that and act like this and harden our heart and put up more walls; we’re told of a plethora of devices and attitudes and dispositions that might ease the pain and make us forget. When we’re hurting somewhere it’s hard to just let the wound be—so it’s sometimes easier to deal with the debris. To get lost in the junk; in the excess stuff that, if we really think about it, is as far removed from the damaged sight as it is possible to be.
Pain is how we know something isn’t right. It’s how our psyche tells us that something went amiss—and a wound is the evidence that we were affected; that, despite our best efforts, we got caught in the cross-fire. Healing is THERE, I believe. In that place where a hurt is self-sufficient, where it isn’t sandwiched between a thousand theories and quick-fixes, where it’s simply allowed to BE. Healing is found in that place where we’re hurt but don’t seek to understand or categorize or fix it; where we strive to accept only that something happened and we’re different people because of it and we still, NO MATTER WHAT, have an obligation to be all that we can be. Our wounds will scar. We still won’t understand, and it will still be unfair, and the evidence of the original wound will still, ALWAYS, be there…but the pain will no longer exist in the present. And, perhaps most importantly, it will no longer define our future.
I’ve lived too long with the misguided idea that I need to rectify the past in order to heal in the present and thrive in the future; that healing comes in retrospect rather than in progress. I no longer want to subscribe to that mindset. I am no longer interested in what happened yesterday—I am no longer concerned with trying to make sense of a past that evades tidy, concrete labeling. I’m realizing, slowly but surely, that I’m NOT the person I would have been had life not happened to me; I’m NOT the person I imagined I’d be when I was five; I’m NOT unmarked and I’m not without scars and I’m not unaffected by the events of my past, good or bad. But I’m nonetheless responsible for today. And for tomorrow. I can’t evade my responsibilities—my life, my SELF—simply because I didn’t get the fairy-tale life I thought I had to a right to. The truth is, fairy tales only exist in our imaginations. A life without struggle, without pain, isn’t life at all, because life is about the challenges that test our mettle; the scars that give us character; the horror stories that made us humble when we were arrogant, flexible when we were unyielding, compassionate when we were self-centered. Yesterday is no longer my responsibility, but I AM responsible for embracing life fully in the present moment. After all, the present is God’s greatest gift to us. The past already happened. The good, the bad, the disappointing—it’s all done with. The future is uncertain. It’s determined in part by circumstances and forces outside our control, but it’s also set in motion by the choices we make NOW. In the present moment. The future is shaped by TODAY’S decision to GET UP, get moving, and get on with it. Enough is enough. We have only THIS moment, THIS day, THIS opportunity to do THAT thing and love THOSE people and make a difference THERE. So don’t waste it. Don’t spend your life trying to understand yesterday or fearing that tomorrow will follow the same broken pattern as the past—close that book and begin writing your story NOW. Accept that your history changed you, shaped you, and believe that you can alter history on a bigger, grander, more universal scale if you choose to inhabit the present and fix your gaze forward rather than backward. God has called you, after all. Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise.
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