The Breach

It’s hard to explain what’s been going on the last several months. There’s been a turmoil in my heart - no, somewhere deeper than that, so deep inside that I can’t reach it or identify it or explain it. It started with a breach in my family, that much I do know. Odd, because it wasn’t the first family breach, not even in the nuclear part of us. But this one was different. Maybe because I didn’t see it coming. If other breaches were the hurricanes of life, slow to approach but full of fury, this one was the tornado. It came upon me suddenly, without warning, and in seconds a roaring locomotive whirlwind had stripped me of any sense of stability that I once possessed.

For months I couldn’t even mention in passing what had happened to me (to us) without crumbling. I couldn’t even think about it without waves of guilt and grief pushing me down, under water where I couldn’t breathe or speak or move.

I almost didn’t post this. And I realized that over the last six or seven months, I have been systematically shutting down anything in my life that might reveal the real me to someone, or even to myself. It wasn’t overtly intentional, more like a subconscious defense mechanism. Just park the car around back… pull the blinds down quietly and slowly… dim the lights… they won’t know you’re here…

And go to sleep.

So I have been hiding from myself because subconsciously I knew a major weakness in me had been uncovered by the breach. I didn’t realize it, but deep down I knew it. After decades of growth and progression toward maturity, I guess I was feeling pretty good about where I was at. I knew I wasn’t perfect by any means, but I was pretty smart, pretty clued in to the whole Jesus thing. The breach, however, took with it any sense of security and confidence I had built up over the years. The breach came skipping along and yanked the sheet off, exposing me.

And really, I was still right there with Jesus even in my humiliation, guilt, and inadequacy. It was just that now, I couldn’t credit his presence to my own doing. I knew it was all him. Once I admitted to him and myself that I had been exposed and I needed help, he stood me up and had a look at the wound. It was pretty bad. Because it is an old wound, and when the sheet was yanked off it ripped open the scar tissue and laid bare the infection that lay under the surface. Funny, I thought that had healed a long time ago. And now, I am in the process of letting Jesus wash me and dress my wounds, and if you haven’t done that lately, let me tell you it is humbling when Jesus wraps a towel around his waist and kneels before you to serve you. No Lord, don’t wash me! But you need it, and unless I do…

Some mornings when I wake I am overcome with a terror of the things I have to face for the day. I am seeing rejection or the potential for rejection in everything, and I am instinctively trying to avoid… everything. And I have to tell myself, feel the fear but do it anyway. That’s what I’m telling myself right now, feel the fear but write it anyway. Feel the fear, but make that phone call anyway. Feel the fear, but get up out of the bed anyway. And Jesus is lovingly saying, feel the fear, but make yourself vulnerable again anyway.

Because that’s what I do, he says. I make myself vulnerable to my beloved, the Church, again and again, because I love… because I AM love. And if I will live in you, then you will love too and you will open yourself to hurt (and sometimes it will be you that hurts others and yourself) and you will still pursue living and loving and you will still pursue me — and them.

Tags: depression, family, fear, Jesus, loving jesus, sin, the church, woundedness