Archive for struggling with sin
June 21, 2008 at 4:34 pm · Filed under Jesus, dying to self, growing in God, loving others, spirit, struggling with sin
When I walk in public places, I find myself searching the faces of strangers, wondering what their tragedies are. We all have them.
Anyone who tells you life is a bowl of cherries, easy-peasy, cloud nine, is full of it.
That doesn’t mean life can’t be full of joy, but joy isn’t dependent on what’s happening to me. I can have joy regardless of my circumstances. I don’t always, but I can. Peace too.
Anyway, life is hard, pretty much across the board, for everyone. Don’t be fooled looking at people who seem to have everything that you wish you had. Look into their eyes, behind the stuff, and you’ll sometimes get a glimpse of the tragedy. And even if you can’t see it, it’s there.
We are an angry people. Anyone who spends five minutes in traffic can attest to that. Getting behind the wheel of a car gives us just the anonymity and the power we need to vent some of that anger on other anonymous souls.
We’re angry because we have a longing for eternity (perfection) in our souls, and all we have experienced is imperfection. We’re angry because we desire beauty and love and satisfaction, and nothing man offers can fill that desire.
No amount of money, no number of possessions, no conquest of the heart can fill that desire, and we are sorely disappointed.
The last several decades have been particularly godless and the fruit of that is anger. I think we’re making a turn back to recognizing true spirituality, which gives hope, but for almost fifty years children have been born and raised in hopelessness.
I don’t think this is the first such period we’ve gone through. It’s a cycle - we move closer to God, we move away, God calls a remnant to him, those that hear, and eventually many follow, then many fall away. So I don’t think it’s the end of the world or something just because there is so much evil and godlessness. We’ve had that before.
And we all have hard lives. No one is immune to this. Don’t let some starry-eyed evangelist ever tell you that if you just say the sinner’s prayer, all your problems will be solved. Untold numbers of souls have been harmed by this premise. Say the sinner’s prayer, become a Christian, happy happy. Then when the problems and struggles don’t disappear they either hate God or themselves and put on the happy happy mask and shake their fingers at others who are unhappy: you don’ t have enough faith.
Seems clear to me that Jesus told us we were going to have troubles. And when he went away, he didn’t say he was going to solve all our problems. He just said he was giving us peace. And he asked us to lay down our lives for each other. I didn’t hear anything about financial or physical prosperity.
So the difference between me and someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus is not that I have a tragedy-free life. It’s that I have a source of peace in the midst of my tragedies. I know that he has overcome the world and that I will overcome also and experience perfection. Not in this life - no one gets to have that. But when I see him face to face, it’s going to be worth it.
For my sake, he didn’t give up, through the trials, the persecution, the injustice, the hurt, the betrayal, the poverty, the hardship, the pain, the death. He persevered through his tragedies, and he overcame.
And for his sake, I won’t give up either. I’m not looking for financial blessing, physical health, to have my needs met, a nice, neat, bow-tied-on-top ending to my life or the lives of the ones I love, or any kind of security other than the hope that I have in him that it’s going to be worth it all.
And there is peace and joy in that, even if we don’t understand it. There really is.
June 2, 2008 at 3:09 pm · Filed under faith, growing in God, struggling with sin
I love that title, don’t you?
But really, please don’t feel sorry for me regarding my last post. I don’t feel sorry for me. When we are confronted with the not-so-pleasant details of others’ lives, we should remember that for that person, it is their life and so it’s never quite as bad as it sounds to someone else. It’s the “mud is always stickier on the other side of the fence” syndrome. I’d rather have my life any day than to suddenly be plopped down into yours. I am doing great, really! I don’t share my struggles to make you feel sorry for me. I share them because I want to share the examination process I go through with myself. I really agree with Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living.
The more I can figure out the “whys” of my behavior, the more I can respond to the events of life instead of reacting to them. The more I can be ready to take every thought captive and give it to Jesus. I’m just not one to float shallow down the river of life. I know there are people who do that and who are very happy and living productive lives and growing in Jesus. I just happen to believe that for me, there is a whole lot more down under the surface if I am willing to do the hard work of digging and getting muddy. My life is truly a journey of discovery. Under the surface, beneath the mud, there are treasures to be found that I would never know if I just stayed in the raft.
With that said, I will probably have another post or two about the “whys” of some of my struggles. I hope that by sharing my struggles and the reasons I have them, others will be inspired to do some digging for themselves.
June 1, 2008 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Jesus, freedom, growing in God, paradigms, struggling with sin
My father was really big on appearance, especially women’s appearance. I find it difficult to even go to these places in my memory because of the very deep pain. How he looked at women. How he behaved toward certain women. How he berated my mother and me and my sister. The unattainable standard he lifted up and worshiped. When I was young, I picked up on a message: your outer beauty defines you. It is what makes you valuable (or not). This message seems indelibly marked on my soul and I cannot escape it sometimes.
I cannot escape it and I can never measure up to the standard that has been etched in my consciousness. This is the source of almost all of my struggle and sorrow.
My father liked to look at Playboy and Penthouse magazines. He collected them. Stacks of them. When I was eleven or so and my parents were gone, I used to go into his room and get some of those magazines down. I looked at the pictures. I read and learned about sex. My entire perception of beauty and sexuality was formed from pornography. My parents never explained sex and sexuality to me. How could they? Their understanding of it was completely broken. So their avoided that topic. My education came from airbrushed lies.
I knew this was what my father valued, so I unconsciously adopted it as my ideal: to be sexually attractive, to capture the eyes of men, to be outwardly beautiful. If I could capture their attention, I could have the love and acceptance and security that I had craved from my father. And because I could never, ever, actually be one of those women in those magazines, I realize now that way back then, I created an imaginary life where I was just as beautiful as they were, just as captivating. I built this imaginary existence in which every eye turned toward me. I was one of the women in those magazines, perfectly beautiful, perfectly posed. The only thing that would break this reverie was seeing myself in a picture. I hate pictures of myself. Seeing one picture of myself snapped in a candid moment can throw me into a pit of despair for weeks. For my entire life, I have imagined that I was something I was not. Do you realize how utterly insane this is? How sadly delusional? I didn’t realize it. I do now and I am afraid for myself.
I cannot adequately express the damage this has done to me that is still being discovered and undone. I am sure that this madness I created for myself has broken me in unspeakable ways that will just continue to come to the surface as I grow older.
I’m sure that the written word is hollow and wholly inadequate to describe the pain of this thing that I carry around. I have not known who I really am and now I have the doubly hard task of coming to terms with who I am by stripping away vain imaginations and seeing myself as I am, AND learning to re-orient my idea of what makes me valuable. Trust me, this is much, much more difficult than it seems. Someone who doesn’t struggle with such a deep-seated brokenness would probably say, ok, you’ve realized it, now just don’t do it anymore.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Memento, let me share with you that, in a sense, I am Leonard. Leonard has a memory disorder in which the last thing he can remember is seeing his wife attacked and killed. After that, he has been unable to make new memories. In other words, he forgets everything he experiences, each day, within moments. In order to compensate, he tattoos himself with important information. To him, important information means anything that will lead him closer to the person who killed his wife.
I am like Leonard. My memory is frozen at the traumatic realization that I can never be the things that my father gave me as ideals. Even though I am “re-programming” myself with the Truth of who I am and what my true ideals are, it seems to slip away over and over again and my original programming: you’re a sham, you’re disgusting, did you see that picture of yourself, look at that roll of fat, look at how small your breasts are, look how big your ass has gotten. If you think this is easy for me to express, let me assure you, this is shaping up to be a very difficult post for me to write.
What I was, and what I am, is a person who is beautiful from the inside out, with some nice qualities on the outside too. An amazing person on the inside, a fairly average person from outer appearances. What I have to constantly tell myself is that is a really cool thing. Sometimes I feel like I start to believe it, too. But underneath the “good” voice that I seem to control, is the “bad” voice that I can’t make shut up, that sometimes I can’t hear, but that is always there like the sound of the highway that drifts over the neighborhoods below. What the bad voice keeps telling me, maddeningly, over and over again, is that being average, middle-aged, and yes, overweight, is not cool at all and makes me a complete and utter failure and it makes me want to hide and sometimes even makes me want to die. I’m sure this sounds completely odd to some people. For others, it may just make sense. And I guess that is why I am willing to share this with basically everyone on the planet. It might help someone to show them what I live with, what no one else, except maybe Darin, sees.
If you’re someone who collects pornography or looks at it online, I don’t condemn you. We are free agents and I am all about liberty. What I would ask you to do is to consider the effects you may have on those around you. I’m quite sure my father, who is dead now for over 12 years, did not realize what he did to me. Or to my mother. Or, I am sure, to my sisters. Or to himself. And it doesn’t end there. The effects continue on in my children, to my husband, to my grandchildren. We are all experiencing the healing that comes from knowing Truth and being set free, but the consequences of seemingly small actions are great and long-lasting.
I am going to be OK. God has given me a great treasure in my husband, who has shown me the love of Jesus in countless ways and has been a friend, a lover, and a father to me. Jesus shines through Darin to me and I have healed so much in so many ways. If you don’t know who Jesus is, please ask him to introduce himself to you. Just talk to him. He won’t be pushy or religious. If something is pushy or religious or condemning in your life, it isn’t Jesus, and you can discard it.
May 28, 2008 at 9:59 pm · Filed under family, fun stuff, growing in God, loving others, struggling with sin
Is it a good idea to have expectations of others in a love relationship? I mean, is it even really possible to do that? To expect someone to behave a certain way or to become a certain person or improve in a certain way? I think that is making love conditional, because love and acceptance go hand in hand.
Love means I embrace you fully just as you are and will continue to do so. And this idea of unconditional love can be held separate from the idea of boundaries. Having boundaries in a relationship means that you cannot physically or mentally hold me hostage or I will remove myself from your presence, perhaps permanently. And this is good and right and doesn’t negate the idea of love.
But expectations create conditions. The person who feels entitled waits, perhaps impatiently, for the expected actions or change in the other person, and until that happens, there is something missing in the relationship. My husband could tell me every day how much he loves me, but if he is also telling me that he expects my appetite for sex to increase by 30% and that I’d better hop to it, I’m not believing that I am accepted. Or if he tells me that my cooking needs to be as delicious and well-presented as Rachael Ray’s technique and that he’s going on a diet until that happens, I’m not feeling encouraged.
Sometimes unspoken expectations scream the loudest. If Darin looked at every beautiful young woman that passed by him while we were having a conversation, instead of focusing on me, that would certainly deliver a message to me. If I go on and on about how Pastor Dashing is so wise and so well-spoken and how captivated I am by his every word, I might be saying something I don’t really want to say to my husband, especially if I’ve been nagging him or complaining to him about something I think he’s doing wrong, or ignoring him, or waiting for him to get on the stick.
I was thinking about this the other day and comparing it to some behaviors I have with my kids. I noticed that I told my daughter what a good worker she is, and I really meant it, and since then, she almost can’t stop herself from doing things around the house. I mean, even when she doesn’t want to, she feels compelled to do it because she believes that she is a good worker. On the other hand, unfortunately, I’ve not told my son the same thing because I’ve seen that doing chores around the house doesn’t come quite as naturally to him. And so he balks at every opportunity to help out. I’m going to do a little experiment, and I’ll let you know how it works. I’m going to start encouraging my son every single time he does one little bit of anything around the house. I’m going to praise him for it and tell him he’s a good worker. And I’m going to ignore it when he does a crappy job. Yes, I am going to stuff a sock in my mouth and be quiet. And over the next several months, I’m going to see if unconditional love and acceptance work better than expectations.
I’ll check back in 12 weeks or so and let you know how my experiment worked.
May 26, 2008 at 6:45 pm · Filed under struggling with sin
Grace doesn’t give us the ability to do supernatural deity-like feats of perfection. That would just make us more selfish. Instead, grace gives us the opportunity to lay down on the altar, die, and let Jesus be perfect, in us and through us.
May 25, 2008 at 6:41 pm · Filed under Jesus, bible, faith, freedom, growing in God, ideals, paradigms, spirit, struggling with sin
Jesus tells us over and over not to be afraid.
Fear of the unknown can drive us to do many things to feel safe, not the least of which is to surround ourselves with unnecessary structure and rules and people to tell us the right things to do so that we never need make a mistake. Or if we do err, it is someone else’s fault because we have transferred personal responsibility. And once we have surrounded ourselves with this high towering structure that we can see and touch, we no longer need have faith. Because, as scripture tells us, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of which is not seen. We have an example of what can happen when we desire a king that we can touch - this is what happened to Israel. God wanted to be their king but the people wanted a king like all the other nations. Someone to go to battle for them. Someone to protect them. This grieved God’s heart. But he gave it to them. He didn’t come up with the idea, but he went along with it. That’s not the ideal.
Inserting ourselves into structures led by kings that we have asked for, which God has given us, is not his ideal for us. But this is what we choose because we are afraid of being unsafe. We choose the good instead of the best, in the name of safety, when all along we have been safe because we are in the hand of God. We choose to put mediators and messengers and vessels between us and God. We choose Moses instead of Jesus. We choose the law instead of the Law Fulfiller. We choose a veil, a curtain, to shield us from God’s glory, when God himself has torn that curtain so we might go directly by way of Jesus to him.
We expect God to be safe, when in fact he is not safe at all. God is good, but he is not safe. If he were safe, we would not need faith. Yet our spirits are safe in his presence, because of Jesus. Not because of a man or a church. But because of our faith in Jesus.
Worshiping God is not a matter of going to a certain place or doing a certain thing. That is how God operated before Jesus was sent. Jesus fulfilled all of the going and doing. It is left to us to believe and follow and worship in spirit. It is not our job to follow rules, but to follow Jesus.
Exodus 20:
18 When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 19 and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
Jeremiah 31:
31 “The time is coming,” declares the LORD,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to [d] them, [e] ”
declares the LORD.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
35 This is what the LORD says,
he who appoints the sun
to shine by day,
who decrees the moon and stars
to shine by night,
who stirs up the sea
so that its waves roar—
the LORD Almighty is his name:
John 4
19“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
John 6
63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit[e] and they are life. 64Yet there are some of you who do not believe.”
May 24, 2008 at 1:16 pm · Filed under dying to self, faith, family, fellowship, growing in God, ideals, struggling with sin
Many of us are victims of hurt from other women. Most of the time it comes from a childhood hurt. For me, it was rejection. Cold, unfeeling rejection from two girls that I thought were my best friends. Many years later, I realize it is possible that neither of them meant to hurt me. But their actions left a lasting wound that perhaps only now is healing.
Women are often suspicious of each other. I have found that whenever I talk about my former “issues” with women, it strikes a chord with other women, who tell me that they have given up and just decided to hang out with men.
The root of this is the kind of childhood hurts like I experienced, coupled with the messages society delivers about what makes women valuable. These messages literally pit us one against another in an endless competition to be the most beautiful, the sexiest, the youngest looking, the best dressed, the most well off, and to get the man. Even if he is someone else’s man. Even if he is yours.
So after we experience the sting of childhood rejection, then they pile on with the news that we have to watch out or some nasty but beautiful vixen is going to snatch our husband or boyfriend out from under our nose, especially if we are not thin, smooth-skinned, and large-breasted enough to continuously captivate our mate and any other man in our presence.
This is not a good environment for friend-making. We don’t trust each other. We’re insecure, and we think everyone else is making us look bad. Just drive to work and you’ll receive hundreds of messages designed to make you feel bad about yourself so you will buy something.
I am convinced that because we women are constantly receiving the message “not good enough,” we see other women not as friends, but as dangerous rivals. We put up our defenses, just waiting for the first slight. If someone else is having a bad day and snaps at us or ignores us or says something insensitive, we take it as a personal rejection. Many times we snap back, or take our hurt and go hurt someone else with it.
My prayer today for all my sisters is that we would recognize our need for healing in our relationships with each other, and our need to overcome the deadly message of Madison Avenue. I know you all think I am “smoking something” with my posts on stepping out of the matrix and not following the systems of this world, but let me tell you that you are better off without these things. Living the message of Madison Avenue brings death to the things that are really important - the things that, when we get to the end of our life, we realize are the things that matter.
I got to be 40 and realized I had this hole in my heart that was missing friendships with women. Since I have begun to heal from my past hurts, I have discovered the nourishing quality of relationship with the fairer sex. With my female friends, I can be mothered. I can also mother and mentor. With my girlfriends, I can be a child. I can be myself in a safe environment where I know they love me. I can grow. Oh yes, we step on each others’ toes sometimes and it hurts. But “wounds from a friend can be trusted,” goes the Proverb. When it comes to friendships with women, “Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?” In other words, we will get angry with each other, but anger is born of true relationship. When we are envious of others’ status, that destroys relationship. Anger can make our relationships stronger, as long as we work through the anger and keep on trusting each other.
If you are one of those women who just don’t “do women,” I get you. I used to be you and I know that it feels safer to just avoid the issue of female relationships. I also know that there is an ache in your heart to experience the God-given blessing of healthy relationships with women. I am praying for you, my sister, to overcome your woundedness and reach out to that motherly woman who needs a daughter like you. Or to pick up the phone and call that mother who needs a sister, or that young girl who needs a mother. Don’t reach the end of your life and realize that in protecting yourself, you have missed what is really important in this life. In giving of yourself you will receive so much more. It really is worth the risk.
May 12, 2008 at 1:55 pm · Filed under Jesus, faith, freedom, growing in God, struggling with sin
Sometimes I use “not caring” about something as a defense mechanism. Not caring becomes detachment, which becomes a place that feels safe. For instance, we have to find a vehicle because my previous automobile was totaled out by the insurance company after we hit a deer. So in the process of looking for a suitable replacement, I have settled into a place of “not caring” what we buy. I have detached myself completely from the process, because several times already I have had car preferences that my husband has had to tell me wouldn’t work for one reason or another. In order to avoid the anticipation/disappointment cycle and possibly acting in an uncharitable manner, I have chosen simply to “not care.” I realize that this puts the entire responsibility for finding a car in his court. But to me, it feels like it was already his responsibility, (because he knows more about cars than I do and because mechanical concerns trump appearance preferences) so why not make it official?
I was thinking about the “not caring” thing this morning and comparing that to Jesus’ admonition to us not to worry. What’s the difference? I know there’s a difference, but I didn’t quite get it yet. But I think I may have hit on something:
The reason “not worrying” is right and “not caring” is wrong, is because worrying happens when I am not living in the moment, and caring happens when I AM living in the moment. To expound, worrying happens when I am thinking about something that COULD happen or MAY NOT happen in the future. Conversely, caring about an issue means that I am prepared to deal with making decisions IN THIS MOMENT, without detaching myself.
When Jesus tells us not to worry, I believe he is telling us to live in the moment. The evil in worrying is that in worry, I am never present. I might be living my entire life five minutes in the future, or years in the future. I am missing out on the only thing that is REAL, which is life right this moment in the presence of Jesus.
But caring means that I am facing this very moment and being present in it. If I stop caring about what this moment holds, I am placing myself into some other time or dimension, and once again I am missing REAL LIFE.
Today my life is a perfect practical application of this principle. Today, I seem to be bent on worrying about my relationship with my daughter, even though right this moment she is not here and there is nothing I can do about our relationship right now, and so my worry is focused on some nebulous concept of future events. Today, I also seem to be bent on detaching myself from the decisions that need to be made regarding purchasing (or not purchasing) a replacement vehicle, detaching myself from the work that needs to be done today, detaching myself from interaction with the people who ARE here.
With both of these behaviors, I am pushing myself out of the moment and out of real life.
So today I have learned why worry is wrong but caring is essential.
May 9, 2008 at 3:26 pm · Filed under Jesus, dying to self, faith, growing in God, spirit, struggling with sin
I was writing a prayer today and I was asking God to please take away this awful burden of self, these daily temptations and driven desires that make endless demands on me. Please take it away, I was begging with my pen, and as I wrote those words I heard him say, Please give it to me.
Huh?
Please give it to me.
……………………………
Oh, you mean I’m holding on to this thing and asking you to wrest it from my white-knuckled grip, when instead I could just hand it over to you? I thought about that for a moment and then the questions started. He probably expected that. He was probably shaking his head and chuckling a little bit as I ranted: How can I just let go because I started to do that a few months ago and look at where I’m at now. It sure doesn’t look like you’re handling it, Jesus. I don’t think you took it away, this burden of self, because right now I am buried even deeper in it. Look at me, I’m struggling and I’m questioning and I’m feeling really stuck. I must have been doing it wrong but I don’t know how to do it the right way and I’m scared.
And he said, Just trust me.
So I changed the subject for a little while, because the thought of just letting go of all of that, ceasing to be concerned about it, and living in the moment with my life directed completely toward him above everything else, was just too risky.
Now, after a morning of consideration, I am feeling brave enough to confront that idea again. And I can see that in constantly begging him to take my burden of selfishness and self-concern away, I don’t have to trust him with that burden because I am still holding on to it. Trust means letting go of the crap voluntarily, not waiting around for him to rip it away forcibly. Trust means not judging the outcome of letting go according to my own desires or vision. Trust means opening my hands and my heart and keeping my eyes completely and only on him, and following with all my strength. Trust means giving up control because I want to, not because I have to.
May 8, 2008 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Jesus, dying to self, faith, freedom, growing in God, struggling with sin
Jesus takes away my sin nature, but what about the rest of me? Does he completely change my entire nature? Or is it just my sin nature that has to go? If he changes me completely then what of being fearfully and wonderfully made? What of being created in Dad’s image? Does this mean I completely suck as a human being and need to be made into something completely different? That he thinks the Tina he made was a mistake? I’m thinking not. I am made new by the sacrifice of Jesus. New doesn’t mean different, it means clean and fresh, which can certainly be different than sin-stained, but it’s not a different me. The old sin nature is dead, but the unique creation that Daddy loves so much is still here and still cherished by him.
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