Sorting Out Who's Who of the Unwanted Guests

Following up on two previous posts about Pain (An Uninvited, Unwanted House Guest and Other Guests that Sneak in the Door with Pain), I'll share thoughts about sorting through all these unwanted guests in order to benefit from Pain's visit. It turns out that Pain is a beneficial visitor if received well and put to good use. She can be a great helper in the journey to mature self-giving love. The problem is that there are many and sundry other guests that slip in with her, and these visitors will destroy love if not handled well.

I'm not going to attempt to present anything comprehensive because our lives and situations are unique and very complicated. So this is simply a couple of things I've learned that may help as we each struggle to find what most helps in our own unique situation.

There are two really big guests that we should not have anything to do with from the start. First is the insidious guest named Perfectionism (sometimes called Religion). Anyone who has Pain as a visitor will need time to process her undesired visit in order to discover her value, and this process can take time. Perfectionism is quick to speak up and demand a correct attitude and behavior, thereby aborting the necessary process. Perfectionism is squeaky clean, very controlled and controlling. A couple of his cohorts are Guilt and Shame who do a lot of taunting when the person doesn't measure up to the demands of Perfectionism.

Beware of Perfectionism! There will be a period of time in which the host will likely need to entertain Self-Pity and Anger and Discouragement and others of the guests who have slipped in the door. Part of the host's way of finding his/her true humanity is having to sort through these guests by experiencing some of them firsthand. In time he will discover for himself the negative effect that they can have if entertained too long.

The other big visitor to avoid at all costs is Isolationism. He convinces the host to lock the door so that no other humans can get in. Some of the lies he whispers in order to get us to lock ourselves in are: "You can handle this on your own..." or "No one should see how you're really feeling so put on a good face" or "Everyone has their own problems and they don't want to hear about yours...", and on and on. In order for Pain to be a positive influence in our life, it's important that select others be involved and walk with us. They help by empathizing and by providing a perspective from outside ourselves which is needed in order to handle the many visitors that come and go as a result of Pain's visit.

Perfectionism and Isolationism - keep them away, and you may find that you will have discernment as to how to deal with the other undesirable guests.

Next I want to share a little about the gifts that have come with Pain's visit...

Other Guests that Sneak in the Door with Pain

Last week I shared about an Uninvited, Unwanted House Guest. I'm discovering that Pain, if put to proper use, turns out to be a good helper on the way to the Kingdom where love rules. However, close on her heels are other visitors who sneak in the door right behind her. These are toxic guests, some of whom have appealing personalities. They are many and sundry; I'm going to talk about two of them who have been most deadly for me.

They are Fear and Discouragement. Fear has been the most outspoken of these toxic guests. Because Pain always disables a person in one way or another, Fear is prompt and boisterous about what is going to happen as a result of the disablement. Fear speaks with a confident and assertive manner. He plays on the victim's ignorance about what's happening but he can also play on having too much information about what's happening. He knows how to use both ignorance and information for his purposes. His intent is to paralyze his victim or to get the person to act from a state of panic.

One reason Fear is so effective is that his reasoning seems so logical. And because he is boisterous, he drowns out the quiet, often silent, voices of Love and Joy, Peace and Patience, Kindness and Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-control; it takes great effort and concentration to pick up on those quieter voices while Fear is yelling.

Close on the heels of Fear is Discouragement; he actually reaches into the soul of the victim and removes whatever courage was there, leaving the victim with no strength to do anything except to do what Fear dictates. Left to run his course and develop fully, Discouragement will grow into Despair, a state of mind which leaves the person without motivation to continue.

There are other subtle visitors lurking around, such as Religion (who accuses the person of not doing enough pious practices to convince God) and Self-Pity (who enjoys telling the victim that his/her situation is worse than anyone else's) and others; but for the sake of time, I'll leave it and let you, the reader, name your toxic visitors that have managed to sneak in with Pain.

Part of the way to make the most of Pain's visit is to learn to separate her from the toxic visitors that hover around her seeking to nullify the benefits of her visit. Next I will share thoughts about ways to sort out who's who of all these unwanted guests.

An Uninvited, Unwanted House Guest

Awhile back I wrote a post about Much Afraid's companions, Sorrow and Suffering..., her strong helpers on her way to the Kingdom of Love.

Today along the same theme, I want to share about an uninvited and unwanted guest that has come to visit me. This guest's name is Pain - physical pain in my case, but she can come dressed in many different outfits. I'm struggling to learn how to host this guest who has moved in to live with me in spite of many and long-term efforts to remove her; most days she stays relatively quiet murmuring in a back room but there are days when she comes rushing into the front room, making a fuss and messing up my plans and hopes for the day.

Being a normal human being who doesn't want Pain hanging out with me, I've done what I know to do about her through medical channels and through prayer and physical therapy, etc. All of this helps keep her in the back room for part of the time anyway, but none of my efforts have succeeded in expelling her from my home altogether and so I live with her for now.

To tell the truth, I haven't been a very good host. I was not expecting her when she showed up and I certainly didn't expect her to hang around so long, and I have cried and complained about her presence. But I've noticed something happening to my heart since she moved in, an enlarging of my heart. I find myself less judgmental of others and more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when I see or hear of situations that I would have quickly judged as "wrong" in the past. My heart is soft and tender towards others' suffering and the desperation to find relief; I'm more patient. I love God more as I think about how he became human and allowed himself to feel the suffering that we feel as humans.

I'm beginning to conclude that Pain, like Much Afraid's companions, has come to help me in my journey to the Kingdom where God's love rules. And lately I'm becoming aware that while Pain herself is a good helper, others who sneak in the door with her are not very helpful.

Next I will share a few thoughts about these others who are easily confused with Pain but who are toxic companions...

A Much Safer Subject to Think About

Some years ago I had a pivotal experience in my growth in understanding what God is like. While I knew the love of God in my life before this, the revelation of His love for me in this particular moment hit me unlike ever before and it set me on a path that I've been on ever since.

I had gotten sick just before leaving on a flight for Mexico City, and I got worse in the following days after arriving there. One night the pain in my body reached a point where I wasn't sure if I'd make it through the night. As I lay in bed hardly able to move at all and feeling like I could die, everything became clear and black and white to me; I sensed the Lord asking me, "Nita, what is the one thing you are most sure about?" Without hesitating, I answered, "...that I love You, Lord."

I sensed His kind response to me: "That's good but there is something greater, and that is that I love you!" In that moment the eyes of my heart were opened to the reality that what is most trustworthy and sure is the unstoppable, unrelenting, unfailing, never-ending love of God.

C.S. Lewis says, "On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him." The apostle John says that we love Him because He loved us first. Our love for Him may be real and sincere but it is His unfailing and unconditional love for us upon which we must rest and build our lives or else we are left with the burden of religion, ever working and striving to be deserving of love.

The love of God for humans is best understood in the cross of His Son, Jesus. In the sacrificial offering of Himself on our behalf, God in Christ has made clear that He is for us at whatever cost to Himself!

Because God's love for us sinners is more secure ground to stand on than our love for Him, we can only find our hearts anchored in peace as we contemplate His love rather than ours.

In our weak condition, we humans are severely bent towards contemplating (giving our concentration to) just about everything else but His love, so it is the work of the Spirit in our lives with our cooperation that empowers us to look at Him. The following are simple suggestions about ways to cooperate with Him in this practice of thinking about God's love.

First, ask the Spirit of Jesus to strengthen your heart to say 'yes' to His love so that the proneness toward not believing His goodness and love is corrected with each 'yes.' The most difficult time to receive His love is when you have failed, but it's also the most important time to freely receive His affection for you.

Next study the cross by simply taking time to read and/or listen to the stories about Jesus' death and resurrection and the way He lived His earthly life with weak, failing humans. Picture yourself and your fears and failures in Him as He died. Ask the Lord to help you understand why He suffered and died so that you get a glimpse of your value to Him (Rom.5:8 "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.").

And finally, practice thinking about His love throughout your day; ask the Spirit to help you see the daily little comments or incidents through the lens of the cross. Develop the ability to see the love and affection of the Father coming at you constantly, whether your experiences are positive or negative, knowing that He is with you in all of it.

As we think/contemplate on this "safer subject" and drink deeply of that well, the overflow of His love will spill out onto Him and others.

Love Enables Us to Overlook a Multitiude of Sins

Some time ago when troubled by a particular situation, I was asking the Lord for understanding of why I was troubled. As I waited, the word "religion" came to mind. I remembered something that I've observed in the New Testament stories about Jesus. Whenever He would heal someone or there would be partying over His presence among the sinners, the religious people were unhappy. They couldn't look past the details of the law's requirements in order to celebrate the bigger and more important issues of forgiveness and joy and healing that Jesus' presence always brought to those who would receive Him.

I had a fresh glimpse into an aspect of religion: it majors on minors and is unable to overlook what it defines as 'lawless'. In his book, Repenting of Religion, Greg Boyd says that in religion, rules trump everything else.

In our proneness towards finding life from judging what's "right" and "wrong" (both in our own lives and those of others), we get easily sidetracked from loving and accepting others who are experiencing Jesus by critiquing whether a person's behavior is "right" or "wrong". Meanwhile Jesus, in His love and affection for the sinner, is able to overlook the smaller issues and celebrate the bigger issue of healing and freedom with the one He has touched. Love empowers us to overlook a multitude of sins.

In the particular situation referred to at the start of this post, there had been a breakthrough in the person's life, and the issue over which I was troubled was inconsequential in comparison. I was in danger of missing the Lord's joy over the person involved because of my concern over details of the "law". Because He opened my understanding, I was able to celebrate with Him and with the person...I'm grateful!

Moving on God's Trajectory is to Dare to Ask Questions

One of the great problems of organized religion is that it traps us into forms and mindsets that no longer serve God's purposes. This is true of the most vibrant movements in the church. The setting up of organizations to facilitate the fresh work of God begins the downward move towards dependence on systems to run and control things. This is hard to avoid, but the biggest danger of it is that we are generally unaware of what is happening and give ourselves completely to what we have established. This then tends to set in concrete something that is meant to remain dynamic and ready to change in any given moment as new generations come along. Even when a new generation comes along with vision to bring positive change, they encounter a system that has hardened and unable to change in any significant way.

One example of this is the charismatic movement that burst on the scenes in the '60s. I was in on the beginnings of that movement when it was fresh and vibrant. Today, although much of the language has remained the same, it has gone the way of all movements and is stuck in its own traps.

There are always 'prophets' who are alert to this hardening and address it in a variety of ways. That is true today as it has been throughout history. I'm not referring to people who are labeled prophets or to people who may have 'prophetic ministry' but to those who are awake to this reality and are calling God's people to new ways of seeing and understanding God and others. There is a great wealth of writing that is going on now that is challenging the status quo of the Christian world. Among them are people like Albert Nolan, Brian McLaren, Sharon Baker, Renee Girard, Walter Wink, Walter Brueggeman, Phyllis Tickle...and many more. These are not stereotypical prophets but are scholars and pastors and leaders calling for God's people to look at God through a different set of eyeglasses and realize that God is constantly moving forward and moving us with Him. If you read the Bible through the lens of a trajectory, you begin to realize that God has had His people on a trajectory that has continued to this day.

To dare to keep moving on that trajectory is to dare to ask questions and to sort through what we have inherited.

One well-known man in more recent Christian history, Watchman Nee, understood this concept and wrote the following:

"...We cannot overestimate the greatness of our heritage, nor can we be sufficiently grateful to God for it. But if today you try to be a Luther or a Wesley, you will miss your destiny. You will fall short of the purpose of God for this generation, for you will be moving backwards while the tide of the Spirit is flowing on. The whole trend of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is a forward trend.

"God's acts are ever new. To hold on to the past, wanting God to move as He has formerly done, is to risk finding yourself out of the main stream of His goings. The flow of divine activity sweeps on from generation to generation, and in our own it is still uninterrupted, still steadily progressive."

Truth is Meant to be Loved, not Always Known

Humans love to know things and the internet has taken this to a whole new level. I believe one primary reason we want to know and be certain about things is that it gives us a sense of control over our lives. Bit by bit as I lose certainty about some of the information I've believed about God and the Bible (subjects I thought I knew a lot about a few years ago), I'm discovering joy and peace in not being so sure about a lot of things. I'm discovering that to "know" in God doesn't mean being certain about information related to Him; in fact, I'm growing more in love now that I'm not as sure about it all. "Knowing" in God includes honest doubting and questioning and not knowing. Truth is meant to be loved, not always known. George MacDonald understood this and said the following:

"To know God is to be in the secret place of all knowledge; and to trust him changes the whole outlook surrounding mystery and seeming contradictions and unanswered questions from one of doubt or fear or bewilderment to one of hope. The unknown may be some lovely truth in store for us, which we are not yet ready to apprehend. Not to be intellectually certain of a truth does not prevent the heart that loves and obeys that truth from getting the goodness out of it, from drawing life from it because it is loved, not because it is understood."  (from MacDonald's book, "The Lady's Confession")

"Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest heart. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood...Doubts must precede every deeper assurance. For uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed."   (from "Discovering the Character of God")