The Forgiveness Challenge

My list was longer than I thought and it's taking some time. I also procrastinated for almost a week, looking at my legal pad, which is practically attached to me everywhere I go, looking at my pen, also attached, and avoiding them like the plague.
In my mind I could easily list the small wounds; there was the girl who's name I can't remember who was mean to me in Kindergarten (I've also realized through this process that I'm incredibly petty), a rude comment made by my grandmother when I was a teen, several years of verbal abuse from a relative that I wasn't that close to anyway, all the millions of mean things my brother did to me as a child which have resulted in a fear of stair cases and severe claustrophobia, etc. Those things were easy.
But when I thought about the truly difficult things; the way my father left, old rejections that truly, deeply wounded, a bitter and recent betrayal by someone I trusted wholeheartedly, and a few others- I came up against a wall which loomed hugely in front of me. It was a wall of fear...and of pride.
Fear because in order to really forgive someone, you have to take an honest look at what the hurt really was, realistically look at your own feelings, and those things are scary. They hurt, so it makes sense that we avoid them.
And pride because I felt I had the "right" to hold onto my anger and resentment like a hot coal in my hand, yelling, "I won't let go! You can't make me!! It's mine!" Well, yes, it is. But it's also continuing to wound me, debilitating me, with each passing moment. And who's really suffering here? Not my father. Not those who rejected me. Certainly not that mean girl from Kindergarten who I'm sure is a lovely individual now.

In the words of C.S.Lewis, "Forgiveness is a beautiful word, Until you have someone to forgive." and he's right, as he so often is. Forgiveness is not a choice we make once. It's a perpetual release, over and over, for what can often be many years or perhaps a lifetime. My father left when I was sixteen and then disowned me in an email because " if you're the kind of daughter I'm going to have, then I'd rather not have one." I remember those words as if they are engraved in stone, which in a sense, they are. They're written on the granite tablet of my heart.
His rejection is probably the most minor in the list of "impossible forgives" which I have been called to do. This is not to say that I have more of a right than anyone else to hang onto my bitterness, because certainly I do not, but only to say that I have a deep and personal understanding of the battle that we all face when asked, either by our God, or by the mere penalties we face in our lives for hanging onto those coals, to release others from the prison we think we've placed them in.
And, as my dear friend Nancy stated in her comment to The Root of Bitterness, Forgiveness is entirely a personal matter. It's not something we will succeed at simply by advertising that we've done it. We can ask and answer that question only for ourselves.
Last summer, I had a strange experience involving my anger towards my dad. Very randomly, on a day when I was busy doing other things and not really thinking about him at all, I felt a very real prompting to write him a letter. To which my response was, "Are you kidding me?! No way!"
I delayed and delayed, that feeling of prompting getting heavier and heavier, the way it does when you KNOW you're supposed to be doing something and you are NOT doing it. When the constant prompting became too annoying to continue ignoring, I sat down with pen and paper, gave myself a pep talk, and tried to write. Nothing happened. I'm a writer. I can write just about anything because for some reason, that's the way God made me, and I tell you, I could not write that letter.
I started over and over, Dear.....who? Not 'dad' certainly. And 'father' was way too weird. I tried his given name and that looked ridiculous, but a better choice than the familial, so I went with it. And then, where do I start? "Hey, nice to finally be writing. Been awhile. How are things?" Nope. I couldn't even put the words on the page without the anger boiling up inside me. I didn't know what to say. I could imagine him sitting there reading it and picking up the phone. I didn't want him to pick up the phone. I didn't want to talk to him. I didn't even want to be writing that stupid letter to that man! I was furious with him and I refused to be polite! I started again and again, but my letter always turned angry and bitter, full of resentment and accusations, and I couldn't send that! My dad had to know that I'd grown beyond that and that he no longer affected me. That would give him too much power and I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't!
But I'd been asked to write the letter and that feeling wouldn't let me go. In frustration, I tore off the millionth sheet from my trusty legal pad and wadded it up, an action I loathed because it indicated failure, and I started over. My way. Obviously I had writers block and just needed to get the emotions out of the way before I proceeded.
I then spent the next hour writing the most scathing letter I've ever written to anyone. Obviously his given name was replaced in the introduction for a pronoun more appropriate to my feelings at the time. The rest of that literary masterpiece followed suit. Four pages, front and back. Later, I set my pen down and leaned back in my chair.
"Well." I said belligerently to that still, small voice who had prompted me to write it in the first place. "There it is. I wrote a letter, just like you said." and dripping with sarcasm and hurt, I added, "Shall I send it????"
I didn't really expect a response, but He surprised me with one anyway and said, very simply, very clearly, in the way He does that is unmistakably His own, "I didn't tell you to send a letter. I just told you to write one." ............oh.

And there it was. All my anger and bitterness and rage and rejection, all the words the child was never able to say to the parent that left them, written plainly in pen and ink, in my own words, undeniable. I hate it, though it's obviously needed, when The Lord reveals the contents of my heart. Especially when I'm trying so hard to hide them from myself and everyone else. I just hate it.
I hate it because it makes me weep. Because it causes me to look closely and realistically at the pain I feel, and not just the anger. I hate it because it makes me vulnerable to a God I don't fully understand and never will and because looking at who we really are is often gut wrenching and horrible.
I sat there that day last summer and cried for that child that I used to be. And I suppose that was when I was truly brave, when I accepted that he hadn't just wronged me when he left and said those terrible things. He had hurt me. He'd broken me. And part of me was always afraid that I'd never be put back together.

Now, was I supposed to restore the relationship with my father? Nope. Because forgiveness does not always equal reconciliation. Again, it's not about the other person. It's about us. I was only supposed to release him, and I am still in the process of doing that. I'm not where I want to be, sure. But I'm definitely not where I was! That day was a miraculous day in my life and I'm so thankful that The Lord did what He did, though it was painful at the time, because I have been slowly able to release that hot coal from my hand. And as I am able to do so, my heart is changed. My father's hurtful words are not what I want written on my heart when the book of my life is at it's end.
Forgiveness is a life giving process in the same way that it is a life giving process when someone is released from prison. The doors swing open, the light shines in and eyes that have not seen freedom in ages, look to the sun, the sky, the world, and it is full of possibilities, endless roads that may be traveled now that freedom has been won.
I. WANT. THAT.

"For where the Spirit of The Lord is, there is freedom..." 2 Corinthians 3:17

The Root of Bitterness

The Root of Bitterness

It's been a week and I'm already hoping I can survive this search for Value. In many ways I feel like I'm in rehab, learning my 12 steps to a full recovery from not really knowing who I am or what I'm about. This is going to be more than learning cute little lessons and then writing about them, I'm discovering. It becomes clear that as I ask God to teach me where my value truly lies, he surprises me by showing me where it is not, as I wrote last week. And this week, revealing the condition of my own heart in response to people who've hurt me, showing me my lack of response when someone does or says something which causes me pain.
I assumed that those behaviors; the calm acceptance of others rudeness, the silence with which I met comments that demoralized or humiliated me, the way in which I picked up everyone's image of me, especially the negative ones, and placed them squarely on myself, absorbing them totally, would eventually fade away or perhaps even be snapped away in an instant the moment I realized the origin of My Elusive Value. All I had to do was figure out the One Word answer to why I don't value myself and that would instantly solve these little annoyances.
However, it becomes evident as I proceed, even in these early stages, that while Christian doctrine would give a simple, decisive and cliche answer to that question; which is obviously, "you must find your identity in Christ!", the answer in my own life is more complicated than that and cannot be defined in one single word, even if that word is Jesus.

Quite possibly, the answer to this quandary shares characteristics with the quantum sciences in that it is many things at the same time, all equally possible yet wholly individual and happening simultaneously. And my responses to people who have hurt me are just one tiny facet in the gem of self evaluation. This is incredibly frustrating.
You see, I assumed that my answers would be found at the end of my search, packaged neatly and ready for printing by the end of the twelve months I've predestined for myself to finish this endeavor. As I said, it becomes clear to me that my answer, indeed my many answers, are going to be found within the journey itself, within the God who leads me through this maze, and will never be neat, tidy or even really ever 'finished'.

I watched my life carefully this week, waiting for another 'basement breakthrough' to occur so that I could quickly grasp it, write it, and add it to the file of research I find myself doing daily. The element that I didn't expect, perhaps stupidly, was that when examining my own life, I would find things that deeply hurt me. I assumed this project would be all about research, interviews with other women, mass amounts of reading. But apparently, the search for True Value is my own individual search and is between myself and my Creator, and has little or nothing to do with the experiences of anyone else. It is not comparable. This weeks lesson has been centered on the contents of my heart, something only He can advise me on.

I have always thought of myself as an outspoken person. But I don't think that's an accurate statement. I can be outspoken, but more often than not, I opt to just take people's rudeness or insult and say nothing. Again, this begs the question why? Perhaps the solution is not in whether or not I address their rudeness or criticism or insult, but in whether or not I accept it internally and what I do with it from there.
My habit has always been to take their words in, mull them over, allow them to sting and then to harbor a deep and perpetual dislike for that person forever after. I marry this reliable tactic with gossip, avoidance and withdrawal, which is really a form of assault as it's delivered with the same intention, which is to hurt.
I can guarantee with eerie certainty that I can remember every insult or bullying remark I've ever received. I cannot remember my responses, probably because there were none, at least outwardly, but the names of those who hurt me will be forever engraved on my heart. I carry them still, those old wounds, and they never fail to reinfect the other areas of my life, other relationships, with their poison.

If you had asked me a week ago if I was a bitter person, I would have given a resounding "NO!" in response. After all, it's not like I constantly think about those incidents or even really remember them unless I try. But bitterness is more than persistent emotion at remembered pain, it's all the ways we allow our life to be different, in ways it otherwise would not have been, ways that harm or otherwise inhibit us and take away our freedom, as a result of that pain. Under this new definition, I must look back and reexamine. Am I a bitter person? Yeah, I think I am.
I have considered that perhaps changing my response to people when they are critical or rude or judgmental and simply telling them off might be successful at deflecting what they're saying. If I could just snap back at them then I'd be good to go. Unfortunately, my hang up here is that when we're openly rude or critical or judgmental to others, we look really, really ugly. And I would rather be the one who says nothing in response to the person who looks so ugly rather than the sort of person who gets sucked in and responds in kind. But it still hurts and I still want to say mean things to them and you can bet, I can still remember everything they said to me years later. So I don't think my silence is really working for me.

How in the world does this interface with a search for Value? I asked myself that question as well and even questioned whether or not this was worth writing about. But after experiencing FIVE different people saying or doing openly rude or humiliating things just this last week alone, a record high even for me, I had ample opportunity to examine my responses and my heart. I was disappointed and surprised to find bitterness there.
It appears that cleaning up my life, sorting the garbage from the treasures, is going to be happening internally, too, not just in the basement. And it's going to have to start with forgiveness.
My value isn't expressed or honored when I choose to respond to someone's rudeness or insensitivity with rudeness of my own, even if that rudeness and pain are kept to myself. It's not just honored, but also radiated, when the only response my heart is capable of offering is one of love.
In Renovation of The Heart, Dallas Willard states that
"Actions are not impositions on who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with."
What's he's saying here is that we behave exactly like the kind of people that we actually are. My responses to people are not accidental, they don't have excuses to justify them, they aren't just 'bad choices' as our culture is so fond of saying. We choose them because we are the kind of people that would choose them.

And my response to that is; uh oh.
And my prayer along with that is, Lord, change me. Make me the woman that you want me to be. Because I can't just magically stop being bitter and I certainly won't pretend that those feelings aren't there if they actually are. What good would that do me? My life would still express who I was in the choices I'd make, according to Willard. So the only solution is that God himself do the work required to transform my inner person into Christlikeness.
But I can be obedient. I can choose forgiveness. And, one memory, one hurt at a time, "take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ." I can make the choice to love God and love others (and there's a reason that love for God comes FIRST here.) sincerely, from the depths of my heart and not just in shallow action occasionally.

So, I'll be spending some time this week making a list of those individuals who have wounded me in various ways. And then I'm going to choose to forgive them and let it go. I'll do this for as long as it takes until forgiveness moves in to the place where bitterness used to live because, apparently, finding value is more than introspection at what's already there, it is the willing participation in the change and growth from what's already there to what we will become as He changes us.

"I am confident of this; that He who began a good work in you will carry it out to completion until the day of Christ." Phil 1:6

A One Year Search for True Value

The Great Purge

As many of you know, what started as a fun travel blog (and a place to randomly post pictures of my life when NOT traveling), has morphed into a weird, sporadic sort of journal centering on my personal journey...to....somewhere. I've gotten multiple emails, phone calls and comments about my writing and what I'm finding is that this as yet unnamed process of self-discovery is really pretty common among women. I'm also realizing that other people find it entertaining to read about someone else going through it so that they all feel more normal. So, why fight destiny?
The truth is that I don't really know who I am. The truth is that I don't have it all together and probably never will. The truth is that I struggle with understanding who God is to me, what having faith really means, what my calling in this life is to be and what kind of woman I really am. The honest to God truth is that I experience times of deep loneliness and isolation and don't always know what to do about that. My role as a mother and wife is not ultimately fulfilling and quite often I feel very wasted and taken for granted. In short, my life thus far has been pretty unsatisfying and I refuse to live like this for one more minute.
Unfortunately, my identity up until now has not supported this new philosophy of accepting truth for what truth is, and admitting that my roles do not fully satisfy me. My identity and actually, my religious views too, have confined me to this strange and scientifically unfounded expectation that I should be utterly joyful doing the laundry and wiping little noses and that searching for more than that is a betrayal of some kind.
Well. Sorry. But I'm doing it. I might be a stay at home mom. I might not have finished that degree I started on all those years ago. I might be living in a tiny orchard town in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn't mean that I can't have an amazingly fulfilling life, full of richness and beauty and one which will be deeply satisfying to me, regardless of the season of my life. I want joy. I want happiness. I'm going to get my six thousand dollars worth out of these braces and smile more often and with actual sincerity.
My first step a few weeks back was realizing that I'm captive to the opinions and expectations of others and that I can't be free to love God or myself or anyone until I find freedom from those chains. This realization begged the question, why? Why do I allow myself to be taken captive by these things? And the answer is value. Or rather, a lack of value, a lack of meaning.
And so for the next twelve months I'm pursuing true value, where it comes from, what it means and what difference it can make in the life of an ordinary woman. I'll be posting my experiences here weekly, partly to share my thoughts with you, but also to help me keep my goal in mind. I not only welcome your comments, but I hope you will comment. Comment, criticize, encourage, make suggestions, share your own experiences, tell me what books you've read that have helped you, give your opinion. I'm deeply curious about any and all information I can gather on this subject.

My journey has begun already, and unexpectedly, with a surprisingly profound purging. For those of you who have basements or garages, or God forbid, perhaps you're like me and you're cursed with both, this post is going to terrify you. But at least you'll have the benefit of having had warning whereas I went into it naively, thinking I was simply organizing the store room.
My husband and I committed this last weekend to finally go through the boxes we had placed on the storage shelves in our basement three years ago when we moved into this house. We're planning on remodeling our unfinished basement this next year and needed to get the useless stuff out of the way and sort the things we wanted to keep before the usual remodel calamity strikes.
And so, in our stupidity, we blithely made a pot of coffee, filled our respective mugs, and headed belowstairs to conquer our foe bright and early Saturday morning. The plan, and this only showcases our lack of foresight, was to sort out the boxes, tidy up a bit and then head outside to take down the Christmas lights. We assumed this little 'Salvation Army Donation' project would be finished up by noon, the Christmas lights would be down by one and we could be happily tinkering with our remaining electrical work (left over from last summers rewiring project) by late afternoon. Yeah. Not so much.
We enter our storage area, which had become a catchall for everything that was displaced when we started the LAST remodel in August, and are faintly surprised by the sheer amount of stuff we've accumulated in the 12x8 foot area. Not to mention the other storage area on the other side of the basement which is equally full of our prized possessions, which we could certainly not inventory if asked to do so by memory. The reality is that we had no idea what was down there, nor did we care. It was our stuff.
You know, the legions of things we keep just for the sake of keeping. Our old elementary school papers, stuffed animals that meant everything to us when we were five, ugly old candles that I would never use, but couldn't justify throwing away because they'd never been lit, pots and pans who's non-stick coating was scratched away but might still work if I used enough oil and if I had nothing else and was in a pinch, Ryan's karate trophy's and awards from FedEx and all the kids baby clothes that someday I might want to look at again. And on top of all of this was an enormous pile of toys that hadn't seen the light of day in possibly years; Megan's old rocking horse, plastic children's chairs long outgrown, every HappyMeal toy that we'd ever received and never thrown out, all in bags and boxes and crates, collecting dust and housing arachnids.
We began happily enough. We strung up work lights and got the broom. Ryan turned on the stereo and we chatted and sipped our coffee's and pulled down one box at a time and started to sort. After the first box I realized I was going to need a garbage bag. I was delighted that that box had had next to nothing in it! Hurray for me, at least this one was easy. I fetch the garbage bag which I believe will be far too big for this job and sit back down with another box.
Broken tile pieces, ugly Christmas ornaments that I'd never put out, old grapevine wreathes that were long past their glory, broken lamps, picture frames with broken glass, rickety tables, an old chair, a clock that Ryan made in shop class when he was in high school which is now missing it's works.
I went for another garbage bag. And several boxes to put all the things that were too good to throw away and could be donated to charity. Soon, I had cleared an entire shelf and felt so proud! I turned around to start replacing all the things that we'd decided were worth saving and would go neatly back on the storage shelves...but there was nothing to put back.
I shrug. On to the next shelf and probably to all the good stuff, I think. But box after box after box were empty of anything worth keeping. At first this process was liberating. The space! I think. The storage for all the good stuff! I am someone who likes things simple and tidy, but it has been very easy for me to avoid dealing with the basement because, well, because it's the basement and I don't have to look at it unless I purposefully go down there. And why would I? The place was a mess!

By the end of the day, we were exhausted. We never did make it outside to take down the Christmas lights and we certainly didn't 'tinker' with the electrical work which is also long overdue for attention. We collapsed into bed and knew we weren't even halfway done with our 'little project'.
Sunday morning we stayed home from church and headed back to the basement, coffee in hand again, but with less determination, like the last day of a battle that has not gone well thus far. We were losing heart and a deep sense of loss and frustration was settling on me which, at the time, I didn't understand. I thought I was just sick of being down there. Sick of the dust and the spiders and the mess and the hopeless pursuit of tidy.
We finished the store room by mid day on Sunday and slowly made our way to the 'storage area', i.e., the other side of the basement where we dumped all of the junk we didn't want to deal with right away. The better junk was kept here; old greeting cards that were too meaningful to toss, books we hadn't read in a decade or more but can't get rid of because someday we will build a library somewhere in our tiny house, the fishbowl now devoid of fish, the telescope that Ryan loves but has used exactly once in our entire marriage, stacks of our old love letters and boxes and envelopes of pictures.
I sat down in the middle of the mess on Sunday afternoon and started sorting every loose piece of paper I could find. That sense of loss and frustration got heavier and heavier. I made a pile for recycling, a pile for the shredder and a pitifully small pile of keepsakes. Ryan, meanwhile, sorted through his own things and the kids toys and finally tackled the monstrosity that was his workbench.
We worked until well past evening and in the end gathered together twelve boxes and/or bags full of garbage and five boxes and/or bags of things good enough to donate. What was left was an apple box of keepsakes, two medium sized rubbermaid containers full of baby clothes, some of which were antique and passed down generations, and a respectable pile of camping equipment.

I look around in confusion. Where is all of our stuff?? I ask myself. I look at Ryan. Where's our stuff?? He too is depressed about getting rid of things he cannot justify keeping any longer, things with no real meaning that he has hung on to for lack of things that did have real meaning. I'm shocked at all the garbage and the piles of donations, things I don't even recognize, things I don't even care about anymore.

I've been harboring a bad attitude all morning and it finally gets the better of me. I bite Ryan's head off about something trivial and stomp up the stairs. He finds me in the car a few minutes later, engine running. I'm leaving.

"What's the matter?" He's deeply concerned and thinks perhaps two days in a dark basement with a woman who is essentially solar powered might not have been such a good idea. "Do you need to get out for awhile?" He thinks he's struck a chord here even though I'm gazing like a catatonic person out the front window. "I know! We'll all go. Let's just get out for a bit. I need it too." At this he rushes back inside and comes out a moment later with our kids in tow. They all pile into the car, I move into the passenger seat so Ryan can drive, and we begin the trek westward. We're not sure where we're going, but we need some space from the project and the emotions it tills up. I still don't know what my problem is but am so desperately sad I can hardly stand it.
We weren't yet to Hood River when the tears came. I just sat there in the front seat, weeping soundlessly. Ryan says nothing. He's waiting and knows I don't want him to bother me about it. When I've gotten enough distance from the dark clutter of the basement and had enough time to process what's happening in me, I can finally diagnose the cause of my grief and I say to Ryan,
"There's nothing left! All those boxes were supposed to have our life in them and they were just...empty. Where did our life go?"
But the reality of the situation is that we have spent the last ten years of our marriage investing in things that don't matter and then storing them on the shelves in our basement. We've hung on to things that weighed us down for fear that giving them up would leave us without our memories, without our pasts. And when we went back to look at those things, it was a bit startling to come to understand that everything we thought we had was meaningless junk.
I saved the most important things, the love letters, the pictures, some of the greeting cards that meant something to me. But we are, more or less, starting over.
This is, at once, terrifying and exciting. We have purged our house of all those old trappings. Now to purge the idea that our value is in what we possess. Easier said, I'm afraid, this idea which is so thoroughly ingrained in our western way of thinking. Even this last Christmas serves as an example of how consumerism has put it's slant on my thinking.
I don't even want to know how many thousands of dollars worth of stuff will be housed on the shelves of the Salvation Army by the end of the week, and all from my house.

In his book The Call, Os Guiness states, "The overall lesson of insatiability is that money alone cannot buy the deepest things we desire. Money never purchases love, or eternity, or God. It is the wrong means, the wrong road, the wrong search."
I suppose the same thing can be said of all the stuff we acquire with our money. It will not bring us closer to loved ones, give us satisfaction or bring us meaning. It's just the junk in our basement.
And so, on my search for true meaning, January's lesson for me has been one of materialism, finding value by discovering what has no value. It's also been one of finding room for what's really important. It's not the telescope, it's pouring a glass of wine and spending an easy evening in the backyard with my husband, gazing up at the stars and hearing him talk about the constellations.
It isn't the photographs, it's an afternoon with Megan, building them into an album of her favorite memories.
And it isn't even about de-cluttering the basement, taking loads of used goods to the salvation army. It's about putting together a basket of our best stuffed animals and taking them personally to the kids at the Providence Children's Hospital and spending some time with people who aren't fortunate enough to be able to go about their day as we do.
Lesson #1. It's not about things. It's about life. I want less of the former so that I can have MORE of the latter.