How's that for an intro?
Okay, so I previously read John Eldridge's Wild at Heart, which I highly recommend. It is an excellent insightful look into the masculine soul--as it is and as it was meant to be. These past few weeks, I've been reading his sequel, The Way of the Wild Heart: A Map for the Masculine Journey. It's all about the phases of development that Eldridge sees in a man's life, and--as before--I've found his insights piercing and accurate. Basically, he divides a man's life up into 6 more-or-less distinct phases (they overlap and, to some degree, may be present at any time in a man's life, he says). In each of these phases, there is a particular thing the developing man needs and a lesson he must learn in order to properly progress. Each phase builds upon the one before it, and a problem in one phase may be magnified or lead to other problems in later phases. The phases themselves are fairly self-explanatory. They are: the Beloved Son, the Cowboy, the Warrior, the Lover, the King, and the Sage. Right now, I'm halfway through reading about the Lover phase--a little over halfway through the book (yes, I'm a slow reader), but I find I must address what I've found in reading over the previous phases before I get to the dilemma my current reading has uncovered in my life. For this entry, I'll focus on the Beloved Son phase.
The Beloved Son phase, as Eldridge calls it, is the early childhood years of a boy. As I said, it's fairly self-explanatory: during this phase what the "Beloved Son" most needs to know is that he is deeply loved by his father. Other people--his mother, his friends, his siblings--no doubt also play a role, but for Eldridge the love of the father is critical. This fatherly love gives the boy a deep affirmation and sense of self-worth (not pride, there's a difference--as I have had to learn the hard way), which he will need as he progresses through the other phases. But nothing on this earth is perfect. No father can perfectly assure his son of his love, and many do just the opposite. Rather than treasuring the boy's heart, they abuse and shut it down, effectively sabotaging the rest of his journey. Thankfully, we serve a God who adopts us as His sons, and teaches us to address Him as our Father. This isn't some divine whim of a title, but an indication of who He means to be to us: a Father. Where our earthly fathers loved us imperfectly, or not at all, He loves us perfectly and cherishes us as His sons. He is a God of second chances, and He is in the business of fathering us again.
That being said, I was fortunate in my own childhood. My Dad really loved me, and does love me, I'm sure. He was a good Christian man and tried to father me and my sisters the best he could--better than his father, who was often absent from his life. I love him and respect him as a man. Yet no one is perfect, and he is no exception.
I tell everyone that I learned to read on the King James Version of the Bible, complete with all the "thees" and "thous"--and all the verbs ending in "eth." It's true! By the time I went to Kindergarten at public school and was introduced to Spot ("See Spot run" etc), I was already used to reading Shakespearian-era English with my family every night ("Behold, Spot runneth upon the fields and leapeth upon the mountains of the wilderness"). Every night, we would all gather together in the living room and read the Bible together in the old KJV. Each of us would take turns, with my parents taking the longer and more complex parts of the passage and splitting the rest between the three of us kids, according to age and experience. If we came to a word of phrase we didn't know, we'd ask about it, and my Mom and Dad would gently walk us through it or pronounce it for us. But when we later came across the same word and stumbled again, we were in trouble. Despite being less than five years old and new to reading, we were expected to recall the words that had been explained to us before. This was simply not realistic, though. I can recall on one occasion staring dumbfounded at the word "the"--having made it through all these larger and less familiar words only to draw a blank here! To my parents, this was not acceptable, or perhaps not believable. They said we were being stubborn, that we just didn't want to read. They would demand that we read the problem word correctly and continue our part of the passage. Yet, speaking for myself, I was almost always genuinely stumped. I was already embarrassed and confused by this mysterious word, and their anger wasn't helping! It went over the top, for me. When I, or either of the girls, continued to "refuse" to pronounce the problem word (again, usually due to inability), we would be punished by being made to stand in a corner while the rest of the family read on. We would only be let out of the corner if we agreed to (and were actually able to) pronounce the word. I remember spending many a session staring at the wall with silent tears streaming down my face, struggling to remember the mysterious word and figure out how to pronounce it, knowing that that was my only ticket out of the corner--no amount of pleading would change my parents' minds.
Now, I can only guess what my Dad was thinking. Probably he just meant for me to have a healthy respect for God's word and not be lazy with my abilities--all based on the assumption that I actually could read those words in the first place. Yet to me, the message was very different. The message I received while staring at the corner and crying silent, angry, hurt tears to myself was this: When it comes to God and intellectual things (especially), you must be perfect to be accepted. No one will help you. You are alone. If you are not perfect, you will not be loved. You are not worthy of love. This was the lie. My Dad really had no idea he was driving at perfection in me. He just wanted me to do my best, and if he thought I'd needed help, he would have offered it. Though I find it difficult to accept even today, I think he loved me even when he put me in the corner, still saw me as his prised son. But I did not see this from him. I accepted the lie and responded by making an unconscious oath that went something like this: Fine. I'll be perfect. I'll do everything in my spiritual and intellectual life on my own (no one will help me) and I'll do it all perfect, all the time (for if I slip up, I won't be loved: I'll be unworthy of love).
For years thereafter, this oath has dominated my life. I became academically driven, and always worked on my projects alone, always striving for perfection. Thankfully, the ties between my academic life and my oath were not very strong, mostly because my Dad impressed upon me the importance of doing my best academically, and explicitly said that my best, and not perfection, was all he expected of me academically. His love and affirmation through my school struggles helped me let go of the intellectual side of my oath, by and large. But the spiritual side remained. I would say I was, and am, driven to perfectionism in my spiritual life. My spiritual life, I'd say, has historically been my number one source of stress and anxiety. It's not because I have a super-close relationship with God: for years I couldn't even imagine that my spiritual life was supposed to be a relationship. For me, it was always a prerequisite for love and acceptance. I will be perfect. I will do my reading in the Bible today. I will say my prayers, just the way I'm supposed to. I will not question, I will not doubt. I will not have sinful thoughts or desires or temptations, just holiness. I will be perfect, and then God will see me as worthy and accept me and love me.
Needless to say, this didn't work out, and if you're familiar with this blog, you've read some of my wrestlings with this before from entries like "Why Does God Love His Saints?" It was especially painful for me when I entered into my teenage years and I began to struggle with so-called "soft" pornography. I had labeled sexual sins as the dirtiest sins a man could commit, the very worst ruins his spiritual life could come to, and here I was committing them! I am sooo imperfect! I remember thinking. God could never love me! It was thoughts like that which cast a dark cloud of depression over my teenage years, a cloud which only began to clear when I entered college. Even there, it wasn't all over. I was still a spiritual perfectionist. I was never satisfied with my relationship with Christ. I wanted to do something more, read more, pray more, do more. I knew my performance wasn't ever perfect, I wanted to make it so, and when I failed, I felt sure that God couldn't love me any more.
So, the weekend before last, I was riding up into the beautiful Rocky Mountains with my Bible study group. We were going to spend the weekend at a cabin on Lake Granby. I was reading The Way of the Wild Heart on the trip up and I'd just gotten through the chapters on the Beloved Son. At the end of the chapters, Eldridge asks the reader to invite God to show him how his time as the Beloved Son was interrupted, cut short, violated, or neglected--and to invite Him to be his Father and heal him in that area. I remembered my times in the corner, and I knew that was my wound from that phase. God opened my eyes to how I was a spiritual perfectionist, and where that came from, how I saw it as a prerequisite for love and how it made my spiritual life about doing "Christian" or "religious" things rather than having a relationship with Him. "From now on, you have no spiritual life," He said to me (not audibly), "Just a relationship with me, in your real life...in all its imperfection." I felt relief. A huge burden to perform for love had been lifted from my shoulders.
It was then that a song came on the radio (I was riding with a man addicted to music, he refused to give up on the signal even when we drove through the dead zones of Grand County). It was "More" by Matthew West, and it was the first time I'd ever really listened to the song. I'd heard it before several times, but it always made me cringe inside. I really only caught the first line of the chorus, you see, and I thought it was: "I love you, Lord!" I thought the whole song was some perfectly spiritual guy belting out his extreme love and performance to a delighted and accepting God--who would naturally never delight in imperfect me. I could not have been more wrong! A Youtube video of the song accurately introduces it as "A love song, from God to you." It's written and sung from the perspective of God, delighting in us, in me! To hear it melted my heart and made me misty-eyed. Just thinking of it has the same effect! The lyrics are chalk full of special expressions of God's love to me. It was all so very personal. For example, the song starts out with "Take a look at the mountain/ Stretching a mile high...and think of me"...as I'm looking at mountains, which never fail to enchant me with their mystery and beauty. God, of course, knew that and took full advantage of it. There's another, harder to explain and more personal in the chorus, where it says, "I love you more than the sun and the stars that I taught how to shine. You are mine and you shine for me too." So, several years ago, as a budding young romantic (with, for that moment, no particular woman to be romantic with), I saw the movie "Stardust"--on the whole an okay movie: excellent cinematography and fantasy, but loose sexual morals, nudity, and crass humor. In any case, what captured my interest in the movie was the young couple, Tristin and Yvaine. Yvaine is a star in the form of a young woman and when she's happy and in love, she shines, literally glows! In a sappy romantic way, I saw that and thought, Awww, wouldn't it be sweet if I could make a girl's heart shine like that someday? Later, I began seeing the parallel between God's relationship with me and a romantic relationship (more on this in To Walk with Him in White and Of God and the Gender Gap), and I wondered: does God want to make my heart "shine"? Is that even possible, or am I just a dull clod? This song was His way of answering those questions.
There is one final, but very pertinent part of the song I must touch on:
Just a face in the cityThis speaks directly to my wound. I know I'm not perfect. I'm not a super-Christian. I picture myself--optimistically, as riding somewhere in the middle of the pack (when I picture the Christian life as a race of religious perfectionism--which is admittedly a wrong image). Sure, God loves me, I think, but He loves a lot of other, better, people too. I figure I get lost in the shuffle and kind of slip into Heaven's nose-bleed section. But that's not how God sees it. Though I'm imperfect, I'm "one in a million" to Him: precious, treasured, accepted, beloved! And this is not dependent on my performance. He never let's go, He never gives up or stops loving (or even moderates His love)...even when I come completely undone!
Just a tear on a crowded street
But you are one in a million
And you belong to me!
And I want you to know,
That I'm not letting go
Even when you come undone!
It will be difficult giving up my perfectionism and learning to live with God in a genuine relationship, accepting His love--which I so desperately need--into the imperfect parts of my life I see as unlovable. But I'll make it. I have an excellent, determined, and strong Father who loves me very much, just as I am!
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