Under the knife
“Wounds from a friend can be trusted.” - Proverbs 27:6a
Some people think what God wants most for his children is that they be happy, healthy, and live pleasant lives. I know better. It is not that God wants us to be miserable & sick, but rather that God has a better, higher goal. He wants to love us, and in doing so he wants to change what we are like. He wants to heal us and strengthen us. He wants to make us into men and women who are like his Son, capable of knowing God intimately and bringing his light to others as well. This is often a pleasant process, but sometimes it is not. Sometimes God has to discipline us, correct us, and even cause us pain. Sometimes, God will hurt us deeply, cutting down into the very core of our being, like a surgeon removing a tumor. And God rarely uses anesthetic.
But perhaps I should start at the beginning.
I was abused as a child. I know I’ve never said this before, and that’s because I never considered it abuse before. Some of you still won’t, but I don’t care - I know the effect it had on me. From fourth grade until eighth, every day I went to school I was a target. I was the outcast, the one at the bottom of the pecking order, and there was always a pecking order. I had few friends, and they sometimes abandoned me because some of the abuse I received would spill over on them. Sometimes they abandoned me for other reasons. I received more insults than I could ever remember, was shunned, pushed away, and the butt of countless cruel jokes. Physically, I was absolutely tiny, so there was little I could do to fight back when the bigger boys would decide to hit me or pick on me. There was never anyone I felt I could turn to for help. Parents and teachers didn’t even slow it down. Other kids would never help; they’d either ignore what was happening or join in.
I had several enemies, people who would search me out from across the school to bully me, and I learned what it meant to hate. I understand Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and why they did what they did. Anyone who has been truly bullied does, for we have all done the same things to our tormentors in our minds that those two did in Columbine. Mostly, though, I learned to hate myself. I learned there was something tragically and unchangeably wrong with me. I learned I was a loser, that I was the most pathetic person ever to walk this earth. I learned I deserved to be punished just for anything I did. I learned I was stupid, ugly, worthless, morally degenerate, weak, and utterly hopeless. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had ever truly considered suicide. I shudder at those times, and thank God I didn’t. Nonetheless, I know the worst time of my life started when I was just ten years old.
Eventually, I learned to beat the bullies. I learned that they wanted me to be afraid, to cower, to be hurt, and to cry. I learned that if I simply never showed them they were having any effect on me, they would eventually move on to someone who would. I learned to ignore, or pretend to ignore, any abuse I was receiving. If someone pushed me, I would just keep walking as though nothing had happened. One day, someone tried to kick my foot out from underneath me to make me fall. I think they may have broken it, since it took over a month to stop hurting, but I just kept walking, trying my best not to limp. I never even turned around to see who it was. To this day, I don’t know who did that to me, and there were too many people who did that to me too often to have any idea who it might have been.
I learned I could never make a mistake, no matter how slight, without drawing wrath and pain down on me like a magnet. The kids I was around were like wolves - show any weakness, and they would pounce. I learned never to show weakness, never to admit pain. Eventually, I also learned I could gain friends by being the clown, making everyone laugh and keeping the more unattractive truths about me permanently hidden. It wasn’t until I learned how to truly hide myself that I more than the occasional and temporary friend.
What saved me then killed me as an adult.
Most people have some great life struggle, some problem or sin they seem to keep coming back to again and again throughout life. Mine is shame. I have gone through many periods in my life where I have fought with it. Shame, as I define it, is not feeling bad about something you’ve done, but rather feeling bad about who and what you are. In countless ways over the years, at many times, I have struggled with feeling inadequate. Those kids at school taught me it, and no one really tried much to assuage it. I try to be free of my past, but the past rarely lets go of someone permanently.
Still, since becoming a Christian, God has been working in me and shown me a lot about myself, and has done much to undo the work of my childhood years. Several times throughout my life, he has focused on my shame, seeking to transform my thinking. This is another such time in my life. I am finding it to be one of the hardest, perhaps because I feel it is going deeper than it ever has before.
I always considered myself to be a very rational, logical person. It’s not that I never felt emotions, nor that I ignored them entirely, but rather that I felt I was a person who was driven far more by reason than by feeling. While I still consider myself a fairly rational person, I have come to see I am driven very strongly by my emotions as well. Often, this happens without me even realizing it. I’m finding I often feel things which don’t make any sense at all. I will be afraid, or angry, or sad, or guilty over something that simply doesn’t matter, and which I know doesn’t matter. Some days, I have felt miserable, and spent the entire day unsuccessfully trying to figure out why. I tried a lot of things to change it, from praying, to telling people about it, to trying to ignore it. Some days, nothing works.
There were many, many times when I felt like an emotional wreck, week to week. I would be doing okay for a while, then I something would happen and I would be crushed. I don’t want to be one of those people who never seem to heal from their wounds, who are controlled by them, but control was the very thing I was losing. Or, more likely, I never really had it in the first place. Throughout all of this, the powerlessness I felt my whole life was laid bare, and the pain of it is very raw. I have been overwhelmed by everything I am going through several times, and have lost all sense of hope a few times. I am so grateful for my friends and my God, who have continued to steer me back. I know the devil has done his part, and has fostered confusion, fear, and doubt in me. I do my best, but sometimes things seem so unclear, and we all know how hard it can be to fight an enemy you cannot see.
So I am learning to pay more attention to what is going on inside me, and to deal with it. Much of what I am dealing with is very irrational, which can drive me crazy. I can have all the reason in the world on my side, and it doesn't seem to help. I'm learning that truth cannot simply be known; it must be experienced as well. If I am feeling alone or ashamed, simply thinking about God's love and realizing all the reasons I have to feel good about myself rarely does much. Instead, I must often somehow find and experience love and acceptance, which then corrects the problem within me. I have turned to God countless times, completely unable to hold myself together. Nothing has surprised me more than God in the past year. He has surprised me because he has helped me far, far less than I would have thought.
It started when I would turn to God in desperation and he would let me know he was there yet keep me at a distance. The first several times he did this, I was very hurt until I realized the message he was trying to tell me: “I’m not the person you should be telling this to.” That first time, I did not have the courage to call someone. I felt so weak, and I think I felt if someone actually saw the pathetic state I as in, I would lose their respect. But a friend happened to call me, and, forcing every unwilling word out of my mouth, I told them exactly what I was going through. Of course, I did not lose their respect - if anything, I gained more because of my courage to be open. Since then, I have had many times when I have been forced to rely on friends, telling them all the things I can’t deal with as they happen. I have learned it is mostly when I feel weak that I want to shrink away, I want to hide myself and not let others see what I am going through. It is my shame, and often even when I find the idea of losing my friend’s respect ridiculous, I still ha a hard time picking up the phone and calling. It has taken a long time to be open with my weakness, but it’s much easier now than it ever was.
Still, it wasn’t enough. Two months ago, I looked to God for help, and as has happened several times this past year, he didn’t do anything to help me. For two weeks, I emotionally broke down. I was angry all the time; terrified all the time. I didn’t know why God was refusing to help me. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I was tired and angry at what my life had become. Was it always going to be a constant struggle? Was it always going to be a fight? Was I never going to have any control over my own emotions? I was tired of the constant ups and downs.
I went through two weeks of hell, and then I got my answer. God wasn’t helping me because I didn’t need his help. Like a bird pushing its child out of its nest to teach it to fly, God was forcing me to try on my own. He knew I could do it, but I didn’t. I was strong enough to face all this without needing God or anyone else to protect me or support me through what I was going through. After all the lessons I’ve learned and heard in life about relying on God, it was a very counter-intuitive thought. Who would have thought that God was teaching me to rely less on him? But I believe this is exactly what God was teaching me to do.
As I have reflected on this the past several weeks, I have come to realize more and more what this change means. I grew up being a victim. I tried for years, unsuccessfully, to avoid being bullied. What I didn’t realize is that I have felt like a victim ever since. Ever since being in grade school, I have felt like I am small, and weaker than other people and many other forces in this world. I felt like a pawn, like I wasn’t in control of my own destiny. God was making me stand on my own, showing me I am a victim no longer. I didn’t even realize that was how I felt until I broke free from it. I feel strong now. Not invincible, but strong. I feel that though I may be caught in a storm, I can still steer the boat where it needs to go. I am stronger than the problems I face.
Never before have I felt so motivated to work. Not at my job, mind you, but on myself and on my life. I have been a passionate person for years, and now that energy is being pored into actively trying to make changes, rather than merely praying and waiting for opportunities. Mind you, I still pray - I would be a fool not to. But now I am trying to do far more. I feel as though I can drastically change my life, but I will have to work hard myself, need the support of God and my friends, and I will have to be very smart about it. But it can be done.
I still rely on God constantly. I still seek him and his help. I still seek my friends, and their help. Now, however, instead of seeing God as going before me, I see him more as fighting beside me. I still ask him to guide me and to support me. He is with me constantly, even though I often forget. I know there will be many times in the future where I will need to rely solely on God. I may be strong, but I am not Superman.
In fact, I know I have a lot to learn in every area. I still struggle, and I still have days where the bottom drops out of my emotions, for reasons I still cannot fully fathom. I feel as though this is more of a half-way point in the surgery God is performing. But it is a milestone nonetheless, and I am learning more peace and hope now. I will learn why I feel the way I do, and how I should embrace and change those thoughts and emotions. I will get there, I will learn, I will become yet stronger. God has led me down an excruciating journey, but I am yet grateful for it.
I know several of my friends read this and think about all my arguments with John Eldridge. Someday, I know, those will have to be revisited. Stop grinning, Sam.
I have three prayer requests for anyone who reads this:
Pray for me that I would continue in the path God is laying out for me. This new-found confidence is still fragile, and some days I almost lose it. Pray that I never do.
Please pray for me as I seek to connect with other people. After being in Denver for almost two years, I realized recently that I really have almost no friends within an hour’s travel. Every weekend and most weekdays are spent being bored and lonely. Thus far, my efforts to change this have failed, though I will still try.
Finally, pray for my friend Greg. Greg is an incredible man of God, and an inspiration to me and many others here. Greg found out a few weeks ago that he has a tumor in his brain. Pray for his healing and for support for both him as his family.
Thanks for reading all the way through this lengthy letter. I pray God can be gentler with you as he leads you forward in your life, but if not, I pray you know he is with you through every step. May his peace and love always be in your heart and mind.
Perzik