1) Just because you've been
rejected and/or abandoned doesn't mean you're a loser. In fact, especially
if rejection and/or abandonment has happened to you repeatedly, God could quite
possibly use that pain later to motivate you to be extra-accepting to other
people or to teach you about how He feels or for some other redeemed reason
that's way too awesome for me to think of. (If I sound like a broken record
because I've blogged about rejection previously, well, that topic has been kindasorta on my mind
during the past few years.) See that photo above of my extremely beloved cats? I
ended up with each one of them separately because their previous owners for
some reason or other decided that they should have new homes and/or that I
should have them. I'm certainly extremely glad that I have them now. But, as I
learned sometime after their previous owners gave them up, they were basically replaced
later by other cats. In essence, these precious little (and humongous) mounds
of extremely beloved fur were rejected.
There's nothing wrong with these cats. In the core of their very
beings, they were created by a God who knew exactly what He was doing when He
made them, and He knew exactly how much I would love them. Yes, they're pets. Yes,
they're animals. Yes, they're technically, legally, property, so they can be
owned and humanely discarded. But in the nearly decade and a half that I've
known them, I haven't found any reason for them to need to be replaced by other
cats. I repeat: There's nothing wrong with them. But for some reason -- perhaps
ultimately for their protection from something like declawing or being
transported to live with somebody else for 3 months at a time -- they were cast
aside. And they flew right into my lap. They're mine now. I want them, and I
want to keep them. Jesus keeps reminding me that He gets rejected constantly,
too, but of course there's absolutely nothing wrong with Him, either, and there
never will be. It just hurts to be cast aside for no particular reason. But
Jesus knows how to deal with this kind of pain, and He will help anyone
overcome it if they'll let Him. I flew right into His lap, and I intend to stay
there.
2) My relationship with God is
supposed to be an uneven relationship. Perhaps if you grew up in a house
where you were expected to perform constantly and perfectly and with little
praise and with constant criticism, or if you grew up in a house where you were
treated more like a science experiment that was poked and prodded and dissected
than like a person who was enjoyed and cherished and protected, then perhaps your
concept of God as a Parent is pretty darn messed up. Perhaps you're used to
having a parent relationship that involves you being shamed if you fail to meet
the million different requirements that are strapped onto your already broken
back. Then when you try to get to know God as a Parent and He tries to tell you
that you don't have to do anything to earn or keep His love, it doesn't compute
in your brain right away, and it has trouble sticking to your heart. And even
the very concept of Him being patient with you while His sounds-too-good-to-be-true-but-it-really-is-true
truth computes and sticks... maybe that's what begins to melt and heal the wounds in ways
that no therapy appointment ever could.
God has been teaching me that my relationship with Him isn't supposed
to be like those healthy friendships that you'll read about in boundary-setting
books -- the friendships that are supposed to have healthy, even amounts of
giving and taking. Often in a healthy friendship, perhaps one friend will help the
other friend, so the helped-friend will find a way to help the helper-friend as
an expression of gratitude. Or perhaps one friend will pay for the other
friend's dinner, and the dinner-paid-for friend will make a mental note to buy
dinner for the I-insist-on-paying-the-check friend the next time they enjoy
each other's company. But my relationship with God is supposed to be different
than that. There is absolutely no way that I could ever possibly even begin to
repay God for the dinners He's provided or for the favors He's given me. He is
a neverending fountain of love -- nay, He IS love itself -- but there is
absolutely no way that I could ever possibly even begin to love Him in the
exact same way that He's loved me. My human brain freezes sometimes when I get
in His presence and try to stop thinking about myself and talking about myself
and start trying to be a good friend to Him and focus on what He would like to
think about and talk about instead of what I would like. But He reminds me that
our friendship is supposed to be uneven, because I will never be God. He will
always be God. And instead of keeping a running tally of all the stuff I could
be doing for Him, He's already commanded me to simply love Him back. He can
talk my ear off (and He's welcome to) while we're hanging out and living life
together, but when I sit in the solitude of my living room and grab my guitar, sometimes
He requests specific songs like a twelve-year-old, and then He quietly listens
while I sing to Him. I think He just wants to be loved on. My heart, soul, strength,
and mind are so puny compared to His eternally humongous, perfectly perfect
heart, soul, strength, and mind, so we could never be evenly matched friends...
and yet He's chosen me as a friend, and He simply commands me to love Him with
whatever I've got. He can't force me to love Him, even though He requires me to
love Him. But because I've gotten a taste of Him and what He's really like, I want
to love Him. And I think my loving Him is really all that He wants. I think
that's what will keep my truly uneven relationship with Him eternally healthy.
3) Please pardon my French.
So, earlier this month when I yet again blogged about spiritual abuse, I mentioned that while I strained to live life in
a spiritually abusive environment, I felt like evangelism's bitch. Very
recently, I was having a conversation with my heavenly Father, and He showed me
that when I felt like evangelism's bitch, I thought He was a pimp. When He first
skillfully sliced through my insides with this truth, it was a bit shocking to
hear of course, but the more I thought about it, the more this "God is a
cruel pimp that you work for now" concept made sense. I thought back to my
spiritually abused days and remembered how everything revolved around
evangelism in an unhealthy way. (Evangelism in and of itself is, of course,
TOTALLY HOLY AND NECESSARY, but the enemy has an uncanny knack for perverting
pretty much anything.) I remembered how you couldn't do anything normal like go
to a restaurant and order food without feeling pressured to stand on a chair
and force a verbal tract down all the innocent bystanders' throats --
otherwise, you were ashamed of the gospel, because today is the day of
salvation, and God hasn't given you a spirit of fear. (He didn't give you a
spirit of rudeness, either, hotshot.) You didn't have the fear of the Lord. You
were shamed. You had to deliver, or else. From what I understand about
prostitution, pimps are the same way. After streetwalkers are broken, they
better hit the streets, put themselves out there, and reel in as many customers
as they can, or else.
But God truly isn't like that. He's not like a pimp who will demand
that you walk the streets and make as many sales as possible, or else He'll
openly shame you or abuse you Himself. (Just typing that last sentence made me
cringe, and now my fingers are shaking.) HE IS NOT A HARD MAN. The parable of
the talents in Matthew 25 tends to get told in Sunday School classes with
emphasis on the very last part of the story: "You better use your gift, or
else God will take it away!" Um, I kinda think having that whole "or
else" mentality is a symptom of thinking that God is a "hard man."
In the parable, the person who hid their talent in the ground was wicked and
lazy. But I think maybe also anyone who genuinely believes that God is a
"hard man" might just be scared to death of using their talent
because they don't know how, and they don't want Him to whoop them for trying and
learning and making a mistake. God isn't a pimp. He's a loving Father who just
wants me to love Him. He just wants to hang out with me. He just wants to dote
on me in an extremely cooler, extremely more holy way than I dote on my cats.
They're just cats. I'm an adopted daughter. Evangelism bitches / streetwalkers
probably won't recruit very many newbies by telling them about their boss. Who
would want to be employed by a pimp? But maybe an adopted daughter who knows
how valuable she is to her Father could have an easier time fishing for newbies
who are aching inside to also belong to an unconditionally loving Father.
4) The best-intentioned people
can give you the worst advice, and even the best listeners don't always hear
you. I think the trick is to just discern which advice is good and which is
bad, and sometimes you need to get boundary-creative with people who haven't
been hearing you say "no." A professor I had in college would call
that "fancy footwork." ("Hey, Tirzah, are you going to take my
class next semester?" "My, uh, schedule is quite jam-packed, and
would you look at the time? I gotta get to my essay-writing class. See
ya!")
5) God cares about your pain way
more than you may think He does. Perhaps if you grew up in a house where
everything was usually kept impeccably clean and where blemishes were
constantly whitewashed and where you got yelled at for puking on the floor once
while you were a sick kid who was bedridden with a virus, the concept of Father
God being OK with the healthy spewing of your soul-infections might take a
while to stick to your brain and heart. I think the psalmists in the Bible vomited
some nasty junk all over their songs, but they didn't write any song sequels
about God barking at them for being irritable. The whole point of Jesus dying,
anyway, was basically that we as a human race had made a mess that was so
beyond repair that Jesus had to come and clean up our mess Himself. And He said
to let the little children come to Him. Little children puke, poop, and sneeze.
They make plenty of messes that need to get cleaned up, but that's the nature
of being a little child -- and all children need to have trusted people to take
care of their needs. Little children are sensitive. They cry when they get
hurt, and they need to be comforted. Little children get into accidents. They
skin their knees and elbows, and they need to be raised by non-tyrants who will
kiss their boo-boos and make them better. God is the Eternal Non-Tyrant who
doesn't expect you to be perfectly whitewashed all the time, because He knows
you're just a little child who needs Him.
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