LETTERS FROM CHARITY

Part 10

Dear Beth,

I was so excited to receive your latest email and I have to tell you that I read it  five times right in a row.  As always, your words were so full of kindness and compassion, and you gave me so much to think about and continue to research and study on my own.  I found myself wondering out loud why there aren’t more people like you out there in churches, teaching truth instead of the “not truth” that seems so prevalent these days.

One thing in particular that struck me was when you said that we can’t tell people “God loves you and has a plan for your life” and think that saying those words will somehow magically erase an entire lifetime of abuse and neglect.  I would see these beatific looks on people’s faces when they heard those words and I thought there was something majorly defective with me because those words meant less than nothing to my love-starved heart.

As I’ve been looking at my life and the ways in which I’ve rejected God (while at the same time thinking that I was seeking Him), I realize that I never thought of Him as being loving or, as John describes Him, as being love.  The main reason for that, though, is because I have never had an accurate definition of love.  If I had a penny for every time I tried to get a pastor or teacher or friend to help me get a handle on defining love only to be told to read 1 Corinthians 13, I definitely wouldn’t be diligently scouring the Internet for jobs right now.  Those have been nothing but words on a page to me for pretty much my entire life.

Remember the story I told you about the walloping I got for passing notes in church?  After I wrote about that, another detail came to mind, which was that my father actually told me he was whipping me because he loved me (side note — he also made me hug him and sit on his lap for a bit afterwards).  I can’t fully describe to you the disconnect that still provokes within me.  Not because I don’t think children need to be disciplined when they blatantly rebel but because the punishment in no way fit the crime, at least not in my estimation.  I’ve done a lot of thinking about that incident and I can’t help but think it was more about his pride than it was about my infraction.  Regardless, it helps me understand even more about why I’ve been turning away from God.  I have always seen Him in the same light and nothing I ever heard in church or from other Christians convinced me otherwise.

I don’t want you to think I’m sinking back into the “God done me wrong so I am justified in my feelings towards Him” frame of mind.  I only wrote that last bit to share that I had another pretty huge revelation.  Not too long after my almost fiancé decided not be with me anymore, I met with a woman who been a casual acquaintance for a few years.  We got together for coffee a few times a year, but as I recall, she had contacted me in this instance because she’d heard about what happened.  She asked how I was doing and I think I rattled off some trite response about trusting that God knew what He was doing (not believing a single word that came out of my mouth, of course), at which point she gave me a rather strange look.  She mentioned that the church she went to had recently hired a new pastor who really knew how to teach the Bible and sort of nonchalantly suggested that maybe I might want to come hear him sometime.  It was such an oddball response to what I had said that I passed off her comment as her just not knowing what to say to me, and I promptly forgot about the whole thing until a few days ago.  I remembered the pastor’s name and I looked him up and found a blog he writes.  When I started reading, I actually almost fell off my chair.  It was like reading your blog and your emails to me.  He says so many of the same things and expresses things about God with a similar passion and forthrightness as you.

How many times have I accused God of not caring, of not showing me even a tattered shred of mercy?  Because I had my mind made up about Him, I missed probably countless opportunities to make different choices and end up somewhere that truth was indeed being taught.  But I preferred to think of God as cold and callous and capricious.  That image fit with my narrative of being the victim of circumstances and a caustic god.  He was offering me choices and I was batting His hand away.

And again, I’m not writing all this in a “I’m a despicable worm” sort of manner.  Realizing these things has hit me harder than hard, but it’s not like the pain I’ve felt in the past.  I think the best way I can describe it is the imagery C.S. Lewis used in The Voyage of the Dawntreader when Aslan turned dragon Eustace back into a human.  Eustace scraped and scraped and eventually shed one layer of dragon skin only to discover that he was still very much a dragon.  Then Aslan came along and Eustace allowed him to dig in and while the pain was excruciating, when he was done, Eustace was a boy once more.  The pain of realizing I have been running away from God this whole time is agonizing, especially because I wasn’t entirely conscious of what I was doing, but I feel like I am on my way to becoming human again for the first time in, oh, ever.

This may seem like a ridiculously enormous non sequitir, but I hope I can bring it back around so that it makes sense.  I’ve recently been doing some research about shoes and what they do to our feet (long story), and I discovered that there’s a lot about shoes that’s just wrong for feet.  Wearing the kinds of shoes that most people wear doesn’t allow our feet to feel the ground, which in turn makes it difficult to walk properly.  We get used to all kinds of unhealthy postures and bearings because we can’t feel the ground.  Our feet are squeezed into these human built things that are supposedly good for us but in reality they are deforming our feet and causing all kinds of health problems.

It occurred to me that wearing shoes is quite an excellent metaphor for how we are taught to stifle our emotions and feelings from the moment we take our first gulp of oxygen.  I’ve received countless messages about pain squelching from well-meaning people in the church throughout my life — here, put on some high heels because it’s ridiculous to look to your family and friends for approval (let’s ridicule our pain into submission); try these practical flats because it’s an affront to God to allow our self-worth to be based on the approval of others (let’s shame our pain into submission); these comfortable arch supported athletic shoes are just the thing because God will remove bitterness completely if we only ask (let’s pray our pain into submission).  Those ideas might sound spiritual to some, but I think they’re really about controlling the pain so we can all get on with the business of being nice, docile church-goers.

Too many people in my life have tried to squish me into their own shoes.  They’ve told me that my feelings are un-Christian and un-Godly.  They’ve told me that resentment and bitterness lead to the dark side.  They’ve preached a God who supposedly loved me but Who, they said, wanted nothing to do with the reality of my very messy and sometimes messed up feelings.  And I recognize that I can’t blame them for all the choices I made.  But the more I read and study the Bible for myself, the more I think that it really does tell us that we’re responsible for each other and for the way in which we present God to others, not only in the world at large but also (maybe especially) when we’re with fellow believers.

Beth, I may be taking an enormous liberty, but I consider you a friend because you have been more of a friend to me through your gracious emails than most of the people I’ve known for years.  I’m still brand new to this path of life that God has laid down for me, but I am praying for the strength and courage and perseverance to keep moving forward even when the setbacks that I have no doubt will come assail me and try to slam me to the ground.  You’ve helped me to see that there is no such thing as “arrived” until God makes all things new.

I’m struck by the fact that when I first emailed you, God had already set these moments up as another opportunity for me to discover the true Him or to walk away once again.  The choice was mine.  I am inexpressibly happy and thankful that I chose to cry out to Him for real this time.  You have played an absolutely essential part in my choice, and I cannot tell you in words — well, I owe you my life.  Through you, God helped me see Him.  And that is no small thing.

Whatever the future holds, whether we continue writing or not, I want you to know that I will always remember you in prayer and ask God to continue granting you His love, grace, mercy, and joy.  You truly are a shining light in this very dark world.

In Love and Hope,

Charity