LETTERS FROM CHARITY

Part 8

Dear Beth,

Wow, I’m not really sure where to begin.  The first thing I should do is thank you profusely for not writing me off (no pun intended).  I honestly didn’t expect to hear from you again after that last email I sent.  Your perseverance and compassion are truly remarkable — although I must admit that upon first read, your response to what I wrote seemed the opposite of compassionate.  My immediate thought was that you were just like everyone else, telling me that if I would just be a better Christian, my life would radically improve.  I am so glad I took a breath and read your message a second time.

It’s not a pleasant thing to examine yourself in the way you suggested.  I mean, maybe it is for some people.  It definitely wasn’t for me.  I realized that I’ve been using my hyper-awareness of my own faults as a defense mechanism, a wall to hide behind so I wouldn’t have to deal with the deeper issues.  It was easy to get down on myself for having no self-control when it came to eating or beat myself up whenever my temper got the best of me.  In fact, I would sort of wear those mess-ups  as a badge of honor, telling people about them so they could see how transparent I was and how willing I was to dig into my own shortcomings.  But the truth is that the act of confession to others was in reality a way of deflecting, a way to keep people — and myself — from seeing what was really going on in my heart.

I guess I never realized it, or at least never allowed myself to confront it fully, but I’ve spent my entire life being enraged (which, I’ve realized, is different than being angry).  Enraged at being treated like nothing about me is worthy of attention.  Enraged at being told one of the worst things that ever happened to me couldn’t have happened because so many people have false memories of things that never occurred.  Enraged at being treated with nothing but contempt and dismissiveness whenever I tried to share something special and important to me.  Enraged at my thoughts almost always being met with derision and scorn and contempt.  Enraged at being treated like an afterthought.

Those were the relatively easy things to admit about my rage.  The more difficult to recognize things had to do with people in my church, people I had thought of as friends and people I had trusted as leaders.  From my friends I got a lot of variations of “your womanly hormones always make you super sensitive” and from various leaders it often felt like I was told “just praise Jesus because it’s all we can do and I’m a little over listening to your problems.”  I think I always tried to take it all in stride because I thought my friends and church leaders knew way more than I did about the Bible and life in God, so I needed to listen to them.  But I am just now coming to grips with the fact that all those responses caused me to seethe with a rage I didn’t know I was even capable of, much less willing to acknowledge.

Anger has always been a tricky emotion for me, and it’s no surprise that I so often conflated anger with rage.  Growing up, no one in our house was ever allowed to express any negative emotions or feelings except my father.  He could pop off at a moment’s notice and we were all left in the wake of his eruptions to deal as best we could.  But God help the unwise soul who dared to convey anything but positive feelings.  I made the monumental mistake as a teenager of telling him that I was unhappy with his assessment of my room cleaning skills at which point he tore through my room, knocking things off every surface, before screaming, “Now you can show me how good you are at cleaning!”

So yeah, I’ve never quite known how to communicate how I’m feeling very well, especially not when I’m enraged.  Truth be told, I’m not really all that good at admitting that I have feelings.  It was always so much safer just to act like I was on Prozac all the time.

I had to think about what you said concerning how we feel about people versus how we feel about God.  I had to think about it quite a lot, actually.  This may seem like a full on non sequitur, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to have a best friend.  Did you ever see the movie, Some Kind of Wonderful?  There’s a character who says a line that has always resonated with me (violence aside, of course):  “You break his heart, I break your face.”  It was that complete and total devotion, that willingness to protect no matter the cost.  I can’t really even put into words how much I’ve wanted a person like that in my life.  I just had a powerful memory — I attached myself to three different girls in elementary school, middle school, and high school, and all three friendships resulted in me being sent notes that said three versions of “you’re smothering me and I don’t want to be your friend, anymore.”  I tried to turn each one of them into what I so desperately needed, and in the end, I drove them away.  It’s hitting me pretty hard right now that I felt like they all abandoned me and I was super enraged at them, but what it boils down to is that I was super enraged at God.

I have to admit that I’ve always thought of God as being completely callous and cruel because He could have prevented some pretty horrific things from happening in my childhood but He chose not to for whatever reason.  What had I done to deserve such treatment from Him?  How could I even relate to the idea that He was moving in my life somehow to “discipline” me or mold me in any way when I hadn’t even come to an age where I fully understood the difference between right and wrong?  I was completely defenseless and He slaughtered everything it meant to be me.  And my argument against Him has always been that He could have prevented so many things and He chose not to, which made me think of Him as the most cruel, heartless, vile being who is completely unworthy of any respect much less worship and adoration.

I know that I don’t see things like God does most of the time.  And I really hated to admit it, but you were spot on when you said sometimes we shield ourselves from God’s voice even when it’s His voice we so desperately need to hear.  I have spent almost the entirety of my life shielding myself from His voice.  The times when I thought I was crying out to Him the most, I think I was really shying away from actually listening to Him.  It was kind of like what I said about confessing my faults to others as a way of avoiding having to face what I was really feeling.  I was using the desperation of my emotions and feelings to keep me from dealing with God in a truthful way.

So I fully realize that this is all new to me and that I have only taken the tiniest of first steps.  I’m not entirely sure I truly understand it all, but I have to tell you that for the first time in my life, I feel the stirrings of hope.  Real hope.  Not just a futile wish that something might someday happen.  This is more like a confidence that no matter how long it takes and no matter how much energy it requires, I’m going to make it.  I’m going to find out who God really is and I’m going to be able to make a choice for or against Him based on truth, and it’s all starting with me getting down and dirty with Him over what I’ve really done in my life, not just what it’s been easy to point out.

You may never know just how much of a difference you’ve made in my life.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to tell you in a good and meaningful way.  Until then, please know that I am not exaggerating or overdramatizing when I say that I am still alive because of you.

Most Sincerely,

Charity