yet hates his brother,
he is a liar.
For the person
who does not
love his brother
he has seen
cannot love the God
he has not seen.
-1 John 4:20
How do we see God? Do you hear God? Do you feel His love for you? Do you see Him working in your life?
Sigh.
I am a mess. Completely just a mess.
Partly because of my temperament, I'm emotionally unstable, I'm deferential with people, and I'm always searching for love/validation/joy in the wrong places. I'm so bad at this, because I'm so scared of being wrong and feeling the threats of that. Messing up threatens so much! It does! People say you can mess up, and I even tell my high school students that they can and will and must be free to mess up, but I confess that I was wrong to be so insensitive about it. I was wrong to say the words without considering my own attitude about messing up. I don't mean slipping here or there and looking like a fool, although that could be the case for you, but messing up for me is botching up something that provides an important thing to my life: Love.
When I mess up it is closely tied to my access to love.
So then messing up is not just "oops, my bad, sorry," but it's a deep cut at the confidence I feel in being lovable. Who loves someone that hurts them or wrecks their life? Merit. Love is earned. You earn love by being good and not messing up. That's how I've experienced it. First with my parents as they did their best to raise and rear me by teaching me good from bad, then with friends who held grudges when I messed up with them or vice versa, and even with myself. If I accomplished something I got to feel good, but if I screwed up on a project or quit something I let myself feel like a failure.
It's no wonder then that when I said that I loved God I was a liar. How could I love God when I let everyone and myself never love me by always filtering my feelings with good for good and bad for bad. Merit. I let love in based on merit, and so love NEVER got in. Because love is not based on merit. I might've called it love because I didn't know any better, but that's not love it's more like a dealing. I do this good and I let the good feelings in, I do something bad and I let the bad feelings in. Aside from the fact that I probably also had a delusion about what was actually "good" and "bad," I was not dabbling in matters of love. I was more about fear. Fear of the bad and desire for the good because of the fear. Love as "feeling good" was great, but "feeling bad" was always worse, and I know this because eventually I sort of went about madly just trying to "do good" not really for the good itself but in order to ward off the bad. It was never a good for the good in itself, but it was a desire to do good in order to make up for a bad or to erase the bad I knew was always down there. The bad thoughts. The bad judgments. The bad feelings. They were there and I ran away from them by chasing the good. Always running, hiding, and trying to get love....out of fear.
Lately I've found that I'm zeroing in on something less ambiguous, less maddening. I don't have much, but what I do have is the fact that I'm emotionally unstable. Haha. It's true. I feel like that's all I have at times, that and maybe a pretty good understanding of SOME theological doctrines like penal substitution, predestination, and sanctification....but really I don't. I mean I know, but I don't know in that way that I'm confident to be able to write a paper on it without stressing out. I know being emotionally unstable is not seen a positive thing. But it's what I have that I'm most sure about. I know it and I see it active in my life.
Sigh. But God has been using that in me and it's been bringing me true joys, real love, and an overwhelming sense of assurance that I'm His very unique and darling daughter. He has been using my crazy emotional instability to tell me He loves me. So even though it's not always fun to cry at the slightest tug in my heart at the sight of something good or bad, and it's especially a faucet when I get real honest with God about my life and situations, it's also been the most beautiful part about who I am and how God uses me. I've learned a lot about love this past year because of my surrender of it to God's purposes. I used to hate feeling things. I would numb myself in order to not feel anything, I would keep to myself about what was hurting or bothering me. I just didn't want my feelings to get in the way, because deep down I felt the rumbling of their unstable craziness. I was afraid to feel.
But fear....fear is such a coercive enemy. Fear is a feeling too! Fear kept me from the freedom to feel and to be loved in all of who I was made to be. I came to the point where I confronted God and said that if He was truly good and powerful then I could lift the latch off my emotions and let them run wild and He'd be able to handle it. I told God that He had better be ready for what I was going to open up, namely my emotional instability. I did this, no, I still do this because I believe that God can handle it. And I needed Him to show me He would handle it otherwise it was something that blocked me from truly trusting Him. I didn't want feel everything because I was scared. Fear kept me bottled up, suppressing what was really there...I was there, and by not letting out all my emotions I was only who I was without them. In other words, I was not me completely and truly. But God kept saying He wanted and wants all of me, especially those things that I am afraid will be the death of me.
Man. Let me say, that for the first 6 months I sobbed uncontrollably almost 3 times a day. In the car on my way to school, at school in the prayer chapel, and then the most at night in my bed. I cried so much I got dehydrated, my eyes would be sore and swollen, but God was with me / is with me still in every cry. I never knew I was THAT sensitive. Then my fear of people became more specific and apparent. The smallest jab at my worth or beauty or ability would hurt so badly. I let it hurt because I let myself feel without defenses. I never realized I was THAT sensitive to people! This was a rough stage...I felt like everyone was against me as I walked through a land mine of hurtful jokes, neglected words, and unreturned text message sentiments. Haha. Of course I wouldn't cry in front of them (although sometimes I wouldn't be able to wait) I would quickly find a place in secret and it would me and God at a cry fest. I cried so much. I was seeing myself more clearly and God was there...always handling it. I think I even got mad at Him a couple of times, not because He wasn't handling my emotional craziness but because I was getting sick and tired of all the crying. I wasn't dying from it, in fact they felt pretty awesome, but having sore puffy eyes makes it hard to wear make up let alone show up to public places like class. I would get mad but then I'd even cry from that because God would just love me....that's how He handled it. I couldn't even be mad for long! Haha
Then came the more recent discovery. I still cry a lot, because I'm more me than I was before in being emotionally unstable. However, now I understand the looks on people's faces more when they are hurting, the look that burns in my own eyes when I tell God about the things in my life that hurt me. I hear people more clearly and I even sometimes connect with their spirits as if I'm embracing that deep part of their heart that just wants to be loved, not dealt with, but just loved just as they are. I start loving them.
I mean, I don't know. Love is so sacred that it feels too cheap to say it so quickly...but it's definitely something. When I'm with people it's like my emotional instability is the vessel God uses to not only fill me with His love but to give it to others. How could I not when I have known so well the hurt that I've looked at in myself with uncontrollable sobbing? Hurting people are my people.
It makes sense that if I say I love God, really love God then it means I have known what it is to feel loved by Him. Since I could not have first loved unless God first loved me. Loved in an unmerited way. Love in my hurt, anger, bitterness, disappointment and sadness. When I let the wild animal out, the super emotional Jamie....which I thought for sure no one would love, God did. God continues to love me, and the way in which He uses me in one of my most terrifying weaknesses has changed the way I love others.
If anyone says, “I love God,”
yet hates his brother, he is a liar.
For the person who does not love
his brother he has seen
cannot love the God he has not seen.
-1 John 4:20
I'm not saying that everyone is emotionally unstable, hahaha! I sure hope not, at least! That would be too crazy haha. But I'm saying that we each have our fears that are signs of what we are holding back from God. And although it may not be that you are emotionally unstable it will probably mean a lot of tears for whatever it is you find is actually embraced by God. The very thing in you that you fear is most unlovable about you, that...that's probably what God will use to love you most personally. And I hope you surrender that to Him, because God's love is a mighty rushing wind sweeping your hair back, a snowflake flurry, a world wonder bigger than all wonders, a ravishingly passionate swell of being swept up in rapturous affection, and everything that makes it all worth whatever pain comes your way.
Jmegrey
No comments:
Post a Comment