“To love at all is to
be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not
even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid
all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will
not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love
is to be vulnerable.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
We may have found Life, Love, and Adventure, but that
doesn’t mean that our lives are completely safe. In fact, Love may be one of
the most painful things we’ll ever
experience. Love hurts because it helps us to feel. It draws us closer to the
hurt of others and makes us face our own hurt and discover who we are. But in
this hurt, we are healed.
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| Love is a purifying fire. |
Peaceful friendships
I have mentioned that ever since I was a little girl, I
lived in the fear of people and their rejection. It’s important to mention that
I had no idea that I lived this way or feared anyone. I was devoted to pleasing
God and didn’t care what people thought—or so I thought.
I also surrounded myself with friends who were remarkably
like me. I never fought with my friends growing up—ever. The closest I came to
an argument was when I was twelve and my friend Cara told a boy I liked that
she had taught me how to play ping pong. I thought she was taking credit for my
ping pong skills, so I fiercely denied it, even though she was right.
But other than that, scarcely a ripple disturbed my
friendships. Oh, we had some tense moments in Bible school, but they were only
the normal tensions that occur in dorm life when people live in close quarters
and grate on each other over long winter months.
Then God sent my closest friends far away to college and
told me to stay home and go to school on-line. But He sent me another friend.
Her name is Mariah.
Loving a tiger
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| Mariah |
I have written about Mariah before under a different
name. Now I’m confident she wouldn’t mind if you knew her real name.
At first, we seemed as different as two people
could be. Her wrists are about as thick as my two wrists put together. She
hated words and girly things and following a schedule, while she loved ninjas
and juggling knives and sticking random food up her nose. She rarely thought
things through before throwing herself into them (once she blithely agreed to
share a hotel room with a strange man), except when she thought things through too much and entered a dark inner storm and scowled for days.
With typical shrewdness, I took advantage of her spacy spontaneity once by
suggesting she drink from a mud puddle. She did, and of course I shoved her
face into the mud.
We have been great friends ever since.
After God told me what He really thought of me, I started
looking for ways to show the Love God was showing me. Mariah was there, and
so I started to love her. It wasn’t always easy. She came from a difficult
background, riddled with addictions and scars. She was a tiger who wasn’t ready
to let very many people close.
With an unprecedented thirst for danger, I
pressed forward anyway, rattling her cage again and again before strategically withdrawing until she was tame enough to see me again. She was
too wild to love me back at first, but that was okay. Love gives and gives without
expecting return, and I started learning how to do that.
I loved her enthusiasm, her whole-heartedness, and her
ferocity for God. She taught me things that no one else could, and my friendship with her taught me things about myself. As I loved her, I
gradually started opening my heart. The hard, cold sepals that had encased my
heart for so long started to curl back, and the petals inside started reaching
for the light.
The tiger hits a nerve
But at that point, the tiger was still licking some wounds from her past, and when I got too close, she scratched me—hard. She declared one night that she preferred another friend.
The sepals that had protected my dormant heart for so
long no longer shielded me. One statement of rejection from her stabbed a nerve
at the center of that flower—a nerve that I hadn’t left exposed for a very,
very long time.
But it had always been there.
I had buried it under loads and loads of dead things,
barricades between my heart and the rest of the world. But one metal pole
remained lodged in the layers of decay. This pole was the theme of jealousy that ran through my life,
rooted in a fear of rejection that had colored every friendship I ever had. It
remained lodged at the center of my deepest hurt and identity.
When Mariah rejected me that night, it was like someone
took a hammer and banged on that pole.
Suddenly, I was five years old again, hearing, “I don’t
want to play with Kayla.”
I had never felt those words so keenly since I first
heard them because I had buried my heart so deeply and injected it with so many
pain killers that it hadn’t felt anything at all in a very long time.
But Love had unearthed it.
Surgery and physical therapy
It took six months of processing this event before I
recognized that I had a fear of rejection. I had been in denial of it most of
my life, but when I found myself crying about little things that should never
upset a healthy person, I finally admitted it.
It took another three months to realize where this fear
of rejection came from. I was going through reverse culture shock, minor
depression, and self-isolation then because I had spent a summer teaching
English in the Middle East and hadn’t wanted to come back to my world of pain
and problems. But the Giver of Love took me by the hand and walked me through a
valley of shadows that winter, showing me lies that I had believed most of my
life.
And he showed me what I wrote about in my other post, "The search begins.". I had a fear of rejection that was rooted in the identity I
lived.
My
identity was entirely based upon the earned opinions of others.
Plain and simple. I had lived out of that identity for seventeen years.
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| My finger's x-ray with three pins |
On the same week that Jesus revealed my brokenness, I
broke my finger. I’m not kidding.
I was playing basketball when I caught a
rebound and a thirty-nine-year-old man tried to steal my ball. I knew that if I
didn’t get it out of his hands in two seconds, he would call it a jump ball and
we would lose possession. Heat rushing to my face, I gripped that ball and threw
my whole weight onto it, trying to push it out of my opponent’s hands. As I
fell to the ground, he held on, but so did I. My left middle finger broke, one
complete piece separating at the joint. The bone slipped a couple weeks later, and
I had to have surgery and three pins put in place.
The entire process paralleled the spiritual healing
process I underwent that winter.
Broken finger bones are very tiny things, just like the
incident of rejection in my childhood. Yet despite their insignificant size,
they can have very far-reaching consequences. After my surgery, my hand was
wrapped in a hard, enormous white bandage. I was surprisingly helpless for awhile. The
simplest tasks became a challenge. I couldn’t...
- cut my food
- type
- do my hair
- open jars
- make a sandwich
- wear coats
- play guitar or violin
- play piano
- shower without help
Broken fingers can also be surprisingly costly. I had no
idea when I fought that man for my basketball that I was making a $7,000+ decision.
I had no idea when my five-year-old heart cracked that I would end up stifling
it in a dark box until Love broke it out again.
I broke my finger in December 2013. After it came out of
its bandage in February 2014, I began physical therapy.
At the same time, I began a different kind of therapy.
Who was I? I didn’t even know anymore. I had lived my whole life thinking that
I could only find fulfillment in pleasing God or people, and my identity was
shattered. I needed a new canoe.
Our new identity
Gradually, God started to show me that I was His. I was
His daughter. I was His Beloved. There was absolutely nothing that I could ever
do or would ever need to do to earn His love, because I already had it.
No conditions.
No fees.
No questions asked.
In Jesus, we are and will always be enough.
This
is our identity.
We don’t have to earn it. Our identity is a gift just
like everything else Jesus gives. If we were able to earn even a piece of it, then
we would get part of the glory for the gift. The spotlight must always
be centered on Jesus. But He offers this identity to all of us, and all we have
to do is follow Him and accept it.
Jesus opens His arms and calls, “Stop fighting
to prove yourself! Come to Me. I will give you rest. Rest in Me, and I will
show you who you really are. You are dearly beloved.”
Learning to live out of this new identity has been a
process. It was especially difficult in the first several months. Almost every
decision I had ever made had been based on how I could keep people or God happy
with me. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have to do either, and I
didn’t know what to do about it. Should I behave selflessly or selfishly? Even
my “selfless” acts had been driven by selfishness, so I didn’t even know which
way was up or down.
I had spent so long unconsciously living a lie that I didn’t
know how to live out truth.
But Jesus was there, whispering, whispering, whispering. My surgery limited me physically so I had to slow down, and at the same time I started slowing down my spiritual bustle so I could listen to His words of truth.
You are
Mine.
Fret
not, dear one.
Rest
in the identity that I have given you.
He is saying the same to each of us.
