Trust Issues & Lone Wolves

            We all want to believe that we can face anything on our own.  Maybe God can help a little, but we certainly don’t want to need other people.  Like the toddler who wants to do everything herself, we feel we have to prove to ourselves and to everyone else that we are strong, brave, courageous, fierce, independent, self-sufficient, and grown-up.  Besides, other people come with far too much risk.  We’ve been down that vulnerable road before, and it didn’t end well.

            The trouble is God didn’t create us to operate as lone wolves.  He placed within us an innate need for deep, real, raw relationships – not just with Himself, but with other people as well.  Sin certainly makes relationships hard.  Some of us have been shaken to our core by the lies, betrayal, cheating, insensitivity, and manipulation dealt to us by the most unexpected of sources.  Only a small taste of such use and abuse can make the sheltered life of the lone wolf suddenly appear irresistibly attractive. 

            If that is where you are, I am genuinely so sorry for the very real and legitimate wounds that have brought you to this place.  However, can I encourage you not to give up completely on allowing yourself to trust other people and to be open with them?  Obviously, we need to have discernment with regard to whom we trust, and we don’t have to let the whole world see our entire lives.  Nevertheless, I’ve struggled alone and I’ve struggled alongside others, and I can tell you that the benefits of being transparent (even if it’s only with a few) far outweigh the risks associated with being close to other sinful people.  Here are five of the benefits I have found in allowing myself to be vulnerable:   

1.  Intimacy (Closeness)

       Relationships are built around knowing and being known.  The more we know, the tighter the bond between us becomes (even though the risk also becomes much higher for greater hurts).  Our unseen hearts, the truest depths of who we are, long to be seen and understood.  We want close bonds.  Close marriages, close friendships, and other close family relationships cannot exist where one or both of the parties refuse to be vulnerable.  If we hold back from being truly known by anyone else, we forfeit the closeness that we so desperately crave.       

2.  Ability to Help Others

       Being open about your own struggles provides opportunities to make a difference in the lives of those you may never have been able to otherwise.  Often, a gesture of transparency and trust on one side allows the other person to feel safe enough to reciprocate that transparency and trust.  Needs to which you would have been completely oblivious suddenly become rich opportunities for service.   

3.  Ability to Receive Help

       When we’ve been hurt, our natural instinct is to put up tall, foreboding, impermeable walls of distrust.  Those walls we build in an attempt to protect ourselves from more pain end up becoming our prison.  No one can come in to hurt, but no one can come in to help either.  Inadvertently, we lock ourselves away alone with our struggles where they can slowly eat away at us from the inside out – crippling us to the point where we don’t even recognize who we are anymore. 

Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10

 

4.  Strength for Your Weakness

       God made us with our own unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  No one is strong in every area.  When we allow people into our hearts and lives, their strengths can balance out our weaknesses so that we are stronger together than when we were apart.  We can learn from each other, keep each other accountable, and spur each other on in the areas where we are lacking.      

5.  Hope

       When I’ve tried to face trials alone, all I can see is the mountain in front of me and the fact that God has not chosen to move it yet.  When I’ve walked alongside others in the same struggle as a result of being transparent, I still see my own mountain, but I also see how God is currently working and moving the mountains that my friends are facing.  Seeing Him work in the lives of others gives me hope that He hasn’t forgotten me and that I will eventually see His work in my own life clearly.

I am so thankful for the many people God has placed in my life in different times and different places.  Yes, I’ve been hurt by some (just as I have hurt others), but those hurts cannot compare with what I’ve gained by allowing people into my heart.  I cannot adequately express just how valuable many of those relationships have been to me.  To all those who have walked with me (and are currently walking with me) in the darkness and the haziness that life sometimes brings, thank you for your vulnerability, for your transparency, and for your trust.  Thank you for being a safe place. To those who are reading this who have never experienced what it is like to do life with other people – real, raw, unfiltered life –  please find your people!  If you don’t know how, talk to God about it.  Talk to me about it.  Talk to someone about it until you can find your safe people.  We need each other, whether we like it or not.      

           

Clay gods

Public school told me I could be anyone or anything I wanted to be.  Mainstream Media popularized phrases like: “I do what I want,” “Don’t ever let someone tell you what you can’t do,” and “You do you.”  Books, t-shirts, mugs, wall art, and eye-catching memes all told me to dream big and to take command of my destiny.  Especially as a woman, I’ve often heard the message that I should reach for the stars and resist fitting into a certain box – unless of course that box is an executive office.  I’ve had unbelievable opportunities at my fingertips, and for that, I am truly grateful. 

However, somewhere along the line, I bought too much into the American dream.  With this inspirational message of limitless empowerment so prevalently preached, I found myself squirming a little bit when I read Romans 9:21.  It was one of my least favorite verses for a very long time (am I allowed to say that?).  It says:

Nobody wants to be a soup bowl.  Shouldn’t we all be made into David, The Thinker, or the Statue of Liberty? Don’t we all deserve to be molded into something glorious?  On the surface, this verse makes God’s sovereignty seem completely unappealing.  Our hearts cry out in protest with accusations of favoritism.  We question God’s love, justice, wisdom, and goodness.  We believe we have a right to equal treatment, equal opportunity, and equal blessing.  Equality becomes our standard for righteousness and justice instead of God Himself.  Lost in our own selfish desires for more, we forget that we already are all equal.  We all consist of the same formless clay – the same sinful substance.  All that we deserve is to be sent away from the Potter forever and discarded without the hope of ever fulfilling the purpose that He originally intended for us.  His love, justice, wisdom, and goodness are shown in the very fact that He chooses to work in us at all.  To work differently in different people’s lives is His prerogative. 

For me, my skewed view of equality wasn’t the only reason this verse didn’t sit well for so long.  Another facet of the American dream had become ingrained into my heart before I even realized what was happening.  The world taught me to believe in myself– which seems admirable and harmless, right?  Yet, everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes.  As much as I hate to admit it, I believed in myself more than I believed in God.  My desire to choose for myself exactly how my life would turn out seemed safer and more desirable than God’s perfect choice.  I elevated my own understanding, character, and morality over God’s and made Him out to be far smaller than He is.  One of the great battles of the Christian life is learning to see God as He is and to see ourselves as we are.  “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30).

In his commentary, Romans: Righteousness from Heaven, R. Kent Hughes notes the following concerning Romans 9:21: “The fact is, God is perfect.  Perfect in knowledge, wisdom, power, presence, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, and holiness.  Therefore, he is perfect in his choices.  God does not answer to anyone, is not responsible to anyone.  He is totally, absolutely sovereign.”  Isn’t that what we so often want to be true of ourselves?  We want to be the Potter.  We lust after God’s sovereignty and wish we didn’t have to answer to anyone.  What a mess we would make of our lives in our limited perspective and understanding if that were so.

He does give us the gift of freedom and choice – a paradox that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.  He doesn’t force us to follow Him.  However, He is no less God, and He is still in charge, regardless of how sincerely we believe that we are in control.  We can kick back against that fact and try to live as little gods, but as our imperfect choices inevitably clash against God’s plan and design for the world, we will eventually reap the consequences of those choices and be faced with the truth.  Our wisdom is no match for His, our sense of justice is seriously flawed, and our desires and dreams are blind to the full picture.  What it all comes down to is this: will we choose to hold God high and trust His character even when the choices He makes aren’t the ones we think He should make? Or, will we hold ourselves high, certain that our own choices are far better than God’s perfect and holy design?            

Expressing Emotions

           

            Not long after a traumatic season in my life including an unexpected move, I watched Inside Out for the first time.  So many aspects of the movie resonated with my heart back then, and I could barely hold myself together.  How could a grown woman feel so much like a lost little girl?  I was experiencing so many emotions simultaneously that it made me dizzy, and I didn’t really feel like I had much control over them.  I wanted to stuff them all away like I could before, but they just kept spilling out.  It made me feel like I was completely failing as a Christ-follower.   

            See, we are told all the time that Christians should always be joyful and hopeful.  After all, there truly is great joy and hope to be found in Jesus.  Unfortunately, we can fall into the trap of equating the joy and hope of the Lord with an eternally happy, peppy disposition.  As a result, we act like Joy in Inside Out – we lock Sadness away in a room and pretend like she doesn’t exist.  She is an unsettling trouble-maker, and nobody really wants to deal with her.  Or worse, we look at Sadness like she is borderline sinfulness.

            We were made in the image of our God.  Our emotions are a reflection of His emotions.  He has given us a wide range of feelings and the freedom to express them.  Now, this doesn’t mean that our emotions never lead us astray or contribute to our sinful behavior.  God is the only One who is able to be angry perfectly, to be sad perfectly, to be jealous perfectly, and to be delighted perfectly.  We are marred by sin, and so our emotions can quickly carry us further away from God if they are not directed by the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the truth of God’s Word.  However, the emotions themselves are not sinful.  Stuffing all negative emotions down and trying to plaster on happiness all the time is exhausting and detrimental.  That’s not how God ever intended for us to live.

            The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, and it says, “Jesus wept.”  I have been so encouraged by those two words this week.  In chapter 11, Mary and Martha asked Jesus to come to Bethany because their brother, Lazarus, was very sick.  Immediately, Jesus declared that his sickness would not end in death but that it would result in glory to God.  He had hope and joy, and He knew the final outcome.  In spite of the fact that His good friend was so ill, Jesus waited a couple days before journeying to Bethany.  In that time, Lazarus died.  When Jesus finally arrived, Lazarus had been buried for four days.  Even though he knew all of this would happen, and even though He knew that He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus cried when He saw his friend’s burial place. 

He could have charged in stone-faced, rolled His eyes, and scolded everyone for their lack of faith or for their downcast countenances.  He could have been completely insensitive and pranced in happily with the news that Lazarus would be walking out of the tomb in just a few moments.  Instead, Jesus empathized with them.  Those tears didn’t mean that He had lost His joy, hope, or faith or that He was somehow immature or insincere.  They simply meant that He was sad.  He loved Lazarus, and He loved the people who had gone through the agony of watching Lazarus die.    

            It’s okay to cry.  It’s not wrong to be sad and to wrestle with the burning in our hearts.  Our sadness does not devalue our belief in Christ, and it does not automatically mean that we have lost all joy, hope, or faith.  For example, when a loved one dies knowing the Lord, we rejoice in knowing that he or she is with Him and in the hope that we will one day be reunited.  However, that joy and hope do not remove all sadness and sense of loss here on earth.  We still hurt, long, and bleed, but the difference for us as believers is that we are not completely consumed or controlled by our grief.  We are free to experience and express it without becoming enslaved to it. 

We don’t have to hide or pretend.  We don’t have to be ashamed.  God gave us a whole spectrum of emotion with which to experience and respond to life.  Our ability to feel makes us human, and it also makes us more like our Creator.  He holds us, cries with us, and hurts with us even though He already sees the glorious end.