A Most Intelligent Idol

So… I'm about to walk across a stage and receive something pretending to be a diploma.

Two years of music.

two years of sign language.

two years of art school.

two years of political science...

250 credits...

one Interdisciplinary Studies degree.

I've come up with all kinds of darling little quips to disguise my shame in taking eight years to complete an undergrad degree.

"It's okay, I'm the most well-rounded person you will ever meet. "

"I just wanted to make sure that I was extra prepared for grad school."

"It's a great boost to the ego when all the 20-year-olds to think that I am one of them."

Since childhood I've been designated as smart. I'm decently eloquent. I can write good papers with little effort. I adore reading and can argue circles around lots of people.

One conversation with me, though, and it's pretty obvious that I reasonably appreciate completely idolize intelligence. I get defensive when people laugh if I don't know something, I try to cover up my ignorance, and I feel personally threatened when not taken seriously. (Gross. Heart.)

Welp, the Lord (in His hilariously amazing timing) decided to speak into my heart with a megaphone right on the cusp of my participating in a ceremony that would serve as a monument to my intelligence.


What did He say to me? I'll get to that shortly. First, follow me for a minute here:


God has commanded His people from the beginning of creation to build altars to Him.
The Old Testament is FRAUGHT with God's people building altars.
They sacrifice.
Something dies.
They repent of their sins.
They remember God's faithfulness.

This case is especially poignant:
"So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, 'Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves, and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone'." (Genesis 35:2-3)

The Old Testament describes the sacrifices the Jews were instructed to make in great detail, and the Lord describes these sacrifices for the sins of the people not just as pleasing to Him, but, particularly, as aromatic. The fragrance of atonement is pleasing to Him.
Seriously, just thumb through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
Offerings of atonement on an altar are "a pleasing aroma to the Lord." (See a billion places in Exodus 9, Leviticus and Numbers, Ezekiel, etc)

(I promise this is going somewhere. And it's going there now. :) )

With this thought of offerings that are pleasing and aromatic and fragrant to the Lord, II Corinthians absolutely floored me:
"For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing." (II Cor. 2:15)

WE are the aroma...the sacrifice.
This makes perfect sense, after all, we're to "offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God..." (Romans 12:1)


So...

Commencement is a benchmark.
It demands that an institution, other subsequent institutions, places of employment, family, and friends, recognize and commemorate what I've done and strived for. It's a celebration that I've passed tests, written papers, and received grades that will somehow boost my likelihood of success in life...whether in the kind of job I get, how I think, or how much more school I want to pursue.

Thing is...my graduation is not representative of what I've done nearly as much as it is what the Lord has done.

The years that I've chased this degree have seen my faithfulness as Jesus' spouse wax and wane.
I've vacillated between motivated and unmotivated, diligent and lazy, crystal clear and directionless.
My time in the Word has varied from consistent and transformative to sparse and utilitarian.
My relationships have been characterized by beauty and intention as much as they have dysfunction and separation.
My heart and mind are everything BUT consistent.

Whether I've known it or not, the truth is that I've looked to intelligence to give me value, to set me apart, to merit recognition, to look for (dare I say) redemption for my unstable and ever changing affections.
What I'm really doing, then, isn't just wanting recognition for my intelligence.
I'm settling for a works-based salvation.
I'm letting my deepest needs to be known and loved be filled by a shallow substitute. I become willing to settle for a false gospel...one that relies on the value of my works that can somehow be judged valuable or dispensable by others humans.
No idol can ever EVER offer redemption.
Only Jesus can.


So yes...today I get to take part in commencement, shake hands, receive hugs, take pictures, and hear my name called.

But I will remember and commemorate this place...
this place where He was faithful.
His wisdom was inscrutable.
His love was perfect.
His heart never changed.

And I will lay my idol of intelligence on the altar of His son's death, present my intellect as a living sacrifice, and rejoice that He loves me enough to use me even in my flagrant pride.



Oh, and here's what He said to me: build me an altar, and lay your intelligence on it, because I've been faithful to you.


"But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession (procession! this graduation metaphor is too perfect...) in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ...
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? ...you show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. (This part wrecks me...) Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
(II Corinthians 2:14-3:6)

Forgiveness and My Testimony

This week in DivorceCare, the ministry I serve in at Watermark, I shared my testimony. I'm in the heat of finals (papers, projects, insomnia, terrible last-minute dining decisions, you know...), otherwise I'd write more about the process of composing my testimony. Writing this out was one of the most glorious labors I've ever undertaken. I cried multiple times, wrote and deleted huge chunks, and could only write effortlessly when it concerned the gospel. Nothing else matters if it's not me telling His story!

Things to know: the topic for this week in DivorceCare was forgiveness, so it's told in the context of that. It was also a requirement that it be written out. It's just over 10 minutes.

So, here's the audio link, and the transcription I read from follows.

God's Story Through My Story

Transcription:
A lot of you in this room have probably read Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. One of my favorite authors, Tim Keller, says in his book Prodigal God that this name is kind of a misnomer, and it could be more aptly titled “the tale of the two lost sons.” For most of my life, I read that story with a tinge of disinterest and had a hard time identifying with it...until I understood that there were not one but TWO acts of rebellion in that story, and that one of them was mine.
    I spent the first 18 years of my life in a Christian home with two parents who loved the Lord and loved each other well...love for Jesus that allowed me to witness my dad reading his Bible nightly since before I can remember, and love for each other that made my siblings and me cringe at the sight of mom and dad making out in the kitchen again. By most measures I was a pretty good kid. And by “pretty good, I mean “Queen of the self-righteous goody-goodies.” I had a big preoccupation with doing what I thought to be the right thing. I stayed out of trouble, my friends’ parents adored me, and was even elected Student Body Chaplain my senior year of high school. For all intents and purposes, I wasn’t just ON the spiritual A-team, I WAS the spiritual A-team.
    It was with this extremely high regard for myself that I met my husband. We met at Calvin College in Michigan when I was 19. We dated for three years and during this time we faced two years of long distance, a revelation of a porn addiction, and several sin struggles physically for he and I before getting married in 2006. We moved from Michigan to Dallas in 2007 and started attending Watermark almost immediately. We were plugged into a community group, became members, and, ironically, served in the ReEngage marriage ministry together doing music. I did everything I could to set us up for success and walk in obedience.
    In the spring of 2011, around year 4 1/2, everything went from what I assumed to be fine to hitting the fan. My husband and I had been talking about starting to try to have kids in the fall. Well, May of that year he told me he didn’t love me anymore and that he had been looking at pornography during our entire marriage. In June he wrote me a letter saying that our entire marriage was a mistake and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to work out. In August I confronted him, and he confessed to having an affair and asked me to move out. Just two months later, in October, I was served with divorce papers. Whatever idiom you think may apply here did, and I’m sure many of you know the feeling well--My world turned upside down, the rug was pulled out from underneath me, I was punched in the stomach.
    My future was gone. I was 27 and felt old, unattractive, and alone. I knew the Lord must have a plan, though (Psalm 139:16--All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be). I hoped His plans would be for my ex and that they would involve softening his heart and bringing him back to me...but there were things He accomplished during that painful time and ever since in my self-righteous heart that He could not have done until He allowed my heart to be rent. When He in His sovereignty allowed that which I prized so highly to be taken out of my life, the state of my heart was laid bare. Fortunately for me, so was the state of God's.
    Over the last two years that I’ve been on this journey I’ve journaled like crazy and have had countless conversations about the heart-wrenching but amazing changes happening in my life. But I’m going to attempt to sum up what I’ve learned about God’s incredible forgiveness and His grace that leaves no square inch of this life untouched in two earth-shattering lessons: my sin IS really that bad, and the cross IS really that good.
    When I first found out that my husband was giving up on the marriage, I was completely shocked. My incredulity, however, was due less to the depravity of my husband, and much more toward a God whose actions I didn’t understand. I had walked in obedience, been a faithful spouse, served the church, extended reconciliation to my husband, and made every attempt I could to establish a Godly marriage. Where were the blessings I was promised? Where was the fruit of my labor? (Hopefully you just threw up in your mouths at the sound of the disgusting entitlement in my heart, because it was definitely there.)
    What had lain in the darkness of my will was a hope--no, a certainty--that walking in obedience would somehow secure God’s blessings (like a good marriage)...as if following Him was some means to an end. I wasn’t obeying Him simply because He was my benevolent Father who loves me. I had a front row seat to the darkness in my husband’s heart, but in my many quiet moments after he left, I was finally faced with the wrenching ugliness of my selfishness, control, anxiety, and fear. Not only had I been dishonest with myself about my own faults and sins during my marriage, but I had been an unfaithful bride to the Lord through my own sin.
    God put me on a journey through Scripture that had me aghast for the first time at my own depravity. He led me to Romans chapter 3, which showed me that “no one was righteous” and that without Him, I’m so dead in my sin that my throat is an open grave. I was reminded of the fundamental reality that without Christ’s sacrifice, according to Romans 5:10, I am God’s enemy, and worse than that, I’m powerless to change my separation from Him, much less my own wicked heart or my husband’s.
    I wept with joy and gratitude when the truth of the gospel penetrated my spirit. Yes, I am hopelessly wicked in my self righteousness and worship of control and dominance. Yes, my husband was wicked in his affair and despair that led him to leave. And yes, we are both screwed and powerless to change this. But! “BUT now, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known”…”righteousness from God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ” (3:21-22)…”You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, (when we were God’s enemies) Christ died for the ungodly.”... (5:6, 10)
    Understanding this changed everything. To forgive my ex, I had to first accept forgiveness. I couldn’t impart to my ex what I didn’t have to begin with. And to accept forgiveness, I had to understand what I did wrong...namely, understand my own sin. It was easy to be angry over my husband’s sin, but I didn’t understand how much I needed forgiveness until I experienced a righteous indignation over my OWN sin and the sweet, tender forgiveness of my heavenly Father.
    So while my poor heart was exploding with joy all the time, my great Forgiver prompted me to examine my life and take practical steps toward forgiving my ex. Meeting with a counselor and talking with my community group helped me identify destructive patterns in my life that likely made my marriage more difficult. It was through this new understanding of my own sin and process of accepting forgiveness from Christ that in September of this last year I sent an email to my ex husband asking for HIS forgiveness. Whether in reality I was responsible for 10% of the dysfunction in our marriage or 50%,  I needed to own 100% of my portion. I needed to walk away from the growing threat of resentment. I needed to quit drinking the poison and waiting for him to die. I needed to submit to the authority of Scripture when Paul says in Eph. 4:31-32 to “Get rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you.”
    So with guidance from the Lord and other believers, I asked my ex to forgive my worship of my idol of control, my constant competing for headship, my worrying and anxiety, and also for not taking some big red flags seriously while we were dating. I hit the send button completely at peace with Christ, knowing that I’ve been forgiven by Him. I had no expectation or need to hear back from my ex. A few days later I did hear back, and his passive aggressive response didn’t phase me for a second...because my soul was free. Free of the need to ask questions I’d never get answers to, free from the need to try to manage my circumstances, free from the desire to see my ex punished, and free from the debilitating guilt that had plagued me for so long over my failed marriage.
    See, y’all, Sin isn’t extraordinary. GRACE is extraordinary. And although I have a new understanding of the Parable of the Two Lost Sons, and that’s been really meaningful, nothing has changed me personally more than focusing on the lavish, extravagant, extraordinary love and forgiveness of the Father and the pursuit of BOTH children who rebelled against Him. My husband’s rebellion was outward, and my rebellion was inward, but the Lord in His steadfast faithfulness opens His forgiving arms to us both and calls us back home to Himself.
    Take heart, friends. Forgiveness is a decision, but it’s also a process, and once it’s been decided, it’ll have to be decided again and again. We don’t condone hurtful things done to us, just as the Lord doesn’t condone us when we hurt Him. Forgiveness doesn’t mean it won’t hurt anymore, and it doesn’t mean we can just forget. Since our hearts are selfish, forgiveness isn’t natural and is often a labor rather than natural. But we don’t forgive because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy. We forgive because we’ve been forgiven, and it’s a step of obedience toward our benevolent Father who loves us and has commanded us to do so.
    So we’re divorced, we’ve hurt someone, and we’ve been hurt deeply. But above that we’ve been ransomed, pursued, adopted, known and loved by our Eternal Spouse...and that means EVERYTHING.

Roar on, Mamas

Normally I write these posts not caring in the slightest if anyone reads them.
This one, however, is quite important to me.

Sometimes God lets us in on His heart for something in a way we haven't understood it before. This is one of those moments for me.

It's about moms...more specifically, what occurs through the eyes of this single individual who isn't a mother, but who wants to understand things the way God sees them.
If that's your heart, too, read on!
If not, fine. Go make yourself a sandwich.

Let me set the stage for you...

It's a familiar scene. I sit down with a few dear friends...two gals are moms, one gal pregnant. After greeting each other happily and spending some time laughing and catching up on our lives, suddenly the pregnant friend asks the more seasoned mamas about a prenatal doctor's visit.
Thirty minutes later, they remember that I'm there and at least look at me sometimes while they talk to each other.

For a few years now I have had the privilege of seeing several friends go through pregnancy and early motherhood. Admittedly, I've experienced a small but real sense of resentment toward the gals in my life. Sometimes it's felt like they only want to talk to...other mamas. I understood that they were going through similar things that I hadn't experienced yet, but I felt like it was a club that I wasn't invited to be a member of. I felt a little outside the cool we-made-babies circle.

I've felt distant from these new-mom friends and just hated it. I've been tempted to resign myself to just believing that we are in different life stages and will inevitably grow apart, BUT (yay) the Lord opened my eyes to something during a visit with a new-mom friend yesterday.


So...this is for the single gals like me who haven't understood, for the fellas who won't experience it (but can be an outstanding support), and, most of all, for the wildly, deeply courageous humans who are called "mama."

I never before considered what a huge shift in identity this is. I mean, I've heard lots of friends talk about the dramatic role shift and life change, but I'd never really considered how drastic this really is in terms of how it occurs.  It's probably more stark than any other role a human can play, regardless of gender.

There's this tremendous, jarring paradigm shift that occurs super abruptly that these people cannot hope to have practiced or adequately planned for.
They go from an employee, wife, lover, grocery shopper, house cleaner, meal preparer, party planner, book reader, traveler, work-outer, friend, daughter, woman with well-rehearsed roles to....this person whose body goes through this traumatic, life-altering pain.
AND THEN while their poor, raw bodies have been stretched and crushed and broken and ripped to shreds, "recoverer" isn't even a role they then get to play.
It's "caregiver."
Exhausted limbs must lift, heave, stretch, and support. Sleepless eyes must be vigilant for every lack, every discomfort and every danger. Fresh wounds are reopened so that her spent body can move to where the cries are coming from.

Then...having been pushed to the brink of physical human suffering, they limp wearily into this new role and are immediately demanded to stretch, move, and adapt without training or a chance to gain bearings...completely disoriented and often scared to tears.
There's a crippling realization that she has no idea what she's doing and that she may never know how to do anything right ever again. There's no standard measure telling her she's doing things well enough. There's no performance review. No breaks. No time off. Just an expectation that she'll give and give and give, and when there's nothing left, she'll give more.
Panic. Anxiety. Isolation. Loneliness. Defeat.

The profoundly amazing thing is...they aren't defeated.
They may whimper...but they whimper into an unknown world, plant their lost, broken feet, and roar with a tenacity that would make the most violent lion retreat into its den. 
They join the ancient chorus of women who have limped forward only to roar humanity into perpetuity with their wild and relentless love.

They somehow find ways through the confusion, despair, and exhaustion to find joy in a little grin. Their rent hearts leap at every little hard-won victory. Quiet moments are used to restore sanity rather than contemplate the mysteries of life...the biggest mystery sometimes being how she'll survive another moment if the little life that needs her awakes from naptime early.

SO ROAR ON, MAMAS.
Your untamable hearts and unique stories of selfless, sacrificial toil deserve to be told and relished.  
You deserve every stripe you have, and you have humbled this selfish heart.
May I learn to roar like you.

Advent: Getting Rid of the Ugly

It doesn't take knowing me long to figure out that I ADORE the Christmas season.
I love the kitsch, the cheesy songs, decorating the tree (anyone's tree, really...I've helped with 4 so far), cookie baking, Muppet Christmas Carol (which I can probably quote from start to finish), geekin' out to Amy Grant and Michael Buble, I just discovered Cee Lo Green's Christmas album and stinkin' love it!

If Christmas could be a love language, it'd be this gal's.

Now, advent, however... is a whole other thing.

The incarnation. The intervention of God in humanity. The One who was thought to be some divine impersonal Logos becoming a person with skin and hair and guts. The answer to humanity's longing and crying for a solution to the human sin condition.

For those who don't know what it is, Advent is the time that Christians take during the weeks before Christmas to take on the posture of the Old Testament Jews and "wait for the Messiah." We wait as those who have already received the Messiah in Jesus Christ, but in doing so we wait for Him to come again when He will restore all things, and everyone will know Him as the true King.

Most of my Decembers for the 10 years that I've been observing Advent have seen me waiting on God for...something. An answer, direction, a truth, an epiphany, something like that.

On this side of the resurrection, we already know the end goal. Christ CAME. Yeah, there is the waiting, but mostly there's the thing that's been waited for. The prize. The end. The change. The incarnation. It's happened, and we wait with hope because...the mystery's been solved.

HOWEVER...I've been missing something significant (not the first time that's happened :/).

In viewing waiting this way, I've made waiting a period of latency and passivity.
But it's not just what we're waiting FOR.
It's the waiting itself, y'all.

While the end is what gives the hope, it's the longing in the meantime that makes the juxtaposition of the unrealized/realized hope so powerful.

This year I've come to see Advent as kind of a mini lifetime. A microcosm, if you will.
If one could take a lifetime with all of its experiences and lessons and events and joys and sorrows and concentrate it down into one month, it bears a remarkable likeness to the Advent season:
~We've got a promise of the coming King
~There's lots of fellowship
~Times of loneliness and joy feel extra hard or extra beautiful
~The hurts and lack of justice in the world are augmented
~There are lots of distractions with materialism and missing the point altogether through the love of secondary or created goods

And, just as in my life, if I am to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, the Advent season as a concentrated lifetime should see me laboring even more to be like Christ...not to just wait passively.

Now, the end is, indeed, GLORIOUS! A perfect prize--the first coming of the incarnation as well as the time when He will come again and establish His kingdom on earth.

...but He delays. He makes us wait. Why?
So that people who don't believe may come to repentance, and so that we who are regenerate might be made more like Him.

II Peter 3:11-12
"...what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God..."

I've been faced with this question this Advent: What sort of person ought I to be, and am I becoming that? Because I'm becoming something, whether I know it or mean to or not.

C.S. Lewis speaks to this in Mere Christianity:
"...every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...
To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.
Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other."

So this Advent...I've been called to actively wait and work out my salvation, basking in the beauty of the incarnation while warring against my flesh and selfishness.

He has come, and He is coming. Wait well with me.

On God's Heart

So. Most people who have talked to me for more than ten minutes over the past 8 months have heard me say the phrase, "I got to learn a lot about God's heart through the divorce and all the crap I went through."
Or something more eloquent than that. (Not likely.)

It occurred to me recently, though, that I haven't gone into any detail at all about what I actually learned.
Because I'm lame.
Let's call it...divine omnibenevolence amnesia. Or the forgetsy oopsies.

PLEASE forgive my lack of witness. Time to testifyyyyyyy! *waves hand in the air*

What I've Learned on God's Heart:

1. He wants me to understand who He is vastly more than what He does.
Frankly, you can't become like someone you don't personally know. The goal isn't to become like some interesting construction of Christ based on collective opinion or cultural Christianity. The only way to really become like Him is to experience Him as He ACTUALLY is. Not just talking about or understanding the value of Him drawing close to me...but actually DOING it.

I mean, I can end up having similar attributes to someone by happenstance (both Lebron and I might be competitive, for example...), but to become like someone who is wholly unlike us in every way takes an enormous amount of intentional time and study.
Knowing Him...spending disciplined time in the Word, letting prayer become a posture and a continuous internal dialogue rather than a quip said before meals and bedtime, and taking time to really open myself up to who He wants to reveal Himself as (rather than who I've constructed Him to be) has changed everything.
~John 17:3 And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

2. He really, really hates sin.
We kind of talk about this vaguely in the church...but as I've spent more time intimately involved with Him and asking Him to let me feel what He feels, I've definitely experienced more of a righteous indignation over my own sin.
He deeply hates sin. He hates it because He knows the end from the beginning. He knows precisely how the selfish decisions I make destroy my relationships, the lies I tell violate people's trust in me, the immaturity I exercise crushes my example, and the foolishness I partake in undermines the church's credibility and makes a joke of my witness.
 He hates sin because He can't commit it, because it's a violation of His character, and we are never more unlike Him than when we are engulfed in ourselves and entrenched in sin.
Spending more time abiding with Him directly results in a greater awareness of the Holy Spirit's presence...and the Spirit's convicting work is BRUTAL when my heart proceeds in rebellion.
He hates when I sin, and He lets me feel it.
~Psalm 5:4 ...evil may not dwell with you...
~Psalm 11:5-6 The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence. Let him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulfur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. (daaaang, Jesus...)
⁵ 

3. He delights in us.
I hesitate to say this a bit, because experience is pretty subjective...but palpably feeling God's approval is pretty stinkin' exciting.
It's kind of like when you study really hard and get an A, or when you surprise a loved one with a gift and they love it as much as you thought they would...only it's a dozen times better, because the approval He gives us is entirely unmerited by us.
Like I mentioned in point #1, knowing Him means spending time and abiding with Him. As we become more in tune with His Spirit, it's kind of like we start to do life together with Him. He experiences things along with us (He's not temporal like we are, but He has experienced life as a human and understands...is what I mean). So when He feels things, if we're abiding in Him, we feel them, too. And just like I feel His anger over my sin, I also feel His joy as his daughter.
I've been struck lately by how multidimensional His emotions are...that He knows what's going to happen and yet STILL delights in it once it does happen. For most of us, knowing the surprise ruins the joy of it. Knowing the end takes the delight out of the process. He, however, is not robbed or depleted of joy even though He knows every act of obedience we will ever commit.
He's just that awesome. :)
~Psalm 149:4 For the Lord takes pleasure in His people. He will beautify the humble with salvation.

If you haven't noticed, I've quoted a lot of Psalms. David, the author of the Psalms, is referred to as the man after God's own heart. Who better to speak on God's heart than one who is reputed for most diggin' on that business??

Good golly!!! I could write way more on this.
But I'm trying to get better about my disgustingly long posts.

So for now... I'm kid-on-christmas-morning thankful over who He is, His righteous anger, and His deep and constant delight.

Divorce, Identity, and Restored Humanity

My sister suggested to me that I was not done writing about identity yet.
...She was right.
This gets more to the heart of what I was talking about in my last post...and isn't as long. :)
It's also much more easily delivered through the context of my own story.

Having gone through a divorce and being involved in a ministry that works with divorced people, identity is a topic that I deal with a lot.
It's obviously not just me...everyone has a story that shapes, destroys, or rebuilds his or her sense of self, but divorce is one that employs all three.

So.

One of the repercussions of dealing with divorce is loneliness. This is not something I struggle with often by any means, but in the days, weeks, and months after my ex asked me to move out, I experienced somewhat of a shock to the system at being forced to adjust to coming home at the end of the day to...no one.
Sure, I missed having someone to talk to, cook with, and watch random nonsense on hulu with. But what struck me most deeply was the wrenching emptiness of feeling unknown.
DON'T GET ME WRONG...I have amazing people in my life who go to GREAT lengths to love me well.
The incomplete nature of this life on earth, however, makes this love very fragmented in some ways.

For example...
My dear friends here in Dallas never knew what I was like as a single person before I was married. My friends from high school and college never really saw my marriage. My family never really saw my marriage because I lived in another state. Any friends I made after September 2011 don't know what my life was like in the context of marriage.
Lives are so multifaceted...there are so many components of our stories that, even as much as we do life together, we can never fully know each other.

This, though, is what makes knowing Jesus valuable so profoundly necessary. We are temporal, and in order to live our lives, to pay attention to one aspect of our lives (either the fact that I was married, or the fact that I'm single now) is to necessarily neglect the other aspects. We simply just don't have the capacity to take in the whole story as one...in my case, no one can know me simultaneously as single and married. No one can address all parts of my story at once.

BUT (my favorite parts of Scripture often begin with "but")...Jesus gets it.
Because He's outside of time. Because He's orchestrating my story. Because He made me.
And this makes it so much more necessary and BEAUTIFUL to abide in Him...because He knows the whole story of our lives without having to neglect any of its parts in order to give another part of it attention.

What about all that stuff I said in my last post about losing ourselves in order to find ourselves? What about all that "I must decrease so that He may increase" business? That doesn't sound like being known...it seems a complete contradiction to say that in order to realize our uniqueness or be fully known, we have to essentially be depleted of everything about us.

HOWEVER...this mysterious decrease of our "selves" is actually the increase of our ultimate Self. As we become more like Him...(He, the ultimate reality, the One who has always existed and has never changed, He who is so wonderfully complex that if He placed a single, solitary unique attribute of His into every human He created, there would never exist enough people over the span of time and space to even begin to house all of His properties)
...rather than losing our humanity as we put our flesh to death, our humanity is more fully restored. Only when we purge ourselves of our love of self do our real Selves begin to take shape.

We've kind of constructed this depressing conundrum where we think that God wants us to lose our uniqueness and become absorbed into some amorphous, homogenized mass.
Good golly. That WOULD be depressing.
The joyful reality is that it is only in becoming more like Him that our uniqueness and humanity can hope to be fully realized.

Christ, in becoming human, redeemed the essence of what it IS to be human.
He doesn't deny us our humanity. He provides the only venue in which we can fully realize it.

Without this ultimate fulfillment of self in the Maker, we walk around like shades...shadows. Becoming less substantive, less real, less known with every self-oriented thought.
Being real means being known...and known especially by Someone who will never stop knowing you, never have to neglect a part of your story to focus on another part, and who has fashioned every detail of your life for His glory.
His glory is much more real than our inhumanity...so really, the crucifixion of the flesh is the crucifixion of our inhumanity.


So for me personally...going through my divorce jarred me to my core...because at my core, I was still finding parts of my identity in my role as a married person. I prized that relationship so much that it became an inextricable part of what I drew my value from.
But God has constructed these elements of life to be enjoyed...NOT to have an identity constructed from them. When we build our value/identity/meaning on something temporal (albeit wonderful, but temporal) like relationships, vocation, political beliefs, intelligence, talents, interests, or anything else created, ANYTHING created is susceptible to change.
Anything, then, that can act as an agent of change in life is not just an agent of change, but a great and real threat to our identities. 

So I've put the role of a married person to rest...and in doing so I have embarked on a journey of losing my need to live for myself or find my identity in anything that changes.
I've been wrestling with the Holy Spirit over what other things I let define me other than Him. It's pretty staggering...my appearance, my intelligence, my potential, my work ethic, my responsibility, my date-ability, my knowledge, my opinions...
I am known...fully...unique and special and loved not because of my temporal roles or changing interests...but because I'm made uniquely in His complex image.

Identity and the Problem of Self

So. Blogging is hard to do when you've got 18 credit hours and lots of homework/church/life/travel/people/stuff that matters more than blogging going on. I could blog more, I suppose, if I just posted the papers I write for class on here...
Not sure, though, if anyone wants to read about the use of ideology and terror in post cold war America or how I had to bring Aristotle out of hell based on his engagement and regard for natural law.
Any takers? No? I wouldn't, either.

So this is one of the things that my mind has been engaging over the last 2 months...

Just about everything in my life...what I'm reading, what I'm studying, my life experiences, conversations I'm having, the music I'm listening to...are all pointing to one thing: a catastrophic struggle with identity.

I'm not just talking Christians here by any means. I mean everyone.

What I'm referring to goes beyond the scope of people not knowing who they are...because most people at least think they know who they are. They look to their interests, vocations, roles, skills, experience, and values to categorize it.
If I did this, I'd say I'm an artist, a musician, a nanny, student, daughter, friend, a traveler, a (groan...) borderline hipster. I'm moderate politically. I like most genres of music. I like trying new things. Blah blah blah.
The rub with all of the components of this laundry list is this: they either change with time and circumstance, or are not unique to any individual.
Everyone is a daughter or son. Friends change. Jobs change. Interests change.

Where am I seeing this? Everywhere.

In marriages.
I serve in a ministry at Watermark (the church I attend here in Dallas, for those who don't know) called DivorceCare where I get to love on folks going through the pain of divorce. I have lost count of the number of people I've heard frame their marriages as tragic mistakes because they "got married too young, before I knew who I really was." This was one of the things my ex said to me when he ended our marriage, as well. As if unbiblical divorce is justifiable because people change over time.

In popular culture.
"What do I stand for? Most nights I don't know anymore." (Fun.)
"In the dark I have no name." (Mumford and Sons)
"Only worth living if somebody is loving you." (Lana Del Rey)

In literature.
I read Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War by K.A. Cuordileone. It's a work of history that draws attention to the gender-saturated language used in society (the government, academia, popular culture) during the early Cold War years. She argues that the call to masculinize the weak, soft, effeminate political left that so many spoke of during the Cold War years was really a reflection of profound sexual and gender identity tension. According to Cuordileone, this gender identity crisis is what perpetuated things like the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and even the civil rights movement.

Even in The Hunger Games, Katniss resolves that making it a life's mission to kill President Snow and ultimately President Coin is framed as noble because revenge became so deeply engrained in her identity after a lifetime of oppression.
(I have way more examples of books that deal with identity, but for sake of space, I'll stick with these two).


...a malleable identity.
Dictated by roles, experiences, and circumstance.
Put together by...whatever you decide.

Why is this a problem? It sounds ideal in some ways, actually. Openness, change, adaptability. This is the pinnacle of human maturity and civil society! Well...not exactly....

I've become increasingly aware of an inextricable connection between the malleable self and the eschewing of moral culpability.

So much of my life recently has been saturated with the theme of the self...namely, what the self is responsible for.
Can one sin without a self?
Are we culpable for decisions we make in our search for identity?
While the answer seems obvious to some, the reality that a lot of people, even Christians, perpetuate the facade that the lack of a concrete self is grounds for exoneration from responsibility or consequences.




We're a society of rampant logical inconsistencies.
(Caveat--I'd be way overselling myself if I said I could adequately put all of the non sequiturs and fallacies into the appropriate philosophical categories (I'd probably just as soon refer to "denying the antecedent" as "crazy business."...let's stick with that.)
But attending a public university has me daily experiencing people and reading material that betrays the fact that everyone is faced with the reality of worldview...and a lot of worldviews are simply just not thought through.

Why did I just bring up worldview?
Because worldview shapes identity.
 A lot of people are quite content with not thinking through their worldview or exploring where it leads at its logical end.

For example...
Here's a statement: Humans have meaning and dignity.
Most of us are down with that. I've got a political theory prof who loves to talk about society needing to have leaders who rule justly and according to virtue, that rights to freedom from tyranny are inalienable, and that some things are just WRONG...
BUT most times my fellow classmates press him on where that meaning comes from, he falls back on the postmodern answer of "whatever you find meaning in. Religion, naturalism, family, your job...whatever it happens to be for you. You decide." Really? That's it? We're talking about why humans have meaning and you shrink back?

People are fine with granting and embodying significance...and not bothered at all about it coming from an unidentifiable source. The intellectual pursuit breaks down, the worldview has been exposed as paper-thin, and rather than face the reality that the argument is glaringly less than comprehensive, we call it being open minded...because we're afraid to call it what it really is: irresponsible and insufficient.
Meaning is what we're looking for in our basest components, right? As much as we operate at the level of functionaries, the silent but violent tumult in our hearts overtakes all of the coping mechanisms we've built into our psyches...and we're confronted with the reality that we have no idea if we matter, or if what we do matters.
How can we impute meaning to anything if we're waiting for it to be imputed to us in the first place? What gives one the authority to say meaning comes from THIS? One can't give what one doesn't have.

A lot of us (Christian or not) simply don't dig an iota deeper when we realize our worldview is inconsistent.
Why not?
Moral culpability.

I'm super down with how Ravi Zacharias talks about this business.
~Through secularization, religious interpretations and institutions have lost their significance, and we experience the end of shame.
~Through pluralism, no worldview is dominant and every moral decision becomes relative, and we experience the end of reason.
~Through privatization, spiritual beliefs are expunged from the public sector of life, and as secularization and relativism spread in its place, we experience the end of meaning.

No shame. No reason. No meaning. No self. No moral culpability.

No hope? Are we doomed to a lifelong struggle with eat-pray-love philosophy in which we search for meaning in relationships, life experiences, and some crazy ass trip around the world?
Without hope, we'd be crushed under the staggering weight of our own inconsequentiality. 

I have not comprehensively studied every worldview out there...but I have done a lot of homework. And based on the evidence that I have come across...the Judeo-Christian worldview is the most comprehensive answer to the issue of identity:

• Human value is answered in the imago dei, humans' image-bearing of God--an infinitely creative Being uniquely made and gifted each individual. 
• Unique individualism is fulfilled in spiritual gifting and personal identification with the Creator. 
• Moral absolutes are grounded in the immutable attributes and character of the Godhead. 
• The problem of suffering is answered with the ability of people to freely choose to love or rebel against a perfect God.
• Hope for redemption is cemented in the ongoing, sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.

An identity can only be unshakeable if it is grounded in something, or Someone, that doesn't change...isn't affected by circumstance, geographic or historical location, experience, or role.

THERE IS AN ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF SELF.
And it is wrapped up in the message of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe to us: you must lose yourself to find yourself.