The True Self, the False Self, and the Reality of Self

Sometimes I get tripped up when thinking about the true self and false self. Does that ever happen to you? 

It can happen like this. 

I’m aware of my true, created life in God, and when I’m living life from that place, everything within and around me becomes timeless. Everything holds a glow of beauty and perfection because God-in-everything becomes so evident in that place. Purity of heart, mind, body, and spirit abounds. 

Living in that place, I experience rest and hope and joy. I can breathe, and I can say with full conviction it is well with my soul.

But I don’t live from that posture of my true self all of my living, breathing moments. 

There’s also the false self.

This is the scrappy, stingy, worried, anxious, competitive, blaming, conniving self. It’s a distracted, consuming self. In its more tempered moments, it’s simply a shell of a real self. 

I don’t live all my living, breathing moments from this place, either. 

They’re both there.

I’m continually invited or compelled toward one or the other by forces outside myself and by habits built up within myself. On any given day, I’m an admixture of my true self and false self.

That admixture creates the reality of self. 

The reality of self is who I am in this very moment, living on this very earth, walking in this very moment deeper into my formation. 

Will I be formed more fully into my true self?

Will I be de-formed by my false self?

These are the living, breathing questions faced by the reality of self each day.

And this place of still forming — of reflecting on the reality of our formation in still moments and of acknowledging that we are forming, still, each day that we live — is one place those questions meet with our appraisal.

How Grace and Truth Relate

I mentioned in a previous post that the first thing I learned in my long journey of coming to understand grace and my need for Jesus was the reality of grace — that grace is the aspect of God that invites us closer to him wholeheartedly and without a single reservation. It’s about our full acceptance and welcome in the presence of God, no strings attached.

This was a pretty huge paradigm shift for me. 

I knew my whole life that God’s love was unconditional and that Jesus created a way for us to have full access to God — but really, that idea lived mostly in my head. I didn’t really understand unconditional love and acceptance because I’d lived most of my life inside rules and conditions.

So the journey into grace was about learning to breathe and receive my love and worth before God. And it took several long and searching years for me to find that path, let me tell you.

But I’ve come to believe it is this foundation of grace that prepares us for the truth of God. I’ve come to believe that no matter how long it takes or how hard-won the journey might be, it is the most essential reality God desires us to receive through our life with Christ.

When we look at Jesus, we are told that he is “the fullness of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What does that really mean? 

It means that somehow, in love, grace and truth peacefully coexist and belong together. 

But without a foundation of grace firmly rooted inside us first, without knowing in a visceral, very real way our full welcome and acceptance with God, then words of truth — and particularly words of correction — only strike us as harsh and shaming. All we hear in words of truth is that we’re going the wrong way and need to go the right way, as though going the right way is more important than who we are.

At least, that has been my experience. Has that been yours?

But once we are in a relationship of full acceptance and embrace, knowing that nothing we do wrong will remove that full embrace and that standing invitation of welcome, we can read these words that David wrote in the psalms …

Train me, God, to walk straight;

   then I’ll follow your truth path.

Put me together, one heart and mind;

   then, undivided, I’ll worship in joyful fear.

— Psalm 86:11 

… and give thanks and make them our prayer.

In a loving, grace-filled relationship, the truth that teaches us to walk straight becomes a gift. It becomes a gentle and loving guide intended for our good. It becomes an object of hope, rather than a ruler of judgment. It becomes something for which we give thanks.

What is your experience of grace and truth? Where in the journey into either do you find yourself today?

Our Burden Really Is Light

Normally I have no idea what I’m going to write here in this space until I sit down and spend time in the quiet with Jesus each morning. But I’ve known since yesterday that I was going to write this post today, when I was in the process of writing that our role is simply to say yes. 

What I want to share with you is something that totally changed everything for me when it comes to understanding what we do and what God does in our process of formation. 

Yesterday, I wrote that our role is simply to notice God’s activity in our lives and then to say yes to it. Our role is to say yes and to embrace his work. I wrote that God does the hard work — all we do is choose to participate. 

But what does our participation look like? What does it mean to say yes? 

Enter the principle of indirection. This is something I first discovered about three years ago, and it completely blew my mind. 

The principle basically says this: 

We do what we can do (something within our power to do) in order to provide an opportunity for God to do in us what we cannot do for ourselves (something outside the scope of our power). 

Usually this means choosing something tangible to practice intentionally and regularly for a season — something it is not difficult for us to exert our will to do — and doing it with the trust and intention for God to do the hard work of changing our character in the places he wants it changed. 

That’s what I mean about him doing what we cannot do. We cannot change ourselves; only he can. But we can participate by acknowledging that we’re aware he wants to work in us and by choosing something small to practice as an acceptance of that work.

This is the idea that backs up Jesus’ words that he came to heal the sick, for the sick cannot heal themselves.

It’s the idea that backs up what Paul promises about how God, who began a good work in us, will be faithful to complete it. It’s the idea that backs up what is told to us about Jesus washing us and then presenting us clean and perfect and pristine before the throne of God in the end.

It’s the idea that backs up all those passages I quoted from Romans 3-5 yesterday about God’s role and our role in the life we share with him.

Our burden really is light because our participation — our saying yes — simply means choosing to do something that is safely within our power to do, trusting that God will supernaturally use it to change our very nature. 

This is not onerous work. It is not meant to be. But it is meant to be intentional. And it is meant to be done with the trust that God is the one who changes us.

Hat tip: I actually wrote about the principle of indirection here about three years ago, when I first learned about it and was starting to have my mind blown by the concept. If you’d like to hear some specific examples of what the principle of indirection can look like in an ordinary life (my own), check out the original article that shares the way I began to practice it from the beginning. 

What simple, faithful choice might you adopt to enter into the acceptance of the work God is about in you right now?

Our Role Is Simply to Say Yes

I’ve been reading the book of Romans lately, and I keep getting stuck at chapters 3-5. These are pretty mind-blowing chapters that teach us so much more than I can even wrap my head around about what God does and what we do. 

These chapters say things like this: 

God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness. 

God sets right all who welcome his action and enter into it. 

Abraham entered into what God was doing for him. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own. 

It was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God.

This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does.

We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us.

God is the one who does the work. Our job is simply to say yes — to receive and enter into what God’s doing.

I look at my life and see that I may participate in the burnishing and refinement process of my life — the hot fires that make us pliable as he forms us into the image he has always had in mind for who we are — but God is the one doing the actual molding all along. He is the one who conceived of the original image he wanted to create in me from the beginning. He’s the one who went about working with conditions and creating new conditions and then molding and forming me through those conditions into the image he wants in me.

All I have had to do is allow it to happen. 

But let’s be truthful: this “allowing it to happen” isn’t always easy.

It pushes against what we’ve learned so far in life and how we normally operate. It can bring us face to face with pieces of ourselves that aren’t so pretty, and we’d much rather look away or brush them under the couch or push them into a corner closet and then close and lock the door. We may be scared to death of what God’s doing or wants to do because we can’t see the outcome, because it means relinquishing control, and because we’re not (yet) so sure he’s worth trusting with the reins of our lives.

But this, too, is something true: God’s original image of you is brilliant. Glorious. Beautiful. Perfect.

It may take hot fires and great discomfort and courage to live into that original image, but nothing else on earth compares to the result.

Where in your life is God inviting you to say “yes” to his touch right now? 

The True Self is Un-Self-Conscious

I was laying in bed this morning, contemplating the words my spiritual director wrote on my Facebook wall for my birthday today.

She called me her friend “who adores Jesus.” 

First of all, I love that she knows me so well — knows that I am indeed in love with Jesus and that I find my life revolving around him more and more with each passing day.

But it also got me thinking about my session with her last week, in which we discussed the true self and the false self. In that session, she had recalled for me what my true self really looks like. I was reminded that my true self walks and talks and sits with Jesus. I remembered that my true self twirls and dances with Jesus. 

And I realized this morning: my true self is not self-conscious at all. 

I could see so clearly that in those places where I walk and talk and sit and dance and twirl with Jesus, I’m not focused on myself at all. I don’t care what I look like, nor am I judging at all what I’m saying or doing. I’m aware of those things, obviously, but not focused on them.

I’m not the main thing. Jesus is. 

He is the focus of my attention, the one of whom I can never seem to get enough.

What he looks like, what he says, how he looks at me, what his gestures are like, how he smiles, what he looks like when he’s thinking or when he’s listening, the ways he teaches and guides or corrects me … all of him captivates my attention.

In this place, there’s no need or room to be self-conscious. 

It’s a wonderfully relieving place to be — not to be preoccupied with myself, but to be concerned fully, instead, with him.

Have you ever experienced un-self-consciousness? What was that experience like for you?

Oriented Toward Encounter, No Matter the Circumstance

“I remember a time when I used to be much godlier. It was sometime in junior high and my room was clean. It must have been beautiful weather outside because the lighting was very nice in my room where I was reading my Bible every day and feeling really good. It was quite clear to me that my sanctification was progressing very well. …

But God took me out of that life and threw me into the rock tumbler. Here, it is not so easy to feel godly. … Here, there is very little time for quiet reflection. … The opportunities for growth and refinement abound here — but you have to be willing. You have to open your heart to the tumble.”

— from Loving the Little Years, pp. 13-14

I’ve connected with a few friends recently who are in the soul-sanctifying work of motherhood every day.

One of them shared with me that no station in life has presented her with the reality of her sinfulness so much as motherhood. Another shared that life is an absolute sprint from the moment she wakes until the minute she falls asleep. Still another shared a glimpse into the tension between loving one’s child and one’s God — putting their needs and desires above her own — and the reality of emotions and desires and hormones and personal needs. 

I heard that nothing has so fulfilled these women as being a mother — I saw the joy in their faces and heard it in their voices — even though they have found it to be the most demanding and humbling work they have ever done.

I also heard these friends share that intentionally connecting to God in this place is difficult.

How is stopping to orient one’s self and connect to one’s inner heart and an intangible God possible in the middle of a full-out sprint that involves Fruit Loops, spit-up, sibling rivalry, and getting everyone cleaned, dressed, fed, brushed, strapped in, scooting around town, and eventually sleeping safely in their beds every night?

There is bewilderment in this place. What does connecting to God look like here?

I am sure these friends of mine could answer that question much better than me. I am not a mother, and they are. They are the ones presented with the question each and every day who are finding their way through to the answer the best way they know how.

But I share these stories and ask these questions to draw our attention to this: God is here. 

Ours is a God who met a childless woman each and every year she came to the temple and did not fail to hear her prayer (Hannah). Ours is a God who met a king in the midst of his sin and called him to repent (David). Ours is a God who wrestled with a man so strongheaded that he bulled his way into every reality he wanted to create for himself (Jacob).

Ours is a Jesus who knew exactly how to speak to an adulteress, a blind man, a remorseful fisherman, a traitor, a thief, a mother weeping over her son, a government official, a leper, a pair of sisters, a man throwing Christians in jail, a prostitute, a man sneaking off to talk with him in the dead of night, and the list goes on and on.

If the Scriptures teach us anything, it is that ours is a God who knows how to connect and relate and speak directly to us, no matter the situation or circumstance in which he encounters us.

As the quote at the top of this post declares, finding God in the rough and tumble (the author speaks to motherhood, but I would expand this sentiment to include any and every station we might live out) simply asks of us an orientation toward encounter.

Openness. Awareness. Receptivity. 

Are you open to God meeting you exactly where you are? What might encounter with God look like for you today, right here and right now, in the midst of your exact circumstances?

Room to Be Yourself

I’ve shared here before that my path to an authentic relationship with God began with an honest confession that I really never had come to understand grace or my need for Jesus, and that this confession was followed by a prayer for God to teach me both. 

That was 13 years ago, and my life has been an ever-winding journey toward the answer to that prayer ever since. 

I’ve learned some things since then — about God, about myself, about the nature and intent and process of formation — and the very first one has to do with grace.

Grace is that aspect of God that invites us in wholeheartedly and without a single reservation. 

This is what Jesus makes possible: full access to God. 

And not just access but welcome! We are ushered in with the unending invitation to draw nearer and nearer and nearer. 

My reading yesterday morning in the psalms affirmed this truth with these words: 

You’ve always given me breathing room,

   a place to get away from it all.

A lifetime pass to your safe-house,

   an open invitation as your guest.

You’ve always taken me seriously, God,

   made me welcome among those who know and love you.

— Psalm 61:3-5 

Love is first full of grace. Of welcome. Of invitation and full acceptance. 

Can you receive this gift of grace from God today? What is it like for you to receive an irrevocable invitation into the safe-house of God, a place that offers you unending breathing room, a relationship with One who always takes you seriously?

Discernment: It's an Embrace of Mystery

As I shared in a previous post in this discernment series, we often think of discernment as finding an answer to our question of choosing option A, B, or C for our lives in a particular moment. But really, it’s about something of a much greater scope.

It’s about the wholistic work God is doing in our lives — our lives seen in their totality, from beginning to end — as he seeks to conform us more and more into the people we actually are and the image of God we were created to bear. 

This means there is quite an element of mystery to embrace when we’re about discernment. 

Think of it this way.

Even when we wait and look and listen and discern the invitation of God in our lives toward a particular decision, we don’t know what will happen once that decision has been made. We may discern that, yes, we are going to accept that job offer — but even if we ascertain that job offer to be the next stone on our pathway forward, we don’t fully comprehend why. 

We only know that God is nudging us toward it. It aligns with the wholistic work he’s been about in our lives. It’s clearly the right choice for us at this point in our story. 

But toward what end? Not simply for the job itself, but toward the end of it being used to further our formation. 

The decision was not a destination but part of a larger process — a process we cannot fully perceive or apprehend and never will. It exists in the mind of God. 

Our part is to discern and follow, and in that sense, to be part of a great mystery that’s beyond us.

This morning, I read a short string of words in Psalm 40 that reminded me of just this truth: 

More and more people are seeing this: 

they enter the mystery,

abandoning themselves to God.

— Psalm 40:3

Life with God teems with mystery. He is so much greater than we are, and he is intimately acquainted with our life and ways and story. He knows the work he is about in us, and we see that work but dimly, simply following the next stone on the path.

Will you accept the holy mystery of this life with God, the invitation to something greater than your eyes alone can see about your life?

Discernment Concerns a Process, Not a Conclusion

When I was at the retreat that prompted me to write this short series on discernment, one of the instructors shared a quote by Richard Rohr that I find to be immensely helpful when considering the role discernment plays in our lives: 

“God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.” 

— Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, p. 23

This gets at the idea I shared in my previous post about all of life being a process of foundational experiences that reveal to us the unique story of redemption and healing and wholeness that God is about in our lives. 

So often, when we are in a process of discernment about a choice we’re trying to make in our lives, we are focused on the concluding outcome of that decision. What is the right decision here? What am I supposed to do? Did I make the right choice? Have I landed in the place I was supposed to land? 

But in the quote from Richard Rohr above, we are reminded that life with God is more about living through a life with God than arriving at a particular point or conclusion or decision. Life with God is a verb and a process, he says. It is active and ongoing. It involves continuous change, and that change concerns our inward and outward being. 

Who is God making us to be? What is the fullness and wholeness of us that is his aim over the whole course of our lives? And how does one decision or another affirm that work of wholeness in us? 

These are the real questions at the heart of discernment. 

It is not about one right answer or another that will bring us to a place of arrival. It is about how a decision continues to shape us into the person God intends for us to become in the broader, longevity-seeking scope of our lives. 

What is the work of healing, wholeness, and redemption God seems to be about in your life? And how might the decisions you are seeking to make be a part of that broader work?

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment III

Earlier in this series on discernment, I invited you to consider your foundational experiences of God, and in the second post on that subject, we narrowed our consideration to those experiences when we knew in an intimate way that God was speaking to us or intervening in our lives. 

Today, I’d like to broaden our consideration of foundational experiences to those experiences in our lives that made an impact on us in some significant or meaningful way. 

What are the experiences that marked you, scarred you, taught you, helped you, harmed you? What are the memories you revisit often, that made a deep impression on your heart? What moments in your life contributed in great measure to the person you have become?

I’d like to suggest that even these experiences can aid us in our process of discernment, too.

In fact, I would like to suggest that every meaningful moment of our lives — the moments that form the stuff of our story — are part of the specific story of redemption, grace, healing, and purpose God is weaving through our specific lives. 

It is my deep conviction that the stories we are living are not senseless.

In the places we experienced deep wounding, God wants to touch and heal us. In the places we were misguided, God wants to come and redirect our steps. In the places we experienced great consolation, God wants to teach us about himself and about ourselves.

When we look back over our lives, we may see the litterings of tiny moments or big moments that made an impact in some way. And it is in those moments that God wants to enter in and heal, touch, teach, and guide us.

He wants to make us whole and complete, lacking nothing, and therefore is about the work of redemption in our lives in exactly those places that broke us, splintered us, harmed us, or de-formed us.

This is how our foundational experiences — whether they were specific encounters with God or simply encounters with life — can guide us in our process of discernment. 

What is God about in you, because of your story? What are the themes of needed redemption in your life? How might that inform the decision you are seeking to make? Which path will take you deeper into the healing or fullness of that redemption?

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment II

We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about our foundational experiences — and specifically our foundational experiences of God — and how they can serve as a guide for us when we are in need of discernment.

There are so many ways to undertake a process of discernment — so many ways this subject has been explored and examined and written about through the centuries and the ages — and so much of that material is immensely helpful in uncovering what discernment is, what the process is about, and how to learn and determine the best path forward. 

We’ve been spending a bit more dedicated time in this small series on discernment exploring an aspect of discernment that is, I think, quite lesser known and considered as a point of value in the process. 

Let’s consider for a moment what discernment is about. What is being discerned, exactly, when we are needing discernment? 

Usually this is a process of trying to determine the right way forward in our lives. This could apply to a large decision we are trying to make — whether to take a particular job, whether to move to a new place, whether someone we are dating is the right person for us to share our lives with, what to do with our lives.

It can also apply to the smaller, everyday encounters of our lives. How ought we respond to that person with whom we have such difficulty? What is my real motive in wanting to pursue a particular path right now? Is this the right church for me? 

And then, there’s perhaps the most intimate question of all: how is God speaking to me right now?

As I mentioned above, there are volumes that could fill whole wings of very large libraries on the subject of discernment. It is clearly not a simple subject for us humans to understand, and we have been trying to understand it and seeking guidance on the matter from the wise ones we know for a very, very long time. 

I think something helpful to notice here is that discernment is needed in those very places that are not clear cut. If there was a simple answer to our question — a very clear response that God indicates would be the right way forward in a given situation, given what has been indicated to us in the scriptures or the tradition of the church — then discernment is not really needed. 

Discernment is required in those very grey and fuzzy places where we don’t have the readily available gift of a black-and-white answer on the matter. 

And this is where our foundational experiences, I’m coming to believe, can provide an immense gift of their own.

One thing I will say about this approach to incorporating our foundational experiences into our process of discernment is that it assumes God is personally acquainted with each one of us. And not just acquainted with us, but invested in us.

It assumes that the significant experiences of our lives — every single one of them — is part of the specific formation God is about in us. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this on Friday. (I won’t be writing here tomorrow, which is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States.) But until then, I’ll invite you to consider this question: 

Have you ever viewed the foundational experiences of your life as significant to God in some way and integrally a part of the formation he is about in your life? 

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment I

So, it’s taken several posts to get here, but I’d like to invite you to consider how your foundational experiences of God can help you navigate through a process of discernment. 

I mentioned in Friday’s post that I’d like for you to recall those foundational experiences of God that you knew at a very deep, intuitive, gut-level place inside of yourself were a true encounter of God interacting with you. 

As you take and hold those experiences, I’d like to invite you to regard those experiences as having provided you with a sense of God that can continue to direct you. 

To make this a bit more practical, let me share with you an example from my own life.

This has to do with the way Kirk and I have learned to discern God’s direction in our life about big decisions — where to live, where to work, whether to say yes to an opportunity being offered to us, and so on.

We’ve learned that, for us, God’s direction often carries the quality of a stone emerging out of the water at just the right time. 

This sense of God’s movement in our life was born out of several foundational experiences that all carried that similar quality of God’s provision and direction and which we have now learned is a means of guiding us continually in these kind of life decisions.

One of the first times I can remember this happening was when Kirk and I got engaged on St. Patrick’s Day in 2006.

I had a feeling Kirk would propose that day, even though we hadn’t discussed any particulars about getting engaged, nor had we discussed anything about when or where we would get married, where we would live when we got married (while we were dating, I lived in Southern California and he lived in Central Florida), or what our life would look like after we joined together. 

Still, I had a feeling we were going to get engaged on the weekend that we did, so in preparation, I began to mentally brainstorm some of the more specific details I knew we would discuss once he asked me to marry him and I said yes. 

One of the first things I knew we would discuss was the wedding. Would it happen in California, where my family lived, or in Florida? Would it be a large or small affair? Would it be a regular kind of affair at all? 

This was a second marriage for both of us, and I had known all along, after my first marriage ended, that if I ever married a second time, I would not want a normal kind of ceremony. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I just knew all along I would want it to be different.

I began to consider the idea of eloping to Ireland.

What a strange idea, I know!

But it seemed very much in line with who we were — we had first met and become casual acquaintances in Ireland, we had begun our initial e-mail correspondence on St. Patrick’s Day, and we were (most likely) going to be getting engaged on St. Patrick’s Day the following year. You could say that Ireland already loomed rather large in our life and history together.

But the real “foundational experience of God” in our life of decision-making together happened when we did, indeed, get engaged. For the very first time, we began to discuss some of the particulars and possibilities for our wedding, and I shared with Kirk the idea I’d begun holding in my heart about the possibility of eloping to Ireland.

I am not joking when I say that he pulled the car over to the side of the road, opened the trunk, and pulled out the latest issue of National Geographic that he had received in the mail that very same week. The cover story concerned the ancient Celts, and inside the cover story was the mention of a monastery ruins site on the island of Inis Mor in Ireland where a priest regularly performed wedding rites. 

Needless to say, that’s where we got married, and I cannot imagine the process being any easier than it was.

And really, our continuing life together these last five years has been comprised of many similar moments.

It often looks like this.

We will begin a seemingly innocent conversation — perhaps about whether to move out of our first studio apartment, or whether to revisit the possibility of employment for Kirk in a certain place, or what sort of next steps might be possible for me when my graduate program ends — and very simply and deftly, the answer to our question will emerge out of nowhere, often very soon after the conversation begins. We’ll come upon a house for rent while out for a Sunday drive, or the phone will ring and it will include a job offer we didn’t know existed at that very same place we had been considering employment, or we’ll be invited to breakfast with friends and a new opportunity will be presented that I couldn’t have imagined for myself. 

We’ve learned again and again that God brings just the right thing at just the right time to us, without our having to go searching or hunting or planning or forcing it along, just like our wedding in Ireland came together for us.

Accordingly, since we’ve learned that God often works in this way with us, we can revisit this foundational sense of God’s work in our life when presented with new opportunities. Does it have that similar quality as all those other opportunities did, like a stone emerging from the water at just the right time and place? Did it come to us organically? Does it feel like it’s happening in an unforced and natural manner?

These things guide our decision-making often, and it’s one practical example of how a foundational experience of God’s movement in our life can aid in our process of discernment.

How might your own foundational experiences of God guide you in a similar way? What sense do they give of God’s interaction in your life that can provide a compass of sorts for your decision-making?

More on Foundational Experiences

I mentioned that I’d be writing a short series on discernment for the duration of this week, but we’ve gotten to the end of the week and I’m realizing there are a few more thoughts I’d like us to consider together on this subject. So I’ve decided to extend the discernment series a bit longer into next week. I hope that’s okay with you! 

Accordingly, today I’d like to revisit the ideas shared yesterday about our foundational experiences of God. 

I realized after writing that post that in asking you to consider your foundational experiences of God, those experiences may not have been positive. Perhaps you came into the faith without realizing fully what that meant. Perhaps you were raised in a church or a home where your understanding of faith was twisted into a pretzel and all that resulted was fear and confusion and pain. 

What we might term “foundational experiences of God” may be foundational indeed — but they may have done more harm than good, and now we’re left to pick up the pieces.

So today I’d like to invite you to consider your foundational experiences of God in a slightly different, more focused light. 

Let’s recall those moments in life when you just knew it was God. Perhaps it was a moment when the truth you’d learned about God’s love or truth or forgiveness or grace somehow clicked and became real for you, not just head knowledge anymore. Or perhaps it was a moment when you knew God intervened in circumstances because there was just no other possible explanation. Or perhaps it was as simple as a felt presence surrounding you or following you around or showing up at occasionally odd moments, and you just knew it was God somehow.

These are foundational experiences of God, too. They’re the foundational experiences of God that teach us, truly, who God is to us — how he intervenes in our lives and relates himself to us. 

This is the kind of foundational experience Jesus had in those baptismal waters when he heard that voice from heaven speaking his beloved sonship over him. He knew it was God. He knew it was truth. It was not twisted or confused in any way.

So, what about you?

What are those foundational experiences of God in your own life? What do they, upon considering them, speak to you about God? How did he relate himself to you in those moments? What did he communicate about himself to you? 

What Are Your Foundational Experiences of God?

Three years ago, when I had just begun my training as a spiritual director, I attended an instructional retreat weekend that had the topic of discernment as its central focus.

On the very first evening of that retreat, we watched a short clip from Mary Ann Scofield, one of the founders of Spiritual Directors International, talking about our foundational experiences of God and how they can serve as touchstones in our ongoing lives of faith. And this past weekend, as I attended a similar retreat weekend on that same topic, we revisited this idea of foundational experiences of God and how they can serve us in our discernment processes. 

Consider the baptism experience of Jesus in Matthew 3.

Jesus comes up from the water, and a dove descends from the clouds as a voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” This was a declarative moment in the life of Jesus — a moment that confirmed his identity not only as the Son of God, but also as one who is beloved. 

We see Jesus move from the bapstimal encounter into the wilderness, where he is tested by the devil at that very point of his identity. Three times, the devil tempts Jesus by saying, “If you really are the Son of God, do this … or this … or this.” He is testing the very meaning of what it means for Jesus to really be the Son of God, and Jesus must go back to that foundational encounter and remember. Reconnecting with his true identity that he received directly from God in that baptismal encounter allows him to respond to each temptation.

What about you? 

What foundational experiences of God have formed your life? What did those foundational experiences teach you about God and yourself? How might returning to those foundational moments serve you in your own process of discernment? 

He Comes to Us Where We Are

Yesterday I wrote about an experience I had recently of feeling like I was being grabbed by a ponytail on the top of my head and tossed about by the whims of others. I shared that I was able to see Jesus sitting nearby, inviting me to disengage from the abuse and come join him on the brownstone steps. I said I found it interesting that he didn’t come rescue me. 

Rescuing me, in the way I’ve previously experienced Jesus as my rescuer, would have looked like him coming to disengage me from the abuse himself. It would have looked like him coming out into the street, confronting the abusers, and pulling me safe into his arms and away from the scene of such pain. 

It would have looked like him rescuing and defending a young girl in the way she needs to be rescued and defended. 

But that’s not what happened. And what’s perhaps most surprising to me is that I was totally okay with that. 

It was a picture, for me, of my growth. I noticed that when I came to sit on the brownstone steps with Jesus, I was no longer a 3-year-old girl with a ponytail but an alive and strong 32-year-old woman who could sit shoulder to shoulder with Jesus and hold an adult conversation. It was so electrifying and invigorating to notice and experience that.. 

And it reminded me that he comes to us exactly where we are.

We’ve been talking about this in the Look at Jesus course I’m teaching right now. We’ve been noticing how differently Jesus responds to different groups and types of people. With some people, he’s gentle and kind. With others, he’s direct and abrasive. 

It can be unsettling to see the many different colors of Jesus in one huge array at once. 

But we’ve come to think it shows his genius — that it has to do with his ability to know exactly what a person needs and to meet them where they are, like the most perfect teacher or parent that ever existed. Some people need gentleness and kindness. Others need greater directness and candor. And others need something totally different than either of those things.

Jesus knows the difference and gives them the exact right thing. 

It reminds me of a moment several years ago when I really got at least part of the miracle of Paul’s teaching in Philippians 2: 

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. 

— Philippians 2:5-7

Now, there are many things to learn of God and Christ inside these words. But one thing these words teach us is the nature of Christ’s love. It’s a love that comes to us where we are. 

When I needed Jesus to rescue me in times past, he rescued me. When I needed him to hold me in his arms to comfort and soothe me, he did just that. And when I needed him to remind me of my strength, my volition, and my own dignity, like he did in the ponytail incident more recently, that’s what he did. 

He comes to us where we are. And where we are and what we need changes over time as we grow. This, too, is what spiritual formation is about. It’s about growing into the whole and complete person we are meant to be in God’s sight, and that changes over time as we grow into it.

How do you need Jesus to meet you right where you are right now? What does his coming to where you are look like in this particular time and place of your life and growth?

A (Small) Glimpse into Formation

In the Look at Jesus gospel immersion course I’m teaching right now, we’re enjoying the privilege of doing just what the course title suggests: looking at Jesus. And when I look at Jesus, I can’t help but fall in love. 

Here is God, hanging around on earth with all kinds of people full of earth and grit. And he doesn’t recoil. Instead, he touches them. He invites them to share his meals. He takes time each day to teach them about the kingdom of God and spends vast amounts of time healing their battered and broken bodies. 

In short, he shows us that God is about coming to where we are and being with us. And not just being with us, but giving us more than we had before.

When I first began learning this aspect of Jesus — I mean, really getting that it was true — I fell completely in love with him. Never had I experienced such love and acceptance. Jesus comes to me. He doesn’t expect me to come to where he is.

What’s more, I noticed that we moved. If I was laying on the floor, curled up in a ball, Jesus met me there. He didn’t hurry me off the floor. He didn’t condemn me for being there. He met me. 

But eventually, I did sit up. Or stand up. Or walk. Or move around.

I learned, through an ongoing process of experiencing this over and over, that Jesus moves with me at a pace that is natural and required to bring about my growth. It’s not forced, but it does happen.

I’ve also learned along the way that there’s a point when something shifts. 

After a time of being with Jesus in this way, being built up inside his love, becoming rooted and established in it, receiving all the love and acceptance he has to offer, the natural course of events begins to push us outward.

We go forth into a new territory, and in that territory, we are much less focused on ourselves.

It’s not so much about Jeus meeting us where we are anymore (although that will always continue to happen throughout our lives as we keep growing). Instead, it’s about us meeting other people where they are, just like Christ met us. And it’s about venturing out to meet God at our own initiative, too. 

It’s about loving God and loving neighbor. And it starts to just happen.

I think this happens because of the love of Christ compels us.

When we truly experience love, it roots us down, and that gives us the strength and room to grow branches outward. We start to grow outward, much less focused on the inner work of growing down roots from a tiny seed, because that’s what we were ultimately made to do.

But it’s a process, and each stage of that process is necessary and beautiful.

Where in the process are you?

Take Me as I Am

I was at the contemplative eucharist service at our church last night, and the Iona chant we’ve been singing recently is a simple verse that begins with the words, “Take, O take me as I am.” 

I couldn’t help but notice how appropriate those words are for me to sing right now. Lately I’ve been struggling with powerful emotions I’m not used to feeling. They rise to the surface in sudden moments, and words flit through my mind or stumble out of my mouth that seem so unlike the person I’ve known myself to be. 

In some ways, I see these emotions as quite helpful. They’re helping me know my heart in a deeper way than I’ve known it before. I’m becoming aware of things that matter to me, and of ways I’m being invited to change and form and grow and interact with the world around me in different ways than I have before.

But in other ways, the power of these emotions scares me. I’m not so sure they’re wholly good. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe they’re both. (That’s probably the case.) But the part that doesn’t feel the holiness of these emotions is the part that drives me to my knees before God, begging for mercy and wisdom. 

I’m so aware of my frailty and fallenness. 

And so this simple chant, asking God to take me as I am, provides great comfort. It reminds me that God does take me as I am, that God does meet me in this place, that God does love and accept me right here, even as the formation process of these emotions in me is yet unfinished. 

I’m so thankful for that grace. 

What is it like for you to invite God to take you as you are, right in this very moment? 

What Is It Like to Consider Going Home?

I’ve just begun reading a new book by Ian Morgan Cron called Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me. It is “a memoir of sorts” by the author and begins with an epigraph by Wendell Berry that says, “When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.” The first chapter begins with a quote by Robert Lax that says, “Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning.” 

Pretty powerful quotes, aren’t they? 

I’m pleased to share that the rest of the book is quite powerful, too — at least, what I’ve read of it so far. It is the author’s attempt to wade through the “harrowing straits of memory” in order to make peace with his history and sail more freely into his future. 

Right up front, the author says this about doing this kind of excavation of our histories:

“Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t.”

What do you think of this idea? 

Speaking from my own experience, I find it to be true. Pretty much the entirety of my adult life, from age 19 to the place I stand now at 32, has been an exercise in going back to my beginnings to make sense of them and find healing, peace, and wholeness. 

I wrote on my personal blog last night that the first big chunk of years devoted to this excavation brought pain, anger, regret, and grief. I did not find peace for many years, but I knew, all along, that peace would be found on the other side somehow. In my experience, God had clearly invited me to visit that excavation site and hunker down for quite some time.

The excavation is still happening, really, and probably will be underway the rest of my life. But the biggest chunks of history discovered and explored in those earliest of days are now, thankfully, in the polishing phase. That is something for which I regularly give thanks.

Going home takes work. It’s hard. It hurts. But I can’t imagine a more worthwhile endeavor, especially when the invitation is offered and then lived out in the presence of Jesus. 

What is going home like for you? Does the notion appeal to you? Scare you? Turn you off? Have you ever visited the excavation site of your history with Jesus as an excavation partner in the process? 

Introvert or Extrovert: How Do You Connect to God?

A couple weeks ago, I wrote the following on my Facebook wall:

I am such a homebody. I could be satisfied staying home all day, every day, with occasional trips to Starbucks to spice things up a bit.

A good friend of mine wrote the following response: 

Both sound terrible to me. I’d be depressed from being alone all the time and then adding in burnt & over-syruped coffee would put me over the edge.

As much as his comment made me laugh, it really crystallized for me the difference between an introvert and an extrovert. And it got me wondering: 

How do extroverts and introverts experience God differently? 

This is a website about formation. We talk often here of the inner landscape of the human experience, which is such natural fodder for introverts to think about and discuss (see this article). We talk a lot here, too, about stillness and contemplation and rest — again, such natural preferences and ways of being for introverts. 

What I’m learning is, this site is quite biased toward the introvert’s experience of life and of God!

Again, my friend’s comment got me wondering. How does an extrovert experience God in different ways than I do? Are still moments of contemplation ever helpful for him or her? What kinds of things draw them nearer and close to God than the things I usually do? Do extroverts reflect on their spiritual life and experiences the way introverts are prone to do? 

Which naturally leads me to want to ask you:

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you find that your introversion or extroversion influences how you best connect to God? What are the ways you prefer connecting to God?

Where Does Your Belief in God Come From?

Yesterday I invited you to consider the question, “What do you believe about God?” This had to do with considering the beliefs you hold about God’s character, way of being, and approximation of us.

Today I want to invite you into a bit of your life history with a more basic question: “Where does your belief in God come from?”

What stories, people, and experiences influenced your belief (or lack of belief) in God?