Do you ever have moments where you just look at your life and think your killing it? Me to!
Do you ever have moments where you just look at your life and think your a big freaking mess? Me to!
I wrote at the end of 2020 in my blog piece 'When did I put on this maks'
As I sit here right now, I know that I have been lying to myself and to others about how I'm going. My life is one marked by a peace that follows me wherever I go - but that peace has been missing for months. I have been struggling to hear Gods voice, and it has left me confused.
But I finished by saying this
And so I want to promise myself, but this time publicly, to leave the mask off, and instead embrace who I am. I am a son of God, I live to enjoy life with Him and to share the hope of that relationship with others. I'm not perfect, I don't have all the answers, and I apologise to my future wife for all my flaws - but that's who I am, and so that’s who I will be :)
4 Months later, and it’s been one heck of a year - this time trying to recover from everything that I found in 2020. It’s like my entire life and view of myself crumbled, and now I am left to walk around the ruins deciding which pieces I want to keep, to rebuild. I don't consider myself to be healthy. I promised to stop pretending: well the reality is I'm hurting, I'm confused, and I don't know what I'm doing. But God is working through my life, He is revealing things that cause me more pain than I know what to do with, but I know that at the end there will be a resolution, that His power will come through, that his glory will prevail. I am hurt! But healing only comes when you acknowledge the pain and deal with the cause.
Sitting with my psychologist I explained to him how mid last year at church I was interning, on the core team of kids, the core team of youth, on the production team, and serving in red frogs (our young adults outreach ministry). But this year, I am currently taking a break from youth, red frogs is taking a break, I left the production team, I only serve once a fortnight in kids, and I am no longer an intern.
And so he asked me 'how are you going with church? How are you going serving on fewer team?'
'Yeah its good. It’s hard, I'm not used to it and all that, but I'm ok'
And as I said this, I felt tears well up in my eyes. And in that moment I felt it - I felt the pain. I didn't know what it was, or why it was there. But for perhaps the first time this year I allowed myself to acknowledge the pain I have been feeling.
Being a psychologist, he prodded and poked a little, asked me to identify the emotions that I was feeling, and asked me to close my eyes and try and recall a memory from my childhood that I felt the same emotions. I named emotions, I cried, we talked, and he encouraged me to create time with God to allow Him into the memory, into the hurt.
So a few nights later, with soft instrumental worship playing in the background I grabbed a bean bag, a cup of water, a journal, a box of tissues, and I sat down.
"God, I don't know what we need to deal with. But I feel like there's a lot" I said.
And I wasn't wrong. The moment I finished praying, God began speaking, explaining, and calling things out into the open.
Have you ever felt like you used to be messed up, but you've painfully dealt with it all? Me too :)
Have you ever in one moment realised that your entire life is built on misconceptions? Me to...
Over the next hour and a half God explained the emotions, the memories, the link, and the reality. He showed me that from a young age I didn't believe that I was worthy of love, and neither did I think that I could rely on the people in authority over me to give me the love that I needed. And so I learned a false truth about life - if I wanted to feel love then I needed to earn love.
God then began to bring up memories from my life
As a kid I played soccer, yet I only enjoyed it when I did well. If someone pointed out an area to improve it did not encourage me, it crushed me. The hidden reality - when someone said you could improve, I felt like a failure, incapable of earning love.
For a long time my greatest fear was the idea that my parents relationship was not guaranteed. I saw movies where parents split, and it terrified me. Hidden truth: If my parents were to break up would be a combination of rejection and failure. I would not just have failed to earn their love, failed to be enough, but I would be rejected as not enough.
Conflict? Not worth it. I became the nicest person, easy to get along with, and I backed myself to get along with anyone. Hidden reality: If there was conflict then people could get upset with me. If people are upset with me, I won't earn their love.
As a child I would work hard, I would do jobs without being asked, I would go above and beyond what was expected - I would work harder and more consistently than any of my siblings. I was often praised for my initiative and work ethic. Hidden reality: every time I was praised for my work ethic, I felt this 'love', and so I strove for more.
That porn addiction that started at a young age? It started right around the time I realised I needed to earn love. Hidden reality: a woman on a screen will never reject you, their love is easy to earn.
Relationships? No thank you - my last relationship was a nightmare. Hidden reality: the accusations that her family made about my character felt to me as failure - failure to show I was worth loving and worth respecting. Double trouble: I saw the father of someone as I am dating as a potential father-in-law, and so I was also seeing him as someone in authority that I should honour - meaning that the rejection hurt even more.
When my pastor Darryll called me to explain that due to covid, visas, and his wife Demi's imminent birth that they were going to have to move back to England I was distraught. He was a great pastor and had been one of the most impactful male role models in my life to date. Hidden reality: Darryll believed in me, he called out the best in me. And I failed, multiple times I had failed, let him down, done nothing to earn his love. Yet, though imperfect, he believed in me and called out the best in me regardless. He was perhaps the first person to convince me that he loved me no matter what, the first person I began to believe that I didn't need to earn his love. And then he left, and I lost that relationship.
Every story in my entire life that caused me enough pain to remember it now, God showed me a link to my core belief that I was neither worth loving, nor could I rely on those in authority over me to give me the love that I needed.
Earlier this year I walked into church - my only connection being one service a week where I served in kids. And I felt ...an outcast. I felt a failure, and I didn't know where my place in church was anymore. This was no fault of church, but purely me own perceptions. I didn't know how to deal with it, so I pulled away more. I would walk out of kids at the end of the service, look around the room at all the faces, and walk to my car. I was hurting, but I never stopped long enough to acknowledge it or to process it. Until a moment that moment, as I talked to my psychologist.
And I realised - I've been trying to earn love in my church community. And when that was stripped away, I no longer knew where I fit in. If I had nothing to offer, then where my friends still my friends? That's a whole big thing in itself! My friends, I have tried so hard to be the best friend that I can. I have tried to be the perfect friend to earn good friends. If I was real, and vulnerable, and allowed myself to switch of and just be me, would they still love me? If I was a burden, if I wasn't always fun, if I let my guard down with people - would they still love me?
God opened up a wound. He showed me that my life has been built on these core beliefs that I am not worthy of love and that I cannot trust others to love me. He showed me a depth of pain and insecurity that began to explain so much of how I think, how I act, and where I struggle.
So I am confused and hurting, an unhealthy mess. I cannot begin to fix this though, because as I wrote in my last blog piece, I have realised that I need to let God do things, and to stop trying so hard. I need to just sit in His presence, surrender it to Him. But this night with God was nearly 3 weeks ago and I have avoided it ever since. It hurts, its big, and it scares me. I need to deal with it but I'm not. I will, eventually I guess...
15/03/2021
23/6/21
I believe that these stories never end in a pit. It's ok to not be ok, but its not ok to just stay there. As I realised these core beliefs that had been crippling my self esteem, I began to process and to seek change. in this journey I had a moment that changed it all. To change a core belief like this, you must have truth that connects on an emotional level. If someone tells you nice things that are untrue, it will unravel, and without emotional connection it will not stick. Well I had my moment during a Sunday service at church. God wanted to teach me something, and I tried to ignore Him because 'it was a bad time'. But He pushed me. He spoke to me about loving me, reminded me of the occasions where He has shown me and told me, and not for anything that I have done.
"Did you forget that I loved you?"
Through nothing that I did to earn it, God still loved me. I was in tears, a sobbing mess. People came and prayed, and I just stayed there. But perhaps what made this such a powerful moment, the reason I am writing this, was my closest friends. They were supposed to be leaving to go to a rugby match - but they stayed. They stayed with me, prayed for me. In that moment I knew I had nothing to give, that I could do nothing to earn their love - yet they stayed. And when I asked about their game, their simple words were perhaps the most important words I could hear all year. "You're more important"
Those three words did more to heal my messy, broken perception of self than I could have imagined. I'm still a mess today - I still have times when I need to stop myself and choose to believe the truth even when my emotions say otherwise. But for perhaps the first time I can remember, I have begun to actually believe that I am loved not for what I do, for what I earn, but despite all of that just for who I am.
We are created by God, and we are loved. That does not mean that we are good, that we deserve love, that we are perfect - those are all different things. But we are loved unconditionally. I believe that to know this, to truly grasp this, is the most important lesson that I have ever learnt. I will keep struggling, I will keep failing, and through it all I will know that I am loved.
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