I wish I didn't doubt, but...

My last blog post ended like this: “In summary: praise the Lord, healing is real…”

I feel like those phrases are among those that get tossed about easily in Christian culture, and, honestly, feel like the depth and magnitude of their meaning has been significantly deflated as a result. In the language of “Christianese”, these are among a series of mystic catch phrases that make many non-believers and Christians alike, cringe and scoff. Generally, I find myself in the cringing crowd, and try to use these phrases only sparingly, when I truly feel conviction of their reality. The truth is, when things aren’t going so well, I doubt the truth of these statements, the same way any other inquisitive human would. When I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, shaking, with my stomach churning, often after a day full of praise to the Lord for how far he has brought me along this healing journey, it’s very hard to believe that healing is real, and true, and has been happening. Similarly, I can barely imagine what it must be like to believe or even utter the words “God is good” after a couple loses their unborn baby, or a single-income family loses that source of income, or a person is evicted from their home and forced out onto the street. How could a God who is good allow these things to happen? If we don’t doubt the truth, even privately in our own minds, even momentarily, how can we ever discover and fully know it?

I’ve had pretty low self-esteem throughout most of the seasons of my life, particularly socially. I always felt somehow different from the other kids, and unable to fit in, and those suspicions of abnormality were, in one way, confirmed to me in grade 3. I was hand-picked to miss a period of math once a week to be part of a mentorship group with a guidance counselor with a bunch of other socially awkward kids, the purpose being to learn how to be less socially awkward and anxious and learn how to make friends—please, parents, don’t do this to your children. Nothing says “you’re weird and unlikeable and there’s something wrong with you” quite like “we’re pulling you out of math class today because we’ve noticed you don’t have any friends, so come let us teach you this basic life skill of acquiring human friendship that you just can’t seem to figure out”. People like me internalize blame, hate ourselves very deeply for it, and also internalize that hate, all while trying to project an image that is at least likeable. When that image fails, we put up walls, isolate ourselves, and stew in our own self-hate and hopelessness, wondering why we just can’t get it together and be normal. Grade 3 me, in all my wisdom (ha!), figured that I didn’t have any friends because I was too smart, so, naturally, to project an image of likeability and approachability, I pretended to be stupid, purposely spelling words incorrectly, and producing wrong answers to math problems. For the record, it didn’t result in any friendships.

About 2 years ago, when I started hanging out with Christians, I was exposed to a lot of new things, particularly relating to charismatic ministry, that I hadn’t experienced before. My first tangible experience of knowing in my heart, mind, body, and soul, the peace, presence, and truth that God is real and loves me—that moment was powerful. It left me knowing God in a way I didn’t know existed, and I wanted that reassurance of his presence all the time. That’s not the way it works, though. The Holy Spirit is not a dimmer switch that you can turn on and off as you please, although some Christians will have you believe that, and diminish all your problems to a lack of faith or spirituality, or ability to step up to the plate and do whatever it is they silently expect you to do. Enough exposure to (or, at least, perception of) that, coupled with my tendency to internalize guilt and blame, has often made me question God’s love for me, and my place in his kingdom. Apparently God outright speaks to some people with words or images or in dreams, but I’m not convinced that I’m one of those people. I don’t doubt that those are ways by which God communicates with humans, just the notion that I am a human he wants to communicate with in this way. Furthermore, when I do encounter inexplicable voices in my head, or dreams, they’re always rationalized somehow: “you only think God is telling you that because that’s what you want to hear”, or “boy, you have some effed up subconscious to come up with those crazy dreams”.

I wish I didn’t doubt. I wish I could just believe that God is real and good, all the time. Last week, Western had a crazy worship night with like 500 people. The sheer number of people in the room when we entered was overwhelming and intimidating, but I was feeling pretty good about the Lord at that time, and he’s proven to me numerous times that removing anxieties is within the realm of his power. I didn’t know very many of the songs, the music was too loud, the lights were over-stimulating (I secretly felt like an old person at a rock concert), but I knew that God was present in that space. At one point during one of the songs, I closed my eyes and heard a gentle, but bold and serious voice: “Helen, I love you—I know you love me, please just let me love you…” And I got emotional for a sec as I tend to do, but I knew within a minute that this was an experience that I would scrutinize, and probably doubt. I allowed the thought trail to continue on: “ha, heard that one before ‘God’, I mean, voice in my head. Of course I want to hear in words that someone loves me because I spend most of my time alone or at work and seldom ever hear those words, of course that’s the first thing I’d think of that I’d like God to affirm to me”. 

But that last part though, that was different.

“I know you love me…” well, yeah, I’m a hopeless, awkward screw-up, and I’ve tried so hard to not be those things, and some days I feel like I only have hate and jealousy toward most other humans, and I’m a horrible, unlovable person because of it. I can’t put trust or hope in myself, or any other humans, or knowledge, power, or wealth for that matter (I don’t have enviable amounts of any of those to begin with), but God has proven his presence and provision through the fiercest trials, when I discovered the endpoint to what human knowledge, power, and wealth can accomplish. How can I have anything but love and gratitude to such a God? I do love him.

“…please just let me love you...” this part is challenging. I can’t even love myself. I have a knack for suffocating and snuffing out nearly every human relationship that I have ever entered for one reason or another. I feel dirty, unworthy, selfish, stuck-up, guarded, and angry all at the same time when I think about salvation. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d even consider myself “saved” because blackness in my mind absolutely rejects the idea of grace. It’s not for me. I’m not a miraculous conversion story. I’m a member of white, middle-class western society, happily blind and ignorant to most of my privilege. I look around at people singing songs of praise in church and think, “oh, how nice it must be for these people to truly accept and believe” borderline unaware of the blatant bitter sarcasm in my own thoughts. My life felt raw before I became a Christian. I didn’t feel fake or censored in front of my Christian and non-Christian friends. I felt like I could say and do what I wanted without having to face the scrutiny of “is this what Jesus would do?” or “have you asked Jesus about this?” or “what does Jesus say about that?” like Jesus is a ouija board. And then I perceive that my thoughts are misaligned with the thoughts of Jesus, so, fuelled by my own fraudulence, the cycle of self-hate continues. Isolation is a tough point in that cycle, where I feel like there’s no one who will understand this sitting-on-the-fence or on-one-side-feeling-like-this-side-wants-me-on-the-other mentality, and “nobody loves you” starts ringing through my brain but I say nothing about that to the Christians because they respond with “lies from Satan!” like he is an easily distinguishable separate ouija board (and having such an opinion is me obviously being not judgmental at all). I’m conceited, jaded, two-faced, fraudulent, sarcastic, angry, confused, depressed, doubtful, ugly, and feel like I don’t belong anywhere, yet someone is pleading with me, “…please just let me love you…”

I think I’d better figure out how to let the guard down and make that happen.

For Christmas, my mom gave me this CD, Welcome to the New by Mercy Me. At first I thought, ok mom, that’s cool that you got me a CD of Christian music because you think I’m super into that kind of thing because I go to church (I actually really dislike most Christian music—it’s just badly-written, poorly-performed, over-produced trash), but then she was like, yeah, I really like this one song on this album, and she starts singing it, and I’m thinking, what the heck? You listen to Christian music? Why? It’s crap, mom! But on one car trip to visit a friend a couple of hours away over the break, I popped it in the car just to see what it was all about. That CD has not exited my car CD player since it was first inserted. It’s a really remarkable album, exploring a bunch of different musical styles, but the best thing about it is the truth in the lyrics. They’re not bending over backwards to work scripture in there (not that there aren’t some excellent songs out there based on scripture), or repeating choruses a billion and a half times at the end waiting for  the last person to finish being prayed for at the altar call. No. They’re real, and raw, based on real human experience of encounter of God. The first track literally had me in tears while I was driving, listening to it for the first time. Check out these lyrics: (and check out the song here)

Got to live right just stay in line
You’ve heard it all at least a million times
And like me you believed it
They said it wasn't works
But trying harder wouldn't hurt
It sounds so crazy now
But back then you couldn't see it

But now here you are
Eyes open wide
It’s like you’re seeing grace
In a brand new light
For the first time

Let us be the first to welcome you
Welcome to the 
Life you thought was too good to be true
Welcome to the new

You broke your back kept all the rules
Jumped through the hoops
To make God approve of you
Oh tell me was it worth it
The whole time you were spinning plates
Did you stop to think that 
Maybe He is ok with just you
There’s no need to join the circus

And now here you are
A new point of view
And now it all makes sense
Why it's called the Good News
And oh

Look at you
Shiny and new
Look at you
You got the proof of purchase
You were purchased
‘Cause you're worth it
Look at you
Finding your groove
Don’t you dare think
That you're not worth it.
‘Cause you're worth it
Yeah you're worth it

I wish grace was simple. I wish I didn’t doubt. I wish I could love myself and allow others to love me. I’d like to have hope that all these things will happen. In my human shortsightedness, I’m blind, but that also gives me the opportunity to trust God, who somehow finds ways to love me even when I don’t want to let him.