faith

The pain of being exposed; the victory of owning it

I’d never talked to this guy in my life, but I could tell by the reflection in the mirror that, with a sassy (can guys be sassy?) look on his face, he was talking to me. Weird. People never talk to each other at the gym. From across the gym, rather. Especially dudes. Especially dudes who don’t know each other.

I racked the barbell I’d been curling and turned around to give the man (he was actually more of a kid…he looked maybe 21) my attention.

“Sho…off?” he barked–sassily–from nearly 20 feet away. This was the second–maybe third–time he’s addressed me. Others working out in the room started to take casual notice.

I took out my ear buds and walked closer to him, offering an apologetic look signifying a request to repeat the question…but quietly. I’m right here.

“You showing off?” He said. Maintaining his boisterous volume, in spite of my compensation of distance between us. Everyone’s looking now.

His question made sense to me immediately. It was rhetorical, of course. I had been doing bicep curls and sharing the same 8-foot mirror space with a younger, attractive female using the same weight set. Was I aware she was there? Yes. I’m a guy. I have a subconscious radar on all of the females in the room. Was our proximity to each other completely inadvertent? Yes. Was I showing off? …No.

Kind of thrown by the awkward, for-public-consumption question, I gave a dorky “pshh”/eye-roll response and neither of us pushed the uncomfortable and painfully unnecessary conversation any further.

I’ve often said, one of my greatest day-to-day fears is being misunderstood. It’s a scary, vulnerable place for me when a conclusion has been made toward me and my character that is inconsistent with what I would actually believe, feel, do or be.

But as I continue to pray for wisdom (James 1:5) on who and why my heart/mind does what it does, I’m realizing what’s even more frightening than being misunderstood is getting called out for being who I really am, in spite of my grand attempts to cover it up. Sometimes, I think I confuse being misunderstood (“My goodness was interpreted as not good.”) with being exposed (“A truth has surfaced that I’m not as good as I present myself to be.”)

That’s a humbling revelation.

So, to tie all of this together, I realized that moment in the gym that my fear isn’t so much being misunderstood as it is being exposed. Was I trying to gain the female’s attention/admiration while I lifted weights in that gym? Not consciously. That kind of accusation would be a misunderstanding.

But…

Do I regularly perform for others to gain attention/admiration? So often that, perhaps sometimes, I’m not even fully aware when I do it? For sure. And that quirky dude — in an effort to make a light-hearted tease in my direction — quite unwittingly exposed it (me) in front of a half-dozen other gym rats that day.

Interestingly, some of the most intriguing stories in the Bible are found in people who are — for good or bad — a lot like me.

There’s King Saul who, in 1 Samuel 15 gets called out for disobeying a direct, God-sent order. God asked him to kill and destroy everything and everyone in the camp they’d been assigned to attack. Saul leads the attack and does 95% of his assignment, sparing the tribe’s king and the best animals that were too quality to kill. Saul wasn’t exactly trying to hide his wrong decision, but when Samuel approaches him on the subject, he makes emphatic excuses. Here’s one:

“But I did obey the Lord,” Saul said. “I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your God…”
(I Sam 15:20-21)

Saul’s responding here like he was misunderstood. He’s saying, “No, no, man. I did what I was supposed to do. This cool stuff we kept isn’t for us, it’s for God. This was the plan all along, right? Save some stuff for a holy sacrifice?” An explanation from Saul would be understandable if Samuel was giving him an earful in light of miscommunication. But Samuel didn’t need an explanation because he was aware of the original plan and that Saul had failed to follow through with it.

Why did Saul fail to follow through? Because he was afraid of not being liked by his soldiers under his authority. Because he was looking at short-term good (nice things, comfort) rather than eternal good (obedience leading to God’s approval). And that’s the pain of being exposed. When our ugly shortcomings are put on display for all (or some…or someone) to see.

It’s so easy to relate to Saul here. In big things and in smaller things, I have so often made excuses when I failed to live up to my assignment. I can blame it on an inadequate family system of my childhood. Or the defects of the other person/people involved. Or I can straight-up lie and pretend I didn’t know/understand the task, when I really did. Exactly like Saul did.

I have to wonder what would have happened if Saul would have just admitted that what he did was wrong and vowed to change, immediately after he was called out. Likewise, where would I be in some places in life, had I courageously owned my mess without excuses.

Like, what David did.

Later in 2 Samuel 12, David faces some of the grossest, most uncomfortable exposure in the entire Bible. David did what probably many people who were crazy-powerful — and men amped with testosterone — would do. In the previous chapter, he’d spotted a beautiful, naked woman, decided he wanted to have sex with her, got her pregnant, and — since she was already married — had her oblivious husband killed in a battle where he was left completely unprotected.

With the husband out of the picture, David married the beautiful, pregnant woman and all of the loose ends were tied up as well as a selfish, narrow-minded human being can possibly fix such a thing.

Until God sends a prophet named Nathan to the scene and calls out all of the above on David. The ramifications are harsh, but considering what David did and knowing God is just (2 Thess. 1:6), I suppose it’s a fair consequence.

If David was misunderstood in Nathan’s accusation, he would have asserted that the husband died on the grounds of being a soldier. Of course the man could have died that way. The man was fighting against people who are trying to kill him, and that’s just what happened, unfortunately. Plain and simple.

David was either trapped or free, depending on how he wanted to respond to the situation. He chose to be free. He chose to admit to all that Nathan was proclaiming as truth. And God had mercy on him. There were definitely consequences. The son conceived in the midst of all of this died seven days after his birth. How painful.

Later, God gave David and his new wife another son. Because He loved him. That son would become the wisest man to ever walk the earth and would be responsible for the Book of Proverbs, which I can’t imagine not being a part of my daily growth in wisdom and direction.

Being misunderstood is definitely a bummer. But in my pride and fear-filled flesh, what I’m truly scared of is my heart and the deceitfulness within it (Jeremiah 17:9) being exposed.

Humbly, I can relate to David’s wonderful example here, too. As I’ve grown up and dealt with the pain of my poor decisions, I’ve also faced the two doors of being “trapped” and being “free” — and I just don’t want to be trapped. I don’t want to be a liar or in denial or an excuse-maker. In the long run, it’s just better to admit to my faults and leave myself at the mercy of a merciful Abba who wants to see His broken children find wholeness through His love and grace.

I actually look forward to living more like this in the days, weeks, years to come. To find counterintuitive refreshment in the freedom that comes from my flaws and quirks when they rise to the surface. To be so OK with being in God’s hands that I really find there’s nothing to hide.

But, for everyone’s sake, I’m pretty certain from now on, I’ll keep a good distance from any females at the gym — at least when that loud-mouth fella’s around.

There’s Purpose in Now

The night’s getting late, so I don’t have time to beat around the bush with this very random mid-summer thought: winters in the midwest are rough. Especially the past several in Northern Indiana. It kind of makes my stomach turn even writing about this right now–in late July–with crickets chirping and fireflies glowing outside my office window.

There’s obviously nothing that can be done about the weather, so it’s fruitless and wasteful of time/energy to gripe about it. But this year was pretty miserable. What made it most…traumatic…was not so much the degree of cold and gloom, but the longevity of cold and gloom. By February, anyone breathing and feeling in the local population I reside is generally over it and ready for warmth and longer days with sun involved.

So when snow is falling down and piling up en masse throughout March and April, the pain cycle is very much in effect: Immobilization turns into denial. Denial becomes anger. Anger into depression. Some people never even get to acceptance…and move to Texas (Hi Mom and Dad).

For example, in late March, amidst mountains of snow in the parking lots throughout my hometown, below freezing temperatures, and a barrage of school and office closings, scores of high school and college students will return from their spring break trips in heavenly Key West, Cancun, San Diego, etc. Hit the mall some Saturday afternoon during this time of year and you’ll know spring break had just wrapped because it’s a walking sea of sun-kissed skin, beach-bleached hair and shorts-wearing. A PacSun with skinny, teen legs.

Oh, did you catch the ‘shorts-wearing’ thing?

Thirteen degrees outside with snowflakes the size of throw pillows, falling sideways from the Oh-I’m-going-to-lose-my-face freezing wind.

The situation is this: these kids–understandably–have just experienced a glorious climate for five to seven days somewhere not in Indiana and they’re now ready to experience a glorious climate back home. So they dress that way. Even in a markedly un-glorious season, where short-wearing outside the home or gym is nothing but physiologically regrettable.

When I watched this spectacle most recently, I thought: No matter how badly these kids want Northern Indiana to be warm, dressing for ‘warm’ wasn’t going to make Spring come any faster. They could wear short-sleeves all day in attempts to will the next season into existence, but until the current season’s over, they are only going to be miserable.

The concept of “seasons” has been particularly important for me to understand, identify and accept over the past few years. I’m learning to accept and respect the famous verse in Ecclesiastes about seasons and how they are all made beautiful in their own time. Not mine. Not anyone’s.

Over the past few years, I’ve sat in a couple of very painful seasons where I’ve had to live through hurt I’ve caused others (most notably to the extent of it ultimately leading to a very painful divorce), the hurt I’ve had placed on me, tremendous loss, loneliness, sadness, shame and guilt. I’ve wanted to do anything and everything to get out of those unpalatable places.

And I certainly tried. I hoped for and pursued more-than-platonic relationships with women; I tried keeping myself super busy (distracted?) with friends and activities; I poured myself into work and expected the fruit of a healthy income to pacify my voids. But I’d get into those things and realize–not only are they not giving me what (I think) I want, but they’re actually slowing me down from getting to the place my heart longs to be.

Not unlike the shorts-wearing kids in the mall, just because I was doing certain things to push a season along, those things didn’t force the next season to arrive any sooner.

In his book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero writes:

I prefer the notions of seasons to stages when describing our life in Christ. We don’t control the seasons; they happen to us. Winter, spring, summer, and fall come to us whether we like it or not.

I tend to believe that the season I am currently in is a product of the season I came out of. And the season I am heading into (at some point) will be the product of the events — good, bad or otherwise — happening in the present. And though my decisions can sometimes affect the timing of my personal seasons, God’s best timing really is up to him (Act 1:7).

**As stated earlier and maybe a caveat to what Scazerro says above, I do believe if I can do things to slow down the process, when I’m living by my own desires/perceived needs and getting off the path that really would get me to where God wants me to go more directly. This is also why I’ve come to believe everything happens for a purpose–for what it was created to do or be. There are tons of things I do daily that are not purposeful, but a choice.**

This blog is named A Salient Season because one of the most critical things I’ve learned (especially over the past couple of years) is the importance of knowing there is purpose and value in every season of our lives. Salient means “notable, crucial, important, essential, vital, pivotal” and if we see the current place that we’re in as those things–preparation for our NEXT place–it’s a lot easier to not only take this time more seriously and intentionally.

And relax.

I’ve mentioned James 1:4 in previous posts because it’s a remarkably refreshing and inspiring promise to me: “Let endurance and steadfastness and patience have full play and do a thorough work, so that you may be [people] perfectly and fully developed [with no defects], lacking in nothing. (AMP)”

Patience isn’t exactly a great time when we’re ready to move out of an undesirable situation; but to know that a loving God who delights in us far more than we delight in ourselves is making things beautiful in his time (not ours) should be at least somewhat soothing. Especially when we look at it the way I just did.

Who knows what the next season looks like. It could be warm, cozy and sunny. Or it could be an even worse storm. Either way, what we are doing with what we have and where we are now is preparing us for where we’re going, later. And I have to believe (after trying and coming up short on a variety of other alternatives) that our decision to endure, trust, hope (I Cor. 13:7), pray, serve and wait now — without a self-mandated timeframe — will adequately (fully) prepare us for whatever lies ahead.