“He who has ears to hear, let him hear."  Matt 11:15

“ Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle.  To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” —Fred Rogers

I'm attempting to write a book.  I've been attempting this for way too long...several years now.  It is about me growing up to be an emotionally healthy adult and how God transformed me when I quit pointing my finger at my husband.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 14

Along this pathway, God became very silent. I groaned, moaned, complained, and whined. I blamed Gene for breaking all the rules. He really wasn’t breaking all the rules, just all of mine and how I believed things should be done. When I couldn’t get him to fall in line, I pointed my finger at God and asked, “Are you really going to let him treat me this way? Really?” I look back now and understand why God was so silent. He doesn’t take too kindly to a spirit of entitlement. I was wearing it well and still digging my hole. Gene’s way versus my way . . . not necessarily wrong, just different. I thought it was him, but really, we were both wrong! You have heard the statement, “It takes two to tango. Might I add here, that if you think the problem is “out there”…that’s the problem.  Trust me…been there done that.
 
Pictures speak loud and clear. This insight came only after I had disciplined my children many times, sat with them with their reactions to my discipline. Crying, angry young children are in no frame of mind to listen to explanations of why they received discipline. The brain doesn’t work that way. However, there comes a time, after they have calmed down, and they are sad, rather than mad, that they would come back and sit in my lap to be comforted. Then I could explain why they needed discipline. It is at this point that I say with great love, “This is the reason mommy had to . . ..” Now they can listen and receive what I’m saying because the brain is calm, and the pre-frontal cortex is back online, and listening and understanding is now functional.
               
                                                                                  The Armor is Cracking
DANGER AHEAD! BRIDGE OUT! We missed the signs. I remember thinking something is terribly wrong here. I had what I thought was a pretty good plan worked out in my mind. I read that in the Bible somewhere! NOT! I read and then created my own reality—if you do this, then this will happen. Where did I go wrong? Still a bit blind to the truth, I’m sure you would agree. I forgot or didn’t know about that little verse in Proverbs 14:12 that reads, “There is a way that seems right, but the end is death!  I began to consider all my Bible school, upbringing, and what I knew was true about God. This was some clear thinking for a moment. I decided only one of two things could be true: either God was the God I learned about growing up, or there was something wrong with me. I decided to trust the truth I knew about God; therefore, decided there must be something wrong with me.” I suddenly realized a bigger truth. When I started on my “very grown-up journey,” I tucked Jesus in my back pocket and said, “Let’s go this way.” About eight years into this journey, as it was all falling apart, I looked back over my shoulder, and saw Jesus standing at the crossroads, just standing there watching me. I wonder if that’s what the prodigal son’s dad did, just looked down the road watching him go. (Luke 15:11)
I realized I had been in the pilot seat all these years trying to tell God what I was going to do, figure out how I was going to do it, and get the results I envisioned, and I expected Him to be on board! UGH! Now I had to return to the crossroads and start over again. I went back and repented of my short-sightedness. I handed Jesus the steering wheel and promised to let him drive. This becomes a reoccurring theme in my life, repenting of my short-sightedness. We were muddling through the dark forest called the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I continued to unravel emotionally. To make a long story short, I was just beginning to realize I was a huge, may I repeat, a huge part of the problem. A God coincidence? Mind you, I was still pointing my finger at Gene. A man asked another man, “What is the greatest threat to your marriage?”  The man answered, “I am.”  G.K. Chesterton responded to a similar question, “What is wrong with the world?”  At the end of his short response, he wrote back with only one sentence, “I am.”

I was at the altar at church bawling my eyes out, begging God to fix my marriage—or better, this was another of many “fix my husband moments,”—when a Sunday School teacher knelt beside me and asked, “Carol, why do you want Gene to become a Christian?” Well, my pea brain was thinking in nanoseconds. “What?” Surely this must be a trick question? Isn’t it obvious? It seemed rather obvious to me that it would help our marriage if he would straighten up and “fly right!” My right! So, I did not answer with the obvious reply. I waited. Then this godly man asked me a second question. “Do you want Gene to become a Christian so he will become a better father and a better husband, or do you want him to become a Christian so he will be a better son, and God will be glorified?”

OH MY! UGH! Suddenly the revelation hit, the lights came on, and I recognized the selfishness of my prayer. I wanted Gene to give his life to Jesus for selfish reasons—I did want him to be a better father and a better husband more than I wanted him to be a man that would bring glory to God. Ouch! First-order desire fulfilled, and second-order desire follows. Imagine that? My desire for my husband to be the spiritual leader of our home is legitimate, but that needs to be my second-order desire. My first-order desire would be that I would be transformed in this journey; God would be enough for me, even if my husband never became the spiritual leader of our family, and Gene would find God along the way as well. I hate to admit this, but that wasn’t anywhere on my radar! Ugh! Nailed! Re-focus! So, I repented and prayed:
 
God, please change my heart, open his spiritual eyes and ears, and let Him hear for himself. Let him hear so he can be a better son to you, so he can give you glory and praise. So, he can show others your grace and glory. Praise God for first things first. All else is secondary. His relationship with you God is first and foremost. I can wait because of Jesus; God will work out those things that are not just exactly right. And please teach me to be patient, to focus on myself to become the person You want me to be if he never, ever, changes!
 

When you have been called out and set straight...repentance is a good thing and the only response.

If you think the problem is  "out there!"  That's the problem.  God is working on you! 
 

The first mention of shame in the Bible Is in the Garden when Adam and Eve fled from God’s presence because they had disobeyed Him and were well aware that things were very different.

Scripture tells us initially “They were naked and not ashamed.”  Then suddenly one act of disobedience and now we read, they were naked and hid themselves because they were ashamed! 

I remember reading this as a child, thinking naked meant naked…no clothes on.  I am sure that's true since Adam and Eve had no need for clothing in a perfect environment, and I do mean perfect.  Perfect harmony first with themselves, second with each other and most of all with God. There was delight in everything, imagine that? This is harmony at its finest.  The complementary rolls that God had established to work in perfection no longer worked as God intended. The woman would have a sin tendency to disrespect her man’s role of leadership and the man in his sinfulness would tend to abuse his authority and even crush the woman.

Both have great difficulty stepping into their role as God created. Both can be aggressive demanding and or passive, avoiding. Now emotions are heavy and hard and difficult, and we attempt to avoid them at all costs.  We attempt to avoid pain, in any way possible, escaping reality.

In our journey of the life that we are now living we try to escape the bludgeons of assault, betrayal, passion and loss. For most of us the easiest emotion to express is anger…which hides what we are really feeling.  This anger covers over and kills any other emotion that we feel, as it is always a secondary emotion. We feel hurt, confusion, sad, then anger. We escape sadness by opting for shame and we bypass loss by giving into jealousy or resentment. We use one emotion on top of the first to hide from one another, and to escape the pain that we feel.

Our emotions reveal how we’re doing with God.
Am I moving toward God with awe and gratitude or am I turning away creating false gods? As we turn away, we turn to anything that will ease the pain, the hurt and remove the burning like fire feeling inside of us.  We turn to may offerings, food, alcohol drugs, shopping, exercising, screen time, scrolling, numbing out on the 10th reel we’ve just watched, and now we have new ways to numb our pain… Cutting...Anything we turn to other than God becomes an idol. Before we had screens of all sizes, we had TVs. We could sit and veg out in front of the TV hour after hour, day after day. This is what my husband did when he was in the hospital in Japan after being wounded in Vietnam. There weren’t many options with his arm in traction.  His day consisted of meeting with doctors, procedures and more procedures, going through physical therapy, sitting in bed, watching TV, eating, sleeping, day after day…repeat.  Of course, I’m not sure what else one does when every movement hurts, even breathing hurts. There wasn’t a lot of other options. God uses all our emotions to reveal us to us, he’s revealing our heart to us if we stop long enough to listen. How can we understand God’s righteous and holy jealousy for us, for his people if we don’t experience our own human envy and jealousy; however, ours is much different from God’s.  To comprehend deeply the heart of God, we must seek to understand and feel and experience and deal with these emotions he gave us. 

Both jealousy and envy involve a furious demand that our soul not suffer. His jealousy is pure and holy because he loves us and wants us close to him and he knows what’s out there that will destroy. The heart is an idol making machine…much like children’s bubble machine.  Running to that “thing” is creating an idol as we attempt to protect self from any possibility of pain.  Despair is a refusal to struggle… the fear of hoping lest I be disappointed. First by choice and it just becomes what we do, automatically without thinking. Losing the ability to hope, and continue the struggle, despair sets in.

SHAME - Good, Godly healthy shame vs toxic shame

• Guilt – based on our actions: I did something wrong
• Shame says there is something wrong with me.
• Healthy, Godly, rightful, holy shame is a good thing. It keeps us from stepping of the boundaries But toxic shame keeps us in bondage and the fear of being exposed, making a mistake and being discovered as phony.
• Shame then comes in, exposes my failure and I get stuck in it.  I demean myself as it becomes something sinister, and toxic.
• Shame exposes me as ugly beyond words. Nothing cuts to the core so personally as shame. It justifies avoidance and sometimes violence. Our fear of being exposed will cause us to retreat and protect ourselves at any cost. I condemn myself and speak to myself, name calling, with perfected character assassination causing a slow but inevitable death of me – the real me, God created me to be…free. 
• Shame is a flight from intimacy. Shame is withdrawal, isolation, drains energy and withers our desire to engage. It’s one of our deepest fears of being caught without defense, without cover and condemned to unrelenting humiliation.

 
We hide…just as Adam and Even did, from others and from ourselves.

Consider these 4 emotions.

• Anger
• Grief
• Shame
• Sadness

I'll pick this up here this next time.  Stay tuned.