Last week, I sat curled up in my chair, journal in hand going through my yearly Examen. This is valuable practice because it provides a way for me to sit with God and ponder my last year as well as where I am headed. The invitation is to see God's movements in my life. Truthfully, He moves in and around each of our lives all of the time. He is closer than the air we breathe so the problem is not that He is not moving, but we so often live largely unaware. Stillness, reflection and silence allows us to begin to notice. For a link to the Daily Examen I used made available by our church, click here. I wrote about the Examen last week so if you want to read more about this practice, click here.
"How has my image of God changed or matured over the past year?" This question jumped off the page at me. Had I not been looking back, I may not have noticed a major shift that happened over the last year. This year has been one of a lot of inner work. Hidden motivations have come to light and my love is much more flimsy than I imagined it to be. In some areas I have been pushed to the edges and here is where I found Jesus.
Being able to experience God's heart for me in grief, in fear or when I have been hurt by another has not been difficult for me in more recent years. I easily find Him and His tenderness in those places. What I did not realize is my view of God often morphed into a more critical harsh one if I found myself in a place where I had wounded another, made a nasty display of pride in an interaction or failed in some way.
This internal view of a shapeshifting God was the root of me being overly defensive when confronted and offended more easily than I desire to be. It made confession difficult and honest reflection painful. If we can lose the favor or the love of God, that is a lot to lose and we begin to defend ourselves like our lives depend on it because if that is true, then it does. I imagine I always saw the edges - the places where my graciousness, generosity, kindness and love finds its limits - surrounded by an abyss. Struggling with my inability to love, a trusted teacher told me, "That's not a big deal. You've hit the edge of your capacity to love. That's called 'being human' and that's where you find Jesus." I realized I needed to walk to the edge and trust Jesus to take me past it.
That abyss scared me. What if I could fall off the edge into the abyss and find Him displeased with me? This led to a painfully perfectionistic internal world where I lived in fear of misstepping. Of course, nothing is ever as clear as that. I did not see it for what it was until this last fall and I did not know this deep fear lurked deep under the surface, but it affected how I lived. I was intense with my internal world and began to see this is not the spacious, restful and free place God has actually invited us into. It's a place of fear and not of love.
When I inadvertently ran into my edges this last year I did not find an abyss of shame or God's disappointment. Rather, I ran into a wall of tenderness. Jesus was waiting for me there with arms wide open, not with a look of disappointment at my failures but with tender love ready to lead me past my edges. In my journaling about my edges, I heard Him say, "It gives Me great joy to take those places in you that need my tenderness and make them whole and holy. I enjoy and savor the transformation process with you.” It is here that transformation takes place. God takes our imperfect love and transforms it with His tenderness. He takes our feeble generosity and grows it with the abundance of His grace. It never occurred to me that God enjoys the process of our transforming. We are not surrounded by an abyss of lost relationship but by a wall of tender grace. We are surrounded by Jesus. We don't need to be afraid of our edges because it is there we find Him.
