“My Character Defects and God’s Garden”
“Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” (Step 6 of 12-step programs.)
“Today, by the grace of my good God, I am ready to have God remove all my character defects. I am practicing this readiness on a moment-by-moment basis.” (A recent daily affirmation from yours truly.)
I continued my report with the following comment:
“I believe that I was indeed ready, and that God did help me to act on my defects. I have a suspicion that they are always there. Perhaps God doesn’t take them away entirely. Perhaps, with God’s ongoing presence, and my ongoing commitment to their removal and letting God work on me, my character defects will stay in remission.”
My sponsor responded to my email report with a question and a suggestion. “How about next time ask God to help you work on your gifts and strengths? Focus on the good within you.”
Good idea!
My lawn guy was here today. He informs me that the main thing is to keep the grass healthy and strong. “If we do that,” he says, “the grass will take care of choking out the weeds.”
My lawn guy is not my sponsor, but he and my sponsor seem to see eye-to-eye on this one. Maybe I put too much emphasis on dealing with my character defects and not enough focus on nourishing my good qualities. Perhaps asking God to grow my good qualities is the best way to ask God to remove my character defects.
What are your character strengths? How could God and you together grow those strengths even more? These are good questions for me to ask myself. Perhaps you might try asking these questions yourself.
“Respecting My Own Values”
This is a reprint of one of my early blog posts. Tomorrow, I’ll be fresher I hope, and so will the post be! I enjoyed reading this again. I hope you do too.
“He makes peace in your borders . . .” (Psalm 147:14, New American Bible, 1995).”
Have you noticed how many sayings we have about borders, boundaries, and related concepts?
“That’s your problem, not mine!”
“You’re not respecting my boundaries!”
“There is a line I will not cross.”
“He/she/I is/am pushing the boundaries.”
And so on!
We all want other people to respect our boundaries. Whole books have been written about this issue. That’s good! It is important that people respect our boundaries. I suspect that books which tell us how to respect the boundaries of others are less popular. I also suspect that less popular equals more needed.
But perhaps the most important topic is being at peace with our own boundaries. I’m not sure I’ve seen lots of books written on that topic.
Psalm 147:14a literally says, “He [that is, God] makes your borders peace.”
This is a very terse verse, and can be translated and understood in a number of different ways. I’m not going to tell you which translation or interpretation is best. The truth is, I don’t know.
At a very literal level, it could be taken as referring to the territory of ancient Israel. Trouble often occurs at the borders of any nation. Nations disagree about where the boundaries were, are, or should be, as well as how (and how strictly) to maintain those boundaries.
Of course, at the micro-level this is also a common dynamic. At work, people disagree as to what is and is not their responsibility. In marriage, the same thing can be observed. In divorce, these border skirmishes become all-out war.
However, whatever the verse is saying, I will tell you what I heard when I read it this morning. I heard God saying to me that I need to be at peace with my own boundaries. I have always had trouble with this.
When I was a very little person, Mom would let me go out to the yard, and would tell me to stay in the yard. I would—for a few minutes. But soon, the pastures outside the fence would call, and I would be off the races. So would my mom and older sister, who ran themselves ragged trying to keep up with my short (but swift) legs. Perhaps boundaries never come easily to small children.
What I would like to tell you is that I have gotten better with boundaries over the years. However, that would be a lie. I am not at peace with my own boundaries. This means, basically, that I am not at peace at all.
Do I believe that God has established and will protect my boundaries? If I do, I should be at peace with those boundaries.
What are my specific boundaries? My age, my physical health, my marital status, my skills, my interests, my work—all these and many more constitute my boundaries. There are times for expanding some of them, but many of them simply need to be recognized and respected.
From one angle, the Serenity Prayer is a prayer about boundaries: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change [i.e., the firm boundaries], the courage the things I can [i.e., the boundaries which can and should be expanded], and the wisdom to know the difference [i.e., knowing which boundaries must be firm, and which ones I need to expand].”
Only when I am at peace with my own boundaries and limitations will I have peace at all.
As that great 20th century philosopher, Clint Eastwood, said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
“The Magic of Bothness”
A friend of mine said the following in an email to me this morning:
“Tonight there was this speaker at the event talking about, basically what we always talk about- love, connection, non-self, etc., and he talked about this Native American saying, ‘I am a pitiful relative.’ Meaning, I am beautiful and good and surely loved by HP, and yet… I am a pitiful relative to this world around me, because we all are at some time or another. He said they say it with joy and humility, not with shame or punishment. I think that’s really beautiful. I’m a pitiful relative. I’m also a really good relative. The bothness is where the magic happens.”
People are good, except when we’re not. The recognition of these two facts and holding them in a continual creative tension strikes me as being one of the most important human truths and tasks. If we simply emphasize the goodness, we will not take seriously the very real evil in even very good humans. If, on the other hand, we only focus on the evil in human beings, we will almost certainly become cynical. We may even become completely hopeless about human nature and human beings.
“Simul Justus et Peccator,” said Martin Luther. We are “saints and sinners at the same time.” And what is this magic that happens in the bothness of our goodness and our evil? It is the magic—or better, the miracle—of God’s grace and love. God forgives us of our evil and grows our goodness into maturity.
This is indeed “deep magic from before the dawn of time,” as C.S. Lewis called it. And this magic of bothness is the magic of accepting God’s grace and love daily and also passing it along to others.
May you and I live in and live out this magic every day!
“You’re Not a Cow, Man!”
“Don’t have a cow, man!” (Bart Simpson)
“You’re not a cow, man!” (Down to Earth Believer)
In our twelve-step meeting this morning, someone proposed “rumination” as a topic. He seemed to think it was a problem for him. I myself am a frequent flyer on the rumination plane, even though I don’t enjoy flying, so I was glad for the topic.
I grew up on a farm. We had cows, and cows definitely ruminate. We didn’t call it that. The word “ruminate” has too many syllables. We spoke of cows “chewin’ the cud.” They chewed and chewed and chewed. Then, they chewed some more. They had to do that in order to digest the grass or whatever else they were eating.
As we discussed the topic of rumination (a.k.a. “mulling things over; stewing on things; obsessing”) a couple of things came to mind. First, cows ruminate in order to digest their food. I’m afraid I’m not chewing on things to nourish myself, quite the contrary. I seem to chew on things in order to make myself sick. Not smart! I ruminate on slights, big and little, real and imagined. I mull over things that I can’t do anything about. In short, I wonder who is chewing whom? I think I may be the chew-ee, rather than the chewer.
Second, I am not a cow, so why act like one? Why not let things go? What do I get out of most of rumination besides a stomachache? And so, I say unto me and thee, “Don’t be a cow, man!”
“The ‘Why?’ in Self-Negativity”
“Why to you speak so negatively about yourself?” This was a question asked me this morning by Bill, my walking partner at a local park.
“I don’t know, Bill. It’s a question my wife has been asking for the past fifty years. In fact, she probably asked it when we were dating.”
“And she still married you!” said Bill.
“Yes, she did,” I responded.
Why do I regard myself so negatively? There are probably a lot of reasons. Some of my reasons might even be reasonable. Some, not so much.
For one thing, I’ve known people who were apparently totally convinced that everything they did was just perfect. I don’t like those people. Why would I want to be like people that I don’t even like? Perhaps I value humility.
But that is about the only somewhat sensible reason. The others are darker, I’m afraid. One of those unwise “whys” is that I don’t want to raise people’s expectations too much. I am a people pleaser, and the lower I can set the bar, the less likely I am to displease.
Sometimes, I’m trying not to set the bar too high for my own self. I’m a perfectionist. There was a book years ago entitled In Search of Excellence. If I wrote that sort of book, I would entitle it In Search of Perfection. The problem with setting the bar lower for myself is that I still, in my heart of hearts, want to do everything perfect—the first time and every time.
There are probably many more reasons, excuses, and bad attitudes that undergird my self-negativity, but this is enough truth for one post. Whatever the whys, the question I need to ask myself is this: How can I get out of this echo chamber that does not really help me to become a better person?
My problem is that I know the answer, but I keep forgetting it. I believe that God loves me just as I am. Well, I believe it at the theoretical level. But do I believe it down in the trenches of individual good and bad choices, in my chronic struggles, in the dailiness of life?
I need to become a more believing believer!
“Prayers and Divine Appointments”
I was struggling with my runaway mind this morning. Not unusual, but very uncomfortable. I’ve discovered that there are some things that work to counter that tendency. One that I wrote about a few days ago is replacing not-so-good thoughts with better ones. That works well, except when it doesn’t.
Another is moving a muscle. We have the saying in twelve-step work, “Move a muscle, change a thought.” So, I went to our local park to hit softballs off a tee and walk. It helped a little, but the intruding thoughts regrouped and attacked again.
Of course, there is always prayer. That, unfortunately, is usually the last resort for this deeply flawed Christ-follower. I am reminded of a comment I read years ago. A lady was talking with her friend about her problems and ended by saying—with an air of resignation bordering on despair— “I guess we’ll just have to pray and trust God.”
Her friend replied, “Oh dear, has it come to that?!”
Bottom line: It would probably be better if I prayed and trusted God first, but I don’t always do that.
Well, anyway, I prayed. And just then, as I was beginning my walk, I saw a friend on the path whom I had not seen for quite a while. Bill and I talked. I mentioned being attacked by my own thoughts, and he mentioned his struggles with feelings of not having much of a purpose. We had both just prayed for God’s help, and there we were, walking together.
Now, of course, the whole thing could have been a coincidence. However, I’ve heard it said that what we call “coincidences” are God’s appointments.
Could be, you know! Pay attention to the so-called coincidences in your day. You might be encountering God in them.
“God Never Promised You a Rose Garden”
Mal. 1:2 “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob 3 but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.” 4 If Edom says, “We are shattered but we will rebuild the ruins,” the LORD of hosts says, “They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the LORD is angry forever.’” 5 Your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, “Great is the LORD beyond the border of Israel!”
This passage seems to reveal something nasty about God. God has loved Israel/Judah and hated Esau/Edom. There are many other Scriptures like that, but I suspect we’re missing two very important things.
First, the Bible often communicates by exaggeration. This is not just true for the Old Testament. According to the New Testament, Jesus said that we are to hate our father and mother (Luke 14:26). He also said that, if our eye causes us to sin, we should pluck our eye out and throw it away. I’ve not found many people who refuse to acknowledge that Jesus was communicating by exaggeration in these instances.
So, what is going on in Malachi, I suspect, is this: God is saying how much he loves Judah by contrasting the fate of the neighboring nation of Edom. Both Judah and Edom had been decimated by the wars and political intrigues of that time, but—speaking comparatively and in an exaggerated fashion—God had loved Judah and hated Edom.
Of course, part of Edom’s problem was of their own making. If we are honest, most of our problems, individually and collectively, are of our making. Or, at least, we tend to make the problems worse than they need to be by our own continued bad choices. In Edom’s case, they were determined to rebuild their ruined cities. Not a bad thing, but the way in which they state their determination sounds more than a bit arrogant. For anyone, Judah, Edom, or America, it is still true that pride goes before a fall. Rebuilding ruins on pride ruins everything.
There is a second thing about Malachi 1:2-5 that we often overlook: the main point. And what is that main point? I suspect it may be summarized like this. God assured Israel/Judah of God’s love. The shot back with an eye-rolling “Really?!” Their response sounds more like an accusation than a question? God says to them, “You think you’ve got it bad? You don’t! Take one look at your neighbor, Edom, and you’ll see that. You are still in existence. Edom is, effectively, not.”
I heard of a guy who got up every morning, picked up the newspaper, and turned to the obituaries. He said, “If I don’t read my name there, I make my coffee and get on with my day.” Hopefully that gentleman was grateful as he enjoyed his coffee and got on with his day.
I don’t know what God’s musical favorites are, but I wonder if he likes the title, “I Beg Your Pardon: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”!
“It’s Not About How Good We Are”
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Peter 2:9-10, English Standard Version)
Do you sometimes feel like a nobody who needs mercy but doesn’t necessarily qualify for it? Well, you’re not as alone as you might think you are.
The author of the letter we know as 1 Peter in the New Testament reminds these Christ-followers who they were and who they are. Peter is not so much impressed with the people to whom he is writing, as he is impressed with what God had done and was continuing to do in their lives. He reminds them that they were, in fact, nobodies who had not received mercy. But God had turned them into somebodies who could and did receive mercy.
And everybody needs mercy, don’t we? And everybody needs to feel that we are somebody.
Let me be very frank. I’ve been around Christians for a very long time. Christians are not inherently nice or interesting or impressive. What we are is forgiven. And maybe that’s enough.
“Waiting on the Pitch—and Other Things to Wait On”
I like to play slow-pitch softball, but I am not hitting well these days. I think I know what the problem is: I swing before the pitch is there. Needless to say (but of course I will say it anyway), it is very difficult to hit a ball that’s not there.
Waiting in general is not my best activity. I am a very impatient person. And yet, almost everything has as one of its components waiting. Waiting for vegetables in the garden to ripen, waiting for dinner to be ready, waiting on red lights while I’m driving. The waiting list is very long.
In the Old Testament, there are many verses that speak of waiting on God. Here is one of those verses:
“Wait for the LORD;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the LORD!”
Apparently, it takes strength and courage to wait on God. But why do we have to wait in the first place? Why doesn’t give us what we need and want right now?
I suppose there are many possible reasons why we need to wait. Maybe, just maybe, God’s timing is better than ours. The fact that we think we need or want something right now doesn’t mean that we, in fact, do need that something right now.
Also, there is an old saying that you don’t hear often in our on-demand-one-click world: “What we gain too easily we esteem to lightly.” Perhaps God’s delays are designed to help us better appreciate what he is doing in our lives.
But the truth—or at least my truth—is this. I don’t know why God sometimes delays things. And frankly, I don’t like it. Perhaps the psalmist had to repeat the words “wait on the LORD” because we/I did not hear the words the first time.
Be that as it may, I need to learn wait on the pitch, especially if God is the pitcher.
“Focusing on the Problem is the Problem”
One of our church pastors who had not preached before spoke for the morning service. He was very good! Nothing against our regular preacher who is also very good! One of the things that I liked about our speaker this morning is the fact that he seemed to have read my blog post yesterday. Just joking. I doubt very seriously that he had read my post, but he certainly confirmed some things I’ve been struggling with and thinking here of late.
His sermon was based on Romans 7, a passage in which Paul writes about an intense internal struggle. He speaks as if he is a man who wants to do what is right and good, but it is impossible to pull it off. Every person I’ve ever known very well (if they are honest) admit to being involved in such a personal civil war. Anybody who has ever tried to eat more wisely will be familiar with this.
Our guest speaker, said that if we simply focus on the problem of the bad things, all we get is more badness. Yes!
Our speaker also made a radical suggestion: Look to Jesus! And that really is a radical thing to do. Here’s the deal: We all want to do “it”—no matter what “it” is—by ourselves. Even those of us who believe that Jesus came into the world to save sinners seem to think that, once we have made our initial commitment to Jesus, we’re on our own. We probably wouldn’t actually admit that, but our lives reflect the fact that this is what we actually believe. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Almost fifty years ago, I said “I do” to the most wonderful person on the planet. What if I had awakened the morning after and said, “That was a good commitment ceremony we went through last night. Now, I am going to do this marriage thing without you.” That would be way beyond stupid, wouldn’t it?
And yet, that is sometimes how we approach the Christian faith. To paraphrase something that a friend said many years ago, “It is very difficult to live the Christian faith without Christ.”
It’s not difficult. It’s impossible.
Recent Comments