Having a Heart in a Sometimes Heartless World
Scripture focus: Because the stakes are so high, even though you’re up-to-date on all this truth and practice it inside and out, I’m not going to let up for a minute in calling you to attention before it. This is the post to which I’ve been assigned – keeping you alert with frequent reminders – and I’m sticking to it as long as I live. I know that I’m to die soon; the Master has made that quite clear to me. And so I am especially eager that you have all this down in black and white so that after I die, you’ll have it for ready reference….2 Peter 1:12-15 The Message
The disciple Peter calls God’s people to right remembering. His letters, written all those years ago, still cry out to us – begging us to expand our view. This is a challenge. In unhealthy families, children have been trained from an early age to NOT listen to anything outside the limited teachings and beliefs of the family itself. It’s often in the best interest of the offender if the offended “just forget about it.” In the book of 2 Peter, Peter is expanding the view of early believers who had been knocked off course by some bad believing on the part of false teachers and lying religious leaders. We can learn from this guy. We can also learn from others who have studied and even lived in a dysfunctional family.
“There is a word for what happens when we try to forget painful memories instead of dealing with them straightforwardly. The word is ‘denial.’ ” David A. Stoop and James Masteller, Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves, p. 190.
“As children we are developmentally and constitutionally incapable of understanding that our parents may be sick. We don’t see that their sickness is the reason they do the things they do. We experience the neglect, the abandonment, the verbal, sexual, and physical abuse, but we don’t understand it – we don’t see the sick codependent logic that fuels the abusiveness of our parents.” Robert Subby, Lost in the Shuffle, p. 93.
“In dysfunctional systems the catastrophe that hits us is a continuous one and denial becomes a way of life, rather than a protective measure to be used only in extreme circumstances. The pain of living in a dysfunctional system is akin to slow torture as opposed to dying an instantaneous death. Day-by-day, year-by-year, decade-by-decade, we crawl deeper and deeper into a shell of denial, defensiveness, isolation and emptiness that is fueled by our shame and embarrassment at the thought of anyone ever finding out what is really going on inside of us. That is the nature of dysfunctional systems – they are closed and implosive, ever more self-destructive. In that sense, they are just like malignant tumors in the body.” John and Linda Friel, Adult Children: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families, p. 102.
So here’s what I want to remind you of – in the middle of this study on forgiveness – it’s possible that there are some offenses – either yours or someone else’s – that have gone unacknowledged. This is a stumbling block to forgiveness. Without having a clean slate, it’s going to be super hard to experience transformation. So much of our energy is expended keeping up the wall of denial. I am praying that if you are feeling spiritually stuck, maybe it is time to think about how denial might be messing with your mind. Have you been offensive – has it ruined relationships with others – and you don’t even know it? Are you trying to live in uneasy, shallow, unspiritual states of forgiveness because you’ve not known what real forgiveness entails? No worries! Just checking! Expanding our view, reframing our memories, telling ourselves the truth all the time – these are essential skill sets, especially so if we’ve grown up in the land of denial! I love knowing that we have a God who loves to rescue and revive the distressed and distraught!
Recommended reading: Lamentations 3 and 4 in the morning; Hebrews 1 and Psalm 75 in the evening
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