I am Afraid Because...

Maybe I am afraid to say very much in this group...

Afraid I will be prodded so much I will lock into depressive resistance.

Afraid that some who thought I have wise counsel will change their mind and all the things I have been learning and sharing will be discredited.

Afraid that I will not get to the root lies and find true release – once again.

Afraid that what I say will be used against me either here or outside the group.

Afraid that, as usual, my mind will disconnect and shut down my deepest emotions and pain and block out access to my deeper pain and issues.

Afraid that others will try to oversimplify my problems in an attempt for a quick solution.

Afraid I will not be understood.

Afraid I will create resentment in someone's mind for being so self-focused.

Afraid I will feel guilty for telling things that I later regret.

Afraid no one will care about me deeply and openly.

Afraid someone will show me affection even though I often crave it.

Afraid that most men cannot understand some things about me as well as some women can.

Afraid I will be censured and condemned for feeling that way.

Afraid there won't be enough time to finish processing and healing.

Afraid God won't show up as dramatically as I wish He would.

Afraid of showing too much emotion in public.

Afraid of losing control of my environment and composure.

Afraid that no one will have the maturity, wisdom and compassion to take me all the way to the real source of these fears so I can face them squarely and come away freed.

Afraid that after this session that those who are here for me now will be too busy or distracted or annoyed to continue this open, honest bonding.

Afraid that after I make myself vulnerable that others will refuse to be vulnerable equally and then I will feel exposed with much shame and regret.

Afraid that I will still be stuck and paralyzed in attempts at deepening my marriage.

Afraid that I will never be able to be close and open at the heart level with my biological children and they with me.

The Heart of the Earth

This morning while waking up another thought came to me. The Garden of Eden was to the earth like our heart is to our own being. Since God designed us to live openly and nakedly from our heart He placed Adam and Eve in the heart of the world to live naked and unashamed. When they received the sinful, twisted “programming” of Satan and moved quickly to a focus on external identity in place of internal value they immediately begin to experience fear and shame and loss of personal worth. They then attempted to fix the problem by addressing the externals and looking for someone to blame only aggravating the situation exponentially.

Because of this new condition, God had to change their physical circumstances to match their internal condition. Since they had chosen to live outside their hearts He required them to leave the Garden, the heart of the world, provided external coverings for their nakedness and gave them someone to lay their blame upon—an innocent lamb. He did this to protect the heart of His new world from experiencing the same defilement as their hearts had experienced until the plan of restoration for all humanity was sufficiently progressed to allow them back into the Garden. This will take place after the Second Coming of Jesus when all the saved are introduced to heaven where the original Garden was transplanted temporarily for protection until the New Earth is restored.

Thus God illustrated how He is dealing with our own heart. He initiated protection for the “heart” of the world by personally keeping it with Him. He also protects our original hearts as He designed them with an angel with a flaming sword to keep us from trashing it completely until we learn to live from it once again in innocence, honesty and naked transparency. This is the object of salvation – salvaging us, restoring us to our original function and design. “Getting to heaven” is almost incidental as simply part of the process of restoration, not the main focus of salvation. The main passion of God in salvation is to accomplish full reunification of the broken relationship of intimacy between Him and every human being willing to accept a vital connection to Him at every level of existence. He is hungry for our affection. He craves to make us outlets and channels of His own feelings and emotions. He wants us to experience the joy of closeness to Him and to each other that He created us to experience. And He is relentless in pursuing His passion until He has drawn every willing soul into the redemption that He has provided in Jesus Christ.

Then humanity will again have access to literally live once again in the “heart” of the earth, the original Garden of Eden restored to the original earth from which it was taken so long ago. The New Earth will externally reflect the restoration that has taken place internally within all the redeemed.

And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying, "To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever." (Revelation 5:13)

“The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From Him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love. {GC 678.3}

Why Anger

The back of my brain has been quietly analyzing ideas and mulling them over subconsciously as usual. When it comes up with a possible conclusion it then offers it up to my consciousness for affirmation. These ideas are not timed as far as I can tell, they just appear when they are ripe. They formulate from inputs and updates both new and old.

One of these appeared a couple days ago and I quickly had to write it down before I lost track of it. I have been a little puzzled about the nature and substance of the emotion of anger. People have a lot to say about it and against it and often have such strong opinions about it they cannot be objective or open-minded to new views of it. But I now think that in many cases anyway, if not always, anger may be more of an “intensity indicator” of other emotions than a stand-alone emotion.

In analyzing my own experience of when I become angry, it often does not make sense for the situation. But if I carefully uncover the original feeling that preceded the anger and then see how or why anger follows it, it begins to make a lot more sense. For instance, in my case many times anger follows almost instantly after shame or fear. Because I feel frustrated by either my inability to express those emotions from fear of exposure and shame or my belief that others will not recognize the depth of those feelings, I then employ anger to attempt to force them to recognize how intense my original feeling is.

Of course this obviously is not very effective at all since I never expressed the original emotion to start with so how would they know how intense it was. But my emotional mind is not so much concerned with being logical as it is desirous of being understood. That's why someone who can have the ability and desire to look past the anger and gently expose the original emotion and synchronize with it has much more influence than simply reacting to the anger and thereby amplifying it. This too may be much of what Jesus was talking about when He said, “Do not resist an evil person”. Resistance tends to amplify the frustration whereby a gentle and loving spirit sees past it to the pain and shame that is screaming to be recognized.

Sleuthing for Identity

9/26/06

I am trying to uncover my true identity. My daughter A- asked me what I am finding – I don't know yet. How will I know when I do see it?

A clue – characteristics of my true heart are probably the opposite of the lies the gods have piled on me. And the deeper the pile, the more intense the lie, then the stronger that trait must be to take that much to hide and suppress it.

Anger is usually a cover for fear or shame – it is defensiveness.

Anger is the suppressant for compassion and understanding(?)

Fear is the suppressant of confidence, assurance, peace and boldness.

Shame is the mask to hide my value and deny it.

Ingratitude is...? tied to fear and shame? Devaluing others?

Over-affection belies my true desire to deeply connect with my wife and children.

Living From My Heart

Several thoughts stirred around in my mind this morning insisting on being captured on record before they evaporated. The issue has been raised, after one of my recent postings about living from my heart, that living from one's heart is viewed by many as a very dangerous and even heretical concept. This does not surprise me in the least as I fully expected to hear something along these lines sooner or later. Religion as we know it has largely divorced us from all understanding of even the existence of our heart, much less learning how to live from it. We have usually been led to believe that we should never trust our heart because of it's terrible reputation of being “desperately wicked”.

But it is equally true that God has promised to give us a new heart of “flesh”. “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27) Is it logical that God wants to give us a new heart but never intends for us to live from it? Do we have two hearts? I believe some of the answer to these issues we struggle with lies in the false gods that lurk in our souls purporting to be our real self's. I also happen to believe that there is a unique “blueprint” or DNA written into us of what God designed us to be in reflection of His image even before we were born or even “converted” that He wants us to become aware of and fulfill as our destiny. That is what I refer to as the “true heart”.

I am beginning to suspect more strongly that the “wicked heart” in us may actually be a “heart facade” erected there by the false gods we accumulate during our life. It is called a heart of stone and is composed of the walls we build around our hearts from our earliest experiences of discomfort to protect our hearts from pain. Because it is built around our real heart to “protect” it, it's shape looks a lot like our heart and we often mistake these walls for the heart itself. These walls are hardened over the years and reinforced by the lying gods that offer themselves to assist us in protecting our hearts from further pain and trauma. They lead us to believe that we must always avoid pain at all costs, that we must mask our true emotions and present false identities and masks to exert control over what people think about us and thereby how they treat us. We amass a very complex structure or maze of masks and appearances to be prepared for any eventuality, but primarily to keep anyone from knowing who we really are on the inside. In doing so we lose sight of our real identity ourselves and come to believe that the masquerade is the real thing.

For instance, as I was growing up I ran into a serious obstacle to many things I felt I really desired to do in my rebellion and anger. It was the deeply rooted, fundamental idea of being honest. It was drilled into me by parents and teachers, church and culture. Honesty and integrity were stressed and illustrated in dramatic stories with wonderful outcomes and strongly encouraged and enforced. I accepted these instructions and became super-conscientious about always being honest. I developed great fear of the dire consequences I might suffer if I was dishonest in any way and went to greater and greater lengths to be meticulously honest. In the process I became very reticent about making promises of any kind. I also developed a very strong reaction of intense anger and shame if anyone questioned my honesty or did not trust me about something. My mother noticed this strong character trait in me and sometimes used it to her advantage to manipulate me into altering my external behavior. My aversion to making promises even troubled me deeply when I realized I would have to make an unequivocal promise when I got married. As hard as I tried I could not find any alternative to making that promise short of not getting married.

Until this morning I have always believed that there was nothing to add to this part of my story. But as the experiences of the past few weeks have chipped away at the ice and stone surrounding my heart in attempts to find my real identity, it has occurred to me that the deep sense of honesty that has been such an intense part of my psyche all of my life was, in fact, only half of honesty. It was just an “intellectual honesty” that I many times found ways to circumvent through rationalization and creative schemes to avoid the pain of exposing what my real heart was feeling. So ironically, while externally maintaining strict honesty factually I was really being trained to be almost wholly dishonest about the condition of my heart and thereby losing touch more and more with my true identity.

The result of this is that I have become a well-groomed and self-deceived hypocrite with deeply embedded habits of thinking and reacting that are very difficult to overcome or to even perceive now. Living from my heart is such a foreign experience to me that I grapple with even understanding where to begin and how to continue. It does help to explain some of my baffling gaps in my character like my lack of natural compassion and my lack of appreciation.

Learning to live from my heart is very difficult to do after years of training for the opposite. It means for me being honest about real emotions and desires in the present tense and getting acquainted with my true heart vs. the false god heart. I am now realizing that I need compassion and pervasive forgiveness to completely replace bitterness and resentment in my spirit so that when I am under pressure and being squeezed, those attributes will be what spills out of me. For whatever is filling me on the inside is what will spill over on others when I am pushed or offended.

The thought came to me this morning that I must be a safe enough person for my opponents to confess their faults to without fear of my censure or shame. That was a shocking thought to me when I began to apply it to all the people that I am prone to criticize and find fault with. I have an awful lot of growing and maturing to do.

When I sat down for my communion time with God this morning I read this in My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, a devotional book that I have read every day for at least 5-6 years now. “If there is sin, confess it, not admit it. Are you willing to obey your Lord and Master whatever the humiliation to your right to yourself may be?

“Never discard a conviction. If it is important enough for the Spirit of God to have brought it to your mind, it is that thing He is detecting. You were looking for a great thing to give up. God is telling you of some tiny thing; but at the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself—the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.” (UHH 9-24)

The story came to my mind of Moses striking the rock in anger in his frustration with the blindness and rebelliousness of the people God had asked him to lead to the promised land. The reason God gave to Moses for punishing him over this incident was not a reprimand for not following God's orders nearly so much as for misrepresenting who God is before the world. Moses presented a distorted picture of God’s passion and spirit toward the disobedient, setting the stage for the present terrible misunderstanding about hell and how God relates to those who oppose and reject His love. We are still struggling to overcome the ill-effects of Moses' wrong choice centuries later and still largely believe the lie about God that he acted out.

It is time for new examples and demonstrations of what God is really like. He desires to incarnate Himself in me just as much as He did through Jesus and demonstrate through my spirit and actions how he feels about lost human beings. To do this He has to get me to begin living from my heart the way He designed me live, the same place that He lives, and fulfill the destiny through the identity that He created me to be. I don't know what that looks like, but He does, and He's in charge of growing me into a man that reflects this aspect of Him to bless those around me through encouragement, compassion, unconditional love and honesty of heart, not just of mind. God, you've got a lot of work cut out for you, but you have my permission to do whatever you desire to fulfill your plan in me.