Stop Kicking Your Own Ass

“Why hast thou smitten thine ass?”  Numbers 22:32

Call this weird, but I like to do a warm up routine before my counseling sessions.  Yes, I know I don’t really need to do it to sit in a chair all day.  But none the less, I do it if only to feel like I’m ready for whatever my clients have to bring that day.  It lets my body say, “Bring it on!”  So I sprawl out on my carpet stretch my legs and back.  I do a few push ups, a couple squats, shake out my arms, pump my fists, maybe a little shadow boxing.  Put me in coach, I’m ready.  

And then I lay flat on my back there on my rug and pray.  Sometimes its lengthy, sometimes its a two second prayer because I’m running late.  Sometimes its just a silent few breathes with my eyes closed to center my heart.  And usually then I’m just listening for anything God wants to tell me.  A little holy huddle with the Almighty.  

A few months back, I’m getting ready for game time, doing my routine, going through my calisthenics.  And on this day, I chose to lay in silence and listen.  God says right away, “You feel pressure to do this well.”  To which my heart said sarcastically, Yeah, God and the sky is blue.  It felt so obvious and so matter of fact as to be a pointless thing for God to mention. I actually felt pressure to come through on most days when I’m counseling.  So I waited in silence, letting God know I needed the punch line.  “The pressure you feel is rooted in self contempt.”  

You know that feeling after you take your glasses off when it seems like your brain muscles are trying to figure out how to see again.  And for a minute you can’t quite see straight.  Well that’s what happened next for me.  I suddenly saw my heart and life very differently.  And my brain was struggling to catch up to what God just said.

Here I was going along thinking that to carry all this pressure about counseling people was just a given, part of the job.  This is the repetitive strain injury of the counseling profession, like carpel tunnel for a typist or back pain for a block layer.  We just carry this chest full of anxiety and pressure around with us.  I actually thought it meant I was caring really well for my clients.  

And then God says this and I realize that apparently I’m trying to do more work than I have to with folks.  I’m feeling pressure to do something I don’t need to do.  And driving myself with this pressure is actually a form of self contempt.  And it appears God doesn’t like this.  

Lets talk about self contempt for a minute.  Self contempt, self hate, self loathing put simply is an inner rejection of yourself in part or in whole.  Its the act of turning on yourself.  Consider it an inner civil war raging deep in your being, leaving you divided, split as a person, no longer whole. Where this hate simmers, there can be no self acceptance and no peace.

It certainly can be an obvious thing, like the times you say under your breath, “You’re such an idiot” or “How could f#!$ it up so bad!” or worse.  I have met many people who cut themselves, pull their own hair, punch their own faces.  All are forms of self abuse and self hate.  Mirrors probably bring self contempt brimming to the surface faster than anything else simply because they give us the experience of exposure.  And as Dan Allender says, turning to contempt is the quickest way to take away these feelings of exposure and shame.  Try standing naked in front of a mirror and see what rises to the surface in your heart.  I’ve known people who literally scream at the likeness reflected back to them, “I HATE YOU!”  Others simply refuse to look at all.

I dare say though that self contempt most often festers out of sight, subverting our lives beyond our awareness.  Only in rare moments can we see our own inner hatred outright.  And so it comes as an impostor, even as things that sound good.  I certainly was living under my own version of this there in my counseling sessions, thinking I was just loving people really well by carrying all this extra pressure to come through for my clients, thinking I had to make the magic happen for them. 

Some believe its just their Type A personality.  “I’m striving after excellence, being all I can be,” yet never letting themselves rest or slow down.  Perfectionism is in this camp, that urge to fixate on every awkward conversation or B+ or out of place hair.  Yep, that’s dripping with contempt.  And why won’t you ever accept a compliment or let others pursue your heart?  Look, we know God gets the glory for what you did, but you did it with him. Not taking and enjoying someone else offering you love is self hate.  

Contempt is behind a lot of the ways we don’t care well for ourselves or others.  Self care is a kind way to treat our bodies and hearts.  And our inner hate invites over eating, binge drinking, sitting on a couch all the time, not caring for ourselves as we need.  I once told a woman that her constant choice of sales jobs was a form of contempt.  It simply did not fit her personality and only left her sleepless, frazzled, and utterly dejected when she couldn’t perform up to snuff.  And surprisingly self contempt plagues people who treat others with rage, like good ole Balaam who beat his own donkey.  As John Eldredge says, how we treat our own heart is how we will treat others hearts.  Or in the words of CS Lewis, a person plagued with self hate, "... seeks revenge, first upon the self, and then on all."

Yet there is no more sinister form of self contempt than when it masquerades as guilt.  And it so often wears this mask!  Do you know people who apologize for everything?  A friend cancelled a phone conversation with me recently because of a work emergency.  No big deal.  Life happens, stuff comes up.  Yet in his voicemail he literally said “I’m SO sorry” 5 times!   I wanted to stop him and scream, “Lighten up! I’m your friend.  I still like you. Stop beating yourself for this!”  Now I know it can be courteous in our culture to apologize for things, like being late or stepping on someones foot.  But the courteous becomes contemptuous when we apologize all the time.  Most of this stuff is out of our control.  

And then their is the religious version of this guilt.  When people tell me in my office they “just feel so guilty” it almost always means they are in the midst of an inner war of self hate.  God simply just does not convict like this.  And he certainly does not want us to hate ourselves after we’ve sinned.  He wants us to be cut to the heart and even weep when it fits.  In its truest sense, to be sorry is to be sorrowed.  And sorrow is an almost opposite experience than self hate.  As Paul says make clear in 2 Corinthians 7, this sorrow from God always has the intention of making us more alive, of restoring our dignity, of setting us free, not drowning us in shame.

And maybe that’s the most important part of this whole discussion.  God is not on the side of your self contempt.  He will not join you in kicking your own ass.  Nothing good ever comes of self contempt.  Nothing.  

I’m getting my battle with pressure a lot more these days as a counselor.  Admittedly sometimes its right in the middle of a session when I catch myself working way too hard.  And you know what God says most of the time when I realize it?  Just simply “I love you Sam.”

Resolute

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  Mary Oliver

“Every entity persists in its state of being - at rest or moving uniformly straight forward - except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.”  Newton First Law of Mechanics

I was tempted to call this the most uninspiring advice on resolutions ever blog.  But I wanted to leave a little room for the possibility that you might get something out of it.  Actually, it may be the most earthy blog I’ve tried to write.  Consider it a gritty pep talk from a coach on the sidelines of your life, now a week and change into the year of your new Resolutions.

I think resolutions are great.  A new year is a fine occasion to set yourself on a path, a new goal, a new dream.  But your birthday or anniversary could work just fine too.  Or next Monday at 3 pm when you get your credit card bill and the blood drains from your face - that will be perfect also.  Which is to say, I think resolutions are truly born only when we have a moment of clarity about our lives or a moment of inspiration about the world. This could be a good moment, like reading a great novel and deciding you want to write more or leaving a movie and wanting to change the world.  Troubling moments bring us inspiration as well, like getting winded going up a flight of stairs and realizing you need to quit smoking.  Or waking up the morning after a terrible fight with your spouse and deciding you want counseling.  Put simply, resolutions must begin in a moment our hearts are engaged.  They must begin with desire, with passion.

And then they must continue with something else - a little something called suffering.   When you set yourself to wanting one thing, your life is going to have to make room for it.  Your life is going to have to change.  You will have to give up something else.  I know that’s terribly simple and obvious.  But the change, the suffering is the thing I underestimate most often in goal setting.  Our lives have momentum and they will most easily continue in a certain direction.  Its Newton’s first law: Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.  So whenever you make a heart felt decision in your life, you can change its course.  But it will require physical, mental, emotional, moral exertion.  Suffering. The force to get you there must come from you.  God rarely does all the work for us. 

And suffering often feels opposed to desire.  That’s why I bring it up.  I think misunderstood suffering is the greatest threat to all our passionate endeavors, all our goals, all our resolutions. Rarely do people stop wanting their dreams.  Its more that the pain of realizing those dreams becomes too much.  It starts to feel like its no longer worth it, like its all misery and no joy.  And so we quit.  We lost heart.  All because we begin to think that suffering is our enemy.  

Here’s the funny thing, you will only suffer when the change you want is something good.  Seriously.  Nothing is going to resist you going more in debt.  Nothing will stop you from wasting more time watching TV or surfing the internet.  You will have a very easy time eating more junk food and consuming more sugary sweets in any form.  Living a half assed, wasted life will be surprisingly easy.  Its as if an unseen force in the world only opposes you when you want to change your life for the better.  Steven Pressfield (the Legend of Bagger Vance author) deals magnificently with this in his book The War of Art.  He calls this unseen force Resistance.  “Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher sphere. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually.” And if its not some higher calling, “Relax... Resistance will give you a free pass.”

This Resistance wants you to waste your life.  Its no wonder Jesus called this resistance Evil and said it would try to “kill, steal, and destroy” all real Life.  And its behind how we misunderstand our suffering.  If Resistance (aka Evil) can’t convince us to lay down and die in a boring life, it will try and get us to misunderstand our suffering.  Resistance wants us to believe that the suffering just isn’t worth it, that its not a path to true pleasure, that its actually making our lives miserable and not better.  It wants this because it wants to destroy any possibility that you will actually make yourself and the world better.  It is evil after all.  

Here is a real world example form my life.  

Two years ago, my wife started the year working out more, doing something called Crossfit.  I rolled my eyes at the time, thinking this to be the latest fitness fad.  But her coworkers were doing it together and so whatever.  Now this will be obvious to you once I say it but as a counselor I sit in a chair a lot.  Like all day minus the bathroom breaks.  Its a lot of emotional and mental work but very little physical work.  I shake hands. I lift my water bottle or coffee cup to my mouth.  That’s it.  So I had no leg to stand on in scoffing at her efforts.  

A month into that year, three things happened in my life.  I had a birthday.  It was an ordinary birthday, but a mile marker of sorts.  And it got my wheels churning on how I’d been living my life.  Around this same time, I started not sleeping well.  It forced me to admit just how much anxiety I lived with from all the emotional intensity of my job.  And I clearly had no physical outlet for my stress.  Add to this that my wife was looking more amazing and was clearly more fit due to the fact that she had slow down for me on walks.  This was my moment of inspiration.  Something passionate in me said I needed to move, I needed to commit to some sort of exercise, for my body and my heart.

So I started Crossfit.   

It was painful.  I found out its a lot like gym class for adults.  On steroids.  I was sore for a month straight.  Literally.  We were asked to do things like pull ups and hand stand push ups and double time jump ropes.  I could not do any of these things.  Add to this that the only class I could make because of my job was 6 AM.  And I am not a morning person.  I love night time.  This was a major adjustment for me.  This was opposed to my entire way of life, let alone my body.  My whole being had to change to make room for this new activity.  

Now almost two years later, I still get up 4 days a week at 5:30 am and workout. I did it just this morning. Its not all that much easier to be honest.  My body is sore even as I write this.  I still fight a deeply difficult battle to get out of bed.  The worst moment for me comes on the drive to the gym.  I am tired, my car is cold usually, and I think about all the exertion I will endure in just a few minutes.  Nothing about this is easy.  I am just used to the mental battle.  And Resistance knows I don’t make any decisions to quit on the car ride there.  Or I would.  And I now know all too well the sweet reward of my body being tired because it spent its energy on behalf of something really good.

Dream really big.  And then get to work suffering for it, armed with the knowledge that Evil wants you to roll over and die a boring wasted life, but God is on the side of all good endeavors.  May this make you more resolute, more determined in your dreams.

Lust, Part 2: The Hangover

“Misogyny: from Greek misos ‘hatred’ + gunē ‘woman.‘  The hatred of woman.”  Websters dictionary

“No sooner had Amnon raped her than he hated her—an immense hatred. The hatred that     he felt for her was greater than the love he'd had for her.” 2 Samuel 13:15

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”  Samuel Johnson

After college, still searching for what to do with my life, I worked a tour of duty as a construction worker.  It paid my bills and let me stand shoulder to shoulder every day with men.  I needed that badly as a rather green-under-the-ears young buck myself.  I was still learning what this manhood thing was all about.  And I absolutely received my education in the best and worst of ways.

The first job they assigned me to was a massive re-roofing project at a local university.  We spent our days perched high in the air, laboring hard in the baking sun.  The university had just begun its fall semester, evidenced by the scurrying mass of college students pouring in and out of buildings like swarming ants.  This giant ant farm of course ran classes in predictable time intervals and the men on the construction crew quickly deciphered this pattern. In response, they developed their own daily ritual.  Here’s how it went:

Someone in our crew, having spotted the first trickle of students, would put down his tools and shout, “Here they come, boys!” And as if called to stand attention, the men in unison set down their tools and did an about face.  Slowly students made their way into the doors of our building, unknowingly parading themselves below our aerial view.  And this elicited a gush of commentary among the men, “Look at that body... Check out that pair... Thats a nice set... that behind is smoking...I’d like to get with that...”

The first time I witnessed this, for a few seconds I felt like a foreigner experiencing a perplexing new custom in another country.  And of course it hit me pretty quickly what was going on here.  And then I was overcome with horror, not the self righteous how-could-they kind.  I had known lust in my own heart for sure.  My horror was seeing how dark the act of lust could become.  These men were openly, brazenly objectifying these women, seemingly without any backlash of shame.  And actually, objectifying puts it mildly.  This was mutilation. They saw only body parts.    These men had become beasts.

There is more to say about lust. I said last time lust gets a man stuck, gets him enraptured with a woman, caught under a spell that keeps his heart from God.  But its not just that a woman feels slimed and a man loses a chance to worship God.  Lust never ends there.  There is always an action-reaction, left-foot-right-foot effect, a vicious undertow.  Lust has its porcelain hugging hangover as well.

Once the fruit has been eaten, the lust enjoyed, the spell gets broken pretty quickly.  You won’t need a cold shower anymore.  Two things will be there to greet a man: embarrassment and disappointment. Disappointment because he will face the fact that a woman is unable to absolve his suffering.  She is not enough to be his God.  She cannot reach into his chest and remove his suffering or sooth his aching heart.  In the right way she can be a taste of that, but the feast is always with God, as my counselor Lottie Hillard has said.  It is called fantasizing for a reason, an act that lets him escape reality only so long.  He will sober up soon enough. 

And this is made even worse by the fact that he embarrassingly ran his heart into a brick wall trying to make her a god.  He’s been played a fool.  Caught with his pants down as they say.   Jokes on you, bud. “Hey everyone, look who fell for old Helen of Troy.  Look who thought he found the fountain of life.”  Really this embarrassment could be a fledgeling form of genuine guilt, a moment to admit his own indecent act made him a fool.  And real guilt could lead him back to God.  We will get back to this in the next blog. 

But the greater temptation, the most well worn path, is to blame the woman, as in resent her, much like the first Adam with those contempt-laden words, “That woman you put here with me, she gave me the fruit.”  Can you see the wagging finger?  As Dan Allender says, contempt is the quickest way to get rid of feeling ashamed and exposed.  So a man turns to resent the woman to reduce his embarrassment. accusing her of seducing him, not owning that he abdicated himself.  Lust almost unavoidably leads to the hatred of women.  This may be its darkest most horrifying evil. 

Simone Weil said, “There are only two things piercing enough to penetrate our souls: beauty and affliction.”  What men hate in a woman is this power she possesses.  Beauty is literally an unstoppable force.  A woman’s allure, her beauty, her grace will move a man, disarm him, blow past his defenses on a beeline to his heart. And in this way a man will feel like the victim of a woman’s beauty, like he was seduced, set up.  He will feel lied to, like her beauty promised more pleasure or adventure or transcendence.  Of course there are some women who do seduce with their beauty.  Yet, a man always has the power to decide what he will be moved to do.

You may remember the story of Amnon, son of King David.  He admired his half sister Tamar’s beauty far beyond mere obsession to the point it literally made him sick.  He could not stop at just admiring her beauty.  He had to have her, consume her.  And so one day he feigned illness asking that she be sent to nurse him back to health.  And once alone he raped her.  She pleaded with him to stop, to have compassion on the devastation this would bring on her, to remember her humanness.  Only after the rape did her humanity become real to him again.  And of course, she was not enough to satisfy him.  The spell, the obsession, the worship of her broke.  “Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her”  2 Samuel 2:13-15.

And with a heart full of hatred, most men seek revenge. A man will try to dominate a woman in order to feel more powerful than her beauty.  A man wants revenge on this power.  As Dan Allender says, “Lust is not about sex. Its about power.”  Lust is a man’s attempt to dominate a woman.  To strip her of her power.  Rape is the obvious picture of this.  Rape has nothing to do with sex.  The pleasure in rape lies in the momentary experience of power.  Notice how the savage brutality of war and genocide always involves murdering men and raping women.  These are not lonely soldiers looking for a little taste of love, but savages looking to slake their thirst for power. 

And notice how specific these acts of war are to the glory in each gender.  How do you dominate a man?  A man is most powerful in strength, as a defender.  So overpower his masculine strength, his ability to fight back, by killing him and thus you’ve seemingly shown your dominance over him. How do you dominate a woman in her greatest power?  Overpower her beauty, her tenderness, her nurture, her allure, her open relational heart by raping her and thus it seems you’ve won, you’ve conquered her.  Rape is a violence on her beauty and tenderness.  The murder of a woman after this is almost an after thought.

There are many other ways to take revenge on a woman, most in forms far less obvious.  I heard some staggering statistics recently about the pornography industry.  Worldwide, about 12 billion is spent annually on pornography.  Of this 12 billion, only 2 billion is spent on what is called soft porn, leaving 10 billion or over 80% being spent on violent, hardcore forms of porn.  Could the connection between lust and violence be any more clear? 

Even the church is guilty of this immense hatred of women.  St Augustine, who ravenously struggled with lust, said, “Women should not be enlightened or educated in anyway.  They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.”  Tertullian, another church father, unapologetically spewed his vitriol against women when he said, “And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? ...You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.” 

It persists today.  One of my wife’s best friends serves on her church’s worship team.  After church one Sunday, her pastor chastised her for her choice of outfit that day, saying that it was causing men to stumble.  She ranks as one of the most modest woman I know.  His words carried a certain conclusive scorn to them.  Little did he realize her beauty invited worship just as much as her singing. 

I dare say most men do not exude such an obvious form of hatred for women.  More commonly, it comes out when a man just withdraws emotionally from his wife, never letting her get close enough to know his heart.  Or one who constantly tells his wife she’s just too needy.  This is how I quietly hated my wife’s affectionate heart for a number of years.  It could be a man who won’t commit to a woman in a dating relationship.  Or one who won’t date period.   I’ve also met men who control the finances and never let their wives have a say in it.  And need we list how often the Biblical concept of submission gets misused in marriages to dominate women?  These are all ways to hold power over a woman, to keep her from really moving us.

All this feels like so much, doesn’t it?  This may have been the hardest blog to write. There is something about being innocent of evil that I’ve walked right up to the edge on.  My hope has been that by peering over into the dark abyss you would see enough of the evil to want to run.  Lust is a brilliant ploy of Evil to take out good men and use them for evil ends.  And few men know this is apart of the process of lust.  As a repentant woman hater, I certainly never thought my lust was this bad.

I do hope you are left more roused than accused as a man - roused more deeply to forsake lust and its sinister ends.

Lust As I See It: Part 1

“That shy but driving curiosity we have about other human bodies will be with us all our lives...  Lust of the eyes and of the flesh is only the perversion of a perfectly natural and healthy curiosity, healthy because it is the Lord Himself Who has made us curious, Who has caused us to be fascinated with one another’s flesh.  It is God Who has given the naked body its shining glory and Who has done so for the sole purpose of making it a marvelous harbinger of His Own infinitely more lustrous glory.”  Mike Mason

“Yet we've so narrowly missed being gods,
      bright with Eden's dawn light.”  Psalm 8:5 (Message)

"In everything which gives us the pure authentic experience of beauty there really is the presence of God."  Simone Weil

My wife, being an artist, loves beauty.  She is moved to tears so very often at the sight of it.  And she can spot it just about anywhere.  A small flower on a walk.  Well written lines in a book.  But her favorite place to see beauty is in the human form, especially the female figure.  That may sound odd, coming from another woman.  Its not a sexual thing as much as an aesthetic thing.  She has an objective understanding that a woman is beautiful essentially.

If you’re familiar at all with the world of art instruction, you know that many artists grow their talents on a steady diet of nude drawing classes.  For those unfamiliar with this practice, it is just like it sounds.  A model disrobes and presents himself or herself to a group of artists who visually trace every curve, mole, and love handle of their bodies.  And with full artistic license, they interpret what they see on paper or canvas with pencil or paint.  Amanda loves these classes.  And we have the evidence to prove it.  Her art studio is plastered with nude drawings of men and women in various poses.  And because she is good, they are very realistic renderings. 

Okay, pause there for a second.  Let me invite you into a vulnerable part of my story.  Pornography used to be my drug of choice, a place I went to numb my pain or loneliness or just about anything else I didn’t want to feel.  I consumed the pixelated naked beauty of a woman for the high it brought.  So you’d think I would have a major problem on my hands, that my wife’s love and my idolatry would mix like oil and water.  Or better put, gasoline and a match, inflaming the lust of my heart. 

In reality, my wife’s art has been balm to my broken sexuality, helping to heal me from the destructive effects of my porn use.  Yeah, this surprised me too.   Her art is the antithesis to pornography.  Of course, the nakedness is the same in both pornography and nude art.  But porn capitalizes on the beauty of a woman, abuses it, treats it as a thing to consume, enslaves it to an evil end.  And the intent of a good artist, to set apart and make sacred, could not be more different, helping the audience see the body, curves, and form of a woman as a thing to behold and honor.  I’ve actually found myself having to look away from my wife’s sketches at times, not out of shame, but out of awe for such a sacred form.  I’m beholding something that pornography never allowed me to see. Secretly, I am her understudy, as she trains my eyes to see beauty again. 

William Blake said that, “The naked woman’s body is a portion of eternity too great for the heart of a man.”  When a man meets a woman he meets an awe inspiring reflection of the beauty of God.  She, whomever she is, embodies the beauty, the tenderness, the allure and grace of God.  From her body right down deep to her soul.  This is true of every woman, no matter how deeply marred, flawed, or covered up. 

I think God meant for the beauty of a woman to move us.  Of course a man wants to enjoy her.  Of course his heart warms to her, wants to look again.  He’s getting a glimpse of what his God is really like.  Seeing a woman’s beauty should move a man, rousing him to worship.  And I think that’s the movement God wanted. We’ve totally annihilated that impulse in a man in our Christian culture, calling it completely lust.  We teach men to bounce their eyes at the slightest hint that something’s stirring within.  But the impulse itself is not lust, the curiosity, even the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty is not lust.  She teaches us to be enraptured with God. 

I once had a woman tell me, “Oh, I like it when I catch a man sneaking a glance at me.  Its flattering.”  She paused for a second and then said sternly, “But then there are those guys, like I had at the grocery store just today, who creep you out, who keep looking, and you feel slimed.”  I’ve learned woman call this a man’s Creepy Factor.  And, guys, you don’t want a high creepy factor.

Let me say it again: a woman is meant to move us, but what she moves us to do is where good and evil wage war.  Will we lust or will we worship?  She is not to be worshipped.  Lust happens when a man mistakes who he is to worship.  Lust kills his impulse to worship God, the true source of this life giving beauty. Instead, he lets his heart receive a woman’s beauty without any inhibition and unknowingly bows his soul to her, worshiping her like a god.  He has tasted something in her beauty and hopes she might offer him relief, assuage his aching soul, or rid his life of pain for a moment.  And in so doing, he shipwrecks his heart. 

Rolling Stone magazine recently did an interview with shock jock Howard Stern, a man who unapologetically consumes a woman’s beauty down to its dregs.  Soberingly Howard reflects on his life style with brutal honesty, sharing a realization he’d come to.  “After my divorce, I was running around, picking up women. then all of a sudden, it dawned on me that I really didn't need that much sex... They were using me for my fame and I was using them for their beauty, the whole thing seemed empty.”

A man who consumes beauty has forgotten that a woman is a created being with feelings, a self, a story, weakness, fears, struggles.  In a word, he has forgotten her humanness.  She is a fellow human being, suffering in her own right.  We are never to forget that she too is finite, breathing air and being human.  She is not beauty itself.  She is beauty embodied.  A woman is an eternal paradox: a finite being bearing the infinite beauty of God.  And when she’s become a god, he can no longer relate to her like a human.  He degrades himself in elevating her. And any companionship or friendship he might otherwise enjoy with her is lost.  Unless the spell of lust can be broken.  As Paul, a friend of the main character in the movie 500 Days of Summer says, ““I think technically the girl of my dreams would probably have like a really bodacious rack, maybe have different hair, probably be more into sports.  Truthfully, Robin [my girlfriend] is better than the girl of my dreams.  She’s real.”  

I have a friend who frequented a bank with a very beautiful bank teller.  Plagued with what rose up in his heart when he saw her, fearing it could easily become the beast of lust, he confessed this situation to his pastor.  And the pastor told him this simple word of advice: get to know her.  Ask her name, ask if she has kids.  It was brilliant advice.  The pastor knew that getting to know her would bring him back to reality.  She was not a god; just another struggling human being.  And it worked.  She never stopped being beautiful, but he learned she was a single mother with a kid and a painful divorce, a fellow human trying to find her way in life.  The spell was broken. 

We will always be moved by beauty.  Its how an alive heart is wired.  That’s not the part we have to change.  Its what we’re moved to do that matters most.   Can you conceive of a world in which the beauty of women only all the time moved men to worship their God?

Calling a Marriage Truce

“We just had a World War III here in our kitchen
We both thought the meanest things
And then we both said them
We shot at each other till we lost ammunition.”  Sara Groves

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  Philo of Alexandria

The year is 1914, the dead of winter, during the Great War.  Along the Western front, German soldiers are dug in against the British and French. This had been and would continue to be a very bloody war with casualties for all sides numbering in the millions.  Though at this moment in the war, it’s Christmas time.  And after some brutal months of costly conflict, an eerie calm has settled in over the battle line.

Christmas has been stirring other odd things among the men.  Under cover of nightfall, spontaneous Christmas carols pierce the cold damp air replacing the usual gunfire.  And now that its Christmas eve, the singing almost takes on a call and response nature between trenches as they trade renditions of Silent Night.  The German line is aglow with candle lit Christmas trees, warming the desecrated landscape.  Men even shout Christmas greetings to the opposing side.  And all of this between supposed staunch enemies.

And then the odd became the unimaginable.

The bravest in the bunch, caught up in this momentum of shared human warmth, abandon their trench positions and only protection from certain death to walk out into the open towards the other side.  To do so, they had to pass through the dreaded No Man’s Land, named for obvious reasons and riddled with dead bodies in case you forgot.  But this is no sneak attack.  These men are daring certain death and treason to their country to offer a friendly handshake and hello.

And it worked.  That Christmas, men by the thousands eventually poured out of their trench positions and fraternized with their "enemies" in the middle.  Only a few men were shot at, and there are reports that apologies were made for those shots.  They exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, a nip of alcohol if they had it.  They shared pictures of loved ones and traded war souvenirs.  Soccer games broke out, a makeshift stuffed shoulder sack as the ball.  The men took the chance to bury fallen comrades.  There are even stories of some giving each other haircuts. 

A truce between enemies in the middle of a brutal and bloody war.  All started by Christmas carols.  It still baffles historians.  The truce lasted all of Christmas day.  And as one British soldier, Murdoch Wood, said, “If we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired."

I sat with a man just this week as he described his marriage struggles to me.  Unprompted, he said, “Its much like trench warfare I guess... I throw my grenades and show throws hers.”  I chuckled with what songwriter Linford Detweiler calls the laughter of recognition.   I hear it articulated this way time and again with the couples I counsel.  And I know it in my own marriage at times. Trench warfare fits all too well.

When a couple sits down on my couch, that six inches of space between them is no less dangerous than that wretched deadly space called the No Man’s Land.  Stick your heart out and its liable to get blown to bits.  I once had a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan say he could more easily handle anything thrown at him in combat than the discord in his marriage.  He courageously coped with threat of gunfire and IEDs, even negotiated insurgent surrender.  But the threat of rejection from his wife shook him to his core.  You may say that seems exaggerated, even laughable.  Just pay attention to your heart in the next marriage or friendship fight that comes your way.

When a couple is at war, every ounce of tenderness or vulnerability is quickly covered up.  Their faces turn hard as steel as they look at each other, choosing the best weapon they can reach for in their arsenal.  I can almost hear the grenades whizzing overhead as they fight in front of me. Sometimes a spouse will turn to me and share just how painful it is to be fighting, often with tears.  And for a moment I see her humanity, openness, and suffering in it all.  But when I ask her to turn back and tell her husband what two seconds ago she told me, she looks at me as if I am crazy.  Facing a spouse-turned-enemy that exposed seems absolutely foolish in a war. 

You know what?  No one really wants to win in a marriage fight.  I’m serious.  We settle for winning when we’ve given up on getting love.  All we really want is a place to be vulnerable and get love.  And that picture of the wartime Christmas truce may be the most inspiring picture of how you get back to love.  Eventually someone has to brave the divide.  Someone has to get vulnerable again, not in the name of surrender, but to call a truce.  And the difference is that its not about winning.

That Christmas day, those impenetrable, merciless military defenses melted away not by a show of power and consequent surrender, but through a truce, a mutual simultaneous agreement to disarm.  Those men put down their guns willingly when they realized the humanity of their enemies.  These were guys with families and children and lives and hopes and desires and a heart beat.  Not evil incarnate to be hunted and shot to death.

The humanity of another person may be the most difficult thing to reject.  If your spouse cusses at you, its so much easier to cuss back.  But if they risk vulnerability, melt into tears or apologize, you have to really steel yourself to retaliate back. Its clear that what can get behind the most hardened defenses we can create is the vulnerability of another person.  

Dan Allender points out some fascinating things about Jesus teaching to turn the other cheek.  He suggests that Jesus is not asking us to be kicked like a dog but calling us to risk a show of our humanity.  To turn the other cheek is to say to your enemy, “I’m not going to hit you back, I’m not going to run away, but I am going to make you look me in the eye.”  It invites your enemy to look into the very face they just slapped, a chance for them to recognize your suffering and soften their heart.

Turning your face is usually what it requires, with an apology, with tears, with finally spilling just how terrifying it is to be rejected.  A fascinating thing happens when someone in a marriage takes this step of vulnerability and the other person is ready to respond: it invites touch, usually even before words.  A strong grasp of the others hand, a shoulder rub, a hand on the leg, an outright hug, the wiping away a tear.  Touch is the unspoken language of truce and its the hardest way to bullshit your vulnerability.  Touch is the way people in love communicate.  Sue Johnson says, “It seems we are truly bonded only with those we touch.” 

Could anything be better than kissing the face and feeling again the embrace of your enemy-turned-lover?  And you wondered why make up sex is so good.  Vulnerability begets vulnerability.  Touch begets touch.  Go risk your heart and find out how sweet it is to disarm.  It is your only chance to get what you really want: Love.

You Do Well To Be Angry

“When Jesus saw her sobbing and the Jews with her sobbing, a deep anger welled up within him. He said, ‘Where did you put him?’ ‘Master, come and see,’ they said. Now Jesus wept.”  John 11:33-35 (Message)

“Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry—but don't use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don't stay angry.”  Ephesians 4:26 (Message)

“Surely the wrath of man shall praise you.”  Psalm 76:10 (ESV)

Jesus friend Lazarus died.  And let me offer my own paraphrase of what followed: Before Jesus wept, he got really pissed off about this.  Its right there in the text, terribly neutered in the NIV version, emasculated down to “deeply moved.”  But John, who witnessed our red faced furious Savior, wanted us to know about it and so there it sits, whether we like an angry Jesus or not.  And what, may you ask, angered him?  Call me a master of the obvious, but I think it was the loss of his friend.  Not much to miss in context there.  The pain he felt in this absurd world made him really, really mad.  And roused by the passion of his own rage, he was moved to tears.  His anger moved him into his sorrow.

I can relate to Jesus.  No I did not resurrect a friend from the dead.  But back in college I had a similar experience of anger.  The summer of my sophomore year, sitting at home on a lazy Saturday, I was restless for no good reason at all.  Unable to shake it or name it, I headed out the door for a stroll in the woods, thinking as Norman Maclean once said that “...a lot of deep inner questions get no answer unless you go for a walk in the woods.”

Soon my wooded path dumped me into a clearing, a meadow warm with the light of afternoon sun.  I felt summoned here.  And at that, a deep anger welled up in me.  From my guts, I let God have it, cuss words and all.  There was no holding it back.  I think this startled me more than it appalled me.  But only a few F-bombs into the whole experience, with no time to restore my reverence, I lost it.  I broke down weeping.  What came out was a deep, deep longing for Jesus to hold me, to feel the arms of a man around me.  I was weeping for a father’s embrace.  Yep, I could name that desire clear as a bell.

I walked out of that forest not a little shaken but forever changed.  I’d found a deep well of grief within myself.  And I was helped by the most unlikely friend: my anger.  That day began a long but fruitful process of grieving and healing the wound I carried from my dad.  I have a wife, a better sense of my heart, and a much better relationship with my father all because of that day.

My counselor Lottie Hillard told me once, “A man must walk through the door of his rage to get to his heart.”  I think she’s right.  Anger is a very passionate emotion.  It lets us know something matters deeply to us.  Its there to move us.  Its a kind of fuel, a psychic energy, a bodily get-up-and-go experience.  And in this way, anger can be a very helpful thing, giving the ole‘ heart a jump start when we’re stuck or just plan resigned.  It offers a constant invitation to enter our inner world more deeply and recognize what matters most to us.  Any strongly held passion or conviction with require you to be angry.  I believe this to be especially true for men, though certainly translates to women also.

If you’re skeptical at this point, good.  You’ve got reason to doubt me. I’m encouraging people to get pissed off.  And when do we ever see people using their hot temper to deepen their lives?  Good anger seems about as oxymoronic as dry rain or honest politicians.  We have so very few examples to follow of indignation used well.  My goodness, I can barely qualify my cussing session with God as good.

We have bar fights.  We have road rage.  We have abusive fathers and husbands.  People go postal in our world.  That’s what we do with anger.  We simply blow it off, release the pressure on a wall or a door or a passive aggressive jab at a spouse.  We fly the flag of our fury.  Why sit and feel it when we can vent it?  And all of this is a waste of really good anger.  It rarely leads to deeper questions about what really may be stirring within.  So many people get stuck here with the car in park and the engine revved, stubbornly unmoved by their anger and maintaining a safe distance from the deeper waters of their hearts.  If all you ever do is get angry with your anger, you expend your passion and gain nothing from it.  You stay a pissed off shallow man.

I love Paul’s words translated in the Message, “Go ahead and be angry... Don’t stay angry.”  In other words, keep moving when you’re feeling provoked.  Anger is not a destination, just a place you pass through.  We have to let it carry us along.  In this sense, good anger takes work.  Though incredibly rewarding, its not an easy process.  How does experiencing your pain and the injustice of the world more acutely sound?  Do you want to weep more?  Are you ready to be more intimate with God?  Are you willing to feel more passionate and vulnerable in relationships with people who may hurt you?  Okay, then submit to your anger.  Let it undo you.  And make it a part of your prayer life.  As Dan Allender has said, “Getting angry with God will save your sanity, help keep you from going crazy in this messed up world.” 

I stood in line at one of those movie vending machines at McDonald’s a couple weeks ago.  The line stacked about ten people back from the machine.  Slowly we snaked forward, the man in front of me standing patiently at first.  Although, his furrowed brow should have been a dead give away he wasn’t going to stay this way for long.  A few sighs later and there was no denying he was about to blow.  “People please!  Pick out a %&$*# movie!”  The crowd went silent.  We all stepped away from him.  His previously playful young daughter walked back to their car, hanging her head in utter embarrassment.  The folks in front hurried alright.  And he got his movie along with a gut full of shame.

What if, instead, he bit his tongue, drove home, and called a close friend to talk out what was irritating him?  Or punched a punching bag for an hour, talking himself through the anger behind each punch?  What might have transpired had he put on some angry music and journaled?  Or gone for a walk in the woods to vent with God?  Who knows what stood just beyond his impatience and how feeling it might have changed his life?  Maybe he lost a friend that day.  Or his job.  Could be he’s waiting for a second child and his wife is infertile.  He might be going through a dark season with God.  Maybe he’s been longing his whole life for his father to really love him.  I don’t have a freaking clue what deeper waters awaited him.  I do know he had a chance to become a more deeply loving and alive man, if he had been willing to tune in to his heart.  But he wasted that chance and that passion. 

So what’s got you angry these days?  What’s hacked you off?  Where do you have a burr in the saddle?  Wherever your anger is, there your heart will be also.

Time is a Terrible Healer

“Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good.  Time does not heal it.  The spell must be unwound bit by bit with backward mutters of dissevering power.  Or else not.”  C S Lewis

“There are some things that time cannot mend.”  Frodo

“You’ve got stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it.”  U2

I should be over this by now.  I sipped my beer, as a friend sat unaware of the thoughts brewing in my heart.  Apparently, my poker face worked better than I imagined.  I needed it today.  I was already having my bluff called.  He had asked for this meeting to intentionally confront me with the undeniable evidence that I had wronged him recently.  I spoke ill of him in a joke that told a little more truth than I wanted.  “Sam, that hurts...”  Now I gulped my beer. “...You can be so guarded in our friendship at times, like you keep me at arms length and don’t want me to come near.”  I had to admit this was all true as well as the fact that I guard myself because I am actually really threatened by him. 

And inside it suddenly felt like someone dimmed the lights and started a movie reel of several old moments in my boyhood.  Seriously.  There was the moment in 6th grade, standing in the middle of a pickup football game, I could no longer hold back the agony of realizing I never got passed the ball by my friends because I really sucked at the sport.  That powerless feeling punched my gut and doubled me over better than any bully.  From that day forward I stayed inside during recess and played chess with the nerds.

Another moment came across the screen.  Its junior high and I’m at a sleep over with a group of the guys - pizza, a movie, and an all night wrestling tournament to see who’s the strongest amongst us.  Its my first match and I have to take on Kyle.  Kyle and I had history of this kind already.  He was my 7th grade nemesis, terrorizing me constantly.  We’d sorta become friends since then.  But now in a showdown again, he had me pinned in 2 seconds flat, him giggling some sinister laugh the whole time.  He took me and my sense of strength out in one foul swoop.  

What are these doing here?  My old wounds were surfacing as fresh as the day they were dealt.  But of course these memories were here.  These were the moments when I came to believe I could never be a match of strength with my peers.  I must be inherently weaker.  My only hope I concluded to be my ability to guard myself from them.  Apparently, I’d been living like that for some time now.

How could I still be struggling with this? It happened so long ago, what does it matter now anyway?  If I had a dollar for every time I heard this in my counseling office, I could see people free of charge.  Obviously, I feel it too.  I have those things that come back to the surface from time to time and they feel so ancient and old and forgotten. 

Most of these things are born from the painful events of our past.  It is the nature of the human heart when inflicted with pain and left without a loving embrace, to hide itself deep within, to dissociate as we say, to tune out.  Given a choice between fight or flight, most times our hearts run away.  We go numb or repress the hurt deep within.  We all do it.  Its a coping technique.  Most times, though, after we’ve escaped the danger, we don’t process the hurt.  That’s the problem.  Try and just forget about it, we tell ourselves.  We may even have others telling us to just let the balm of time do its work. 

Time alone has never healed anyone of anything.  Sorry to have to break it to you.  Even with your body, when you get a cut or break a bone, its not time all by itself that heals your injury.  Its what your body does over time, the healing processes that kick in, that repair the break or mend the wound.  The same is true for your heart.  There is a process of healing that must be entered into.  What you do with those wounds, with your heart, over a period of time - that’s what heals.  Time and attention, as my friend Joel says.  Time and attention.

Paul said famously, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”  And every married couple hangs there head in shame whenever they hear this because eventually we all have a fight where we go to bed steaming hot mad.  Although its a lot easier to sleep when you’re not mad at your spouse, I don’t think Paul meant his statement as a simplistic list topper for some set of marriage “rules of engagement.”  I really don’t think this passage is about marriage or even just anger.

I think Paul’s offering more of a metaphor for time, that what we do with time is as important as what we do with our anger or anything else going on in our hearts.  I hear him pleading, “Do not let too many days pass on what’s stirring within.  Too many dusks will tempt you to forget about your anger or pain or sexual abuse or divorce and just let if fade into the shadows of memory past.”

Paul says this way of life, “...gives the devil a foothold.”  Yikes.  By letting something important in your life slip into the long forgotten past, you give the devil real estate in your inner world.  And evil would love nothing more than to dance you around like a marionette and run your life without your even knowing it.  Its the way I could unknowingly hurt a friend without realizing it.  Some old wounds in my past, long forgotten, had shaped a certain way of relating to my world, my friends.  And that was bringing harm unaware.

I sipped my beer again.  And over the rim of my glass I noticed my friends hand shaking just a little bit.  Was he actually nervous about sitting with powerless me?  The boy in me dropped his jaw in disbelief.  I apologized to my friend and let him in on the movie reel playing in my head, the boyhood wounding I’d suffered here before.  “Sam, you swing a big sword.  It makes it intimidating to come to you.  But I want to be your friend.”  He took the risk to love me.  This was not a friend to fear, but one to lean into.  He was offering a hand up to the boy. I can tell you that day brought great healing for me, started a process of paying attention to a way of relating that I have long forgotten in my boyhood past.  A part of my story came back from darkness into light.  I felt like I got more of my heart back that day.  I did. 

Don’t forsake your healing to the hands of time alone.  Your story must be told to be healed.