.written to Ardath Smith
Our time the last 2 weeks with Karen has been so healing that I've told Jim I think I need a new name. After all the things I've learned about myself and the realization in a deeper way how God truly loves me the way he made me. I want to fill you in a little before the next time we talk.
I realized in the last few weeks that though I've always been able to genuinely encourage others about God's unfailing love and acceptance of them, I haven't offered that same encouragement to the gal I see in the mirror. (Bless my dear family -and husband- who until recently I thought of as "all good-which means I'm all bad." They really love me, but they were young and are all pretty non-emotional left brain types who ganged up on to tease and criticize me, and tell me to simply "get ahold of myself" when I was moody and feeling deeply about things).
I've spent a good part of my compliant life as a strange wild artsy type trying to reconcile Me with the models for being a good Christian woman I saw all around me. Though since puberty I've read and tried to be Anne Ortland, or Joyce Landorff, or Emily Barnes or or Cynthia Heald. God did not intend for me to be them. But I just didn't know it, or know that I truly had other options. I do know this is what has drawn me to you - you BEAUTIFUL unique spiritual creature! You have mystified me!
So, for all these years I've been reigning in the deepest parts of my heart. I've been trying to put that weird wild creature on the altar with memorized verses about "not conforming to the world, but being transformed as a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to God."
I've always wanted to be pleasing to God! And from what I was learning about the world around me, I couldn't do that unless I changed who I was. And Scripture seemed to support this notion.
My whole life, I've been interpretting that and all the other verses about "to live is Christ," or "be perfect" by trying to be the idea of what a "Christian woman" is supposed to be: A stereotype ingrained by the evangelical conservative family I grew up in (my mom is superwoman, super-servant, and now is -appropriately- the Women's Ministries Director of her mega-church). Reinforced by the college I attended (Biola a bastion of conforming Christianity). And sealed by the role I married into as a pastor's wife (in a "don't rock the boat" male dominated conservative church where we served for 12 years).
Trouble is, while truly honestly trying to "live my life for Jesus" I'd been suffering a slow death from repression and trying to get my life under control, in essence: stuffing my God-created passionate personality. My creative flair has obviously not been entirely squelched--you can clearly see her manifestations in the arenas where she can be safely wild and passionate: my motherhood and my work in theatre. But outside of these two safe arenas, no one who knows me would deny that I have learned how to "behave." I have (sadly) become a competant, capable, mature Christian woman and have learned to care for and relate to others in thoroughly appropriate and acceptable ways. I've learned a fine art of figuring people out and be for them what they expect me to be. It was when we had our troubles with our teammates here and in our NOT being able to figure out how to be what they wanted us to be - the stress from that began to show in troubling physical and psychological symptoms.
Over the last 20 years, since we began dating, I've experienced unexplainable jealous anger that would occassionally bubble up and be aimed at Jim or other men, or an inner disdain for women who did fit the mold. Now I know that it came from the buried feelings of being a hopeless failure, not knowing what I want to do or be 'cause my options were unattractive or I messed things up, not trusting or believing that God is good to me (he IS good to others, but I don't deserve his goodness), wishing I fit in as easily as Jim does in the circles life has placed us, and trying to stuff my uniqueness all these years.
I've had no trouble identifying with Paul, "for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." 'Cause really, I was already dead deep inside, and heaven was a hopeful alternative to my joyless existence.
Karen asked me what I was afraid of if I were to "let go" and I was embarassed to say what I felt and saw - If I were to let go, I would start crying and never stop.
No, worse than that. If I were to let go, the roof would blow off this muti-storey cement apartment building and we'd all be buried alive in heaps of rubble. If I were to let go, and let my heart free, the earth would explode from its core and we will all die! She laughed and asked Jim who was going to tell me that I didn't have that kind of power. Of course.
But what could such strong images and fears mean?
The past few weeks have ignited the fuse to begin exploding my long-ago planted, ingrained, blossomed and root-bound notions of who I'm supposed to be. I've got to go demolish the hopeless idea that God wants me to "get myself under control" to be acceptable. I have to go back and start on a path of hope for finding out who this bizarre and beautiful creature God made me to be. So that THEN I can put her on the altar to burn up for Him!
April 2003 Discovering the Orchid Garden with Ardath Smith
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