Month: May 2019

This week I turned 49 years old and began my 50th year of life. My birthday week started with dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse and ended with a gathering of friends and family in my backyard.

Over the week, I have been reflecting on the life I have lived thus far. Highs and lows. Victories and defeats. Good, bad, and ugly.

I could write a book on what I’ve learned, but let me share a few nuggets of what came to mind…

Some lessons are only learned from experience.

I have read more books than I care to count, listened to more sermons than I can remember, spent hundreds of hours in therapy, and journaled thousands of words. But until those words manifested in my life, they were just ideas and concepts.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I tend to get stuck in my head and overthink things. There are moments where I know all the right things to say and do, but they remain in my mind. They don’t become lessons learned until I act on them, sometimes finding success and other times failure.

This is not only important for self-reflection, but also as I deal with others. Often I get frustrated because someone doesn’t seem to “get it,” but I need to remember they may not have had an opportunity to learn from experience yet. I need to step back and provide the opportunity for them to find that success or failure for themselves. Simply preaching at someone or telling them what to do is usually the seed, not the sprout or plant. Experience is what life needs to grow to it’s full potential.

Sometimes life just sucks.

I have spent much of my life trying to control my environment to avoid pain and fear. While feeling better in the short-term, it typically results in stunted growth and emotional and spiritual immaturity. Unfortunately, I have too often learned that the hard way.

My experience of childhood sexual abuse (CLICK HERE to read my blog about that) caused me to develop coping skills for numbing pain and fear. While serving me well in my childhood, I carried those coping skills into adulthood and often avoided difficult situations, bypassing necessary steps in my growth.

Let’s be honest, there are times life is painful, agonizing, and unpleasant. Between the unhealthy extremes of numbing the pain and allowing the pain to overwhelm us, we must seek a healthy place of engagement with the difficult realities of life. It’s not a fun place to be and all of us work to avoid it to some extent or another. But when we can sit with the difficult emotions, we will find growth we may not have even realized was possible.

In order to live, we must learn to die.

Every day I am one day closer to death. Every moment this body grows a little older. Death is an inevitable exit ramp we all must take some day.

My last breath is not my first death, but my last. Every day before that, we must learn to die a little. Die to our pride. Die to our self-importance. Die to our mechanisms for avoiding vulnerability.

Dying to live may seem counterintuitive, but it is precisely the path to living. Deep inside we each contain a True Self, our essence, our core. It is who God made us to be. But life has piled pain, shame, abuse, neglect, rejection, self-righteousness, judgmentalism, and a host of other wounds and callouses over our True Self. It is only through the death of those layers that we can slowly discover that essence inherent in each of us.

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know and how much there is yet to discover. However, this pathway is teaching me to think less of myself so I can think more of myself. By dying to myself a little more each day, I am learning my true value and self-worth, and discovering how I fit in the overarching narrative of God’s redemptive dream.

This weekend I spent 24 hours alone at a retreat center. No phone. No internet. No contact with other people besides the staff.

I read, journaled, prayed, walked a prayer labyrinth, sat silently, reflected, napped, and took a few strolls through nature. I listened to birds, breeze, rain, and rushing water, watched a hawk for several minutes, observed fish swimming in a moving river, and spotted a herd of nearly twenty deer grazing in a small meadow.

It was a day to listen rather than speak. Reflect instead of reacting.

So let me ask something. Have you ever known something but had a moment where it became significantly more clear? I had one of those moments yesterday. Here is my epiphany…

Until we learn to be alone, we cannot truly be present to others.

Most of my life, being alone has been a struggle. I needed noise, activity, an adventure, or another person.

I’m guessing all of us struggle with this to some extent. Being alone, truly alone, forces us to listen to the voices we often want to ignore, the ones that say things we don’t want to hear.

Voices saying things like “you’re not good enough” or “you’re a failure.”

What I’m discovering is those voices drown out the small, still voice beneath the rubble that is our broken lives. They are echoes of the struggles and disappointments we have all faced.

When we can be still and alone with our thoughts long enough, we can start to hear the Voice deep inside of us, the voice that has always been there.

This Voice says “you are loved” and “you are accepted.” This Voice declares your true worth isn’t found is what you did or do, where you live, how much money you make, or how many times you have fallen. This Voice speaks to the inherent goodness breathed into each of us.

This Voice was present in the moments of silence. It was audible in the rushing river. It spoke through the herd of deer. It whispered in the labyrinth.

The challenge is that we each have to hear the Voice ourselves. We can read all the books, hear all the sermons, and see all the quotes we want. But each of us has to do the hard work in our own lives to clear the space inside.

The other voices in our head and the vast access we have to entertaining ourselves are in an ugly dance, a dance that continues to distract us. How many times have you turned on the TV, picked up your phone, or gone somewhere just so you didn’t have to be alone with your thoughts?

I had a significant realization this weekend about my own life, a brokenness hidden deep below the surface. And being alone provided the space to hear it.

I certainly have not arrived on this journey and will stumble more often that I care to admit. But I was reminded in a very powerful way this weekend that the best way to be present to your life in this moment is to learn to be alone and listen to the small, still Voice that dwells deep inside.

It was a warm summer day. The sun was softly shining in the window of his apartment. It was like any other day that summer as I sat in his living room, until it wasn’t.

He started talking about sexual encounters with coworkers. Then he pulled down his shorts. And then my life changed forever…

Shortly before I became a teenager, I became a victim of sexual abuse. A family friend. Someone we had known for years. But on that day, he was anything but a friend.

I don’t know if that was the start or simply the catalyst of a life lived in darkness. Did this day, this moment, drop a match on the gas puddle that had been a childhood filled with abandonment?

I don’t have all of the answers, but I have questions. These are questions I have been exploring for the last four years since I stepped from behind the facade and exposed the darkness to light.

For decades I lived hidden, shame and unworthiness the voices constantly screaming in my head. They handicapped my ability to maintain real friendships. They contributed to the failure of my marriage. They fueled thoughts and behaviors forever etched in my mind.

I don’t share these words for sympathy or pity. There is no time for that. For the last several years I have engaged in therapy, reading, meditation, confession, and a host of other exercises to combat the evils that have haunted me for years.

This is much more to this story to share, but today I’m taking off the mask. I’m shining light into the darkness. And I hope, in the process, that someone else will find the courage to confront their demons and seek the healing I thought I would never find.