We All Have Patterns...Bring them!

We have patterns.  Patterns we would like to hide, unacknowledged, cover up, mask.  Patterns in relationships, patterns in our emotions, patterns in our self-governing, in our thoughts. In my own life I am beginning to see them as the sin that they are. 

 

They are the things that make me snap when I am busy. The things that make me judge, blame in my closest relationships.  They are the words I don’t say that conceal resentment and invite it to nest in my heart.  They are the anxiousness that floods right under the paper-thin surface of my outside presentation, that push me to distract and power-through unattended.

“Every broken place that has not been healed and transformed in God’s presence is a hard edge of our personality that slices and dices other people when they bump up against it” (Barton, 2010)

This revealing of patterns, the calling out of that which is just so “not working” in our lives, is in good timing.  We are on the threshold of Lent.

 Ruth Haley Barton says this in a recent blog post: “I want to enter into Lent in a way that has meaning and will change me somewhere deep inside where it matters.  I don’t want to just “give up chocolate for Lent” because I like chocolate and God is the curmudgeon in the sky who wants to keep it from me.  I want to enter into Lenten disciplines that correspond to the places in my life that cry out for deeper levels of transformation. Oh God, let something essential happen to me.”

These deep levels of transformation are really our balm. Our healing and our solution to the unsatisfied places in our lives.  Unless we let it be a spiritual process in the core, we flirt with self-motored, exhausting efforts to fix ourselves.  Naming these things in the Presence of Jesus is the only way to operate in a way of transformation and avoid coping with what really doesn’t change deep down.

I attended the IF Gathering this weekend.  There was a point in the conference when over us was read a list of things that might belong to us in the form of prison bars.  That might be the culprits behind our unsatisfied places.  I want to list them here for your consideration.  Many of them (ok, all of them) grabbed me from the gut and whispered “THIS is the face of your brokenness”

·         I cling to opinions of others instead of God’s opinion of me.  I build my identity on acceptance of the world instead of you.

·         I make up stories that make myself appear to be more or less than I actually am. I stretch the truth, I present myself as I want rather than as how I actually am, and I lie.

·         There’s an ongoing pattern on sin in my life.  There is an addiction that is taking control of my thoughts, my actions, my body, and my relationships and I know that it is a pattern that destroys

·         I use blame and shame to emotionally  hurt others

·         I have masked pain with anger, humor, sarcasm, or isolation.

·         I have kept scales over my eyes when it comes to injustices of this world. I have remained silent and passive as racism and discrimination and inequality have continued to prevail around me. I have turned from and ignored those most devastated and needy in the corners of the world I am not a part of.

·         I am living way beyond my limits.  I say yes because I do not believe that I am enough, or that God is enough.

·         I carry a spirit of judgment in my relationships. Even if I don’t say it, I let it live in my mind and it can control my thoughts.

·         Fear is how I move through this life.  Timidity, anxiety, suspicion, worry, doubt, stress, live and hold me back from my true self. 

·         I have harbored resentment for something done wrong to me. I let it control my thoughts and my actions. 

Of these things, the Lord says: “BRING IT”.  Bring it into the light. Bring it to me. Name it in my presence.  I want it so you don’t have to carry it.  Don’t hold it back, don’t let it reside in your most precious places.

On Ash Wednesday, the high church tradition is to smudge ashes on the forehead of those coming to bring these sort of confessions in preparation of our most high and lifted up mark in the church calendar – Easter.  Lent summonses us to a gorgeous period of purposed weeks leading up to the celebration that is Easter. The ashes of Lent are the threshold into this period of sacred time in which we are invited in does after satisfying dose a of shedding what doesn’t serve, and drinking in the abundance of Christ replacing that real estate in your heart that “less than” once occupied.

Whether or not you have any connection to high church practices, I feel there is a metaphor in the tradition that we can receive an invitation through. We cannot fully celebrate the  tectonic shift in our spiritual reality that Easter brings that is death defeated and sin and sickness and simply surviving is banished at the cross… unless we bravely ask for those weights that we carry to be revealed to us and daringly bring them into the light.

Poise yourself! Make ready some space for this good work to unfold.

 Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful.  Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something awesome, something real.  Speak to my condition, Lord and change me somewhere inside where it matters.  Let something happen which is my real self, Oh God.

—Ted Loder