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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
Fortunately, the heartbeat of the universe is the heartbeat of its Creator, our Father, not of those we have hurt.
There are two deadly sins that tend to afflict us if we don’t trust God to work evil for good. The first is self-pity and the second is self-accusation. Both bind us to the pain of our past and distract us from our mission in life.
Consider Joseph; he could have given in to self-pity as he considered the betrayal of his brothers. They had robbed him of his freedom, his family, and seemingly his future. But he instead chose to discover the hand of God in the terrible crimes committed against him. He held on in faith through his sufferings, and this enabled him to find so much good in them that he had little reason to dwell on his losses.
He also could have given into self-accusation, blaming himself for not seeing the “writing on the wall” with his brothers, but he chose not to live in regret. Even more impressively, he chose to do what he could to free his brothers from regret. He knew how they would feel when he confronted them with what they had done, so he said: “…don't feel badly, don't blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives” (Genesis 45:5, The Message).
Joseph’s brothers needed to understand God’s sovereign control of the universe so they could see their crimes from the proper perspective. Only as they looked through the lens of His loving redemption could they have a healthy outlook.
I believe it is worthwhile to speculate how Joseph came to these sorts of conclusions. I suspect they were driven home to him as he watched the men with him in prison. Those who fell to self-pity came up with an excuse for everything. Their parents weren’t good enough, their friends had done them wrong, and society was out to get them. They saw themselves as victims, and their sense of self-righteous helplessness locked them into a lifestyle with no good future.
On the other hand, those who fell to self-accusation magnified their own sins to the point where they became victims of their own shame. They turned into prisoners of their negative perceptions and failed to grasp that God was greater than their limitations. He was more than able to forgive them, restore them, and give them a new life.
Joseph understood what the negative forms of Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow could do to people. This led him to help his brothers through these emotions by presenting their sins in the light of God’s plan. They were the nation of Israel – God’s chosen people. They had a glorious future in which self-pity and self-accusation were out of place. God was weaving even their wrongs and hurts for good. They didn’t need to be ongoing victims of their own or anyone else’s sins.
While I was writing this book, I had an experience which helped me to come to grips with some of my own self-pity and self-accusation. In the summer of 2008, I needed a tree removed from my property. I had recently lost a good deal of money in the stock market, so I didn’t want to pay the hundreds of dollars it would cost for a professional to cut down the tree. I figured I would save money by cutting it down myself.
I prepared the tree and had my wife pull on a rope to make sure it fell in the right direction. It was next to a road, but I figured that even if it fell on the road I could quickly clean it up. Unfortunately, as I started to cut, I realized that I couldn’t see if cars were coming on the road. If the tree were to fall in the wrong direction, I might not be able to stop traffic, and it could hit an unsuspecting motorist. I also watched the wind change directions and push the tree toward the road. With a rush of adrenaline, I came to the conclusion that my over-confidence and poor planning might get someone killed!
Since I had already started cutting, it was too late to wait for a better time. I quickly ran to look for a neighbor willing to stop traffic while I finished cutting. I anxiously knocked on doors until I found a couple who were willing to help. We ran back to the tree, only to find that every time the wind had blown in my absence, it had leaned a little farther over the road. It was now dangerously close to falling, with my wife valiantly pulling on a rope to hold it back!
My neighbors stopped traffic, and I cut the tree so that it fell harmlessly. Then I quickly cleaned up the mess.
Afterward, I felt a deep, pressing Fear and Guilt over my carelessness. A dark sense of my culpability threatened to grab hold of my soul and drag me into paranoia. I knew I had made a blunder that could have killed someone, and this made me afraid of my weaknesses. How could I know when I would make the next stupid mistake which would really hurt someone? A frightening presence seemed to press into my consciousness, claiming that I was too dangerous for the world and needed to drop out before I hurt someone terribly.
This menacing feeling had been under the surface for years, but I had resisted it. Who could live with that sort of demonic self-accusation in his consciousness? Still, it had continued to plague me regularly, so I had angrily quarantined the emotions associated with it in my heart. By refusing to let myself feel them, I was able to more easily ignore their darkness.
I was doing a good deal of writing on the early chapters of this book at the time of this tree incident, and God was using that writing to uncover layer after layer of coping mechanisms I had put in place to shield myself from painful emotions. This had led to increased joy as I discovered the discernment and wisdom I needed to handle my inner life rather than cutting myself off from it. I was returning to the emotions that had become too much for me, and God was helping me to nurture them to maturity.
The menacing guilt and fear I felt over the tree incident were some of those emotions. When they showed up again, I remembered why I had quarantined them. I was tempted to return to my bad coping mechanisms, but this would have aborted the process of emotional healing I had been enjoying. I cried out to the Lord and told Him that without His help I was likely to lose my newfound freedom. I needed to find His Appointment so I could continue with the work He was doing.
After praying, I sensed God saying that I needed to take a stand for His fatherhood. At times like this when I wanted to reject myself, I needed to say, “No! I am a child of God. How dare anyone speak about me as if I am so defective that I should give up on life! He is working to save me, not reject me. I need to see the universe from His perspective rather than from the perspective of what is most likely a demonic accuser.”
That helped me some, but it didn’t stop the Fear and Guilt. A short time later, I realized that I was trying to inwardly run from them, and at best this would only delay the battle until another day, so I decided to embrace them. I needed to reclaim these newly uncovered expressions of my heart so they could become what God had created them to be.
I fairly quickly sensed the Lord confirming this decision by communicating to me that I was experiencing the immature and distorted feelings left over from my youth. They were shaped without proper guidance when I was too young to handle them, so I ran from them and buried them. As a result, they had never been able to gain the character He wanted to give them. I needed to trust His Spirit to mix His emotions with mine to help them to mature.
This put the whole tree incident into a new perspective. I realized that God had allowed it in order to bring my dysfunction to the surface, and this circumstance was going to turn into a stepping stone to a better future. My internal Parent would learn how to better nurture my heart. This would free me from the threatening paranoia and also help me to avoid the sort of carelessness that had led to the tree incident in the first place. God wanted to fix the problem at its root rather than cover over the symptoms.
To be honest, the entire experience surprised me a little. Though I had known theologically that the paranoia wasn’t the voice of God, it still felt like it was. It seemed so commanding and “Thou-shalt-not-ish” – like a voice shaking the heavens as it pointed out my faults. It seemed to serve a good purpose too; it steered me away from nasty sins like putting others in danger when I cut down trees. Yet it could have derailed me as a human being.
I was once again learning that I needed to carefully parent my feelings so they could grow into maturity by God’s love, power, and wisdom. He had ways for me to be responsible that didn’t require me to wither beneath negative feelings.
If that was how I felt about a situation in which no harm had been done, imagine how I felt about the times when I actually had hurt someone (nothing close to as bad as dropping a tree on them, but in smaller ways)! Though I knew I was forgiven, the self-accusation that came from the fact that I had caused pain was tough to bear. I wondered if they hated me, and I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to think about them without being shaken.
My empathy might even show up in “smoking fetish form.” I would see myself through the eyes of those who might hate me …shame would enter my heart …and I would want to smoke in order to both medicate myself and slowly kill myself as punishment.
Fortunately, the heartbeat of the universe is the heartbeat of its Creator, our Father, not of those we have hurt. Our empathy should cause us to understand everyone’s feelings in the light of His love. Though it is true that He will judge those who don’t turn to Him, it is also true that He loves to forgive. In fact, forgiveness is so high on his list of priorities that He requires everyone to imitate Him in it (Matthew 18:21-35).
We are unwise to look at those who don’t imitate Him, who hold our wrongs against us, and to let them shape our internal Parent. Our care for ourselves should instead be an expression of the One who suffers long and is kind. He is not easily provoked (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). He is like a patient parent who bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things (1 Corinthians 13:7). He has made us into precious new people who are loved and have great potential.
Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. …Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it!
(2 Corinthians 5:16-17, The Message)
If people hate us they are out of touch with heaven, and adopting their view only compounds evil in the earth. Though our hearts should rightfully care about them, they are not our judges – God is. Adopting their self-pity and making it our self-accusation hurts everyone.
“But what about their pain? Shouldn’t we carry around a weight of guilt and self-loathing over it?” Once again, what is the heartbeat of the universe? Is it God’s or someone else’s? It is God’s, of course, and He has an answer for everyone’s pain – even the pain of those we have hurt. He has a life changing set of Appointments in which He wants to visit them. If they will surrender to Him, they will be like Joseph and learn from experience that mercy triumphs over sin and judgment.
But if they choose self-pity, though this is a tragic mistake, it isn’t our responsibility. They are responsible to find God’s plan for themselves. We, of course, still need to sincerely repent from our sins and to understand why God would judge us were it not for Jesus. We might also need to make restitution. In addition, we need to be sensitive to the fact that it would appear to be extremely self-serving if we were to preach to them about the dangers of self-pity. The best we can do generally is to be honest about our faults and pray for God to work in their lives.
It has taken me many years to grow into emotional freedom in this area, and I have many years of growth ahead of me. The answers for me have been found in discovering God’s friendship and support while experiencing my sometimes-distraught emotions. I embrace them as parts of me, even though they show up in unhelpful forms. I slowly redefine my experience of them based on His heart.
He is with me like a Father who stands by my side and helps me to grow into the jobs He has given me. I don’t need to feel overwhelmed or abandoned, because He will be with me in both failure and success. My job is to keep putting one foot in front of the other as He teaches me what life is really about. The Holy Spirit gradually changes my emotions as I learn to see life through His eyes.
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