proudly arriving at the enlightenment around my senior year in high school, at the eave of my boyfriend breaking up with me in the all of a sudden rupture to the 'I thought we were going to be significant' type of entitlement, in and the vacancy of misinterpreted reality where I thought life although couldn't be planned, had back allies and ways of short cutting to the good stuff..I arrived at the vision that I didn't need him, or anyone for that matter. That I was just dependent on him for a love I didn't have in myself. I was insecure, I was unsure, I was in high school. I was convinced that God had different plans for me, and I was too inept to see them and focused my plans on him instead. So, for the next two years of college I focused on the prime care-taker of all these future plans, the master of the show; me. Although I dated, I never really put my whole heart into anything or anyone for that matter, I'm sure all of them can tell you that and in reality I realize it was selfish, but the whole time it wasn't for my gratification, it was to make them happy because they seemed so sure about something I was just waiting to be sure about.
It was at this point it dawned on me, you need to love yourself before you love someone else, otherwise you will require in them a need for something you don't have. The phrase "you complete me" really did me in, I really hated it. I thought "I am whole, I don't need anyone else to complete me. I have God, I don't need anyone else."
but it wasn't until literally the past few days when I realized that there is something skewed about this whole proposition. the whole "I have to love myself before I love someone else, I have to focus on me before I can take care of someone else, I have to finish my plans before I involve anyone else." Who gave us that authority, and why do we deserve it? I realized as much time as I've spent trying to clear my head, as much time as I've spent single (4 years now, with no consistent boyfriend and only dates, my last one being a year prior to this post -) I've only concluded that I don't like myself any more or any less, I don't find myself more beautiful, more appealing, more intelligent, more confident than before, I only find that I understand myself more, and in a sense, that's not always a safe thing. The more people invest in themselves, the more they expect out of others and the more they look at themselves as worthy, the more they won't stand for anyone who treats them differently. This is the lie I've been believing.
I think I should start from the beginning (where all things appropriately stem), I am absolutely nothing. I have no credence, or mind or ability to create the things on this earth nor the capacity for Him who created me. Without God, without Jesus, I'm nothing. But He makes me something. That is something I can boast in, I cannot be confident in myself, but I can be confident in what He can do through me. I think I could stand to be a little more insecure, at least it would constantly put me in touch with reality. I have a lot of problems with my appearance, but at surface value, I only do because I believe I'm something better, that I don't deserve to have things wrong with me. When in actuality, I am not the author of what I do and do not deserve, for all of the sin that we as a human race have done, that I myself have done, I don't deserve to have anyone look at me at all. This isn't an unhealthy dwelling on my flaws, its realizing that I always fall short of God's glory and the humanity in that is what makes Him praiseworthy, that there is always something He can help me with. Right now, it is caring for others. Because with this lie, the past four years of my life has been devoted to seeking out my identity, wondering who I am, where I want to go, preparing myself as it were, (all the while thinking, this will humbly show the man I'm supposed to be with that I did all of this for him, and truly improved myself for him).
In some sense, this is true, if you don't consider yourself of any worth and try to look for it in another person, then obviously you will never find it and you will remain hopeless and waiting for the next distraction. But I'm not saying to remain insecure and find your worth in someone else, nor am I saying be independent and find that you have all you need by yourself. Instead, I think to really, truly love someone you don't look at yourself at all, rather you look at God, and that He can, and does fulfill every part of you that you'll ever need, so everything else is a gift.
before, everything else was still a gift to me in the mindset of being independent, I relied on God for everything I need and everything else I received as a portion of grace, in actuality I think what I was doing was relying solely on myself for everything I need and developing requirements for those portions of grace based on what I felt I deserved. God was no longer something I needed.
This is so easy what that phrase "I need to love myself" can turn into so fast. Do we realize that we expect the same out of people that we don't give ourselves? 9 times out of ten, I'll hear someone say "I just wish he/she did this more" when they themselves haven't done it once, If I was in a relationship I'm sure I would do the same.
In the bigger picture, I think we find weakness in others from that which we see as advancements in ourselves. If we think we're strong and independent, its easy to spot out those who are co-dependent and frail, if we have patient attributes, we see impatience so easily in others. In truth, we're administering those weaknesses we think we don't have by pointing them out.
What i'm trying to say I guess is, we're never going to love ourselves enough, and if we do, we love ourselves too much and need to hold off. The more we love ourselves, the less we look at God, the more we can distinguish our qualities, the less likely we wil refer to them as God's glory shining through us, being the sole provider for why those qualities even exist. And the more we focus on ourselves, simply, the less we focus on others. When this happens, we will never be satisfied with what one can give us and we'll always be looking for them to do more and more. We'll never think that someone can love us fully because we love ourselves so much that no one can ever prove to us the love we have set aside as sacred for ourselves. When you spend so much time thinking of your capacity for love, no one. No one will ever be able to meet it, and the more they try, the more you are disappointed. Nothing will be taken as an act of pure unconditional love because love is a point that gets acrossed and nothing merciful, love is treated as an exchange principle, you give me some, I'll give you some, but those two lines are conditional upon each other.
If everyone were to find their hope, their need, their ability to sin, their weakness, their hatred of being proven wrong, their reverence, their gratitude, their seething through getting over things so they can move on to the next level through God, they would find that only He is able to help and guide and nourish and offer the medicine for curing the things we simply can't do on our own but try so hard and convince ourselves its working. It's not. We don't have to love ourselves first. We have to love God first. It says In the beginning, GOD. Not in the beginning, I.
I am just ready to actually start caring for people. In spite of that I've wasted so much time thinking I'd care for them more if I cared for myself. If I have love granted to me by the giver and maker of love, I think I'll be able to care just fine inspite of the self that tries to be an in-between.
Ahh, the pedulum swings both ways.ahh, the pendulum swings from side to side. When you have a realization like the one you describe, it is so easy to let it swing from one extreme to another. I think this new perspective is wonderful, and you've been able to see things I've only glimpsed in my life. You've articulated half thought ideas I've had, but never quite understood. But what you've said in the past - stuff like "you need to love yourself before you can love other people" - can be understood at the same time.
ReplyDeleteIf you look within yourself and see a soul that belongs to God, self love will come easily. But this perspective is so hard to keep. Our big plans obscure it. Our ego hides it. Our desire distracts us from it. Even the church, other christians, and the trivialities of life can keep us from realizing our true self - a child of God.
But there is a balance to be struck. We can only pay attention to one thing at a time - and there is all of creation out there to discover! God is within you, but he is also within me, and everyone else. I just rode my bike from Arcadia to Logansport a few days ago, and I saw the best hills and valleys and long roads of Indiana. He's out there, waiting for us to get over ourselves and live our life.
Your life is only a small part of creation - but an important part. It is the part he has entrusted to you. In this, you cannot unclaim yourself. Your will is your own, if you would have it or not. In recognizing God's glory, we cannot but acknowledge our own.
We are not mistakes. We are puzzle pieces scattered about a big world. It is in each other that we find completion because it is in each other that we find God. I am reminded of a quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."
God has given us a lot to love. Ourselves. Each other. Him. This huge world. None of it deserves to be ignored. All of it demands our attention. It's tough, it's impossible, it's ridiculous. It's also given to us through grace.
~Brian
yeah i agree, there is a balance much like i described when I said you can't depend on a person to fulfill needs that you have within yourself because you'll never be satisfied, but although I believe that, I don't think thats so much loving yourself as it is making an idol out of things on earth. So when I say you need to love yourself first before you love others, I think what I was trying to say is, you need to love God first so you enjoy his creation and not idolize it. I don't think that God's entrusted me with anything, because that would mean that He needs us to fulfill a purpose he couldn't do and that would make him less perfect. But when you realize that, that he doesnt in fact need us, but that he made us out of his own desire in spite of no requirement just to show us his love, that makes us lucky. But also very purposed at the same time, because while we're trying to live, we're also trying to find out why we are living and for us to really have true free will we have to see God through each other and then come to Him by ourselves. The very fact that we are His and we are His creation makes us purposed, puzzle pieces how you put it all playing a part in His plan for us, but that plan is only conditional upon Him making it, and Him allowing us to make our own will in spite of His.
ReplyDeleteSo theres a fine line there between what He gave to us, and what we actually deserve. Cause if truly looked at, we took everything he gave us and basically made it our own from our own egos, you even have people that deny he even exists at all, so I think if God truly made us what we deserve is to be responsible for the actions we took against Him, i don't think for that we deserve all of his blessings, all of His love. We don't have entitelment because we don't title ourselves, we're not the maker or the vision for ourselves, we're trying to find it in the midst of one already purposed for us. We only can be grateful, i think, that he gave us everything, he gave us Jesus, in spite of us casting His son down and beating Him before He would die for us. I don't think I can ever fully love myself, but I can love what I've seen Him do through me, and in that sense it is loving myself. For every minute I think that my own identity has caused me to be the way I am, and not God allowing me the opportunity to have a will to be the way I am, that is the minute I think I'm one step closer to doing everything on my own and that I don't need him, or He's not absolutely necessary for all parts of life. That's a lie, to me, thats what I was trying to say. I hope this made sense.
thanks dub
em
(From Brian)
ReplyDeleteThanks for being so open with me. I know you don't express these sorts of thoughts regularly.
re-reading this message, and what you posted on your blog, has taken a lot of thought. The nothingness of ego as ideal is something I struggle with. I tend to think of myself as God made, and having some dignity thereof. But if all glory and honor is his, then our pretensions to independence of any sort is hollow and borrowed at best, and self-delusional at worst.
Let me see if I understand what you are saying: That before you felt the need to love yourself apart from others in order to love anyone else fully. But that this attitude, this need for a fierce self love, drove you toward a sort of vanity, or independence of spirit, which created a sense of separateness from God and other people. That, in your mind, your goodness was separate from God's, that it was yours and not his. But that is a lie because your value, everyone's value, lies in our relation to God. It is not our light, but his which shines within us. Which gives me an interesting view of Matthew 5:14-16 for me.
14 “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Has your independence from God (by insisting on self love before God love) set up unrealistic expectations for yourself and others? Re-reading your blog post, these two quotes jumped out at me:
"The more people invest in themselves, the more they expect out of others and the more they look at themselves as worthy, the more they won't stand for anyone who treats them differently. This is the lie I've been believing."
also:
"I have a lot of problems with my appearance, but at surface value, I only do because I believe I'm something better, that I don't deserve to have things wrong with me."
One last thing I can't leave unsaid: you look beautiful without makeup and fashionable outfits. You may need those things to fit an external standard of beauty, but this has to do with human expectations, and not anything actually wrong with you. I realize that you are portraying your insistence on a perfect appearance as a fault - but the perfection you are envisioning, vain or not, is less beautiful than your God given form.
thank you bri, im glad you saw how hard for me it was to write you back, i paused a lot. but this is all part of dealing with the consequence of taking action after believing this sort of deception. I dont have to be so protective of myself, if the only thing I really want people to is God, thats just part of my nature I think. I think you said it perfectly though, and even gave an amazing light to that verse.
ReplyDeletethroughout the past week ive had just one section of the 1 corinthians 13 verse stuck in my head, almost like a line of a song you cant get out, but its "if i speak in angelic and human tongues, but i have not love, im but a resounding gong or a clashing symbol." and i think now, it was that those instruments are very loud and repetiive, almost as if they drown out any other thought and just keep resounding off of the walls. If you speak in such a way that allows even yourself to believe you have quality and uniqueness and deserve another, someone may speak that they get it from God but its hard to really believe that, cause like you said we were made and in that sense you feel some sort of entitelement sometimes, but like you said its just borrowed, and that should be at the forefront of our heads instead of what we deserve, what we should claim, and what we're worthy of. I think all attention we're trying to get back, if it doesn't radiate back to Christ, is not love, and therefore its a resounding disturbance.
but yeah naturally when you feel so independent that you even feel independent from Christ's creation, you grow to stand on your own feet, whether your satisfied or not, youre content within yourself, and i think that does make you expect more out of others. If youre happy within yourself and think you have all of the things you need, no one will ever meet your standards, cause why try working on a relationship that may not always be secure, when you will always feel security in yourself? I think youve read the book by dean kuntz, but it reminds me of odd thomas's mother, the one that is so sweet at surface level, but just so long as no one is asking her for something she gets manic depressive and threatens to kill herself. she just wants to be alone and refuses to be of help to anyone else. not to this extreme has my independence set unrealistic expectatins, but before it was easy to picture myself with someone, and now im finding that I can't even do that, and it scared me. to put it best, i dont want to be alone, for myself and for another. I know that may even sound selfish, but I honestly think it would be better for my relationship with God to have someone as a constant accountability, even through just observance, i think me wanting to help them as well would inspire growth in them, and growth in me too.
and thank you for the last part, i think over the past years even though its still a problem, its not as much of one because i feel like its just such a burden to think about all the time, and so selfish really. There are so many worse problems in the world, not that it diminishes the importance of self respect, but to think that if I had just grown up elsewhere it would have never been in an issue, like if I grew up in Nairobi, my appearance would be the last thing I'd think about. So in reality, I've not considered it such a problem as much as I did, but it really does still help to hear things like that. Especially from you, cause I know you mean it. I don't think I depend on those words like I used to, but it really does still help.
thanks for actually, talking to me about this and not just reading it and considering it for how you thought I meant when I said it. it shows you really are interested in hearing.