The light of Christ cannot be imposed onto a life to make it beautiful. It must soak into us, then through us.
“Since I was a child, I loved solitude— to sit on a rock, or by a lake, and quietly feel God’s presence with me. But I also struggled with anxiety. When I faced insecurity, I’d feel fear coming, and I’d try to push through it. Decades later, I finally realized that my fight to “overcome” my struggle was the problem.”
Jennifer Freeman
Struggle is not something to fight against.
My battle with my adult self has been to fight to protect myself from fear of failure and fear of the unknown. That defensive stance made it difficult to relax and trust that the struggles were not going to overwhelm me.
I can trace the same struggle back to when I was a child. When I would feel uncertainty or insecurity, it’s like I’d say to myself, “I can’t let this (whatever it was) be in my life”. And it’s almost like I’d take a running start at it, and then feel myself body slam against a wall. And I’d do that over and over again.
It was finally in my mid-thirties that I heard God say, “Would you just walk through this door I’ve put here in that wall you’re slamming against?”
And I realized that struggle was not something to fight against, or even hide from. Because that’s what I was doing. Instead of walking through the door that God was providing for me, I was trying to push my way through the barrier I was facing.
I found that if I quit trying to fix myself on my own, I could walk through the door.
The door was my emotions. Once I’m willing to see what’s behind it, what the wall is actually made of, then I found I was able to walk through it. Sometimes finding the door takes time. It’s not always visible in the beginning. It’s the Spirit that reveals it through those feelings I have—or that you have. Rather than a brave performance aimed at controlling behaviors (which, by the way, makes it harder to know what you’re feeling) you receive something from God. And that moment comes when you’re fully present with your condition.
I have an expression I use often when I’m teaching: you need to make friends with your emotions. Another way of putting it is to say that we have to befriend our struggles. Why? Because when we recognize that our struggles are normal we are in a unique space to receive from God. The wall that looms over us is the very place that grace becomes evident.
Otherwise, when we’re body slamming against stuff like we do—and we’re falling back onto our habitual behaviors— that’s the one time we can’t experience Jesus.
C.S. Lewis said, “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wishes, and precautions — to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way — centered on money or pleasure or ambition — and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly.
“And that is what Christ warned us you could not do…It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.”
We can’t impose His grace onto the outside of us (by trying to make and “be” our ideal selves), we can only know and then bring our entire selves to Him so He can soak us with everything that He is.
Welcome!
I’m Jennifer Freeman.
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