What You Need to Know about You and Them

A few things about you, them (and God).

You are at a different stage of fear than they are.

Everyone has fears. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it’s how we function. It’s how we survive. If we had no fear, we’d be dead . . . and we wouldn’t mind the idea.

We aren’t just a product of our fears. Almost any fear can be expressed instead as a desire (the fear of death is a desire to live; the fear of being alone is a desire for companionship; the fear of your cat throwing up on the carpet is a desire to do anything that involves neither cleaning up cat vomit nor smelling/stepping in it). Interestingly, though, not every desire has a corresponding fear.

You don’t have to be afraid of being in a messy house to prefer a tidy one. You need not fear the idea of your friend having a normal day in order to motivate you to send them the kind of encouraging note that becomes a day-maker. Sure, if you dig deep enough you can find a fear to connect to any motivation, but sometimes fear just isn’t in the driver’s seat or even sitting inside the car.

But a lot of times fear does take the wheel. Maybe it’s the whole vehicle. And before following that natural impulse to judge all things fear-related, please remember: fear is like fire—it can help or hurt depending on what you do with it and how well you control it.

You’re afraid of some things. They are either afraid of different things or they’re at a different stage of fear than you are about those very same things. You have more than two options of how to deal with that difference.

You can:

1. Judge other people and their fears.

2. Help other people address their fears.

3. Leave other people alone.

4. Understand their fears better and grow or change or stop fanning the flames of those fears.

5. Pretty much any combination of the above.

They Did Not Create Your Pain

Something someone did or said (or neglected to do or say) caused you pain. That much is true. But they didn’t originate your pain. The story of what hurt you never truly begins with just one person—there’s always more to the story.

But that doesn’t excuse . . .

You’re right. I know. But there’s a bigger system that grew your pain from the ground up than just the person who planted the seed. It’s worth seeing and understanding that if for no other reason than you have to be able to move on. You can acknowledge what someone has done to hurt you without dwelling on it, judging, or begrudging.

You Are Extremely Vulnerable and Immeasurably Strong

They might give credit to God for every time they or you have been rescued, lifted up, dusted off, raised from the ashes, or spared the sword. But I want you to know something:

You are strong. You may have had help, but you got out of there alive. You forgave. You healed. You’re a phoenix.

The pain you felt was real. The desperation you were drowning in was real. Maybe it IS real right now. You can be wounded. You can fail. You can be defeated. You can be hurt. You can screw up worse than you ever feared, and you can fear to the point of paralysis for longer than you ever imagined.

That same person—that same wounded, agonizing, flailing failure—is also a hero, a savior, a champion, a BMF.

You once were lost. You found yourself. Grace is amazing, but so are you.

If God made someone who needs rescuing, that says more about God than it does about you.

Being Mad at God Is Weird

I try not to judge, but, when it comes to this . . . I stumble.

The God of Christianity is an idol. That isn’t to say God is or isn’t real, it’s to say that the events outlined in Exodus 32 when the Israelites made a golden calf to worship instead of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain is exactly what has happened with Christians and their concept of God.

A professor of mine once said that simply attempting to imagine God in your head was an act of idolatry. It may have been the most powerful thing I ever learned, and, yes, it was at a Bible school.

The idea was—and is—that if God is infinite and incomprehensible, any attempt to define or imagine God is an attempt to construct a manmade version. Even mental constructs are manmade. One need not wield a hammer and chisel to craft a graven image. If God’s face is engraved in your mind, congratulations: you’re an idolater according to biblical definitions.

When we get mad at God (to the best of my understanding) we’re typically getting mad at a manmade product of our own imagination. We’re getting mad at the God we were told stories about, preached hellfire and brimstone sermons about, and the one crafted and used as a weapon of fear, greed, and the lust for power. We’re mad at the image we constructed in our heads out of the building materials we collected throughout our lives—stories, feelings, favorite Scripture passages—like little nests in our souls. We get mad at that guy for not being there for us when we needed him, but . . . we invented that concept for ourselves. When we get mad at the specific idol we imagined for not being real, our anger burns against ourselves.

Treating that concept like a person who harmed us is just an extension of that idolatry. That’s what makes it weird to me. It’s the last fleeting act of worship of a God we made. It is not worth the trouble.

They can go on worshiping their versions of God. That doesn’t need to stop you from discovering someone or something true neither confined nor created by your finite mind.