Blessing.

I have never had reconstructive surgery…but returning from a month’s sabbatical, I feel like I know what that must feel like: surgery for the soul. Reconstructive surgery happens when an injury “deconstructs” something vital in your body. Something has been damaged, torn apart, usually with violence and trauma, causing enormous pain and loss of capacity. In this case, a crippling of soul. The injury is such that it can’t simply heal; it must be mended.

Do you relate to that at all? Have you hit a place in your life that felt that disabling? It’s vulnerable, dangerous, isolating. You might call it a loss of heart…without much hope of finding it again. It might show up as great loss and sorrow…or perhaps great frustration and anger. Regardless of how it presents emotionally, the common root seems to be a terrible disappointment, maybe even a disorienting sense of betrayal.

I think the damage for me had begun some time ago without being fully conscious of it, but this summer it turned ugly, and I became intensely aware of it both internally and externally. While my coaching business had eased off due to COVID, our other business—vacation rental properties—had exploded with activity. Everyone on the planet, it seemed, wanted to get out of the city and up to the clean mountain air. Understandable. And Kellie and I wanted to give them a most wonderful experience in one of our mountain cabins. Yet while we were grateful for the business, we simply couldn’t keep up with all the work involved, and we were running morning to night poking our fingers in the leaky dike. It was awful.

By the time sabbatical eased around end of August, I was utterly and completely exhausted…and that was just externally. On the inside, the situation was much worse. Much. Worse. 

I was staying alone at a cabin in Tennessee for sabbatical, and one day I picked up one of the early books I had written, back in 2005 actually, called When God Waits. I flipped it open absent-mindedly and started reading a page. In it, I was talking about our transition from Colorado back to North Carolina and the things God was teaching us about the waiting effect that dogs us between one season and the next. But it was the tone of the writing that caught me by surprise: the optimism, the hopefulness, the anticipation, the light-heartedness. Honestly, I didn’t recognize that guy. Somehow I had lost those qualities along the way…and in their place found numbness and cynicism. I felt disenchanted. Despairing even. And very, very angry.

I resented that life had been so hard for so long. Struggling year after year to make ends meet. Each year feeling that, if I just work a little harder or a little smarter, maybe this will be the breakthrough that allows us to ease off a bit and actually enjoy the life we’ve been given. And each year, no matter how well things had gone, it didn’t seem like enough. I didn’t feel like I was enough. Shame metastasized into bitterness…although I was clever enough to hide it from others. I even hid it largely from myself.

The real damage, though, lay even deeper. The greatest violence was perpetrated against my view of the Father’s heart. The blame was largely subconscious; it was actually easier to blame myself than God. But the result was the same: I had lost all sense of living under God’s blessing. Under God’s loving care and sufficient provision. Instead, I felt ignored, disregarded, at times even meanly teased. And I resented the hell out of it. Why, God? Why would you ask the impossible of me? Why would you make it so hard? Don’t you care about me any more?

I know I’m not the only one who has found himself in such a dark place. Life can be viciously hard at times, even without the depth of suffering that many encounter, like the loss of a child or a crippling disease. The blows of life can lead the most hardy among us to lose heart. It doesn’t take much sorrow to stab our hearts with a splinter of doubt: Is God unfair? Is God hidden? Is God silent? Philip Yancey tackles these difficult questions in his achingly honest book, Disappointment with God…which I happened to read on sabbatical.

Graciously, though, God began his gentle surgery on my soul before I even got to the book. It began with the recognition that God wasn’t the one making life so desperately hard on me, I was! Part of my response to the summer’s profound loss of heart was an addiction to stress. Keeping myself over-busy and over-stressed was actually a coping mechanism for the deeper heartache I couldn’t face. So if I couldn’t find enough pressure, I generated it myself in a self-destructive spiral of effort and exhaustion. If this cycle had not been arrested by the sabbatical, I’m not sure how badly this would have gone.

Something about reading pages I had written fifteen years ago shocked me into a sobriety of humility and repentance that began the mending process in my soul. The shadows of abandonment began to fall away, and for the first time in a long time, I began to feel the Father’s embrace again…and know, beyond all doubt, that I am truly loved. And at the end of the day, this is all that really matters. That what I have taught and written about for decades is actually true! We are beloved beyond all knowing. Alternating waves of relief, grief, and contentment rocked me, and I began to surrender to this Truth above all truths. The one thing our souls need more than oxygen: Love.

But it’s a particular kind of love that is anchored in a rock-solid security and affection: I live within the blessing of God. He is for me! He delights in me comprehensively—not the me that’s free from frailty and limitation and failure, but the me that includes all that human messiness. His lovingkindness surrounds me and holds me and saturates me. It’s prodigal-son kind of stuff! I honestly didn’t know just how much of my spiritual vitality, my divine life force if you will, had been lost…until it was re-found.

ThriveTip

The thing I most want to convey to you now is, not the concept of your belovedness, but the experience of it. I don’t know if music moves you as deeply as it does me, but I find that it often has the power to bypass my mental defenses and sneak in around the edges where I’m still tender, where the longing still hides. My son sent me this song just as I returned from sabbatical, and it conveys as powerful an impartation of this truth as I’ve ever encountered. I hope it moves you. I hope you can own its truth for yourself. Can it be true that God is for us? My heart says yes, a thousand times yes! If you’ve lost hold of it, know that it has not lost hold of you. It is the Truth of all truths, and you belong to it. It is your heart’s true home.

Takeaway

God is for us!