Repenting of Complacency

Christianity has taught me many painful and destructive lies, and I am still recovering from many of them. The human idea of what Christianity looks like and the God-truth of what it is seem to be two very different things. One of the bigger examples of this has surfaced recently in my consciousness, and brought up some issues that had not been dealt with, but rather ignored.

And truly, it feels like Christians think we should just ignore issues because conflict is bad, anger is bad, and hurt is bad. Or maybe that's just the way I interpreted Christianity in my young, impressionable mind. I believed that for years, and still do to an extent. I feel like it is sin for me to get angry when wrong is done to me and I am treated unfairly. The problem is that I feel the anger whether I acknowledge it or not, so it is much healthier for me to stop lying to myself and everyone else and admit that I feel the way I do. Once I admit that I am angry I can properly direct it, not at people but at the one who is really responsible for the wrong, the hurt, and the destruction that is going on in this world.

But I don't think everyone sees this the way I do, and until this morning I had begun to doubt myself on this. Even now I am wondering if it is wrong for me to express this anger to another person. Maybe I should keep it to me, or just between me and God. Is it okay for me to open my anger to another Christian? Perhaps I should just be more discerning about how people will respond to my anger before I just spill my guts to people.

But I really, really want to share everything I'm feeling with someone, another person in my life. Unfortunately, this led to what may have been unwise confidences, and I wish I could take it back. But there's no sense in regretting what is done, I cannot take it back. I must just learn to accept negative responses, and learn to be more careful about to whom I open up my true self, my heart and soul. There is nothing so precious, and so worth guarding as my heart.

The other half of repentance for me is in admitting hurt and pain in my life. We all have, at one point in our life or another, been taught that feeling pain is weakness, and true strength is in just letting pain slide off with no effect. The problem is that the only kind of heart that can just ignore pain like that is a heart made of stone or iron, a hard heart that feels neither pain nor love. None of us really wants to be like that, so we just feel guilty for feeling pain and try to hide it from everyone.

For me, it was an avoidance of crying. Not only did I hide my tears from my friends and my family, but I loathed myself for even crying in secret, with no witness to my weeping but my own miserable self. The problem is that trying to avoid feeling hurt and avoid tears only intensifies the pain when you finally realize the necessity of dealing with hurt rather than burying it. Pain that has not been properly dealt with only grows over time. I guess we are afraid that it will grow anyway, so it's better to hide it so it cannot completely overwhelm us and drown us in our own blood and tears.

But sometimes I am afraid that I am becoming to emotional, to ready to cry. While I don't want to enter an emotional drought by witholding my own tears or freezing them all up, neither do I want to create a flashflood in my life of self-pity and victimization by inundating myself in tears and hurt. It's probably very unrealistic for me to worry about that, though, since I am very unlikely to ever go that route in my life.

I still feel very uncomfortable crying around others, mostly because I don't want their pity and I don't want to talk to just anyone about what's going on. So I still hide my tears, my hurt, and my disappointment from most people, but I am learning to let some people in and learning to trust others with my heart and my emotions. But it had to start with opening myself up to God and to myself.

It may sound funny to think about opening up to yourself, but it's very necessary for most of us. If we knew who we really were we wouldn't have to hide and pretend, we could be ourselves with all our faults. You see, accepting Christ means that we now are like Christ, not necessarily in our behavior, but in a deeper truer sense than that. After all, God says He sees us like He sees Christ. I think most of us tend to think God's just turning a blind eye or pretending we are something we're not. But I say that if God sees us that way then there must be a truer part of us that really is like Christ now. If we saw ourselves as God sees us, how very different we would experience life.