Fourteen

Breaking the Lies
in Your Head

He went without comfort so you might have it. He postponed joy so you might share in it. He willingly chose isolation so you might never be alone in your hurt and sorrow.

JONI EARECKSON TADA

The soil in the garden feels warm under my knees. I can’t stop thinking about her. How Elizabeth’s laugh sounded like the rain of childlike laughter and I’m parched. Do the next thing. When nothing feels simple, simply do the next thing. “You don’t judge your feelings. You simply feel your feelings.” My friend turns those words over to me on the phone like an unearthing, an excavating of something sacred. “That’s what feelings are for—feeling.”

I’d been bent down in the garden. Pulling out a bunch of overwintered, dead kale plants. Cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear, listening to the words:

“You don’t judge your feelings; you feel feelings—and then give them to God.”

I stop. Straighten. Something overwintered in me, something frozen numb and dead, breaks open through the hardened earth. Elizabeth’s body’s been lying in the ground three weeks now. She’s not coming back, ever, and this isn’t a bad dream I can ever wake up from. Her voice has flown from the earth.

I have to go. I have to get off the phone. I have to breathe. It’s all I can do to stammer out a good-bye, drop the phone softly on the mossy brick walkway, and breathe.

What if I began to feel? What if I let the dam of feelings break? It was coming, and there was no stopping it. Grieving how plans change—is part of the plan to change us. Elizabeth had broken something in me; she’d broken me open to this reaching out to trace the face of suffering, to feel along its features—and I hadn’t wanted to recoil, but at times, it felt too much, too vulnerable, to live broken into life like that. But what if I didn’t recoil from this? What if I didn’t pull back from the pain?

What happens if you just let the brokenness keep coming? Surrender. Let the wave of it all break over you and wash you up at the foot of that cross. What if I lived like I believed it: Never be afraid of broken things—because Christ is redeeming everything.

Elizabeth is gone. And I’ve failed to love like I’ve wanted to. Always, I’d about give my eye teeth and left arm for more time to get it more deeply right and less painfully wrong. I wanted to be more—more patient, to never lose it, to always have it together, to keep calm and sane. I’ve wanted more flashes of wisdom in the heat of the moment when I had no bloody idea what was the best thing to do. I’ve wanted fewer nights crawling into bed feeling like a failure who always gets it wrong when everyone else seems to get it right. I’ve wanted to take the gold medal in living well and loving large and being enough to be wanted. Instead, I’ve been the person who escapes behind bathroom doors, the person who turns on the water so no one can hear the howl, the person who fights what is and struggles to surrender, who completely ups and forgets how to break into givenness. And there’s the razor edge of it: I am not someone who once walked nice and neat on this narrow way, and then suddenly didn’t. I’m not someone who just tripped and stumbled a bit, but then pulled herself back up on the narrow path. I’m the person who’s always been shattered on the inside, knowing brokenness deep in the marrow and ache of me, the one who has wasted days, years, despairing and replaying the past, who’s let lies live loud in my head, held grudges, and grown bitter, who’s cut myself down, literally, and known depression, suicidal and self-sabotaging self-destruction, and been convinced she would so keenly feel like a broken failure in the end that she’d wish she had never been born.

Feelings of failure can be like this bad rash—scratch one failure and all you can see is an outbreak spreading all over you. Can I choke it out, how this trying to love, how this surrendering to being cruciform—which is what love is—can feel like being lashed to an altar and your bare back stinging a bit raw? How there are times you’d like to cut and break free and run, only to realize you’d be running into meaninglessness—which would only hurt and break you more. What if you just want desperately, in spite of everything, for someone to remember how hard you’ve really tried? There are days when the sharp edge of self-condemnation cuts you so deep that you can be reaching, grasping, but can’t seem to remember to believe that He believes in you. God, make us the re-membering people.

Maybe the only way to begin breaking free is to lay open your willing hands and bear witness to the ugly mess of your scars. To trace them slowly and re-member what He says about you, even if you forget. This is about bravely letting our darkness be a canvas for God’s light. This happened that the glory of God might be shown through even you.¹ What if the re-membering of your brokenness comes in remembering that your trying isn’t what matters the most, because His scars have written your name and your worth over all of yours?

Kneeling on the garden path, sun on my neck, in a brown and dead patch of brittle kale, I keep tracing the outline of the bricks, finding a way. There’s this breaking, this spilling for all that hasn’t been. All that I haven’t been. The lament and the grieving and the repentance all mingle. Feelings are meant to be fully felt and then fully surrendered to God. The word emotion comes from the Latin for “movement”—and all feelings are meant to move you toward God.

What if I fully surrendered to becoming cruciform so I could feel along my scars, along my own scarred face, and know my own name is Beloved? I don’t know if there’s any other way to break into abundant living unless I come to know this.

All this failing rises from the ground of the kitchen garden toward heaven, bits of dead kale leaves breaking and falling in hardly a whisper of wind. The garden path bricks feel like a kind beckoning forward under my tracing fingertips, my bent knees.

I don’t turn away—grief can feel like an aching love song.

It’s after the kale has crumbled and this grief has rattled the windows with the wind, after the calcification around the heart’s broken and split away, after I’ve shut my eyes and drowned a bit, that Hope comes into our room, throws herself across the foot of the bed, and I can see the girl’s just looking for a way to stand.

“So . . . what exactly am I supposed to do now, Mama?” And I know she means about friends who betray and break trust, I know that before she even finishes . . . Girls can be downright mean and women can devour each other and Christians can crucify each other and I just keep telling my girl that: Girls can rival each other, but real women revive each other, girls can impale each other, but real women empower each other. Girls can compare each other, but real women champion each other and we are all made to be ground breakers and peace makers and freedom shakers.

I sit across from Hope, memorizing her face. My girl and I are mirrors of each other, mirrors of the same kind of different. When you lose someone or when people steal something of you, you’re left trying to find yourself again. We’re all in the midst of our own identity crises, trying to find our own busted way.

Someone’s left a light on down the hallway.

“Really, it’s all going to be okay.” I try to tell this to her, to me. “We’re going to be okay—even if we feel un-okay.” Can I remember to let feelings be fully felt and then fully surrendered to God? Emotions are given to move you toward God. Can I remember? I don’t have to fix things, I don’t have to deny things, I don’t have to pretend away things. Could I simply feel the brokenness of things—and feel that’s okay? Could I feel okay being un-okay, trusting that Christ is always making a way?

Hope puts her head in my lap. I gather her long hair in my hands, gather her mane all in one long strand and twist it slow, around and around, as if I can somehow make a rope for my girl, for us, to hold on to.

“Hope-girl, listen. . . .” A robin trills out in the sunburst locust at the corner of the house. “If we all listen long enough to the voices about who we should be, we grow deaf to the beauty of who we are.”

My throat hurts. How long can we be deaf to our own words? Her hair feels like long silk between my fingers.

A cacophony of voices about who you should be or how you are supposed to feel or how you have to do this and that to be good enough, and you still don’t measure up—it can feel like a dark serpentine shadow suffocating you. A death-squeeze around the two of us. The robin falls silent.

When you’re most wounded by the world—run to the only Word that brings healing.

And His Word makes it clear: at the core of every one of our issues is this attempt to construct our identity on something else besides Christ.

Hadn’t Søren Kierkegaard described sin as not to will to be oneself before God—to “be in despair at not willing to be oneself”—and faith as “that the self in willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God”?² You are most who you are meant to be when no wind in the world can stop you from being grounded transparently in God. You are your truest self when you live with your heart as glass to God.

“Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God,” writes theologian Tim Keller. “Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him. What does this mean? Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something . . . Human beings were made not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above anything else, and build their very identities on him. Anything other than this is sin.”³

What I won’t break to build my identity on Him is sin.

Everything falls quiet. Hope’s long and willowy next to me, like a stilled sapling leaning, looking for light. And I’m looking for words to give her what I know of the scars and history of my own brokenness: you can’t experience intimacy with Christ until you know your identity in Christ. Activity for God—is not the same as intimacy with God or identity in God. And it is your intimacy with Christ that gives you your identity. You can’t experience the power of Christ, the mission of Christ, being made new in Christ, until you know who you are in Christ. Your identity literally means “the same”—that regardless of changing circumstances, the core of you is unchangeable, stable, the same.

When your identity is in Christ, your identity is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Criticism can’t change it. Failing can’t shake it. Lists can’t determine it. When your identity is in the Rock, your identity is rock-solid. As long as God is for you, it doesn’t matter what mountain rises ahead of you. You aren’t your yesterday, you aren’t your messes, you aren’t your failures, you aren’t your brokenness. You are brave enough for today, because He is. You are strong enough for what’s coming, because He is. And you are enough for all that is, because He always is.

Nothing can break your life like not knowing who you are in Christ, and there is nothing that needs breaking more in life than the lies about who you are in Christ. The greatest danger to our soul is not success or status or superiority—but self-lies. When you listen to the self-lies hissing that you’re unlovable, unacceptable, unwanted, that’s when you go seeking your identity in success or status or superiority and not in your Savior. Self-lies are the destroyer of the soul because they drown out the sacred voice that can never stop whispering your name: Beloved.

“Hope.” She turns her face. I can start here. I can tell it slant. I can meet her brokenness with bits of my own because the shortest distance between two hearts is always the way of brokenness. “I ever tell you about when my uncle Paul started chasing me through the house with that snake?”

She rolls onto her back across our bed, her searching eyes finding mine. “He chased you with a snake?”

I stroke her hair slow, my girl trying to navigate the words and feelings of broken people with serrated edges that cut her deep.

“I mean, he didn’t mean anything by it. Uncle Paul, he’d turn out the lights in Gram’s yellow-tiled kitchen. Then he’d flick on the flashlight and spin it round till the light was flooding up this glossy two-page spread from one of Great-Grandpa’s old National Geographics. And for a little kid, that paper snake was as real as if its sandpaper tongue had licked me.”

I can still close my eyes and see it, that beady-eyed snake with its mouth wide. You can spend your one wild life trying to outrun glossy, beady-eyed lies, the fears strangling you right there at your thin neck.

“One of the devil’s greatest weapons is to make you believe you’re all alone,” I tell her. “You are not alone.” And we’re never alone in feeling alone. We’ve all felt as if we’re unwanted failures and it’s Jesus who cups our faces close: “I’ll never let you down, never walk off and leave you.”⁴

“In grade school, Josie Miller said I must be wearing clothes from the bottom of some garbage bag from the Sally Ann because I was a rotting, musty mess that stunk up the world.”

I lean in close to Hope.

“People will always have opinions about you. But you live for God because He’s the only one who has intimate knowledge of you. Nothing anyone says can malign you, assign you, or confine you. Your Maker’s the only one who can define you. Your identity isn’t founded on you finding yourself. Feelings are meant to be felt and given to God—but feelings can’t tell you about God, you, or your relationship. Your identity, your security, your acceptability come from who God is—and not how you feel. Because there was something before what you felt about yourself—and that is what God feels about you. Feelings are meant to be felt and then taken to God, who felt first about you. Will you believe first how He feels about you? When you experience how God knows and receives you, you bond with God, united, and let Him speak your true identity and there’s nothing more important in this world than to truly feel and know what God feels about you.”

NEVER BE AFRAID
OF BROKEN THINGS—
BECAUSE CHRIST
IS REDEEMING
EVERYTHING.

Hope’s nodding slow, and her finger traces that cross drawn on my wrist.

“And you know what?” I whisper it quietly to Hope, remembering what it was like to be exactly where she is, which seems like its own kind of miraculous koinonia. “Whatever Josie Miller thought I smelled of? It wasn’t a garbage bag. I’d fed a couple hundred squealing hogs before I ever stepped foot in that school. My hands would smell of hogs and feed troughs and shoveling out pens. There was no getting rid of that smell.” How do you become ashamed of who you are? No matter how hard you scrub, it can feel too late to change who you’ve become. That lie of ugliness and less-than-enoughness slithered under the layers of years and snaked up me a bit.

I pull Hope close. “None of us are ever alone. When I was ten and the school bus dropped me off, I was walking up our farm lane, wearing my red cropped pants with a scent of hog on my hands, when a baseball smashed into the back of my head, and the whole busload of kids erupted in cheers. I turned and saw Lissa Turscott, and I just wanted to die.”

“Oh,” Hope’s eyes read sympathy.

“And in eighth grade, the girls jeered that no one in the whole school was more hated than I was. I can still hear them laughing.” I take her hand, bring mine up to her cheek. “But none of us are ever really alone.”

I’ve made wide berths around women for years and skirted the communion of community because who knew when smiles could turn into fangs if you turned your back? Your identity might be broken by lies. And my girl looks like she knows bites that have broken the skin. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Munford, once wagged her finger in my face and said I wasn’t smart enough for her class: “You only made it in here by the skin of your teeth, Little Miss Ann, and don’t you ever forget it.” All my life I’ve felt like a fraud with skin on.

And what I don’t know how to tell her is that later in some way, those words formed me.

They’ve become like my own name engraved right into me.

Fraud. Phony. Not Good Enough.

Hope’s resting her fingers on my wrist-drawn cross. Some wounds so twist and form us they become more than scars, but who we actually believe we are. Some wounds cut so deep we carry them like our very names. When I’d told my friend Mei what Mrs. Munford had said, she had let me sit with my words, and I’d turned to her and mumbled it, finding my stumbling: “Maybe we all find it easier, safer, to feel like broken misfits than to face the fact that we’re beloved. That we belong.”

I let my one hand pause in Hope’s hair. My pulse beats at my cross-marked wrist, resting on hers.

Living as one truly loved and cherished by God is the crossbeam that supports an abundant life in Christ. Belovedness is the center of being, the only real identity, God’s only name for you, the only identity He gives you. And you won’t ever feel like you belong anywhere until you choose to listen to your heart beating out that you do—unconditionally, irrevocably. Until you let yourself feel the truth of that—the truth your heart has always known because He who made it wrote your name right there.

The clock’s ticking loud above the stairs. Hope’s tracing the penned cross, and I quietly trace the veins on the back of her hand, like we’re both looking for ways.

“I’ve done more than you will ever know to break myself.” She’s seen the scars on my wrists. She understands. She’s looked into my eyes and seen me. I’m sitting there looking into her.

The mirror her dad and I bought with a little clutch of wedding money, we found it covered in a layer of dust in McFarley’s barn full of antiques—it’s hanging on the wall across from our bed. There’s a tin cross from Haiti hanging beside it. Hope and I look wavy in the old glass.

Something in me hurts deep—because your girl can mirror you. I can’t stop reading her eyes. Don’t judge the feelings. Feelings are meant to be felt . . . and then surrender the feelings to God. God, I don’t want her to hurt. I don’t want her to hurt alone. I don’t want her to feel broken alone. I want to share in her sufferings, participate in her sufferings. The worst human emotion to experience is aloneness. And I want koinonia with her, want her to feel it—the brokenness and givenness of koinonia is always worth the risk. I want to cup her face in my hands and tell her, tell both of us: that serpent, the enemy of your soul, his name means “prosecutor” and that’s what he does—he tries to make you feel alone and on trial, tries to make your life a trial to get you to prosecute yourself. He poisons you endlessly with self-lies. And the first tactic of the enemy of your soul is always to distort your identity. You can feel the hiss slithering up your neck like this deafening replay in your head: Did God really say you were worth anything? Look at you—you’re damaged goods. You’re too broken to be chosen.

That’s the voice that rattles me, that can form my feelings, that too often can shape my identity instead of the cross, that keeps me lying awake night after night, fearing I’ve run out of time, fearing I’ve missed the boat, fearing I was never good enough for the “real boat,” fearing I’ll probably get kicked off this boat. Surrender the feelings. Break open your heart and honestly feel and surrender the feelings to God. In the middle of the night, sometimes you can hear Him in your heart beating out His truth to the lying prosecutor and all these fears: You’ve never missed any boat when you’re holding on to the cross.

Hope curls into me. I’m desperate to make her self-lies go away. Hers. Mine. God, help.

Isn’t the fear that I am not enough really the lie that God isn’t enough?

If every belittling of self is a belittling of God, a kind of blaspheming of God’s sufficiency and enoughness, then maybe . . . maybe we don’t really have faith until we have faith that God loves us right now more than we could ever dream of loving ourselves.

What if speaking your most unspoken broken is what it takes to release a dammed-up Niagara Falls of grace? Grace that says your faith doesn’t have to try to measure up to anyone else because Jesus came down—and He measures you as good enough, as worthy enough, as loved more than enough. Grace embraces you before you prove anything, and after you’ve done everything wrong. Every time you fall down, at the bottom of every hole is grace. Grace waits in broken places. Grace waits at the bottom of things. Grace loves you when you are at your darkest worst, and wraps you in the best light. Grace seeps through the broken places and seeps into the lowest places, a balm for wounds.

That’s the tragedy and the comedy of life: Grace is grace when it gives us what we’d never ask for but always needed, and moves us to become what we always wanted. But hardly ever the way we wanted.

I uncoil Hope’s long hair from my fingers. It falls free. Touch her cheek.

Grace is what holds you when everything’s breaking and falling apart, and whispers that everything is really falling together.

She closes her eyes.

A simple line of words can be a lifeline. Words can be the essence of the ministry of presence. “That is what we’ve always got to do,” I whisper, “what you and I and all the broken can never stop doing: shake off that lying snake and break free.” Because that lying snake’s head’s been long crushed. No, make that pulverized. For the love, and for the sake of God, let go of the self-lies. It’s in a frame on the wall over my desk: “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”⁵

It’s only when you know your real identity that you can really break the enemy and break free. No matter what you’ve lost or who you’ve lost, or what bits of you have been broken off and lost—nothing that’s happened in the past can change it, and nothing in the future can intimidate the reality of it, because this is the realest true: you are always sufficient because God always gives you His all-sufficient grace.

I press my hand into Hope’s, my wrist and its drawn cross into her wrist, like the gift of who He is can be imprinted right into her.

Some kid slams the back door too loud on his way in. That tin cross falls off its pin on the wall beside the dresser. Hope leans over the edge of the bed, picks it up off the floor, and hands it to me.

It was once a discarded oil barrel. Now it’s cut and hammered into the shape of a cross. Like it’s a sign: How we are is not who we are. How we feel about us is not how He feels about us. “All His is mine and all mine”—my sins, my death, my damnation—“is His,” writes Luther.⁶ How we are is not who we are. Who we are is who He is.

The tin cross in my hand mirrors the ink cross on my wrist. The world and us, we are all being re-formed. Union with Christ—this is how to be fully human. Union with Christ, writes Karl Barth, “is the starting-point for everything else to be thought and said concerning what makes the Christian a Christian.”⁷ Believers in Christ are seen by God exactly as Christ is seen by God. I am who He is. I am crucified with Christ, unified with Christ, identified with Christ. Full stop. Full story. I am who He is. I am not the mistakes I have made; I am the righteousness He has made. I am not the plans I have failed; I am the perfectness He has finished. I am not the wrongs I have done; I am the faultlessness He has been. I am not the sins I have chosen; I am chosen by the Beloved, regardless of my sins. In Christ, I am chosen, accepted, justified, anointed, sealed, forgiven, redeemed, complete, free, Christ’s friend, God’s child, Spirit’s home.

The cross, this is the sign of who I am, of my actual and realest identity. Maybe all the brokenhearted don’t need to try to believe more in themselves, but to believe what Jesus says about them more. Your value is not defined by your achievements. Your value is defined by the One who said, “It is finished!” and who achieved it all. You don’t have to be awesome and do everything; you simply have to believe that the One who is truly awesome loves you through everything.

You’re more than your hands do.

You’re more than your hands have.

You’re more than how other hands measure you.

You are what is written on God’s hands: Safe. Held. His. Beloved.

“Yeah, Mama . . .” Hope gently squeezes my hand. “I think I hear what you’re saying—that once you face Him, you see who you really are . . . so you can go face anything.”

That—exactly that.

Be brave. Your bravery wins a thousand battles you can’t see because your bravery strengthens a thousand others to win their battles too.

I run my fingers around the edge of the cross. The tin’s got all these hammered indentations, raised spots like braille around these depressions. And it’s in the depressions of feeling not enough that we have to say, “Enough!” to the lies: “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”⁸

Hope’s hand lies in mine. Break the lies. Break the self-lies. I can feel her pulse. We both breathe together slow. The caress of God meets us in a stillness on the inside. It’s when we let the lies grow so loud around us and in us that we forget how to live from the inside out. Old barrels can forget they are being formed into crosses. Identity formation is most complete when we are formed like a cross. I slip the cross back into Hope’s hand. When love’s got ahold of you—there isn’t a lie in the universe that can pull you apart.

“Careful.” I smile at her standing there smiling at me, certain and brave. “The edge of that cross is sharp.” There’s a cross that can be a weapon in your hand. There’s a cross you can take into your heart to break you free . . .

. . . that can cut the head off a lying snake.