Overcoming the Alone-ment

My heart aches for those who are struggling with isolation. Trapped in despair and feeling that you are all alone in your struggles is a terrible place to be. I speak from much experience. My stubborn refusal to feel worthy of the love of God and others has brought me great sadness.

I am currently in an unplanned career transition - I was recently laid off from my job. I’ve been through this twice before. The two previous times were filled with despair, frustration, anxiety, and depression that I thought would crush me completely.

Now, as I’m going through it again, I have the PTSD of past fears resurfacing, but they don’t last very long. I no longer have a daily binge of acting out in various addictive behaviors and that helps, but what makes ALL the difference is that I’m also not trying to do it alone.

A friend shared this term - Alonement - from a guest on the Leading Saints podcast. It is the opposite of Christ’s Atonement where God sacrificed everything in His power to save me. The Alonement is shacked with the chains of Hell, self loathing, suffocating solitude. It states that I am nothing and so I’m not worth being loved.

I connected with this term because it illustrates my past. But it is not a part of my present and I don’t plan to let it play any role in my future.

This time as I’m going through deja vu, people are reaching out to me. The many hours I have invested in others is paying dividends. I never put forward the effort with any expectation of a return, but what a great return it is.

In Graham Cooke’s The Inheritance, he states (speaking in the language of God),

“And you may love Me back with the love that I give you.
You may love Me back outrageously with the outrageous love that I bestow upon you.
And know this, you can only love Me as much as you love yourself.”

The greatest of commandments are to love God and to love others as we love ourselves. And I’ve only been able to love myself as I’ve learned to let go of the ”gods of this world” and embrace my Eternal Father who sees me as His little kid, and loves me 100% as I am right now.

As I accept that, I am able to love others with the same love. And my life is that much better for it all.

By Pete, Writing Team

Regaining Myself

I know that there are many reasons to not come clean about one's addiction. Ever since I was a teenager, I would regularly feel the twinge of my conscience telling me that I needed to make a confession, but I never listened to it. It was just too terrifying, had too many ramifications, and would brand me with too many labels. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I kept the double-life going all the way through dating and the first five years of my marriage. As the years went by, I developed more nuanced justifications for concealing the truth. I knew that my wife looked up to me, and I told myself that it would be irresponsible to hurt her by letting her know of my betrayal. I considered the callings that I had in my church, and told myself that making a confession would mean losing those opportunities to serve others. And what if there were legal ramifications to my sins that compromised my ability to be a father to my son? “So you see,” I said to myself, “silently bearing the burden of what you’ve done and letting everyone else remain in blissful ignorance is the noble thing to do.”

What absolute, manipulative, self-serving, BS!

This wasn’t about other people, it was about me. I didn’t want to jeopardize my marriage. I didn’t want to lose my social status. I didn’t want to pay the price for my wrongs. I might have dressed my selfishness as concern for others, but it was selfishness all the same.

Thankfully, one day I managed to break out of that state of denial and justification. Exactly how is a story for another time, but the end result was that I finally told my wife, my church leaders, a therapist, and my family what was really going on. And when I did, I found something that I hadn’t even realized I was missing.

Myself.

You cannot live a lie without losing yourself. That’s just the way it works. And in all my years of telling lies I had lost my soul so gradually and imperceptibly that I didn’t even realize it had happened. Because I was always wearing a mask, life happened to the mask and not to me.

But then, from the very first moment that I made my confession, the mask came off and light and air rushed back onto my real face and I definitely felt that! It felt like my soul was being restored. Yes, now there was a great deal more stress and drama in my life, but it was all happening directly to me, not to the mask, and that was all that mattered.

In all my years of fear, I had been keenly aware of all the bad things that might happen to me if I told the truth, but I had never accounted for the good. If I were to travel back in time to talk with my past self when I was still unsure about coming clean I would say, “you’re right, you might lose your family, your status, your church, but none of those will be as bitter as you think because you’ll also get your authentic self back, and that is sweet enough to make up for all the rest.”

Jesus asked, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26). He is suggesting that no reward is worth the loss of a soul. I know now that this is true, because I’ve experienced the happy opposite of it.

What does a man really lack, even if he loses the whole world, but regains his own soul?

By Abe, Writing Team

Do I Understand My Pain?

In my previous writing, titled “God is Eager to Display His Work,” I used the story of Jesus healing the man born blind to explore the idea that the pain I often try to medicate with food and pornography could serve a greater purpose: to display God’s work as He heals me. And that healing may be closer than I think.

In this piece, I want to explore the possibility that I may not perceive my pain as clearly as the blind man understood his. The blind man knew exactly what his problem was—his blindness. Before Jesus came, he wasn’t wandering around upset that someone had neglected to turn the lights on. He understood the source of his pain.

In my case, much of my pain comes from past trauma, unwise decisions made by my children, challenges at work, and sometimes even the frustrations of home maintenance and loud noises. I often pray for God to help me forget my traumas, to guide my children to better choices, for work problems to be resolved quickly, for my house to hold together, and that my neighbor’s dogs will just - stop - barking! But I realize now that I’ve been praying wrong.

You see, I’ve been assuming that I simply am the way that I am - like how I believe loud noises will always bother me. But as I read about the healing of the blind man, it struck me: the problem isn’t the noise. The problem is how the noise affects me. And I could pray for healing from that.

Christ couldn’t have "turned the lights on" for the blind man if the man had seen his pain that way. In the same way, it might not be in God’s plan to change the hard things from my past, to fix my children, to make work easier, to hold my house together, or even to quiet my neighbor’s dogs.

As I reflected on the idea that I may not be seeing my pain accurately, I envisioned what life would look like if the real issues were fixed. Here’s what the vision entailed: A difficult memory surfaced, and I acknowledged it, let it go, and moved on. I was assigned a difficult work task with a deadline and got right to work on the interesting challenge. One of our three showers sprang a leak and I calmly turned off the water and added the repair to my to-do list. My child made a poor decision and I responded with love and guidance, without catastrophizing, forming an unhealthy attachment to the outcome, or taking it as a reflection on myself. An intentionally unmuffled car woke me up and I turned over and went back to sleep.

This sparked a new hope in me—that I could be changed. The world could stay as it is, but I could live in it without the negative effects it currently has on me. And why should it have that kind of power over me anyway? God may need me to work at it or even seek professional help, but I believe He is powerful and good enough to make that change in me.

In short, the real issue isn’t events themselves—it’s my negative reaction to them. What I need healing from is the hurt, not the causes of it.

This perspective can change how I pray. Instead of asking for events to change to suit me, I can now pray to be healed from my unhealthy reactions to these events.

I’m going to give it a try!

By Ty, Writing Team