Exposing A Well-Guarded Secret

Exposing A Well-Guarded Secret

I have been going to my church for over five years.  The sermons are helpful, and I’m learning a lot from the classes offered there.  But when I look around at other people talking and laughing before meetings or classes begin it seems like most of them have special friends that they are close to, and I feel lonely.  I know a lot of them by name and often “chit-chat” with them.  But being a “loner” feels miserable.  Any ideas?

What a great question.  I admire your openness to ask it and to try to deal with your lonely feelings.  Not only have I had them—and sometimes still do, but years ago, when I was participating in a ministers’ meeting, I met Jack.  At the time, Jack was a district superintendent whose position in his denomination made him a pastor to fifty or sixty other ministers.  He was handsome, intelligent, articulate, honest about himself, personally committed to Christ…and miserable.

As we talked, Jack told me that he felt basically lonely inside—even though he has a good family life and success in his work.  It seemed to him that many of his co-workers were part of a kind of “in-group,” and seemed to have close personal friends with whom they came and shared a room.  He couldn’t be as personal with anyone as they seemed to be with each other.  In fact, he didn’t have any close personal friends among his associates, and very few truly close personal friends at all.

As we talked, I thought about how often over the years I have felt like a “loner.”  I remembered our family moving to a new city when I was in middle school.  I looked at groups of boys who seemed to be close buddies, wishing I could be a real part of what they seemed to be sharing.  But when I became a part of such groups, and later fraternities, and even was a leader in several,  I discovered a surprising secret.  Except in rare instances, “in-group” members are not nearly as loving and vulnerable to each other about their real problems and aspirations as they appeared to be from the outside.  I discovered the “façade of intimacy” that in-groups often wear.  And this well-guarded secret makes probably millions of kids and adults feel inadequate if they do not have “lots of close friends who are ‘in.’”

As I have counseled with successful men and women over the years, I have found myself identifying with their feelings of inadequacy in this area of life so often that I began asking some of them how many really close personal friends they had.  Many replied, “None.”  Some said, “One or two,” but almost no one had more than five or six.  After having moved more than a dozen times as an adult, I realize that although there are many people I love, respond to, and enjoy being with on occasion, there are only a handful of people I feel are close friends.

All this made me wonder if perhaps many of us have been subtly conditioned to look for something which actually does not exist, expect in a few cases—a place in life with a large number of intimate, totally open friends.  In a busy active life one has the time and energy to be real friends with only a very few people on a continuing basis.

And I now believe this restless yearning for connection to others is universal.  And although we try to fulfill it through friends, mates, and children, it seems to me that this restlessness can never be completely satisfied by people.  I am becoming convinced that this deepest unrest is a longing for a deep connection with God, a longing planted in the fabric of every person’s life.  Maybe Augustine was right when he said that our hearts will always be restless until we find our ultimate rest in Him.

Some years ago a friend called me and ten other friends, telling us he was having a hard time and asking if we would meet with him over a Friday night to counsel and pray with him.  We did, and because of what those of us who came got from the meeting, we have continued to meet three times a year and share our real failures…and successes—for thirty-one years now.  It has been through those men that I have learned that at some level we are all just uncertain children.

In my own life, I feel closer to people with whom I work and pray, who are also trying to surrender their lives to God since I do not expect them to fulfill an interpersonal need which can be met only by God.  And paradoxically, some of us are becoming to each other the deeply sharing friends for whom I have always longed.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Augustine, Confessions

“Great priests, saints like the Curé d’Ars, who have seen into the hidden depths of thousands of souls, have, nevertheless, remained men with few intimate friends.  No one is more lonely than a priest who has a vast ministry.  He is isolated in a terrible desert by the secrets of his fellow men.”

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“’A friend is one soul in two bodies.’  Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; he who has many friends has no ‘friend’; and ‘to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.’  Fine friendship requires duration rather than fitful intensity…”

Aristotle, Ethics

Lord, give me the grace to avoid trying to force other people to give me the kind of unconditional acceptance and love that only You have to give.  Help me not to reject them when they cannot be You.  Thank You that in Christ You have offered to be the personal friend I have longed for—in whose unconditional love and acceptance I can sometimes find the courage to reach out to others.  Help me to risk their rejection in order to introduce them to You and Your truth about living as a son or daughter in this complex world.  Although I hate to admit it, I am glad that You went through the experience in Christ and with Paul of having to go it alone without friends during some trying times.  It is comforting to know that You understand the feelings of a loner.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

Jesus:

…“Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.” Matthew 26:56

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice…’My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” Matthew 27:46

And Paul:

“Do your best to come to me soon,  for Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia.  Luke alone is with me… At my first defense no one took my part; all deserted me…” 2 Timothy 4:9-11, 16

Has the “façade of intimacy” affected you?  If so, how?

Do you have a close friend with whom you share your life?

Exposing A Well-Guarded Secret

How can I Change my Mind?

Keith, I’ve recently become a Christian.  Everybody says I’ve got to be willing to let God into my life, and to let God guide my life.  So I finally am willing, but nothing has happened.  Can you help me?

This is an excellent question, maybe the best anyone could ask who wants to lead a spiritual life.  My problem is that most of my life I’ve lived in my head, that is, in my thoughts.  If I thought of something, I thought I’d done it.  But Jesus seemed to be teaching that everything we commit to do in our heads has an appropriate behavior in the real world to accompany it.  In other words, if you commit to loving God, then you’ll do certain things that God would have you to do.  The questions are: what are those things, and how do we get these things out of our heads and out into our real, behavioral world.

I guess what I’m saying is that willingness is the true beginning.  But willingness means that you move toward actually doing the things that God wants you to.  And as you begin to do them you experiment with how to do them, what your style is and how it works for you.

To find out where that guidance is accessible, I began to look in the scriptures for the kinds of things that would help me change my life.  The Apostle Paul spent a good bit of his time teaching people how to do these things.  At one point, he said that we’re supposed to surrender our everyday ordinary lives—our eating, sleeping, walking around, going to work lives to God. (Romans 12:1)

So I said, “Okay, I’m  willing to do that.”  But then someone pointed out to me that I needed to start doing it.  So I began to think about God when I went to work at the office.  At the end of the first day, I realized that I forgot about God as soon as I got out of the car in the parking lot.  So how did I get God from inside my head out into actions at my work place?

I created some personal reminders.  For example, I wrote on an index card, “Listen to this person.  God may have a message for you.”  Then I put this note card in the lap drawer of my desk.  Every time someone walked into my office, I’d open my lap drawer,  take out a pencil and pad and put them on the desk.  And as I did that, I’d see the note card with the reminder on it.  I began to listen to people better, and as I got to know them I could pray for them.

When I went to get a drink at the drinking fountain down the hall, I’d pray silently for the people as I passed them.  These were some ways I began to bring my willingness to have God in my life out into actually doing things in my real life, without making a big sanctimonious show of it.

As I read scripture, I found that Paul described very simply one way this life is transmitted to others.  He said, “Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard, and saw, and realized.  Do that and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.”  (Phil. 4:8) In other words, if you’re willing to get worked into God’s plans, then he said to the people following him:

1.  First put into practice what they heard.  They heard Paul say that Christ lived in him and had changed him from “the chief of sinners” into someone who was willing to risk talking about and living for Christ.

2.  Then the next thing is “what they saw.”  After people heard Paul talk about risking his life, they saw him do it.  For example, they saw him get arrested for believing.  They saw him take chances of all kinds with his real life, his vocation, everything.

3.  And then, after they’d heard and seen him, they realized, “I could do this too.”  Something clicks over in one’s minds when he or she actually see someone else taking the risk of really trying to live for Christ in ways the beginner is afraid to do.  Christian mentors don’t have to talk about the life they are trying to live all the time.  They just live their life in line with what they teach and witnesses to. But it’s obvious that God is always a part of what they’re doing and being when one is with them.

When people asked Paul how to change the inside of one’s mind  so these outward behaviors would follow, he said in effect, to change the content of what you put into your mind.  The only way into your mind is through your senses, your eyes and ears and so forth—what you listen to and what you watch.  You have some control over that.  You can choose what you watch and read and listen to.  Is it porn?  Is it the market place? Is it football?  What is it that you put into your mind?

Paul’s advice was to put good things in there that will replace the bad things.  You don’t try to ferret out the bad things.  You put the good things in and there isn’t room for any more, so something has to go.  You can ask God for guidance about which things to eliminate when you put in prayer, meditation and reading the scriptures and other helpful books.  Paul said it this way.  “Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling and gracious.  The best, not the worst, the beautiful not the ugly, things to praise, not things to curse.”  (Phil. 4:7)

It also helped me to tell some people (e.g. my mentor, or people in the small group I’m in) that I’m willing to be God’s person.  And then I  began to do some of these things and share what happened to me—good and bad—when I tried to change the habitual content I’d taken in.  And they had heard me talk about this, and then they saw me doing it, and then they started asking the real questions, like you’re asking.  So I became a Christian who likes to help people find out who they are and what God may have for them to do with their lives.

Another change I made came when I had trouble sleeping.  Twenty years ago I began to memorize certain prayers and scripture passages about what I wanted to be.  These passages include the two that I just mentioned and two other passages on love:  1 John 4, and the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians.  I also memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.    So when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would lie in bed and repeat these things, putting these things into my mind instead of the terrors of the night or my fears or anxieties about the future. After I got them memorized, I wouldn’t have to get up and turn on the light (which often got me out of my funk) and I would go back to sleep.  I would replace the sleep-depriving thoughts with these great statements about how to live for Christ.

Almost all the great heroes of the faith have wound up seeing and telling the people to whom they wrote that loving people and God both in their minds and in their behaviors is the goal of the life Jesus offered us in God’s name.

“We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love.” Francis de Sales

Lord, thank you that you do not try to make us pious, “successful” looking people  we are not, but that you offer us a way to live and love that fits us and can release us from the fears and limitations that keep us from being the honest, free and loving people we’ve always hoped we could be.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

“Let me give you a new command: Love one another.  In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.” John 13:34-35  The Message

“My beloved friends…everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love, so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him.” 1 John 4:7 The Message

“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” 1 John 4:17-18 The Message

Keith mentioned ways that he has moved from “willingness” to “action”.  Share your experience with this and have you encountered any blocks that have kept you from doing things you believe God would have you to do?  If so, what are they?

Exposing A Well-Guarded Secret

Something is Broken

I have been disloyal to my wife and she found out.  I’ve confessed, and have also confessed to God.  I feel like God has forgiven me, and I’ve forgiven myself.  But my spouse says “It’s not that easy—that something’s broken—that ‘being sorry’ won’t fix it.”  She said she feels betrayed and that is (so far) not possible to get over.  We both still love each other, but don’t know what to do to get really close again.  Can you help us any?

Oh boy, this is a question that many people have asked—including me.  From my counseling and my own experience, I have found that for some people (who are the “betrayers,”) it is difficult to grasp all of the domino-cascading consequences resulting from the betrayal.  One of these consequences is related to the nature of trust.  In fact, many people equate “forgiveness” with “trust.”  But there is a difference between the grace that allows someone to forgive us, and the difficulty that person has with trusting the betrayer again.  Personal betrayal is about as deep a wound as can be inflicted.

Recently I heard a sermon by Rick Shurtz, teaching pastor at Gateway Church, that helped me see this whole problem more clearly.  Rick talked about the impact a personal betrayal had on him.  One of his elementary school teachers was, he felt, the best teacher he had ever had—even through graduate school.  The teacher was especially friendly toward Rick, and Rick especially remembers the period set aside each day during which each student read silently something of his or her choice.  Rick noticed that the teacher did his own silent reading, and he always had his Bible open in front of him.  This made a very strong positive impression on Rick.

Eventually this teacher moved to another city and became the Principal of another elementary school.  One day, when Rick was around fourteen, his parents told him that they had just learned that this former teacher—the man who had befriended him, inspired him to learn, and who showed him that it was not shameful to be a Christian—had been arrested for child molestation.

Later that evening, as Rick watched the story reported on the local nightly news, he felt numb with shock.  This teacher’s behavior felt like a personal betrayal to Rick—and it hurt and confused him in many ways.  For example he couldn’t help wondering if, when he went to class the next day, the other students (who knew Rick was one of the teacher’s favorites) would think that Rick had been one of the students this teacher had molested, although he hadn’t been.  He questioned everything that he learned from his teacher—particularly concerning his Christian witness.

In his sermon Rick pointed out that many people who have been betrayed (though not all) have found God’s grace and been able to forgive the person who betrayed them.  And although grace, and forgiveness are a free gift, the trust of the people who had been betrayed had to be earned, and restoring trust might take a lot of time.  After a betrayal, the person betrayed experiences many painful feelings, and must also grapple with the heart-breaking knowledge that the trusted one had the ability and the will to deceive her or him.

This statement said a lot to me about the struggle that a person who has been betrayed goes through, especially after deciding to continue in a relationship after a betrayal.  It is difficult to regain that original freely given trust that had existed.

So it may be that what your wife says is “broken,”—that saying, “I’m sorry” won’t fix— is trust.  Trust is one of the most essential ingredients of a close relationship.  So if getting close again is what you and your spouse want to experience, perhaps your focusing on restoring trust between you can help you make progress.

So how do people restore trust when it has been broken?  I don’t know.  But for the one who has been the betrayer, as you have, I think practicing patience and learning to do what you can to behave in a trustworthy manner toward the one you have betrayed would be important.

For the one who has been betrayed, here is something I learned from Pat Mellody.[1]

“Relationships require trust.  The problems come when we do not recognize that trust is not a decision, but the result of certain actions.  Trust is the result of taking risks over time and not getting hurt.”

Somehow the one betrayed has the idea that he or she must be vigilant and smart to somehow avoid being betrayed again.  But keeping up a constant vigilance to protect oneself from the pain of being betrayed can close the door on current and future intimacy.  So making the decision to take some risks with the relationship is a step of courage that—if one doesn’t get hurt—can allow trust to grow.

While the original, unblemished, freely given trust you each had for the other may never return, I believe it is possible for a new kind of trust to grow, perhaps stronger because of what you have both learned in this painful but maturing process.

And for both parties, I would add—pray for yourselves and each other as you go through the coming months and years.

This sermon clarified for me why some people close to me (not my wife, Andrea) have difficulty being around me, even almost forty years after I had a moral failure and betrayed their trust.  I have been forgiven (by God and by these people), and I have tried to conduct myself in a trustworthy way toward them.  But the relationships with some of them are not close (at least not as close as I would like them to be).  And the tenuous contacts I do have with them feel very delicate and touchy to me. I am very sad about that, but understand and accept it as one of the many consequences of my unwise choices almost forty years ago.  I am grateful for the insight I got from Rick’s talking about how being betrayed impacted him.  So I want to say “thank you” to any of you reading this for questions like this.  Sometimes in trying to help you sort these issues out, God helps me to deal with them in my own life.

Dear Lord, thank you for your grace and forgiveness when we confess.  Help me to hear and try to understand with patience the reactions of those whom I have hurt.  Teach me what you would have me to learn from the painful reality of the pain I have caused in others.

And please help me to learn how to be trustworthy in all my relationships—particularly with you.   In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Are you hurting? Pray. … Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out.

Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.  (James 5:13, 15-17)

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.  Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

How do you learn to be trustworthy, when you can’t undo a betrayal or have hurt someone in other ways and they can’t trust you?  We welcome your comments below.


[1] Mellody, Pia, with Andrea Wells Miller and J. Keith Miller, Facing Love  Addiction. p. 157

Exposing A Well-Guarded Secret

Is there Any Power in Simple Loving?

Sometimes I feel like my life for Christ doesn’t amount to much.  I don’t do big things that change people or their lives, and I don’t know how to do that.  Someone told me that they felt their purpose is just to love people.  But I can’t see how simple acts of love in my ordinary life could be significant.  Any ideas about that?

For years it didn’t occur to me that simply doing or saying loving things as a Christian could be significant.  But your question took me back to a time when Andrea and I were doing a course with some people who asked this question:  “What can we do that’s loving, and how could simple loving actions as Christians be powerful?”

So we decided to explore what Christian loving would look like in our daily lives.  We met with this group of people to try to see what we could learn about what loving people for God might mean.  At the end of each weekly session, I’d give them various assignments, such as focused listening and paying attention to someone in their family, getting to know people around their church, in their neighborhood or at work whom they didn’t know very well, and then experimenting with doing caring acts for people—like calling on new people moving into your neighborhood and helping them locate good cleaners, pharmacies or other services they might need.

As the final weeks of the course approached, I gave this assignment:  “Think of somebody that you really don’t like.  You don’t like to be around them, you have negative feelings and you find yourself not wanting to be with them at all.  Then do one of these loving acts that we’ve all been doing in the previous assignments with one (or more) of these people and report what happens when we meet again next week.

There was a collective groan and a spattering of chatter before the closing prayer period.  So Andrea and I were really curious to see what we and the other group members would come up with.  (We always did the same assignment as we asked the others to do.)

Well, the next week one woman—who was usually one of the last ones to report—spoke up first.  (She never had done that before.)  She said, “I just don’t believe what happened this past week! I didn’t have to go outside my own family to find somebody I didn’t like.  I have five siblings, and we haven’t communicated with each other in our family in almost twenty years.  As a matter of fact I moved out to Texas from up north to get away from them.

“Our oldest brother is the one that drove me away.  We just don’t like each other, and I haven’t spoken to him in all this time.  So although it really scared me to think about talking to him, I prayed about it and decided that he would be the one I’d contact.

“After putting it off for several days, I called him.  When he answered the phone, I felt a kind of shock to hear his voice, and I didn’t know what to say.  So finally I said, ‘Uh, Brother?’

“And he said, ‘Sis, is this you?’  And then after a brief silence, he added, ‘ What do you want?’

“I took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, I just want to…uh…to tell you… uh… that I love you.’

“Then Brother said, ‘Good grief, Sis—what’s happened to you?”

“I didn’t know what to do then, so I just said, ‘I can’t talk about it.’  And I hung up.”

Everybody laughed , and she did too.  Then I asked her, “Well how did that feel?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “It was frightening, but there’s more!  The next evening my sister called, the one I’m closest to.  I haven’t really communicated with her very much either but she’s the one I would call in a family emergency.  She called me from 1,500 miles away and said, ‘What in the world did you tell Brother?’

“And I said, ‘Why?’

“Then my sister said, ‘Because he just e-mailed us today that he’s sending all of us round trip tickets to Austin, TX to come down and find out what happened to you.”  And she stopped talking and swallowed hard.  And we both almost cried.

And as I heard that woman’s experience, I thought, “My gosh, I’d been thinking all my life about big things could I do for God that would be helpful.”  And then after the other group members had reported, I thought, “Maybe there are some people in my life I’m reluctant to talk to whom I just need to tell that I really care about them—because listening to that woman’s simple act of caring made me realize how important simple acts of love can be.

Lord, teach me how to be loving even toward those whom I do not like—or am afraid don’t like me.  Forgive me for reviewing in my mind all the reasons for my dislike of people who hurt me so that I can learn how to re-approach them with simple in loving ways that are genuine.  In Jesus’ name.

“You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.”  Matthew 5:42-44, The Message

“This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.” Matthew 10:40, The Message

“Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”  John 13:35, The Message

Please share your experience with us.  How has a simple act of love changed you? Post your comment below.

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