BP 166
My name is Mark. I have walked with Jesus for 25 years as of last month. At sixteen, I confessed that Jesus as my Lord and believed that God raised Him from the dead just as Romans 10:9,10 instructs. I believe (most days) that I am a new creation as per 2 Corinthians 5:17. John 3:3 tells me I have been born again.
So, why are there days when I feel like anything but a new creation? I feel more dead than alive.
Ephesians 2:4ff also informs me that, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith.”
Often, I do not experience that immeasurable grace or feel like I have been made alive with Christ. On a bad day, I feel worthy of rejection. I feel unredeemed. I simply don’t feel God’s love in my bones. What’s wrong with me? On my worst day, I wonder if I am even a believer!
Scripture tells me that when Jesus died, He nailed my sins to the cross
Colossians 2:13ff says, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”
So, why do I sometimes feel like my debt and shame are nailed not to the cross but driven like a railroad spike into my forehead? People tell me not to listen to my feelings; they remind me that my head is more reliable than my heart. What do I do with my heart, then? Ignore it? Am I not supposed to love God with all my mind and all my heart? Should I avoid my heart or go into it and clean it out like Jesus said about the inside of the cup? Shouldn’t I remove all the obstacles in my heart that prevent me from drawing close to Jesus with my affections?
How many times have I heard Romans 8:31? “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.”
So, then why am I still so engorged with condemnation that I am combat ready whenever I perceive someone is criticizing me? I am so quick to assume people are accusing me when they are simply stating their opinion. I feel attacked and respond by attacking back either outwardly or passively in my heart with isolating resentment and bitterness. I think others feel like they’re walking in a mine field whenever they even look at me—they have no idea how I will respond when I feel under the magnifying glass of scrutiny. My entrenched experience of shame and badness put me on the defensive always. Sometimes, I even feel like everyone is against me.
I have always heard verses like 2 Corinthians 5:21 that says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
According to the Bible, Jesus took my sin upon Himself and then credited His righteousness to my account. My unrighteousness has been removed and I am now filled with the righteousness of Jesus! I’m perfect in God’s eyes! So why do I still feel like I’m so bad on the inside? Less than others?
Could my compulsive behavior of washing my hands thirty times a day and hating any mess in my house have something to do with trying to purge the dirty mess I feel inside my mind and heart? Could it speak of the deep shame I feel every time I sin, a shame so deep that it causes me to avoid God for days afterwards until I feel like He may have forgotten how bad and unlovable I am?
A year ago, I was ready to walk away from God. I wanted to deconstruct my faith to the point of leaving Jesus because it just wasn’t working for me.
I started therapy instead.
Nine months into the counseling journey–after months of working through my resistance to even the slightest emotional mess–a door opened in my soul that had been closed for 25 years–actually, bolted shut. I began having flashbacks of my mother and her anger.
I myself had never felt strong emotions before—not really. Now as I began to recover memories of my mother’s erasing anger, I began to experience many emotions including something I would call rage. The emotion was so intense that I felt like it was a brief insanity. I now understood what people meant when they said they saw red. I not only saw red, I felt it in my viscera. My insides were on fire. Clearly, I did need to clean the inside of the cup.
Why was I so angry? And sad? And afraid?
I was slowly realizing that at five years of age, I had slammed the door shut against my emotions because emotions are connected to memories, and I did not want to remember what my mother had done. In short, my mother had used all of us kids as scapegoats—especially my siblings. I was actually her favorite child for years because I had observed the interaction between my fragile, unpredictable mother and my older siblings and had learned what not to do in her presence. Positively said, I learned how to never trigger her anger by being a very good boy.
After five years of experience and close observation, I had memorized the “mother map” and knew where the land mines were. I intuitively had learned what not to say or do–and what to do to avoid her unpredictable reactions.
What do I mean? Mom tolerated her children until any of us touched her third-degree emotional burns. (None of us know how she got burned in the first place—something from her childhood, no doubt). If we were careful and did not touch her fiery wounds, there was a fragile peace in the family. As soon as we talked back, disagreed with her, showed anger toward her, chose someone else over her, triggered her intense shame in any way, she mutated into a female version of the Hulk. Yes, she was different than the Hulk in that she never used physical punishment against us—only a searing psychological attitude toward us that destroyed us as humans worthy of love and keeping.
At fourteen, I almost made a fatal mistake: I told my mother I wanted to be closer to my father (he lived in the house with us but had always been emotionally distant). That verbalized intention to make a bid toward my father threatened my mother. For some reason, any affection I felt for my father represented a withdrawal of love from her. Thus, the more I loved my father, the more my mother hated me.
She never could do “both.” It was always one or the other for her. Never “both-and” but always “either-or.” She was not nuanced in the slightest. I either loved Dad and hated her or hated Dad and loved her. She was so sensitive to rejection. She even saw it in my eyes and heard it in my sighs. Every gesture was personal to her. No wonder it was always about her. No wonder she had no love for us. She was too busy scanning her environment for abandonment.
Within days of my utterance about Dad, I had become the worst of all the kids in my mother’s eyes. It wasn’t difficult to discern her emotional shift because she started locking me out of the house for small offenses and began to tell me that I was selfish, mean, hateful, a “mistake” that she had never wanted. She even began to give me the silent treatment for days at a time while showing more love to my siblings. I began to feel very bad and unloved. She was gifted at making you feel unloved if you ever made her feel unloved.
I was in the mother doghouse, an experience tantamount to emotional death by abandonment.
Even at fourteen, I discerned that to get out of that doghouse, I would have to undo my badness. I would have to die to self. I would have to go back to being the good boy who did not threaten mother’s fragility but made her feel safe, desired, and special.
I was in a dilemma. If I became her favorite child again by becoming who she needed me to be—enmeshed with her and more of a husband to her than my father—I would have to die to my true self who was a separate person and not a merger figure who would be swallowed up by my mother. But if I did separate from her and pursue my father, I would die because she would kill me with her anger, blaming, and abandonment.
I was going to have to die either way. So, which poison would I choose?
I was weak—like my father. I did not stand up to her. I went back to who mother needed me to be just as my emotionally detached father had done during his 23 years of marriage. The door to my heart and my repressed emotions did not have a chance to open even a crack during that two-week period. So it was that at fourteen years old, even though I came so close to choosing life instead of death, I ended up where I had been for decades—dead to myself and alive to my mother.
I do not want to blame my mother for me being dead. I do not want to give her that kind of power over me. On the other hand, I want you, the reader of this blog, to try to understand the power that such a parent holds over a child. I’m not talking mild “shame on you” messages from a parent or “I will have to send you to your room for fifteen minutes.” Those consequences are child’s play. How I wish I would have had one of those good, emotionally mature parents instead of the three-year-old mother!
No, I’m talking annihilation. Death. Erasure as a person. Abandonment by the mother. Being used as a scapegoat for the parent’s badness. Total devaluation because the mother (or father) feels totally devalued by the child. Withdrawing all love and gaslighting the child until he or she becomes the person the mother needs in order to not crumble. Telling the child things like, “You have ruined my life” and “God will send you to hell for this” and “You are so stupid and selfish” and “Either I am going to have to leave or you’re going to have to be sent away” without ever taking the words back or apologizing for the emotional outburst later.
The primary insight I received in therapy is that while Jesus credited righteousness to my account, my mother credited unrighteousness to me. She deposited her badness and shame inside me if I wounded her (if in any way, big or small, I treated her like her mother or father did). She laid her sin on me as her scapegoat. She could never be bad, so she had to see the badness in me and then view me as the terrible child who was unworthy of her love.
So, my mom killed me in two ways whenever I separated from her in a way that shook her equilibrium. She withdrew her love, yes, but then she also gave me her badness. Thus, I was not only unlovable, but I was also the bad one who should never have been born. I began to see that she was the opposite of Jesus who loved me at my worst and then also gave me His righteousness.
I had finally discovered why God’s grace, love, and mercy never penetrated my heart. Mom had taught me for years (especially as I watched how she treated my siblings if they threatened her weak ego) that my true self that God had created was intolerable to her and therefore could not exist. My genuine self was actually a threat to her—shameful and worthy of abandonment. She could not love who God had made me to be but only who her fragile self could receive, namely, a child who would never challenge her but always live to prop up her fragile self and remind her that she was an amazing mother.
So, my mother credited unrighteousness to my account until I felt unworthy of being alive. Meanwhile, Jesus credited righteousness to my account until I knew that I was loved and had been made alive with Him. What a chaotic dissonance that lived within me. Two totally different voices, one that spoke of a conditional acceptance that left me anxious and shameful and the other that communicated an unconditional love that eradicated condemnation.
At the darkest point in my therapy journey, I felt that my mother was in cahoots with Satan, the thief who came to steal, kill, and destroy—so unlike Jesus who came to bring me life and bring it to me abundantly. I hated her and wanted her dead! I felt like my mother was right—I am a mean, shameful, ungrateful son who deserves to die! Fortunately, things have improved a lot since that darkest of valleys. I have even begun to forgive her.
What do I want you to take away from my story? If you ever feel incapable of receiving God’s love and grace, one stone to turn over in your healing journey is if someone projected her or his anger and shame onto you to such an extent that you felt rejected, abandoned, and possibly even annihilated as a person.
Don’t deconstruct your faith if you’re making little progress right now in experiencing Jesus’ grace and love. Don’t believe that He has forgotten you or hates you or that He doesn’t even exist.
Rather, be like me and identify the ancient messages from childhood that still ring in your ears and lie and accuse and murder and sound like God’s voice instead of some human voice (or devilish one). Then, with the help of the Holy Spirit, replace the message of annihilation with the gospel of Jesus’ love and unrelenting pursuit of you.
Mom told me I was unlovable and worthy of death while God tells me that He takes great delight in me and wants me to have abundant life in His presence. He actually wants me in His family, and He will never send me away.
So, never believe that Jesus has turned His back on you. Intimacy is always a battle in this brief human existence. This is the war raging between death and life, separation and love.
Trust a parent who corrects you and gives you consequences for your sin and disobedience with the goal of making you a better person—fully alive in Christ and more like Him.
Do not trust the parents who must psychologically and emotionally kill you in order to preserve their fragile sense of self-protection and control and who use you as a receptacle for their badness and shame. Do not be party to the death of your true self through the crushing projection of the anger and sin of others.
You will need to forgive such parents and possibly even separate from them because they are untrustworthy, reactive, and personalize everything. Run instead to Jesus. He has no need for you to treat Him with kid gloves. Rather, He will remind you that He came for you so that you might be freed from condemnation and pursued by grace and love.
Always remember that Jesus credited righteousness to your account, to your heart and soul. Even when you sin and fail and grieve the Holy Spirit, you will not be rejected, excommunicated, condemned, or annihilated. Jesus was already annihilated for you. There is no more condemnation.
So, rejoice, give thanks, and glorify His name!
