BP59
Did you know you were born on an incline? The moment you enter this world, you will be moving backward if you put no strenuous effort into moving forward. There is no neutral in the transmission of life. Only Drive and Reverse.
So, then, there is no level ground in this world. People sometimes talk about arriving at a plateau in life. Well, there are no plateaus. You are daily moving upward or rolling backward. There is no treading water. You are swimming or sinking.
Climbing a mountain is a better analogy. To achieve a good, satisfying life you must make the intentional choice to ascend. If you do not make a plan to climb, you will go backwards. You will not settle into some safe and comfortable base camp—although it might feel that way; rather, you will devolve as a human being to lower levels of humanness.
Another word for The Climb is growth. You must choose to grow if you want to finish strong in this world. If your goal in life is simply to succeed, or feel good, or be safe, or comfortable, then you will never attain the summit of life. True, growth can occur vocationally, physically, and financially. But DTFL argues that the most critical litmus test for growth is witnessed in your psycho-spiritual-relational (PSR) life.
A person can be wealthy materially but be in poverty relative to God. He might be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company but not know how to love people. She might run a marathon in under 2:30 but psychologically be seven years old. These people will gain the world, as it were. They might be rich and famous and gifted on the outside but lose their souls and their hearts. Outward triumph often rests shakily on the crumbling foundation of inward tragedy.
I am not saying it is inconsequential to grow in any other way except spiritually, relationally, and psychologically. Even scripture talks about the importance of attributes like motivation and discipline.
Take for example Proverbs 6:6-11: Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
The universal truth is that growth or legitimately succeeding in this world on a level that matters requires certain ingredients. Discipline is one of them. We need to be disciplined in our studying, work, eating, care for our bodies, thought life, and spending habits. We even need to be disciplined in the use of our free time so we avoid frittering away our precious lives with too much of a ‘good’ thing: video games, Netflix, HGTV, watching golf, social media, news addictions, even reading novels to escape.
Moving forward. . . . Climbing. . . . Growth. . . . Putting the transmission of your heart into Drive. . . . Being disciplined. . . . All these are helpful ways to describe how to live your life well. The Bible tells you unequivocally that you will reap what you sow in this world. The question is not, Will you reap something in this world? The question is, What do you want to reap in this world? You will always reap something, namely, ascent or descent. The latter will come without any effort on your part while the former requires discipline, planning, insight, foresight, and a peak to summit.
Let’s briefly consider two people whose paths intersected mine during the last two decades and witness how they chose to deal with the incline in their lives. In these two individual life journeys, we will readily see that there is such a thing as a Climb, and that it makes all the difference in the world if you place your gear shifter in Drive or Reverse. A well-established truth in this universe is that people, after 80 years of living, can end up in radically different destinations. Triumph or Tragedy. Every decision takes you forward or backward.
Let’s begin with Beth.
In Beth’s defense, she grew up with a cold, emotionally unavailable (even incapable) mother who had been sexually abused as a child. Unfortunately, the mother never sought healing for her abuse but built a wall around it and buried it in her subconscious like one might attempt to ignore a splinter that has lodged itself just far enough beneath the skin that it will be painful to remove. Instead of making any effort to heal her trauma, the mother projected it onto Beth and saw her daughter as the bad and damaged split off part of herself. Beth became the black sheep of the family.
Beth’s rejection by her mother was accompanied by repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Neither parent turned out to be safe for little Beth, then. She had to retreat inside the deepest hiding place in her heart and wait until the day might come when she would be rescued from her mom and dad.
Beth ended up repeating her mother’s coping: she buried the pain from her mother’s rejection and her father’s abuse and built a thick wall around her heart. The thick wall was Beth’s way of protecting herself from more bad things getting in. Tragically and ironically, the wall kept bad things inside (like the infection from the splinter in her heart) and it also kept good things from getting in.
What were some of the bad things Beth entombed within her heart? Fear, loneliness, anger, and distrust. Over time, Beth’s unhealed fear reaped anxiety, the loneliness spawned self-sufficiency, the anger embittered its way into full-blown rage, and the distrust degraded into suspicion and even paranoia of others around her.
When I first met Beth, she was fifty years old, unmarried, living alone, working by herself in a small cubical in the lower level of the business that employed her, and was moderately overweight. Since she had ignored the festering splinter from her childhood for more than four decades, she had not grown emotionally. Almost all her psychological resources had been committed to suppressing bad memories and maintaining a constant stiff-arm so that others could not get too close to her.
It was a miracle Beth came to counseling at all because she was so averse to being observed beyond the level of her skin. Even that was difficult for her and so she covered almost every inch of her body with clothing so as not to be seen.
Instead of growing, instead of climbing upward in her psycho-spiritual-relational journey, Beth chose regression in the form of self-protection to a fault, unrelenting self-sufficiency, and total hiding of her true self. There was no way she was going to ascend in life when she chose to cope in those self-murderous ways. Instead of turning to relationships with God and people, she escaped to alcohol and food as her companions in life death.
I am convinced to this day that I was the first person who was ever granted access to her heart. I was the first man (possibly human) she had ever trusted to some degree. Unfortunately, after seeing her for a year, she began missing sessions periodically until she stopped coming altogether. Even though I left her repeated messages (I was not going to give up easily on the bridge she had built with me), I never heard from her again.
Fifteen years later, I still feel sadness when I think of Beth.
There was one thing about Beth’s personality that, if she does not deal with it, will isolate her forever: her sudden rage. I remember the first time I stepped on that land mine. . . .
I must have said something that reminded her of her father or mother. Immediately, her body tensed, and her hands gripped the arms of her chair like talons. Her cheeks flushed with a deep crimson color and her eyes burned with fire. The words she breathed from her mouth were molten lava as her voice became a low growl.
I had never witnessed such a sudden transformation in a person’s affect.
It took several weeks, but Beth was able to move on from that breach in our relationship—at least I think so. Maybe she stored it up in some sub-basement closet and when I repeated my faux pas a second or third time, I became another person who hurt her too much and she had to leave me.
When I think of Beth, I am reminded of those famous words that C.S. Lewis spoke: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable ~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
Beth was one of many clients over the years who taught me that self-protection can be a sin. I think Larry Crabb, a Christian psychologist, said something to that effect.
In summary, when I think of Beth, two primary things come to mind. The most significant thing I remember is this woman’s courage. How amazing that she even dared to come to counseling and share her life with another person! I wondered afterwards if she chose to see me, a male, because her father’s abuse had somehow been less destructive than her mother’s rejection. At least her father touched her. I do not want to dwell on that thought because the sexual abuse of a child is terrible. (But maybe abandonment by a mother can be even more damaging.)
The second thought I have about Beth is that she waited too long to come to therapy.
Undoubtedly, significant damage is wrought by the original abuse inflicted by a parent whether it is abuse by commission or by omission. However, even greater damage is done by the child/adult child if she copes in unhealthy ways that result in her being defended by bitterness, rage, fear, and a withdrawal to the darkest dungeon of her heart where she will not even permit God to enter.
Beth’s growth could not occur because she was in defense mode always, perceiving the world as dangerous and always prepared to protect herself from abandonment and abuse. Sadly, this over-protection of her heart only resulted in further abandonment. Years later, the acid of bitterness that leaked out of her underground toxic barrels burned even her own insides.
Beth’s life went into reverse at a very young age. Initiated by her parents but then carried on by Beth herself through the adoption of unhealthy coping skills, she buried herself further and further away from the loving Presence of Jesus as well as from safe people who might help heal her. Sadly, people like Beth are in danger of becoming more animalistic than human.
In the company of God and safe others, we become more human. Far removed from them, we are reduced.
It is possible that Beth’s experience with me led her to open her heart to others. In fact, I know that it did. I just pray that when she left the safety of her time with me that she sought out others with whom she could continue her journey out of the darkness of the valleys of life. Pity the person who never makes any attempt to ascend the mountain of growth but remains in the darkness–alone and contemptuous, forever.
A second example of The Climb is a man named George. His mother died when he was five and George was left alone with a father who, like Beth’s father, also sexually abused his child.
Fortunately, George commenced his therapeutic journey when he was twenty-two years old, three decades earlier than Beth did. Even though George seemed to be in a more primitive emotional place than Beth had been (due to the total absence of his mother or to the fact that his father had abused him, the same gender?), the wall around his heart came down more quickly. Yes, the loneliness was there as well as the self-protection and the anger and the rage and the depression and anxiety. But somehow, George made better progress.
Part of this growth was that George trusted me with his heart for four years.
Like Beth, he was enraged with me on several occasions. Unlike Beth, he never entirely guillotined me. He weathered these disruptions and eventually told me quite transparently whenever I hurt him or angered him. How amazing when someone can be so relationally honest!
I often reminded George that the most powerful part of his therapy was our relationship and that if we continued to communicate and build trust despite the moments of rage and hurt, he would grow exponentially.
Yes, one of the most powerful growth points for George was that after a year of working with me, he was able to express the emotions and thoughts he never felt safe to share with his scary father who was quick to beat him for perceived disrespect.
George went through a long period of anger toward God because He had allowed him to be abused by his father. Fortunately, George did with God what he did with me—he began to communicate his anger directly to God the Father, something he had never been able to do with dad the father.
Over time, George’s rage, depression, and same sex attraction all abated as he became increasingly transparent with both God and me. He slowly changed from being a zombie into a living person. I told him that God was raising him from the dead—not physically, of course, but spiritually and relationally. A miracle was occurring.
Eventually, George ventured out of his dungeon and began relating to people. At around the same time—not by coincidence–he stopped using food, pornography, masturbation, video games and gambling to comfort the hidden self.
Slowly, in the messy but predictable relationship with me, his hidden self healed. Yes, a significant part of his growth was that he chose to trust me not just with the good stuff inside his heart, but also with the bad, ugly stuff that he initially thought was too dirty and despicable to be seen by others.
Here, in therapy, we see the power of the gospel: God invites us to come to Him with our sin and badness and darkness instead of locking everything inside our hearts and fending off everyone who could help us—even our merciful and loving heavenly Daddy.
George stayed in therapy long enough to finish his journey with me. He trusted me enough to permit me to accompany him from his beginning position 500 feet below sea level to 12,000 feet above it.
When George left therapy, he knew he had more work to do. However, his intentional choice to shift his vehicle into Drive instead of Reverse (this change of gears would not have been possible without the power of the Holy Spirit) got him to a place where his life was built on a foundation of trust instead of on primitive fear and biological acting out.
George’s growth was miraculous.
The greatest miracle in this world is when God calls a man or woman to Himself and creates a new person within them. We call that being born again. It is more amazing than healing those who are physically blind, deaf, and cancer ridden.
I’m convinced that the second greatest miracle occurs when a new creation chooses to respond to God’s second calling, namely, to grow into being like Christ even though the man or woman might have come to God initially as a primitive, shameful, bad, hidden self.
What is the takeaway from this blogpost? Progress v. regress. Ascent v. descent. Growth v. dysfunction. Life v. death. Walking with God closer and closer into His glorious Presence or walking away from Him into increasing darkness and deterioration.
So, you can choose to grow forward and upward during your brief lifetime, or you can choose to slide backwards—day by day for eighty years. Which will it be for you? The Climb must be intentional. It must be characterized by discipline. You must do it with like-minded climbers. You must seek God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength because He is your anti-Kryptonite. He will empower you to live life triumphantly.
What will be the fruit of your ascent? Love, joy, peace, and goodness, to name a few. You will know you have lived life well if you love God and others more than material things or personal success; if joy is present in your heart even when the outside world is aflame; if peace is a steady state within you during times that previously tied you up with anxiety; and if you sense that you are now righteous instead of innately bad.
So, choose The Climb. Put that Jeep Wrangler in Drive and travel up the mountain as far as you can go. Then, when the ascent becomes steeper, get out and hike. You will not be alone. Even if you have not met them yet, there are others who are serious about growth and sanctification. In fact, they live for such things because they know the brevity of life and the incomparable beauty of God.
Be someone who chooses growth over backsliding, and life over death. Sow your seeds intentionally and with discipline, for all of us will reap what we sow.
Sadly, Beth may very well find herself alone the day she dies, but I am confident that George will be surrounded by loved ones when his faith turns to sight and he sees Jesus.
Be George. Pray for Beth.
God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places ~ Habakkuk 3:19
Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters ~ Matthew 12:30