Have you ever noticed that religion often teaches us to hide?
You can hide your sorrows behind “God is good.” You can hide your anxieties behind “Casting all your cares.” You can hide your burnout behind “godly Christians spend and are spent for Jesus.”
But when you hide, eventually a deep ache grows inside. You may squash your longings and shield your true feelings until you’re not quite sure who you are anymore.
When my youngest brother was small he used to bury his nose in my hair or my arm, sniff deeply, and say, “You smell good.” Only he was so small it came out “You ‘mell good.”
I think of him even now when I smell something delicious or disgusting and wonder if he’s still sensitive to smell. And I wonder if my nose has evolved into as good a “smell detector” as his always was. Continue reading →
An old friend and I recently reconnected around grace and during our musings, she reminded me of an important grace symptom: refusing to care what people think of us.
After our chat I couldn’t stop thinking about this post, written a long time ago during my new-to-grace days. Thank you, my grace friend, for the reminder of this important truth and the chance to walk down memory lane for a few minutes.
My Dear Reader,
I don’t care what you think. But actually, I do. That’s why I agonize over my blog posts until I’m almost sick of looking at them. It’s why I’m insecure every morning and night thinking that I’ll never write anything worthy of you reading. Or if you do manage to be duped into reading it, you’ll put it aside in disgust with a shake of the head and a tsk, tsk, because it really was mindless drivel anyway.
I don’t care what you think. But, I do. Continue reading →