On Confession & Thirst & A Fully Attentive Life
Hello friends,
Today I am sharing a letter with you that I wrote a few days ago. It is perhaps the most vulnerable thing I have shared “publicly.” My prayer is that it can be a help and that in the end, you may find yourself less alone in navigating this thing we call life. Much love, and thank you for reading.
“The man who articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. He is able to create space for Him who heart is greater than his, whose eyes see more than his, and whose hands can heal more than his.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen
Today is my birthday, making an admittedly reflective heart all the more so. I was with a small group of close friends a couple of nights ago over a beautiful meal, moments of laughter that leaked out the sides of our eyes, and in the end, tears that found their way out for heavier reasons. In my last letter, I talked about the times when paying attention can hurt. It is impossible to live a fully attentive life and deny our hearts the process of pain. The question often though is what to do with that pain. For the short time that I have lived on this earth, in my experience, it can either drown us or become our greatest source of healing for ourselves and vessel of freedom for others.
Depending on how you look at it, I have been gifted, or perhaps tortured, with the kind of spirit that can carry the heavier things. I'm not surprised by much anymore, maybe because I am acutely aware of the ways that desires can become so easily disordered and how I am inclined to hide them away.
As I was praying about the coming year, I clicked on a sermon out of a Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. The voice of a young child began reciting the verses of Psalm 51. There is something beautiful about the voice of a child reading scripture, a voice not yet stripped of innocence and wonder. This child came to verse 17, and it became clear that this would be my verse for my forty-third year.
"My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
A broken and contrite heart
You, God, will not despise."
It would be helpful to back up a few years. My thirty-ninth year of life was one full of reckoning with some things in my past and how I ran and hid, numbed and denied. As it always does, my strength had run out, and I hit a wall left with only one choice. I had to come clean about what had been done to me and what I had been doing to numb the pain. The moment that I had feared for close to twenty years had come out in a way that, in my mind, could only cause the people that I loved the most to turn and run. Instead, I encountered moment after moment of people who sat tenderly and shared in my suffering. In place of judgment, there was grace. Where I thought there would be abandon in the midst of confession, instead I was met with what Tim Keller calls our deepest desire, "to be fully known and deeply loved." For me, confession bridged the gap between bondage and freedom. It happened almost as fast as it took to write this sentence.
I have told you a little bit about the book I am writing. In October of 2020, I came across the 55th chapter in Isaiah. I happen to believe the words in the Bible are alive and active, and as often as I am ready, they tend to meet me in powerful ways. After a pretty intense year of excavating my past and reconciling it to my present, I read these words.
"Come all who are thirsty." We are all qualified for this invitation if we are honest. Thirst is a desire that can lead us by the still waters, or in a disordered state, can lead us to that which can never satisfy. My interest was peaked. The chapter goes on to lay out a formula of sorts, one where in the end, we "go out with joy and be lead forth in peace." It starts with an invitation and ends with a promise, in the middle presenting us with a practice that feels nearly distinct in our culture today. The words in this chapter intersected my life at the right time. It put words and a visual to a process of healing that had been taking place over the past year, and inspired the book that I have been working on since that moment.
The struggle I have had in writing this book has been to give a name on a more public level to the things that had crippled me for nearly two decades. After listening to the sermon I mentioned above, I have felt compelled to talk more candidly for the first time in a public forum. So, in fighting back a little bit of fear, here goes. Just after college, I had a traumatic experience at the hands of another man. I spent the next twenty years burying that experience so deep that my operating system was running out of a place of survival. I woke up most days in with at the least a dull and ever-present ache, one that we what it became too much, and often it did, I would find ways to very momentarily numb it. There is a substance called alcohol that, as much as society and even the church try to glorify, became the thing that compounded my shame and kept me hiding.
The day I finally recounted the whole story to my counselor, with my husband by my side, is a day I will never forget. I had finished letting out every last detail when a moment of silence that may have lasted a few seconds felt more like an eternity. As my eyes ran back from the wall I was staring at and into her gaze, I saw what looked like grace and was met with the words, "of course you did." It was less an excuse for how I had managed my pain and more a moment that eventually paved a completely different way for me to move through life. It was the invitation I couldn't even see I so desperately needed. In that moment, I felt what it meant to be fully known and fully loved. One that wouldn't erase my past but would give me permission to live free from the shame that had gripped me for nearly two decades.
You might be asking why I would be telling you such a heavy thing on a day like today? My answer is this. I feel like I am in a place where I have living and breathing friends and family who know me in the most transparent ways. I feel settled in my skin and my faith. By the grace of God, I have been able to live a life that is far from perfect but free to let others know that it is not. We are afraid, and rightfully so, to practice confession because we fear rejection. What I have found to be true is that confession draws us most near to God and each other. "A broken and contrite heart You, God, will not despise." Your deepest desire, just like mine, to be fully known and fully loved is waiting on the other side of letting others in on the things that you have tucked away in an attempt to keep you safe. I have such deep compassion for the weight that this carries.
To live as a wholehearted follower of Christ is to, as David so beautifully penned, is to offer a sacrifice of a broken spirit. This is so much of why I spend my time writing and sharing pieces of my story like this one with you. I'm telling you that twenty years of pain almost instantly melted away through the sharing of it with another living, breathing, soul-filled human being. That's the power of confession, which leads to repentance. That's the bridge between the invitation and promise that came alive for me in Isaiah, and what has compelled me to share some of the harder parts of my story.
In the sermon that Tyler Stanton from Bridgetown Church preached so beautifully on confession, he said this. The pathway to maturity is the inner excavation called confession. He pointed out our obsession in this culture to keep up with appearances. Those words hit me deep in the gut. I'm not sure how many times I said to myself, "if they only knew who I really was." Shame will never tell you the truth. Tyler went on to define true spiritual maturity as the act of running to confession and fearing keeping up appearances. Shame tells you to hide, Jesus invites to come. He shared this quote from Frederick Beauchner.
"I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell."
I suppose on a day full of reflection; this may be the thing I am most grateful for. There was a time when I thought I would never wake up and spend the first hour of my day looking through the murky lens of shame. I can say that four years after a year of deep excavation, I am not entirely without a fight against those voices, but where shame says to hide, grace points us to a place where this no condemnation in Christ Jesus. It's that simple and that true. For me, at least, there is a comfort in knowing that in spite of me, His mercy never ends. So, I offer my sacrifice of a broken spirit that ironically is not so much broken as it is whole in Christ and known by the people who love me the most. Thanks be to God.
Here is a link to the sermon from Bridgetown Church. In no exaggeration, it may be one of the best and most necessary sermons I have ever heard. He has much to say prophetically about what could happen if we were to engage in the practice of confession on a large scale. I highly recommend that you take the time to listen.
Another resource that literally changed the direction of my life is a book by Curt Thompson called The Soul of Shame. It speaks to exactly what the title says and truly freed me from a lot of my disordered way of think around God and myself. I believe it should be required reading for every living, breathing human.
Lastly, I know the subject matter of today's email has been heavy. I believe with my whole heart that the desire of Jesus is for us to be free, and that it is nearly impossible to be so without at least one living, breathing person to share in our stories. I would encourage you to prayerfully consider who that might be. I belive in counseling and programs that have been designed to help us cross over our greatest fears and into a place where we are fully known and fully loved. If you don't feel like you have that person, please feel free to be in touch and I will do whatever I can to help you find that.
Julie, this was amazing to read. I, too, spent a decade acting out from a place of deep pain after a similar experience and not understanding the connection. The shame was harder to carry than the memory of the event, and once someone said something similar to "of course you did," I felt the same release...before myself, people, and most importantly, God. Thank you for sharing!
Oh, Julie. I'm so grateful for what you've shared here, knowing it was anything but easy. And, once again, you've ministered to my heart in ways you couldn't have imagined.