What if I am worth hating?
When my racing thoughts stop and the productivity and acclaim and noise quiets down, my deepest fear surfaces: what if I am worth hating?
For a long time I didn’t answer that question because I feared the reply.
I lived in a shut-off, tamped-down, disengagement. A low grade depression. A low grade life.
I grew up believing that God’s grace was enough, is enough, and should always be enough. But I wasn’t happy. There was no sense of fulfillment, peace, or “enough” in my life. I thought that made me a bad Christian. I had accepted Jesus into my heart, my sins were forgiven, I was supposed to be happy. I should have been happy. I believed Christians had a duty—a responsibility—to be joyful. Christians had the hope of heaven and the relief of forgiveness, a built in best friend and Savior. Non-Christians had Darwin and Nietzsche, chaos and meaninglessness. I had no idea how they even got up in the morning.
But instead of joy and security I lived in depression and guilt.
When I was little, I was not only a rule follower, I made up my own elaborate rules. There was a right way to do everything from the order I ate my food (from least favorite to favorite, vegetables first) to the right way to be a Christian. I thought God wanted me to do everything perfectly and was constantly afraid of failure. I repeatedly missed my own mark, failed to measure up to rules of my own design.
I carried this into adulthood.
I burdened myself with unrealistic rules and expectations to the point that fear of failure paralyzed me. Then I’d feel guilty. Then I’d feel guilty about feeling guilty. You get the idea.
I wrote last week about the transformative power of asking the flipside to my life’s haunting question. What if I asked not if I’m worth hating, but if I’m worth loving?
When I began to live my life as a Yes to the second question, everything changed.
I began to love myself. I began to believe that God might love me.
I found the true meaning of mercy: a compassion that forbears punishment even when justice demands it. Even when justice demands it.
I found a God that loves me even when I deserve punishment and smiting and consequences.
In my weaker moments, that question still haunts me. Am I worth hating?
But I’ve found that it no longer matters what that answer is. That answer is not the reality of who I am.
Regardless of where I’ve failed, God invites me into a new reality of love and being loved and loving others.
The answer no longer matters because I know that I am loved, even when I am worth hating.
Helpless to Helpful, One Block at Time
As an empowered, white young woman with a college degree and healthy dose of idealism, the world is my oyster. But instead of embracing this freedom, I love to feign displeasure at all of the overwhelming choices I have to make on a daily basis:
As much as I pretend to get all flustered and overwhelmed and indignant that I am “too empowered,” the truth is, I love being in control. What I don’t love is not knowing what to do with this control. I want quick answers and color coded set of instructions.
But outside the protected walls of kindergarten and playtime, these manageable chunks are hard to come by and after a guilt-ridden semester abroad I found myself completely paralyzed, unable to determine block number one.
In the midst of depression and guilt, Love began to speak to me, to urge me out of my shell of shame. I discovered that regardless of my circumstances or how I felt about a situation or all of the million and one factors that conspired to render me frozen and hopeless, I could still choose love. You probably all realized this years ago and I'm just a bit of late bloomer, but I found (and still find) it incredibly empowering to know that I can choose my response. I can’t choose whether or not the world is fair or children die of starvation in Nicaragua (well, not as directly as I’d like), but I can choose my attitude and my next steps.
Instead of watching helplessly as my guilt spun out of control, I stopped doing the things that made me feel guilty. Shopping made me feel sick and guilty after a semester of living out of a backpack, so I decided not to buy clothes for the rest of the year. My roommates teased me and tempted me with shopping excursions and confounded looks, but I found peace in the fact that my actions were beginning to match my beliefs.
I discovered there were many ways I could help the poor, live more sustainably, and incorporate the ideals I had learned about in Costa Rica. But instead of knowing what I should do, but remaining ensnared in guilt, anger, and despair, I actually started to change, to act, to live. I volunteered my time. I began to let my mom and my friends back into my life. I was more intentional about what I bought and how I spent my money. I started going to church again not because I felt guilty or thought it was something I was supposed to do, but because I missed the community. And I didn’t fight every word the pastor said. In small ways, I found I could make a difference.
It was these manageable chunks—one step at a time, one foot in front of the other—that helped me climb reluctantly out of my post-study abroad poverty stupor.
Regardless of what phase of life you’re in, from complacent to content to contrite, I think these manageable chunks of love are the best way to bring about lasting change, the best way to learn to choose love. And I guess this isn’t so much of a new epiphany for me, but more of an addendum to my early days of block numbering.
It’s these baby, baby steps of selflessness and compassion that spur us toward becoming more loving, more compassionate, and more fully engaged in our world.
The knowledge that I can choose to love and empower and give through my thoughts and actions is has been incredibly redemptive for me. I can make a difference little by little. I can learn and grow little by little. I can love little by little.
Hound me later if you think I’m being trite, but welcome to my favorite obsession: “manageable chunks of love.”
When "I Love You" Comes Alive
As much as I viewed Praying to Love as a new revelation in my life, it was really more of a continuation of the Love I was already experiencing, not as an idea or a belief or a piece of information, but as a reality. In fits and starts, this Love began to come alive not only in my thoughts and reasonings, but in heart and in my life. In Margaret Feinberg's book, The Sacred Echo, she explains this transforming power of love better than I ever could. She says,
