To my constant
companion—the most faithless of my friends—
the person I know best
and, sometimes, wish that I had never met:
ME.
~ * ~
You.
I've known you for years. A lifetime,
in fact. I have seen you grow and blossom, and I have seen you
crumple and wilt—all too often, as you drift from one to the other
throughout the years. Months. Mere moments, sometimes, as you fade
from a loving, glowing life into a bitter and self-flooded
death—killing yourself, over and over again.
I think you must have died a thousand
times since I've known you. And I watched you do it. I never could
help you—I died with you, you see. Every single time.
I always wished I could put my finger
on what it was that brought you back to life. I wished I could know
it, could tame it, that rare
and beautiful spark that lit you again in flames of hopeless love for
your Jesus; the love that burned you back to life again. I never
found its name. I never learned how to summon it. And I cried more tears than you ever have in your life, as I stood and let you die.
Watching
you die isn't like seeing a person with a heart attack, their life twisted into a writhing battle and then suddenly ceasing to be. It's
not like that at all. It's like seeing a puppy starve itself—refusing, weakening, wasting away. And me looking on,
helpless to save such a fragile, wordless life. You see, the puppy is
the only one that can save it—it simply won't. Because it's too
full of something sick and sorrowful even to remember that it is
hungry. Even to give the aching emptiness inside of it a name.
For at last, we have come to the point
of this whole letter. You're so good, so good, you
see, at communicating that you are bent and bruised and broken, and
yet so much better at hiding the truth behind your brokenness. Even
in your journals (don't be surprised, you know I have read them) you
will not write them down—the memories, the realities, the measure
of the distances you have wrought between you and your beautiful
Jesus. Oh, you still write brokennesses. The pain of them, the idea
of them, the confusion of them... all the feelings that can so
quickly be made beautiful, even lovely, by some tender lilt of
language. But you never write their names.
Because
sometimes, the names hurt too much. They're too real. Like pride—the
voice that convinced you Worth was something you became, not
something you were given. It built your life into an endless,
glamorous treasure-hunt, and taught you well the rules of the game:
how to seek for affection, for attention, for gain; and most of all,
how always strive toward the greatest treasures becoming your own. It's
both strange and terribly tragic, watching you play. You don't realize
that every time you win, you lose.
Or
bitterness. The ugly
thing that twisted your thoughts and your heart and the cold secrets
of your intentions, until even a smile could be used to hurt someone.
You never thought people could tell that you hadn't forgiven them. But
I'll tell you a secret: they didn't have to. It's your heart, your
wretched heart, that falls in flames every time you refuse to offer
the grace once given you. For there's another secret, and this one is
even more tragic—that when you stand before Jesus, it is you who
will bear the scars of your unforgiveness. Not them.
Believe
me, you don't want to write about your brokenness. Not really.
Because there are times when it hurts you too much to realize that
some brokenness, we are not meant to reconcile—we are meant to let
go. You won't admit that you don't want to let go. That you still
hold closely the shame and bitterness that haunted you as a child.
The loneliness that convinced you that no one loved you. The
experience that convinced you that no one ever would. That you still
feel the deep, desperate hurt, the hurt that keeps you angry at the
people whom you always believed should somehow have loved you better.
You won't say it. And you won't say
this, either—that you hurt, you hurt so deeply for people
with chains and addictions, not just because you love, not just
because you should, not just because you want to, not even
just because Jesus did... but because you've had them, too. You've
possessed such empty things, embraced them, even loved them. And that love was the
most treacherous, shameful love you have ever known.
There are other names you will not say.
Names not for your brokenness alone, but for you. Names
like Liar, and names
like Thief.
Those are the two you hate most
of all, aren't they? Because they're the two you're most afraid of,
the two words that are the most lonely of any you've ever known. Nothing can beautify such twisted words, nobody would dare to claim them in writing or song or speech as their own, to identify themselves with a brokenness so deceitful and self-seeking. But it doesn't matter. Even if you are the only one in all the
world who has possessed so much darkness inside of you, you must say
it. You must name it.
Even though you are afraid.
For I
know you are afraid. So am I—we are part of one another, remember.
You've always been afraid of them, all of them. Every dark and
dreadful word that you cannot make sound beautiful anymore; words
that are contrary to the very idea of beauty, that show you above all
things how very ugly brokenness can be. But it's time you stopped
being afraid. It's time you stopped running.
It's
time you named them.
It's
time you named your shadows.
The
shadows are full of your shame. I know that. But I do not ask you to
do this because I want you to feel it. These shadows carry your
guilt. They possess your memories. They know your name. And they
taunt you because even though, secretly, you know theirs, you will
not admit that you do. You ran from them, and you never told a soul
that they followed behind. For shadows like this only chase the
people who created them—and you were too ashamed to admit that you
did.
I told you, I am not asking this of you
because I want you to feel shame. I don't want that. I never have.
But I want...
I
want...
I so desperately
want...
I want you to
let it go.
Only by naming your
brokenness, only by realizing its depth, its ugliness, its vastness,
and its pastness, can you understand your freedom. For you see, to name the brokenness is not to claim it. It is not to carry it once again, to fear that it may somehow come back to possess you. For now that you stand on the other side of the Cross, brokenness truly becomes beautiful—for you are no longer naming the distance that lies between you and your Maker. The lovelessness that lies between you and your Father. You are no longer naming yourself.
You
are naming the distance Jesus crossed, the pain He suffered, the shame He
carried,
the reaches of His mercy, the depth of His love,
and the cost that was as nothing,
compared to the claiming of you.
You're redeemed.
You're redeemed. It is the reason I am writing this: you
are REDEEMED. But as long as you write as though that doesn't
matter, as long as you clothe your sins in sweetness to somehow
shroud their sting, you will never understand the beauty of the
redemption that destroyed the sting forever. And I am writing you now,
to ask you, to plead with you, to beg you... to remember. Just to remember.
Please.
Remember.
Because it's about time we started a
new year off right. And if you will, if you somehow can—if
you'll shed the darkness and let Jesus breathe the spark that will
set you aflame, if you'll bear the pain and poverty to know that the
desolation of you will bring you so
beautifully, gloriously alive again—
If you will—
If you can—
if you'll pray that
you can—
Perhaps this will be the year that we do.
