On the World Race we do this thing called feedback where we offer one another insights into each other’s lives, both positive and constructive, in order to help us all grow more into the image of Jesus. It helps us see ourselves honestly, identify our blind spots and pinpoint our weaknesses while it also teaches us about our greatest strengths and shows us where we’re growing most.
Recently I got some feedback that hurt more than any has yet.
When feedback hurts, angers you, makes you cry, puts you on the defense or offends you – that’s when you know it’s good. It hurts because it’s true, and you get the obnoxious privilege of deciding whether you’d like to remain indignant, in denial and a fake kind of strong or risk looking momentarily weak in order to find true strength and healing and be more Christ-like. It’s an art we’re all trying to master. Feedback takes an extra measure of humility.
One of the people on the Race that I trust most to speak into my life and process gave me something to chew on without me asking, and it was a tough pill to swallow. I fought through several negative emotions because I knew it was right, and I knew that choosing to fight through the pain of accepting it now is going to bring much-needed restoration later.
But it’s still hard. It’s hard because we don’t want to admit how imperfect we are.
If the Race is teaching me anything, it’s that I have lived with the understanding that I am a perfect person who occasionally makes mistakes as opposed to an imperfect person who occasionally glimpses perfection in her most unintentional moments.
You see, Perfect Meredith prides herself on loving people.
Like, really. I will be the first to tell you how accepting and willing to tolerate anything I am. I love being the girl who anyone can tell anything to, who can hear the dirtiest of past sins and lovingly wipe tears off of stained cheeks with an embrace and a limitless extension of grace. I take pride in my ability to receive anyone and look condescendingly down my nose at those who are quick to judge. Very condescendingly. No room in my inn for those people. [Don’t bother pointing out the inconsistency. I know.]
Mostly, I just love to love people and I love to talk endlessly about loving people and acceptance and Christian fairies and rainbows and flowers and the unconditional love of God and tolerance and how good I am at all of those things. Kumbaya is the soundtrack to my Christian life.
That being said, this feedback hurt.
“I think you need to consciously think about giving that love purely for the good of the other person and not for how they perceive you from it. What I mean is give love to give it, and not because it makes them love or need you.”
I read it, and my mind raced.
How dare she. Me, give impure love? Are you joking? I don’t love with the intention of receiving anything. I love well. I don’t love with hidden agendas. I don’t accept to be accepted or tolerate to be tolerated. I don’t love to get love. That’s entirely too selfish and weak and self-protective. What a jerk.
As the pain grew more profound as the words continued to sink into my spirit, I knew she was right. And definitely not a jerk, but in fact enacting real love, the love that offers us difficult truths to make us better even when it knows it may sting – love I’ve never understood because Perfect Meredith love accepts and tolerates all things and never hurts anyone intentionally.
The very fact that I was so quickly justifying and explaining it proved that I’d already devoted a lot of mental energy to justifying and explaining what I had been doing.
So like any good World Racer, I began to journal.
And I discovered more and more that she’s absolutely right.
Most of the people reading this blog probably don’t know much about my real life, about the way I learned to use a God-given gift of influence to manipulate and protect myself from the rejection I so fear from others; about how I don’t have many friends because I so skillfully mishandled past relationships in an effort to avoid more rejection that most became codependent or unhealthy sources of love; about the way I learned to use my God-given gift with words to cunningly deceive people about the choices I was making because I could not emotionally handle disappointing them, yet was too selfish and immature to quit making choices I knew were wrong in the name of gratification and more people-pleasing.
In my eyes, I loved with reckless abandon by becoming everything to anyone who was willing to let me meet their needs. A true God-complex.
In reality, I manipulated and deceived people into needing me so that it would ensure my place in their lives. By creating a need for myself, I created relational stability in my own life – the thing I feared not having the most – and it didn’t seem to matter that it often came at the expense of the other person. I unconsciously led people away from God and toward me in order to make myself feel more accepted, more loved, more tolerated. More well-liked. More needed.
Traditionally, I’ve exhausted relationships of every resource they offered to meet my own needs while being the other’s resource for his/her needs until the relationship imploded upon itself and forced me to watch the other person walk out of my life, leaving me with what I was trying to avoid all along – rejection and loneliness – while I stood open-mouthed and heart aching, wondering why I was always left with no friends when I tried to love so hard, when I accepted them unconditionally like love is supposed to.
It’s become a familiar heart pain, watching people go. It’s the kind that you never really get over but just learn to accept as part of life; the kind that you know will wake you up crying from time to time and make your heart drop and even throb when you see things or hear songs but won’t stop your life from going on. Maybe that’s the hardest part – that life does go on, just without them in it. It hurts.
I’m tired of watching people walk away because truly, I was created with a huge capacity for and desire to give love, and I don’t think it has to be this way anymore if I don’t want it to be. I don't think this is how my life has to go. I think healthy relationships are possible, and I don't think I'm a failure.
I think healthy love is unquestionably possible and dangerously powerful.
I suppose the point of this blog is confession, repentance and forgiveness, because to get to such a powerful love, I've got to get rid of what's currently taking its place.
I’d like to surrender my need to be needed, my desire to be wanted, and my fear of rejection to God’s provision, to actually begin to trust that he will provide my every relational need just as much as he’ll provide my every physical need. As the Race passes I am certain of little else than God’s faithfulness to be who he says he is and to give us our daily bread. I’d like to tack that onto my relational life, as well.
I’d like to stop thinking I’m so perfect and that everyone needs me. Perfect Meredith would like to retire.
I’d like to live a life of healthy, selfless love that actually tolerates, but calls people higher than sin; that actually accepts, but sees the value in growth and pushing people toward it; that actually loves with no hidden agenda, no under-the-table needs and no condition, but treasures everyone as beautiful reflections of a beautiful God, each with something unique and essential to offer the world.
I’d like to ask your forgiveness for having been this person, for having lived a life of selfish love, and to ask your permission to become a new one.
And I’d really, really like to love you for no reason at all other than God's loving us with no agenda and my wanting to be more like him.
Here’s to new beginnings, pockets full of grace, powerful love and the feedback that hurts so good.
m
