When healing hurts: pre-holiday thoughts for the broken

The holidays are coming. (Hey, if it’s not too early for Target to play it up, it’s not too early for me, either.)

Can you feel the excitement? The joy? The wonder?

Or, like many folks, do you feel trepidation? Anxiety? Even fear?

If someone took a picture of you and your extended family, would it look like a Normal Rockwell painting? Or would it look more like this:

Oh, yeah.

All smiles, but weapons loaded and ready.

A couple of years ago I wrote a series on Surviving the Holidays. I think some of the reasons Americans drown themselves in consumerism this time of year is not for the sake of giving. More likely, our overindulgence is an attempt to wrap up our pain, hide it away, and tie it up with a silver bow.

I sat with some friends the other day, many of us in tears, about our struggles to love people as Jesus commands, especially when some people are so hard to love. Indeed, we are called to love our enemies. But what does this look like? Are we, as Christians, utter failures if we cannot bring ourselves to literally wrap our arms around those who hurt us most?

Ultimately, we left the conversation that day, none of us feeling like our painful relational situations had been resolved. But we did agree on two things: 1) loving people the way Christ calls us to is a process which won’t be perfected until we reach Heaven; and 2) in a world as broken as ours, sometimes it is best–for the difficult person and for ourselves–to establish strong boundaries and protect our hearts and the hearts of the ones God has entrusted to us.

I don’t know about you, but I start early working to protect my heart and my household against the pain and duress which, in the past, has nearly ruined holidays. We’ve spent years establishing our own healthy traditions. Slowly but surely, we’re seeing generational cycles of emotional and physical abuse breaking.

And praise God, our children–the ones God placed under our roof–have a chance to live abuse-free lives. They are the first in a line of I don’t know how many generations on both sides of our families who will launch into the world without the baggage and wounds of abuse.

This big old ball of dirt is a hard enough place to walk around without having that.

Problem is, and as my counselor warned me, breaking generational cycles comes with a price. The price of being misunderstood. The price of being criticized, ridiculed, ostracized, even hated for establishing boundaries.

Justin Bieber was on the Today show this morning, where he made this profound statement:

“I’m going to be a target, but I’m not going to be a victim.”

If you’re entering into yet another holiday season feeling like a victim; if you’re dreading once again dutifully taking the pain from relatives, mother-in-laws, steps and ex’s; if you’re knees start knocking at the thought of that awkward family photograph or dinner, I challenge you to consider this:

You.

Do not.

Have to live.

That way.

You have a choice. You can choose healing. You can choose to break cycles of abuse. You can choose to no longer carry the baggage and start new today. 

Two exceptional books about this topic are Bold Love, by Dan Allendar, and Boundaries, by Cloud & Townsend. 

Breaking generational cycles is hard, but so worth it. As Allendar writes, “An evil person, regularly and masterfully, portrays his motives and behavior as innocent. Others just do not understand. He is deceitfully gifted in making the victim of his abuse feel like the perpetrator of the harm. . . Evil misuses power and then claims innocence. If that is questioned, then evil uses shame or mockery to bludgeon the victim into accepting the shame.”

So no wonder it feels so yucky when you begin the journey.

But don’t accept the shame.

Step away from the bludgeoning.

Know you are SO not the perpetrator.

Immerse yourself this season not in decorations, schedules and shopping.

Instead, surround your soul with the hope of healing.

And accept the only true gift that will make you whole.

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” ~John 8:32

What about you? How have you broken cycles? How do you–or don’t you–deal with the holidays and why?

Seeking fragrant resolutions

Do you remember taking chemistry?

Maybe you took it in high school.

Or maybe you took it in college like me, back in the day when I thought I really wanted to be a doctor. That is, until I realized I’d have to be in school at least six years longer than my co-ed classmates.

Though it proved to be the end of my pristine grade point average (thankfully buoyed by A’s in writing and literature), chemistry class was cool. What I lacked in mathematical understanding of the science, I more than made up for in passion for the unexpected arrangement and rearrangement of molecules, atoms and electrons.

The fact we could, in our mangy little college laboratory, manipulate the minutia of the elements of our entire being left my jaw hanging open, while my pre-med lab partner urged me on to the next steps in the experiments.

One particular afternoon–when I wasn’t adding pieces of foil from whatever test tube happened to be hanging over the Bunsen burner to the ever-growing foil ball hidden in my locked lab drawer–we created a scent.

Sure, that may sound weird, and weird it was. Weirder than Weird Science weird. (Lucky for us, no one was ever turned into a giant glob of excrement. Watch the movie if you don’t get what I mean.)

A little bit of powder from one bottle and a splash of liquid from another mixed in the flask. We reduced the mixture over the flame, then added more powder. More liquid. Then we reduced it again. Or maybe we put it on ice.

I don’t remember.

The point is, within the hour, we were left with a liquid that smelled just like cloves. Like the cloves my preschool teacher stuffed in a sachet for me to bring home to my mama. Like the cloves kids poke into oranges to make Christmas decorations. Like the cloves I use when I make apple pie.

In one definition, Merriam-Webster says “resolution” is:

“the act or process of resolving: as the separating of a chemical compound or mixture into its constituents; or the division of a prosodic element into its component parts.”

That’s what we did in chemistry class. We separated compounds. Mixed them up. Divided them. Heated them up, cooled them off, churned them together, wrapped them in foil, and put the mixture into a fancy mass spectrometer to figure out its final components.

All I really remember, though, is what we came up with started from nothing.

And ended up fragrant.

Maybe you don’t know why parts of your life are the way they are today.

I know I don’t.

Some days I look over my past and into my future and wonder why some parts feel wasted, awkward and ugly. I resent the parts of my life I never asked for. I grieve the time I waste over uncontrollable, damaged people and situations which never change; which always hurt; which forever accuse.

Tiny connections and synapses and double-, even triple-chained links in deep parts of me break, just like electrons, and leave me flailing to reconnect with an opposite charge to complete me again.

Does the Great Scientist use even these to heat me up? To cool me off? To wrap me up in a place of metamorphosis?

I know He uses the good things. Things that smell good to begin with. It’s easy to remember He uses the good. Some days, though . . . perhaps too many . . . I wonder if life’s greatest stenches can ever be used, too.

My head says yes.

The Bible says yes.

But some days it’s hard to have the resolve to believe it with my heart.

What about you?

Has God used experiments gone bad, unexpected chemical combinations, impossible concoctions, and situations that just plan stink to change you into something fragrant?

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival today on Resolution. Visit the other blogs posted there. They’ll probably smell a little better.

On brokenness

Each of us knows a piece of hell.

As soon as we breathe our first breath, we know it. Because our first breath means there shall be a last.

The moments between the first and last hold pieces of heaven and chunks of hell. Slivers of wholeness and shards of brokenness.

Hell. 

Brokenness.

Whatever you want to call it.

Life.

Like this tiny acorn I found this weekend, squished between craggy rocks at the edge of a choppy lake. So full of promise. Pressed in by pointy edges. Exposed to the wind and rain, sun and heat.

Someday, the acorn must choose: to expose a tiny root to the warm hug of the soil . . . or to stay encapsulated within itself, unable to rise, unable to reach Heavenward, unable to create a canopy to shade its own seedlings.

Exposure means being chipped away by rough edges . . . bracing against storms . . . reaching past foggy mornings . . . risking driving rains . . . growing crooked then straightening out . . . pushing forth leaves and dropping them . . . again and again and again. 

Brokenness is choosing to live exposed.

That’s what I think.

Do you?