Pain

What is your message?

Melissa Presser Melissa , , , , , , , , , , ,

We all have a message. God has made us each unique and accounted for. We have our own victories and struggles, and we need to be able to own all of it. 

I have tried to write for twenty-four hours and just couldn’t. Sometimes I am just stifled by the world. Many times I just can’t figure out what the heck is wrong with me. If I suffer, I shouldn’t be suffering, I should have joy. I shouldn’t talk about the pain in the world, or the pain I’m feeling. My message should be supplanted by the one you have for me, your ideas of what God has for me. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me on the inside. I know what’s wrong on the outside. God wouldn’t let me write, and well for good reason. I was trying to write someone else’s message. 

The Jennifer Fulwiler show as I have mentioned so many times before is a source of light for me.  It’s inspirational as it is funny, eclectic, deep thoughts through a Christian lens. But it’s real, it’s who God called her to be. I appreciate it for introducing me to people I would otherwise have never known about, but also for the subtle messages that God provides through Jen’s microphone. I listened to the on demand episode from yesterday, and in the midst of the two hours of taking my mind to a secluded island, I found a gem. Jen had this to say after an interview with a local Christian rapper:

“The message that God calls you to put out there, just do it.”

It was like a knock to the head. What? It’s o.k. to be me? I can talk about suffering? I can talk about ugly things?

I had to reflect on that a bit. What is my message? What am I trying to get across?

And that led me to a song that someone gave me when I first found Jesus. He had listened to it himself and told me that when he heard the song, he swore it was written about me. When I was first introduced to it, I listened to it on repeat five hundred and one times because every word of it was sacred. It was the story of my life…

You must listen to it yourself to understand its depth, but its theme is unmistakable. Why do people think there’s something wrong with me because I am me? Because I question? Because I wonder if there’s a God who cares about me?  Did anyone ever consider that this is just the way God made me? Here are a portion of the lyrics:

Maybe this was made for me
For lying on my back in the middle of a field
Maybe that’s a selfish thought
Or maybe there’s a loving God

After hearing Jen’s commentary today, I remembered the song. It has been a rough week and I have felt myself spiritually lying in that field, questioning, while others think that I shouldn’t be. And I realized, that’s ok.

My message through my writing, my talks, my ministry, my conversion has never changed. I can’t help that. I can’t help that I’ve experienced trauma or that I hate being a working mom or that my son has ADHD or that the world sucks. I can’t help that I cry every time I see a homeless person or an abused child. I can’t help that I identify with the suffering and pain of Christ and it’s where I feel closest to him. My message will never change- It’s o.k. not to be o.k.

There are people out there who need to hear that. That it’s o.k. to cry or be an atheist because you believe God killed your mother. Why are we always trying to save people? Why can’t we let them go through whatever they are going through, why are we always stifling suffering?

I realize that the reason I wrestle so much is because people are uncomfortable with suffering. They don’t want to talk about the hard stuff. They don’t want to hear about my sexual abuse or how it effected me, or my son’s disability or how the things I see at work everyday in the criminal justice system affect me. I work in suffering. I am in the business of suffering. And when I read the next report and the next report that comes in about another suicide or rape, I silently close my eyes, and pray. I understand…

I urge you to think about your own message, your uniqueness. The person maybe you think you’re helping but really are alienating. How you may be trying to play the role of Jesus.

Listen to the song…

Not Just the Hands and Feet — It’s the Eyes!

Little Monk Building Bridges, Little Monk , , , , , , , , , ,

earth beautifulHere we are in Lent. That’s a different thing for everyone. “Seasons”, Liturgical Seasons, are wondrous times, opportunities for the Holy Spirit to focus our interior eyes on a particular aspect of grace and our relationship with God. Such seasons as Lent, or Easter, or Advent, or Christmas, or the Pentecost… all allow us to concentrate our gaze on some facet of this “Crystal Rose” in our Garden of Prayer, the King of Kings. Generally speaking, the Lenten Season is somber, reserved, reflective, looking forward through the great trials and sufferings of Christ approaching the Crucifixion, as He draws to His climax in Jerusalem and the Cross.

What should Lent be like? Well, if the rhythm of this season resonates, the experience should be whatever the Holy Spirit calls for it to be for you in your own unique journey with Christ. For some, it is a time of recollection of our own need for grace; reminder of our frailty and fallenness, sense of responsibility for our wrong decisions, and awesome wonder at all the pain heaped upon our dear Lord in our place, in payment for our own regrettable actions and decisions. For others, it may be an intense awareness of Jesus’ passion, of His strength, courage, determination to do the will of the Father no matter the personal cost. Lent may generate the intense response of admiration and worship for so noble a Lord who struggled and overcame so much to honor the will of God.

There is no “right” way to experience Lent, and no “wrong” way, as long as the Holy Spirit is given free rein to prepare straight paths for the renewal of the Truth of the Resurrection, and the glory of Jesus’ triumph over Death itself on Easter. Traditions, customs, denominations, cultures, and eras are incredibly diverse in their observation of the Lenten Season. Across my own life, the experience has been tremendously different from one year to the next, one decade to the next.

So let me invite you, let me encourage you, to make way for the Holy Spirit to use this season to bless you. Let me invite you to enter into the Scriptural experience of these days approaching Easter, making straight paths for the Holy Spirit to show you whatever nurtures your relationship and awareness of the immediate and intimate presence of Christ in your life and spirit. Your experience doesn’t have to “look like” that of anyone else, as long as the focus is on Jesus the Christ, and the scriptural elements that so richly fill these days and these pages.

This one thing I would note in addition.

That there is no meaning to Lent, no meaning to the suffering, no meaning to even the “forgiveness of sin”, or the “payment for sin”, or the “satisfaction of God’s justice”, or even the “extension of grace and mercy to man”… if those are seen as merely “functions”. If those are seen as “things God did” or “things God does”… When we see these things as simple “extensions of God’s methodology”, we miss the point entirely.

All these things… ALL that we see of grace, of God’s workings…. is direct expression of His Infinite Love and nothing less.

Embrace the awareness, the sorrow, the contrition of knowing He took our own just punishment for our own willful and willing sin… yes. Don’t reject or resist that, if that is what the Spirit leads. Embrace the awareness of His suffering, His pain, His humility and obedience, His submissiveness to His destiny and the Father’s will, in the blood and the nails… yes. Don’t reject or resist that movement of your heart into His on the Cross, if that is what the Spirit leads. But in all of that, just don’t get so fixated on the blood, the scourge, the thorns, and the nails… that we neglect to look at His face, His eyes. They radiate with the reason for it all… His Infinite Love, Our Father’s Infinite Love, the Spirit’s Infinite love… for you, personally, individually… and every other child He has fashioned as well.

Let us not gaze upon the mysteries of Lent, these incredible 40 days, or Passion Week with its horrors, spectating like onlookers at the scene of a great train wreck. If we fixate, fascinated on the scourge, the thorns, the nails, and the blood, and we miss the wondrous theme playing just below that surface… we simply witness a deep drama of horror and cruelty.

Even in grief, we want to remember that undergirding all this… is unspeakable Infinite Love. That’s what all of this is about. This is the act, prepared before the foundations of the cosmos, that embraces all of creation in the arms of Infinite Love… by the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amazing, isn’t it? Amen.

I’m over Christianity

Melissa Presser Melissa , , , , , , , ,

It’s Sunday morning and I’m here debating whether or not to shut down this blog. It was originally intended as an online way to journey, to share my life real and honest with others. I did the same with my secular blog except that it was clothed in anonymity and prose. And although people flocked to it, it was mired in pain and sin and God wiped it clean when I came out of the water, when I was free.

As my blog journey has continued, it has taken me so many unexpected places. It has brought people back into my life who I hadn’t spoken to in many years, it has allowed others to reach out to me who have been sexually abused and asked me for prayer. It brought me to the Catholic church and allowed me to free myself from some of the bondage I still suffered from, namely people pleasing. There has been so much refinement and blessing. Honesty will do that- allow God to mold and shape you into who He wants you to be.

But lately as I journey on, I see a sad trend in Christian writers who feel bashing Catholics, posting derogatory articles about Catholics, or making seemingly “harmless” arguments masquerading in “doctrine” about Catholics on the rise. Many of the blogs I used to read, I cannot read anymore. And you might say, well say something! Yes I could do that. But then I would have to quit my job and my family to have the adequate amount of time to lovingly tell people to cease and desist hating Jesus.

The typical arguments I receive are:

“Oh well you’ve only been saved for a little over two years”  (Not sure where Jesus stated a requirement for how long one needs to be saved before talking about Him, help me out here people…)

“You didn’t go to seminary so you don’t know your doctrine” (Ummm, ok well the same bible you’re reading tells me that I actually don’t have to go to seminary to do that. But oh that’s right, Jesus went to your alma mater, forgive me!).

“Look at the sexual abuse that’s occurred in the Catholic Church and you want to go there?” (Oh yeah that’s right, only priests sexually abuse children, duh!)

“Catholics believe in tradition and don’t read the bible like we do.” (Oh yes that’s right. Let’s completely forget the first Christians were Jews who came out of synagogue with ummmm traditions and reading of scripture out loud before the whole congregation. Shhh let’s just flush that and start again our way, the right way!).

There are so many more that if I wrote all of them down this post would become a novel. Suffice it to say I’m over it, way over it. So over it that I am embarrassed for the non-believers out there including militant atheists who read some of this stuff. I am not quite sure in a hurt and dying world why people would feel it is their “job” to proselytize (or their version of it, I call it bashing, but tomato, tomatoe, right?) Catholics. And don’t get me started on about one billion other topics that Christians write about out here which wouldn’t even lead my dog to the Lord.

So as I mull over my decision to leave this blog, I’d say to all of you Christian bloggers who are using your space to hate on Catholics, please in the name of Jesus take that stuff down. Hello, we have work to do out here! And just so you know rather than it “converting” me into another non-Catholic denomination it’s hurting me and making me run the other way, all the way into possibly shutting down this blog. Maybe some other Catholics won’t tell you how they feel, but I will. Because I was one of you before becoming one of them. And what you’re doing is not love, it’s not love at all. And some of you have completely missed what the gospel message is all about.

Honesty is something, huh?

(Thanks my friend for the song. Hard to listen to but, I did, and I needed it. And you know, others do to.)

God of Love

John John , , , , , , , , , ,

And then suddenly, when those others start having faces and hearts and stories and brokenness, you begin to see just why Dad loves them like he loves you—unconditionally.

It’s not always easy to love if we’re honest. It’s not always easy to understand, from our perspective, how God is now, and has always been, love.

We expect performance. We expect to earn someone’s affection. We expect to be loved based on what we’ve accomplished.

Dad has no such expectations.

God created us to be the objects of his affection. It is our sole purpose to be loved by him and to love him back. But love is a choice, so it can only truly be love when the recipient chooses to love in return.

Thus, we get this creation we live in. There first had to be a choice—to turn away from God’s love and experience something other—or to turn around and experience Dad’s love for us—or the word we (mis)understand—repent.

Repent (turn around, it’s right behind you), Dad’s love has come near.

The gaping chasm we couldn’t cross with our works-based faith, with our compliance to external rules, our older brother has bridged. No longer are we estranged from Dad like we were. No longer are we orphans. No longer does Adam’s choice have to separate us.

It’s true, that choice has caused us to be born with a desire to face the wrong direction—to face away from Dad’s love. And once turned away, we only know how to attempt to make provisions for our self. We no longer have the ability to trust Dad with providing. We labor in the world to produce for ourselves.

We believe this is how it has to be.

But this all seems to have a purpose. We only truly know love when we experience something other.

So if we’re so loved, where does pain fit into all this? And where is God then?

All too often, we seem to misappropriate pain as punishment from God. Our view of God tends to be of crossed arms and scowled face with head shaking in disapproval. In other words, we’ve dragged Dad out of his role as Sovereign Lover, and into our human terms of relationship.

But, it seems we only truly bridge the ground of a loving relationship with others when we’re able to relate to, and even share in, their pain—just like Jesus did with us. My heart has been tenderized through pain whereas before it was hardened by rules and “right” knowing. Now, I see Dad was with me in every iteration of my pain even though I didn’t know it at the time—and I wouldn’t change a single instance as, slowly over time, it has helped me love others I’d been taught to condemn.

God isn’t distant, he laughs—and cries, with us. He’s right there in our pain and loneliness even if our heart is turned away from knowing that.

God doesn’t cause pain, but he allows it to change us—for our benefit.

And then, when those others we’ve deemed as evil and vile, when the sinner or evildoer is revealed as a friend or family member, when we see the brokenness and frailty of another that we know personally, when that sin we’ve established our platform against has a face we’re familiar with—a heart we’ve loved—then maybe we begin to understand.

Then all our correct doctrine, all our allusions of righteousness and superiority, all our beliefs of right and wrong—go right out the window, and we begin to see in some small part how Dad can love us—how he sees us even at our worst—and how he never will give up on a single one of his children—ever.

We then start to see how he would be willing to shoulder the pain of the entire world and die to prove his love for us.

Religion, politics, rituals, tradition—it all goes to the wayside when one of our beloved is broken, and all we can do is hurt with them.

And that is our Dad who loves us.

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you haven’t performed well enough—that you have to earn his love.

He loves you because you’re worth loving. The universe would fall apart if you were anything less than what he made you to be—his beloved; his precious and unique treasure.

Dad sees our heart. He sees all of our brokenness. He knows you intimately. And he loves you more than the human mind can comprehend.

Don’t allow a lie to win. You are loved—now and for all eternity!