I didn’t sleep well that night. Everything was turning round and round in my head. Finally, at the unearthly hour of 5:30 (I am NOT a morning person) I felt compelled to get up and play the old and battered upright piano that stood unused in a corner of the meeting room. I had noticed a hymnbook there. Perhaps some time with God would bring some answers and resolution. I played for nearly an hour and a half, quietly humming the alto line as I did so, singing in my head every verse to every song I played, looking for songs that spoke to where I was at the time.
I mentioned earlier that a canvas had been laid out for people to paint on. Each person would take a portion of the canvas—sometimes small, sometimes large, and sometimes mixed in amongst the paintings of others—and paint during worship or teaching times. It began to occur to me that I could take out some of the anger and emotion I was feeling by painting, though I am certainly no painter. I went over, picked some very dark colours and basically slapped and painted them onto an empty space I found, trying out the different ways of moulding the paints with the knife, after using a very thick, broad brush. I’m sure some must have wondered what I was doing but no one asked and I didn’t volunteer.
When I sat down, I wrote, “I’m beginning to see my heart. My head knows God loves me. I’ve known my heart doesn’t match. I want God but do I really think in my heart all sorts of horrid stuff about him? My brain dominates because I dare not let my heart loose. I dare not give it free reign. Do I dare here?” I think some of that angry wanting-to-punch-and-kick-walls was a symptom of blackness in my heart towards him—-blackness that I tried to depict in my paint and blackness that I’ve never acknowledged or verbalized even in my thoughts.
The session that followed was on confession. God wants us to be not only emotionally healing (we’re always in process) but also spiritually grounded. Some, however, want the healing while refusing to be grounded in confession and repentance; the healing of the cross without the WAY of the cross.
Our needs are legitimate. Our attempts to fill them, however, are false and often we’ve grown up in an environment that has fostered our false belief system. For instance, the need to always appear good leads to a belief that we can never share the bad and so we live in secrecy, hiding the bad, sometimes from even ourselves. I know I have done that.
Paul wrote, “I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may work through me. … For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12:9,10 NLT
My weakness is not my sin and my goodness is not the answer. JESUS is the answer. He allows himself to be swallowed up in my hell. God doesn’t want to take away my desires. He wants to redeem them, clean them up, bring them in line with what’s good. Isn’t that amazing?
God never created us to be able to stand sin in our souls and live healthy, creative lives. The distortion of sin corrupts us and so it is imperative we take our sin and put it on the cross. But first we must own the sin. This is confession. “I did it my way again. I did….” To confess is not to be weak. Freedom comes in confession; bondage comes in secrecy. The importance of confessing to (safe) others was also stressed. We can’t manipulate others like we think we can God, with others we have to be specific and when we hear their words of forgiveness, it has a powerful effect on us.
Throughout the morning, the desire to kick and punch walls continued. I seemed to vacillate between that and disassociation. I didn’t want to connect with any of this. I thought of my inability to truly accept God’s love in my heart and was angry. But small group was next and the expectation was for us to use the time for confession. It was also a time for processing the stuff God was bringing to us so which would I do? I was cognizant of the issues that had arisen in the weeks before the conference and felt a need to have them addressed and yet, if God was raising other, deeper matters that were perhaps at the root of the issues that seemed more obvious, I didn’t want to ignore that either. The biggest issue to arise since I had spoken and been ministered to in small group the day before was this issue of the Father’s love for me.
I thought of the Styrofoam cup illustration from Monday. I was certainly the cup full of holes, maybe even the bottomless cup. Look at all the people who had ministered to me the night before and shown me love and still I felt empty. I wrote, “I can know certain people love me but still I feel unloved, unwanted, rejected. There is only one person whose love I’ve KNOWN, whose love I’ve been certain of even in my soul. But her I had to walk away from. The one person who loves me, I can’t have. I have accepted the wrongness of the relationship we had and the essentialness of keeping away from her but my longing and desires for her have not changed. Every breath I breath is her.”
I went into my small group, sharing this and the struggle I’ve described above regarding my anger and rage at God and my inability to … hmmm … I was going to put "accept his love" but the thought has come to me that maybe I don’t even believe he loves me. Only one person has loved me and she’s forbidden. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
I wish I could remember all that happened and all that was said. The two group leaders gathered around me to pray. One had a picture which came to her mind of a meadow in a forest, butterflies flitting throughout. God was there and said that the only thing missing to make the scene perfect was me. I thought of the experience I’ve come to call
“The Doorway” (if you follow the link it's the last section at the bottom of the page) in which I WAS in a meadow with God, only instead of butterflies there were dragonflies and God and I were dancing through the tall, flowering grasses.
The group leader did an unusual thing. Normally, participants are to receive only and not give. Even when they hear another being prayed for, they are not to join in prayer for that person, even in their mind, but rather hear that prayer and pray it for themselves—-at least the parts that apply. But this time the group leader asked the other participants to do two things. First she had them all sing to me, “Jesus Loves Me”, inserting my name in the appropriate places. And then she invited them to speak out if they had anything to say to encourage me. One of the women in the group offered to mother me. She asked me to stand in front of her and then she began to speak to me, exclaiming over me with joy as though I was a brand-new infant handed to her for the first time. She looked at me, reached both hands up to take a long strand of hair from each side of my face and run her hands down the length of them, continuing her gentle greeting and then she took me in her arms and held me.
When she released me, I didn’t feel a bit different. I still felt angry and distant. But the shock from the group leader was amazing as she cried out in surprise that I had changed. My eyes were different. I was glowing. Like I said, I didn’t feel any different but everyone agreed that I looked much different. And they all gave me a great big hug. At lunch I asked my roommate if I looked different and she agreed I did. By then I was starting to feel more at peace.
During the afternoon session, I returned to my dark painting of the morning and decided to add some brightness and light to it. There had been a cross painted next to my painting and so I used that as a focal point from which the light emanated. I didn’t add a lot but it was a beginning. Had I had access to that painting the entire week I might have continued to add more to it but it had to be rolled off the table the next morning to expose more empty canvas for others.
During the afternoon small group, I decided to do what I was told to do in the morning and just rest in God’s love. I found myself in the place he had shown me 2½ years ago when a friend introduced me to
Centring Prayer (again, if you follow the link, the story I allude to is in the last section near the bottom of the page) and stayed there the entire time. As the other women took their turns to talk about their issues, I wanted to pay attention but God wanted me to stay present to his arms. I found that as I did, I didn’t take on any of their pain like I would normally have done and I stayed at peace.
It was an interesting thing. During both the afternoon and evening sessions (“Sexual Addiction” and “Embracing the Spirit of Repentance—The Idol-Smash Dance”) much came up that would have normally turned my emotions into knots but God’s palpable presence would pull me back to him and I stayed at peace. Another interesting thing happened part way through the evening worship. God withdrew as Father and came instead as Jesus the Lover. Instead of Fatherly arms holding me, I felt Jesus nuzzling my neck with his face from behind me. I could feel him, almost ticklish, and I couldn’t help but grin. His presence, this physical sensation of his presence, the joy of his presence, was in stark contrast to the deep, unrelieved pain over my heart that seems constantly to demand a knife. He was like a persistent lover. He was there when I sat. When I stood, he was still there. He was there during the talk and if my mind started to wander, his nose would tickle my neck, I would giggle to myself and be back in his presence again. The serious topic of idolatry could not dampen my joy.
We must have done something at the end of the talk on idols to symbolize the breaking of them but for the life of me I can’t remember. All I can remember was the celebration that followed. The chairs in the room were cleared away and we were brought back into worship—a joyful time of singing and dancing to the Lord of all. I grabbed one of the scarves from the pile, went to an empty area where I would be off to the side and somewhat alone and danced and sang to my God, my Father, my Lover. Others were dancing with the scarves (wish I knew the correct name) and two people took the long, 15-foot blue “scarf”, one at each end of it, stood at the front of the room and made it billow up and down in the air. People danced over and under it. Everyone was joyful. What a wonderful celebration!
There were other gifts God gave me that day as well. A woman came up to me sometime during the day and thanked me for playing the piano so early in the morning. I told her that I’m not a morning person but that God dragged me out of bed to play and she took that to mean that God did it just for her and left beaming. Apparently others were also blessed by it. My roommate took me aside and told me I’m special. She said she saw it even before we started talking our first morning together. She said I glow and she sees God in me. One of the Winnipegers who had been part of the prayer team I had led, called me his fearless leader and seems to have a lot of respect for me. Oh, and during the late night celebration of God, during a time I had sat down to rest, one of the leaders took the scarf from my hand and draped it over my head and shoulders as though I was a bride. In a day that had started with such turmoil, God had ended it with incredible blessing. How could I stay angry?
