by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
How do you deal with sad things like missed opportunities or things you regret in your past? I have some incidents from twenty years ago that periodically come up in my dreams. I wake up filled with sadness, but since we can’t undo what happened in the past, how do you learn to live with it?
A great question. I’ve had several kinds of regrets that used to plague me periodically in my dreams. Some, like things I did wrong or that hurt someone, I have learned to go back to the people involved and make what amends I can. (E.g. I paid off a debt I “forgot,” and told people I had hurt that I’ve realized what I had done and how they must have felt, and asked their forgiveness.) Other things I have just had to confess to God or a spiritual counselor and ask God to help me use the painful situation to show sensitivity toward others, and to take the time to love and help people I meet who come to me.
But sometimes there are totally unexpected opportunities to find healing one could never have caused or predicted. For example, recently I had an unexpected opportunity to possibly find healing for a painful situation that occurred while I was in college at Oklahoma University sixty-four years ago. Last spring I got a letter from the new basketball coach at O.U., Lon Kruger. Lon and the athletic department were going to institute a weekend celebration to which all living players who had ever lettered in basketball would be invited to come back to O.U. for a celebration get-together. Among other things there was to be an exhibition game, and the letter said that anyone who wanted to play in that game would receive a complimentary game uniform.
First let’s go back to when I was in the ninth grade. I saw my first basketball game and became fascinated. I told the coach I would do anything he told me to do if he would give me a chance. And he did. I worked diligently, developed some skills and became a starter on the Tulsa Central High School basketball team that was undefeated during the regular season.
Later, after World War II was over and I got out of the Navy in the summer of 1946, I enrolled at Oklahoma University. My high school coach must have given me a very good recommendation because I got a basketball scholarship job.
When I got to the campus I learned that twenty-seven returning veterans showed up to play that year, young men who had lettered in basketball in college, mostly at O.U., and then had been in the service during the years of the Second World War. Nine had been All-Conference and two players had been All-American (Gerald Tucker and Allie Paine). Coach Bruce Drake was building the most talented team in O.U. history to that point, a team that got to the national finals game in the spring of 1947 against Holy Cross with Bob Cousey, et al.
My freshman year was a fabulous experience. I told Bruce Drake the same thing I had told my high school coach: “I will do whatever it takes to make the team.” I realized that I was going up against the best players in America every day in practice. But I worked very hard and in my sophomore year began to travel with and play on the team.
Then during the Christmas holidays, I told the coach that I could not go to the New Orleans invitational basketball tournament because my brother, Earle, was killed the year before and my parents were going to be alone at Christmas. He understood, and O.U. still had a great deal of available talent from the previous year.
But during that Christmas break I went with some friends to a party in Enid, OK, about sixty miles away. The car was going 90 mph down a highway that had the dirt washed away from the concrete slab. The right tires slipped off the edge of the slab and the driver tried to whip the car back on the road. The car flipped into the air and rolled 270 yards down a hill. I broke my neck and they didn’t know if I’d be paralyzed or even live.
I remember praying—not knowing what was going to happen, and I turned my future over to God.
I went through a long rehab and after a lot of hard and uncomfortable work (and a lot of the grace of God through a great spinal surgeon) I recovered much of the use of my body, but not enough that I was cleared to play again. Bruce Drake saw that I lettered in basketball in 1947-48 year.
I tried hanging around at practice, but felt like a leech, since I had nothing to offer. Finally I couldn’t enjoy going to the games, so I quietly withdrew from O.U. basketball and began to build a new life. But something started happening then that I never told anyone but my wife until recently. I would have a dream that I was playing basketball at O.U. again. And I’d wake up from the dream and cry like a little boy. That started in 1948 and happened periodically for years.
So when I got that letter from coach Kruger I first just thought it might really be fun to “go back home to O.U.” and meet some of the players I’d heard about. Then a thought hit me. I called coach Kruger and asked him if he had a good sense of humor. He chuckled and then I said, “I’m a letterman, and I’d like to get a uniform and be a part of that game.”
He said, “Fine. We’d love to have you do that.”
I said, “The problem is, I’m 84 years old. I can still shoot the ball a little and I’d like to warm up with the team. But—if someone tries to put me in the game, I’ll put out a contract on them.”
He laughed and said, “Fill out the form. We’d love to have you.”
The thought that had hit me (as a man with a degree in Psychological Counseling) was that if I signed up, suited up, and showed up on the court for that game, it might lay to rest that ache in my gut that caused the dreams about having to quit playing basketball.
So I got a new pair of basketball shoes and began to practice handling a basketball and shooting close in shots so I wouldn’t fall down or otherwise shame myself.
When Andrea and I got to the hotel in Norman, we discovered that this was a lot bigger deal than we had planned on. At the banquet the night before the game, I realized that we were sitting in the midst of a bunch of All-Americans, retired NBA players and other really outstanding players from the past forty or fifty years. Some of them still played in the NBA or on European teams overseas. And there were two outstanding coaches who had been named “Coach of the Year” during their time at O.U. Also I discovered that the exhibition game had been advertised, the public invited, and was going to be in the O.U. game facility where the varsity games were played.
When the two teams (Red and Cream) were ready to go onto the court, I trotted out and was introduced on the Cream Team, “84-year old Keith Miller from the class of 1947-48.” I tried to jog onto the court as if I were a younger man (of 60 or 70). And somehow the sight of an 84 year old man with a white beard in an O.U. basketball uniform must have triggered something inside that crowd, because although I couldn’t hear it, Andrea told me that the crowd’s response was very positive and big.
Photo courtesy of Karl Dickinson. To see more, click above.
Both teams ran the warm-up drills and shot a few baskets. When I’d hit one a student section on our end of the court would cheer, and when I’d miss, they’d go “awwww,” sadly.
And then the game was on. It proved to be very rough and competitive. It ended in a tie and the Cream Team won in overtime. Every five minutes a new five players would be substituted. Three times coach Sampson tried to send me in. Although the game was so rough the first injury was a torn quadriceps tendon, there was no letup. But still, the third time coach pointed at me to go in, I almost did! You talk about insanity—I couldn’t even keep up running the length of the court. But the thought crossed my mind, “Maybe I’ll get lucky!”
After the game the audience brought the prepared autograph pages out onto the court and kids and grownups alike came for autographs. Since I was the oldest person, my name was listed first. So I looked in the eyes of and encouraged a lot of little boys who were star struck by the whole experience—but no one more than the 84-year-old in an O.U. uniform who was burying the pain of his past, and being born into a new life as a “real player” in a life filled with gratitude to God.
Thank you, Lord, that it’s not over until it’s over. You stay with us all the way with your loving and healing presence. Help me to be aware that many people have painful circumstances and unmet dreams from the past that you can fulfill in their hearts. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“People brought anybody with an ailment, whether mental, emotional, or physical. Jesus healed them, one and all.”
– Matthew 4:24, The Message
“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”
– Hippocrates
Ancient Greek Physician, referred to as the Father of Western Medicine
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Honesty, Integrity, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Saturday at Riverbend Church here in Austin, TX, a large number of people gathered to say a formal “Goodbye,” and “We love you, Hank!” to our dear remarkable, unpretentious friend, Francis Leo “Hank” McNamara.
It was a strange mix: some 50 or 60 family members; many Austinites who had known Hank since grade school; at least as many who had known him in recovery programs—some only for a few days or months. The atmosphere seemed to be permeated by…love, at least that’s what I kept thinking as I met dozens of them.
The day after he died, his wife, Trish, asked me to speak at his funeral. I nodded my thanks, went home and cried.
Ten months earlier, Hank had broken his neck. It would not heal, which meant that if he tripped or bumped into a wall wrong the second vertebra would shift and he’d be dead—or paralyzed. Since he already had a bad heart and several other serious physical issues, his prognosis did not look good.
One day several months ago I asked Hank if he would like to tell his family who he really was and what he thought of them (he had a very large family). He said he really would. Shortly after that, using a tape recorder, we started on a joint trip through his whole life that for me was a life-changing journey. I swore to him that I would never reveal what he said on tape until he had edited it and given me permission to reveal it.
After only a couple of sessions, I realized that he had raised or co-raised thirteen children who lived in various places around the country. After we had finishing a taping session, I asked him if he would like to say something specifically to them. If he would, we could structure that into our sessions together. Hank said he would. He told me (not on tape) that although he’d been married three times before he wanted each of his children to know that he had loved their mother, that he loved each one of them and his grandchildren especially, and he was glad he’d gotten to be their old man. And he wanted to tell them before it was too late. Unfortunately Hank died before we had any more recording sessions. But because he had told that to me in a personal conversation when the tape machine was off, I could pass that part of our conversations on to them at the funeral. Also I could tell Trish that she was the love of his life—even though I’m sure she already knew that.
Although I never can type and share the information on those tapes now, I learned a lot about Hank McNamara in the last few weeks before his death that I could and did pass on to those who are his friends and family members at the funeral.
Hank was a remarkable man. I can still see him coming up the sidewalk. He had to wear a kind of neck support made up of four rods (two at either side of his face and two at the back corners of his head) going up several inches over his head and connected by wires—like some sort of futuristic scaffolding. He had oxygen tubes in his nostrils, was pulling an oxygen tank, and as I recall, carrying an aluminum cane. And yet he was smiling and gracious to everyone he met. He was going through some of the most scary and painful things a human being can experience, and yet he was filled with gratitude—gratitude for his beloved Trish (he was very much in love), but also I never saw him when he wasn’t grateful “for another day.”
The “magic” Hank brought with him everywhere he went was amazing. The day he died I heard a young woman say that she had come for help to a meeting Hank had started, feeling shame and worthlessness. But the way Hank shook her hand, smiled and greeted her—as if she were a fine worthwhile person—awakened a belief in her that maybe she could become those things someday. I heard many similar stories during the next few days.
As I thought about Hank’s life over the twenty years I’ve known him, I realized that he had changed the focus of his approach to helping people in trouble. For the last several years he had begun to “stand by the door” of the places where people in trouble were frantically searching for God. He had begun to spend more and more of his time helping “newcomers” to get started on a spiritual journey that could lead them to become the people they had lost hope of ever becoming—or becoming again after a life of failure and running from reality and God.
That night before Hank’s funeral, I remembered a poem I had read years before. It had been written by a man who I consider to have been one of the most outstanding men in the 20th century regarding helping people into a life of faith. The man had sent it to me in October of 1961. I decided to read a couple of stanzas of this poem at his funeral because I recognized Hank within in the lines (although I am almost certain that He did not know about the poem).
SO I STAY NEAR THE DOOR—An Apologia for My Life.
I stay near the door.
I neither go too far in, nor stay too far out,
The door is the most important door in the world—
It is the door through which men walk when they find God.
There’s no use my going way inside, and staying there,
When so many are still outside, and they, as much as I,
Crave to know where the door is.
And all that so many ever find
Is only the wall where a door ought to be.
They creep along the wall like blind men,
With outstretched, groping hands,
Feeling for a door, knowing there must be a door,
Yet they never find it…
So I stay near the door.
The most tremendous thing in the world
Is for men to find that door—the door to God.
The most important thing any man can do
Is to take hold of one of those blind, groping hands,
And put it on the latch–the latch that only clicks
And opens to the man’s own touch.
Men die outside that door, as starving beggars die
On cold nights in cruel cities in the dead of winter–
Die for want of what is within their grasp.
They live, on the other side of it–because they have found it.
Nothing else matters compared to helping them find it,
And open it, and walk in, and find Him – – –
So I stay near the door.
…
There is another reason why I stay there.
Some people get part way in and become afraid
Lest God and the zeal of His house devour them;
For God is so very great, and asks all of us.
And these people feel a cosmic claustrophobia.
And want to get out. Let me out! they cry.
And the people way inside only terrify them more.
Somebody must be by the door to tell them that they are spoiled
For the old life, they have seen too much;
Once taste God, and nothing but God will do any more.
Somebody must be watching for the frightened
Who seek to sneak out just where they came in,
To tell them how much better it is inside.
The people too far in do not see how near these are
To leaving—preoccupied with the wonder of it all.
Somebody must watch for those who have entered the door,
But would run away. So for them, too,
I stay near the door.
The startling thing about this poem is that it was written by the man who was “standing near the door” when Bill Wilson’s friend Eby brought Bill to Calvary Church in New York. That man, The Rev. Sam Shoemaker, put Bill Wilson’s hand on the latch of the door. Sam showed him how to commit his whole life to God. And then, at Bill’s request, Sam helped Bill to frame Alcoholics Anonymous and to put the spirituality into the “Big Book”, and The Twelve Steps and the Twelve Tradition’s. And this anonymous movement became the fastest growing spiritual movement in the 20th century during a time when many organized religious organizations were shrinking or floundering.
It was this incredible realization about Hank that made me realize the deep significance of his life: Our friend Hank McNamara (who did not consider himself to be “religious”) had realized—as Sam Shoemaker had half a century before him—that the future of the movement that saved Hank’s life and the lives of so many of us, might be continued only by loving persons willing to stand near the door—wherever they live—to guide the hands of a few lost people onto the latch of the door through which they may find Life—and God.
I am very grateful that I got a chance to know Hank McNamara, a real man of God.
“If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you.”
-Revelations 3:20, The Message
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Prayer, Small Groups, Weekly Devotional
Keith, After I decided to surrender my life to God, how should I go about finding my vocation?
Good question. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was a land man for a major oil company. It was a good job but hardly considered to be a training ground for Christian disciples—which I definitely wanted to be after finally trying to turn my life over to God.
I prayed about what to do and at that time there seemed to be only one way for really serious players to go: go to theology school and become ordained to be a full time Christian minister. So I studied the Bible and theology and the history of the church and preaching under some good professors. Along the way I sat with my parents when my older brother was killed and with my father when he died of a heart condition and with my mother when she died of cancer—all before I was 30. All during this time I was praying and reading the Bible and the lives of the saints—the people in the past who had given their lives to God.
I decided that the playing field I was called to in which to help people find hope and real love was in the ordinary life I was trying to live as a businessman. I made a decision that God had my address. Instead of spending all my time “deciding what I would become for God,” I would treat my own ordinary life as a father and husband who commuted in a car pool twenty miles one way to work five days a week—that I would commit that life to God and to learning how to live for him all day long.
I made that decision because I simply didn’t know any ministers at that time who talked, preached or shared individually about having real problems in their own lives and relationships with their spouses, children, parents or fellow clergy. I was still in my thirties and just couldn’t believe that I was the only committed Christian who wrestled with lust, jealousy, and the many faces of fear of failure. None of these pastors seemed to have that terrible three-day silence warfare with their spouses or had to be right in arguments with a spouse or feel like a wimp, or worry at night about developing a retirement plan or squeezing in vacation time. In fact, since I did wrestle with all of these things, for a number of years I thought I must not be a good Christian.
But at another level I was learning that the way out of the fears for me was not courage, which I’d prayed for, but love. When I was worried, I discovered that if I helped someone else, my fear left me—and that maybe Jesus was right (J) when he said that it is “love that casts out fear.”
At twenty-two I had met a man who encouraged me to keep a journal about the things in which I was interested. He helped me write a small book of ballads. And after a few years of talking to lay people about the hope I was finding in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, I began writing books about the simple yet agonizing discoveries concerning what it might mean to try to live one’s whole life for and with God.
As I’ve written in blogs before, I kept trying to be open to finding out the truth about my own character defects. And that process has made me face many of the denied self-centeredness and control issues with which I had never before been confronted—either in church or school. But because I’d learned a lot about Jesus and his life, teaching and self-limiting love, I knew that when I learned about my sins and character defects, to confess them to some Christian men also trying to live for God. And I began to see how I’d hurt many of the people I love most.
The incredible thing to me is that in spite of my flaws—many of which didn’t surface until I had become a best-selling author and lecturer and had traveled in many foreign countries around the world, teaching about how God can change our whole perception of what it means to live intimately with him and other people. The bottom line about the discovery process is that I would have bet anyone that I would not do the immoral and hurtful things I wound up doing. And they happened to a man who was very disciplined and had “kept the rules” all his life. I was baffled. And when I faced and admitted what I’d done, it was too late to mend some of the fences I had charged through.
What does this have to do with finding a vocation? For me, a great deal. After having a number of best-selling books translated into many languages and having trained with and learned from many powerful and wealthy people as a young man, I finally realized I am just a person. And that I can sometimes love and help people who are struggling with the questions of life and who have discovered the hard way that they are powerless on their own to change their lives at a deep level.
I go to group meetings of people, some of whom I have known for twenty-five years, with whom I share the pain and joy of trying to live for God. When guests and new people come, we discuss our scariest and most fearsome problems. I was writing books and lecturing in different places in foreign countries, but for twenty years I didn’t find it helpful or necessary to tell them that I was a writer and lecturer. But lately, since many of the people who read my books are very old or deceased, I have told some of these people I love and meet with that my vocation is being a writer and a sort of talent scout for God—helping a few people discover the vocational dreams they buried along with their self-centeredness and control issues. That’s come to be the focus of my vocation.
The short answer to your question about choosing a vocation as a Christian is that since God seems to want loving representatives in every culture and every financial, political, educational and medical field, it doesn’t much matter what you do vocationally as long as you love God and surrender the center of your life to God. So I’d advise you to pray about it, ask God’s will, and then pick something that you really love to do. Then go and find out if you can do it.
Will there be pain and sorrow? Of course, but you will find that in the long run your ability to navigate through pain and still be loving will have more effect in spreading the Good News into other people’s hearts around you than all of the sermons you could preach and all the books you could write.
Lord, help me to keep listening for your voice in the pain of other people’s lives and in my own. And thank you that you let me fail enough to wake up and see that I don’t have to “win” to be the person you will love “someday,” but just to open my eyes and see your loving presence in Andrea, our families and the other people we get to walk with on your crazy adventure. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice.”
-Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew 10:42
“But I do more than thank. I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!”
-Ephesians 1:18-19, The Message
“Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.”
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox—American Writer (1850-1919)
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
-Theodore Roosevelt—26th President of the United States (1858-1919)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, what does Jesus say about the fact that good Christians often have serious pain?
I don’t know where the notion came from that committed Christians shouldn’t have pain. But for me pain has been the most important way that I find my way back to God—again and again. I remember hearing Dr. Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician and author and also a Christian, give a lecture on this topic. A physician in the audience asked him a similar question: “Dr. Tournier, how do you get your patients out of their pain?” I was shocked at his answer, as was everyone else in the room.
“Oh, I don’t,” he responded. “Not until they know the meaning of it.”
For most of my life I was very anxious to get out of pain—that is until I tried to surrender my whole life to the God Jesus called Father. It had not occurred to me that personal pain is virtually a necessity for one who hopes to live as a serious citizen of God’s Kingdom/Reign. In fact, as I’ve said before (see this post), pain is like a fire alarm system to help us pinpoint issues we need to recognize and deal with.
There are many kinds of personal pain: pain that results from physical injury or various kinds of pain involving loss of self-esteem or from troubled or broken relationships.
When Jesus first drew his disciples apart from the crowds to teach them, he listed some of the most painful personal experiences or losses people can experience and said to them, “You’re blessed …
- …when you reach the end of your rope.
- … when you feel you have lost that which is most dear to you.
- … when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.
- … when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
- …every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me…You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble. (Matthew 5, The Message)
I think he was saying that until the disciples and I realize that we are powerless on our own to control our lives, our circumstances and other people’s acceptance and approval of us, we will not really believe that we actually need to surrender our whole lives to God.
When I became a Christian, I surrendered my “overall” life early on with a statement to that effect. But as time went on my behavior (and my family) finally told me that first surrender had evidently not included my insistence on being right in arguments, and over time my ambition that caused me to neglect my family (although I made valiant attempts to make it up to them, etc.). But clearly I was powerless and hurt my family because I was over-focused on succeeding at everything I did—even as a Christian. And I failed as a husband and a father. Only then in the despair and rejection resulting from a failed marriage that I had caused did I hear Christ saying to me that unless I would go back to square one and become like a child in my relationship to God as my intimate Father. I could not see and change my life-long mostly unconscious compulsion to control circumstances and people to get them to act the way I wanted them to. I needed to recognize clearly that inside where no one can see, I am a little child calling out to his intimate Father (abba=daddy). I am asking Him to teach me how to live and relate to other people as loving siblings instead of getting them to be actors in the drama I am producing and in which I am the star.
This stance of putting ourselves on center stage in our daily or professional lives and subtly or openly trying to get the others around us to be supporting actors in our drama is a powerful word picture of the self-centered Sin that we Christians believe only God can overcome. The problem is that God’s process of transforming us into the wonderful, loving and creative people he created us to be cannot, it seems, begin without our giving God permission (to the best of our ability) to teach us who we are and what our role in life will be that can bring happiness and fulfillment to other people and ourselves. And this evidently begins with awareness, confession and surrender.*
One of the greatest mysteries about God’s process of transformation is that we cannot see in our own lives and behavior that we are in fact trying to control the other people around us (however subtly and “lovingly” we may be doing the controlling). Some people who have the most serious problem of controlling their wives, husbands, children or siblings are consciously so “gentle and loving” with their hints and suggestions that they are astounded when accused of controlling. They may even cry or rage and say things like “Controlling?! Good grief! I’m only trying to HELP you!!” Or weep and say, “I’m trying to help you avoid making some terrible mistakes!!” And that may be how they experience their behavior. So solving these difficulties may take some counseling to unravel.
In my case, rejection by family member—when they couldn’t get through to me about my self-centeredness and control issues—caused me so much pain that I went to a treatment center, and there my denial finally cracked open. (I described how this happened for me in The Secret Life of the Soul.) Now I try to listen to the pain in my own life and see how I can relate to it as Jesus did and see what it may have to teach me about how to be more loving the way Jesus loved.
The experience of inter-personal pain is often a shock—whether it is experienced by being rejected by a person or group or the pain of a degenerating spine. The good news is that as I surrender the pain and my future to God I can learn how to walk through the pain of living and understand better how to love people as I’m going through it. And looking back I have realized that the areas of personal pain in my own life are like drawbridges I can put down into other people’s lives and walk with them as I learn how to take their hands and help them know at least one path through their particular kind of pain.
So it is often through our experiences of pain that we become “specialists” in helping people learn how to deal with their experience of that same kind of pain—or at least to know that it is possible to make it through that pain, because we made it through—or are still making it through.[1]
And my journey as a Christian has led me to realize that it is the experience of personal pain that can lead us to see new values in the world and to be more caring and loving to people who are alone in their pain. And since that is one of the purposes of citizens of God’s New Reign in Jesus—to love people and be a part of their healing, we can actually use our painful lonely experiences to become the loving people we were designed to be—if we can learn to look for and notice when other people are in pain…and when appropriate, to walk a few steps with them.
Dear Lord, thank you for realizing that the various kinds of secret pain in my life can be sources of wisdom as to how to love you and other people specifically when they are going through the loneliness of solitary pain. Help me to learn to listen and let people tell about their pain instead of rushing in with fixes and all kinds of “answers” (before they are even asking for help). Thank you that you didn’t promise us “answers” in the usual sense but said you would be present with us in our pain—and that would somehow transform us to learn how to love others in their pain. Help me to be willing to go and sit with people in their pain—as you have done through those who have visited me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.
-Romans 12:1, The Message
Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self.
-Mark 8: 35, The Message
Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth…and another way to put it: You’re to be light, bringing out the God colors in the world … (and the way you’re to be light is) to shine…be generous with your life. By opening up to others you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.
-Mt. 5:13-26, The Message
* I’m not being “Pollyanna” here. I still want to get out of pain as quickly as possible. But I’m not quite as frantic about having pain because I have realized that all I have learned by going through a good bit of pain has helped me to become more sensitive and loving to other people—and more aware of God’s presence in my real life.
[1] If you have had this experience, you might consider taking a look at Facing Codependence.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, as I have watched you from a distance for the past twenty-five years, you have not been a Christian who just made up his mind to be a Christian and just relax and be one. You seem to keep wrestling with the faith as if it is a continuous process after you are saved (or accepted by God). Why would you have to struggle with faith problems when you’ve been saved?
That’s a good question. It implies to me that you (or people you know) see Christianity as a transaction between God and a person like joining the YMCA or signing up as a Democrat or Republican. Once you’re in, you’re in. Of course you may have to pay dues, but the decisions are over once you’ve made the choice to join.
But for me, a serious relationship with God is more like a marriage than joining something. A marriage involves an initial commitment, but if one has a real marriage there is a commitment to ongoing communication and growth as the relationship deepens. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of how the life of faith has gone for me.
When I was a little my mother told me that God is real and taught me to pray. I continued to “say my prayers” at night, and prayed for help when I felt vulnerable or like I might fail or not get what I wanted.
Then by the time I was twelve or thirteen I decided that “God is real”—not symbolic like Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. So when asked to, I stood with a bunch of other young people in front of the huge congregation at Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa and “said the words” that the Methodist church had for a commitment to Christ. I was doing what I had been told was the next right step. And according to the Church, I was officially saved and going to heaven. And I am not doubting the validity of the churches confirmation rite. But for me, inside my mind, I was to experience a lot about which I hadn’t been told.
That was when puberty hit. I began having two kinds of consciousness. I had my usual mind that dealt with schoolwork and how to be better at sports, etc. But when I was tempted to do things I was pretty sure God wouldn’t encourage us to do (like masturbate, think about girls and sex, etc.) I stepped out of the “God room” in my mind and into an empty windowless film room. Having a secret space to go where God was not invited didn’t seem like that big a deal for a long time since I’d never been told that God would “get me” if I wasn’t good.
Then life brought devastating situations that I could not change or make sense of by myself. My only brother was killed in WWII. A few years later I walked beside Dad as his damaged heart weakened, then killed him. I sat with Mother (taking the night shift in the hospital) a few short years later as cancer took her life, an inch at a time.
I began to ask questions I’d never asked, like “What is death?” and “Why do people hurt and kill each other?” I read serious books about what it might mean really to know God and learn how life was designed to be lived—since I believed he was its creator. I knew that I didn’t know God as I knew other people.
I had married a beautiful and very intelligent young woman. We were in love and I went to work to start fulfilling the American dream of raising a family and “becoming successful.” But when my mother was dying I realized that life wasn’t what I’d thought it would be. And then one day on a roadside in a car I had a deep intuitive knowing that I needed to surrender my whole life to God, and that he would guide me into the truth about life.
When I started to live out my commitment (to this God Jesus called Father) in every area of my life, I began to write books about the journey. The books succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I studied theology and then psychology, writing and lecturing in many places across the world about what I was discovering. Before I knew it, I had been given more affirmation and success than I could ever have predicted.
The experiences about which I’ve written might be seen by some people as struggling with faith. But to me it as been more like a struggle between myself and God over who would be in charge of my life.
Sometimes I wish it were as easy as I’ve heard people say it is for them—easy just to surrender, keep out of the driver’s seat of my own life and allow God to be in control all the time. It has not been so for me. At each stage of my learning, I was being asked to face personal issues that came up. I would pray and finally realize that I was putting something ahead of God. And after much prayer and counsel, I would see what I needed to give to God, finally surrender that and have a new burst of freedom.
Somewhere along the way—after some years of notoriety and the deference that comes with it—life lost its joy, and I was bewildered. I became aware of “something” about myself that was totally resistant to surrendering to God. I didn’t learn exactly what it was for years. But I was baffled at the uneasiness and frustration I was experiencing—while living a life of effectiveness and glamor caring for many people everywhere I went. I was really confused, but could not see what the matter with me was.
People close to me sensed that somewhere very deep in my life I was not the unselfish person whom people seemed to experience in relating to me. (The person whom I consciously was much of the time.)
Eventually a little beer or wine morphed into a lot of Scotch whiskey. Even several years of prayer and psychological and spiritual counseling did not uncover what the problem was. My behavior deteriorated and I acted out some of my fear and frustration in very self-centered and immoral behavior leading to a divorce and to the crash of the great life and work I’d been given to do.
Finally my misery led me to a treatment center where I learned that the thing I would not surrender to God was so deep and so well defended that I’d even repressed it from my own sight and sincerely thought God was driving my life. I came to the place where I saw no other way, no other solution than to agree to surrender whatever it was that I was hiding, if God would show it to me, as frightening as that prospect was. And at last I saw that it was my self-centered need to be in charge of my life and to make sure that I could get my own gigantic need for love and attention met. Facing and surrendering that was the most frightening experience of my life. I felt that if I surrendered my future, I might be nothing. (I have described the experience in a book.) The morning after facing my deep self-centeredness and my unconscious need to control even God, I realized that the self-centeredness and need to control had been my underlying denied problem all my life.
So the answer to your question, “Why have I continued to struggle with God and faith if I were truly saved or converted when I first committed my whole life to God” is this: In my conscious experience I gave all of my life I could see to as much of God as I could understand, asking him to show me what to do. And as God began to shed light on what I might do for him, that same light revealed things I needed to surrender in order for me to be able to do what he gave me to do. My struggle has been to recognize, confess, and be willing to give up each character defect he showed me—and then ask God for the power and the courage to live and love people, trusting Him with the outcome of my efforts.
Twenty-six years ago I began a new adventure of faith by seeing and confessing my deepest sin of wanting to control my destiny. On the new adventure, I have been learning more about how to think about other people and their adventure and to help those who are seeking to find the dreams God has put in their lives—and to help some of them accomplish those dreams.
***
I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
– Galatians 5:4, The Message
Cultivate your own relationship with God, but don’t impose it on others. You’re fortunate if your behavior and your belief are coherent. But if you’re not sure, if you notice that you are acting in ways inconsistent with what you believe—some days trying to impose your opinions on others, other days just trying to please them—then you know that you’re out of line. If the way you live isn’t consistent with what you believe, then it’s wrong.
– Romans 14:22, The Message
The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him [or her]. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you.
– Galatians 3:11, The Message
Lord, thank you that you have been so loving and patient with me as I have struggled to see not only your will for my life, but also as I have struggled to learn to live each day asking what your priorities are for me today, right now. And thank you that my job is not to try to change other people—especially family members—but just to love them as you have loved me. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Small Groups, Weekly Devotional
This is a response to the second question of a two-part question that came up after John Burke (Lead Pastor at Gateway Church) interviewed me last month. I responded to the first of the two-part question on last week’s blog. Last week’s question was about why I think the kind of small group I had mentioned was important. My response is that Jesus spent approximately two-thirds of his three-year ministry with a small group of twelve men—the same twelve men. And all Jesus left was that small group and the Spirit in their midst. Further, Paul’s ministry was largely devoted to starting and continuing to correspond with and mentor a few small groups scattered in cities around the Roman Empire.
So now I’m getting to the second question: “What is the purpose of the small groups you talked about, and do these groups prepare Christians to fulfill the Great Commandment to issue God’s invitation to the world?”
What is the overall purpose of an “adventure” group?
Although the members of an “adventure” group learn about and experience ways to pray as Jesus taught the Twelve, and they examine relevant scripture passages, the overall purpose is for the group members to experiment with and actually experience receiving and giving the love of Jesus in their real time everyday lives and relationships. The experiment begins with every member agreeing that for thirteen weeks they will assume that the God Jesus called Father is real. And for the thirteen-week period the participants will live as if they had actually surrendered their entire lives to God. This includes an agreement among the group members not to argue about God’s existence or different interpretations of the Gospel. Instead they will be guided to experiment with how to love the people in their personal and vocational lives beginning with the other group members. They learn how to share in the group meetings by listening without interrupting or challenging what anyone else says they have experienced, and by reporting what happens—the failures as well as positive experiences—when they consciously take God with them clear through their days and nights. Each group member agrees to pray for the others every day during the experiment about the things shared in the group.
This group experience is not like any Bible study or sharing group most people have ever been in. The purpose is not to evangelize your neighbors or become expert Bible students; it is to learn (by doing) how to carry out the new command that Jesus gave the disciples when he was about to leave them: “Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.” (Jn. 13:34-35, The Message)
Since we are also called to love the world, the primary purpose of Jesus’ group and these groups is to learn how to love God and do his will in all areas of our own lives, secular as well as “religious.” And as we try to do some simple things to learn how to receive and give love—with the Father and each other, we will be acquiring the core characteristics, attitudes and behaviors that we will need later when we go out to meet the needs of those who have been marginalized in our culture—the hungry, the sick, those without clothing and shelter, etc. I’ve always thought it was strange that Jesus didn’t send the Twelve out on missions until not too long before the crucifixion. He evidently wanted them to be sure to go out with love as well as a perspective in everything they did.
Bruce Larson and I worked for years with dozens of groups to build a course that is emotionally safe. We did this by developing rules (and making these rules clear) that keep the members from putting people down who risk sharing their reality, (i.e. not “fixing” them, offering suggestions or corrections) that would shame them for not participating or for “making mistakes”. The leader and all the group members will help each other to learn how to love and assure every person’s safety in the group. (This experience can be invaluable later in missions to people who have been abused in their worlds.)
Almost anyone can lead an Adventure group. In the meetings, Bruce and I face and respond first (on CD’s) to every question to which group members are asked to respond. And the group leader responds third. So an appropriate level of vulnerability is established before other group members are asked to share, which allows the group to become safer and closer more quickly than is usually possible otherwise. Also, any participant can choose to “pass” on responding to any of the questions or exercises without being shamed or criticized. These guidelines create a safe and more free and open atmosphere than many participants have ever experienced anywhere. An atmosphere in which the real issues, the fears, the joys and the reality can be shared—of trying to commit their lives and relationships to God in the real life contexts of their own families, church situations and vocational and social lives.
So in this safer atmosphere, the participants try various experiments in their real life situations (outside the group, between sessions) of praying, handling the many disappointments of admitting when they are wrong and asking forgiveness. As they do so, they are building a library of experiences—living stories—from the experiences they will personally go through and share with the group during meetings. And while they are carrying out these experiments between group meetings, the group members will also be examining some of Jesus’ stories (parables) and considering with which character they identify—thus adding more living stories to their educational base.
When people close to Jesus (including the Twelve) asked about the stories he pointed out that they (whom he was teaching) were getting a good picture of how the Kingdom of God works in their lives. But other people whom they encountered along the way—people who hadn’t had this much teaching from Jesus and so didn’t understand—for those people stories created readiness—readiness to hear more. (See Mark 3:10-11, The Message, quoted at the end of this blog.)
What usually happens—invisibly at first—is that in the process of being heard and accepted as they are, people who may have been church members for years, come to realize that love has crept in and replaced loneliness and the sense of not fitting—feelings that apparently all people long to overcome.
As to the sharing, it often happens that when someone who has “passed” several weeks in a row finally speaks, he or she may be a different person than the one whom you met at the first meeting.
We believe that these experiences are all parts of the transformation process Jesus said was essential. It is like being “born anew from on high.” And friends, when you see a fellow adventurer being transformed before your eyes, week after week, it is impossible to tell you what this can do to your faith and ability to love God and other people. It seems that one must experience this personally to understand how important it is.
There is also a strong rule about keeping everything that is said in the meetings confidential. At first this seems strange but in the end, this creates an unbelievable sense of freedom and honesty. I remember when I started the first group of this kind in a church in Norman, OK in the 1950’s I had explained the group plan to the pastor and gotten his permission to start the group. We were meeting in our home. After several weeks the pastor called me and said, “What are you telling the people about money?”
I said, “Why are you asking?”
He said, “Well, three of the couples have started tithing since the group started meeting and they were a little vague when I talked to them.”
I laughed because tithing hadn’t even been mentioned. But the minister was so happy that he said, “I’m sending another couple over to join your group.”
“I’m sorry, Joe,” I said. “The rules are that no new members are allowed to join a new group after the second week. In this intimate atmosphere running in new people every week means starting to build the trust level all over again. We may do another group later if some people want to.”
The minister then asked, “Well what is this ‘secrecy’ all about? Where did you ever come up with a rule about people not sharing what’s going on in a group?”
I smiled and said, “Jesus. Several times Jesus told people who’d been helped by his ministry, “Don’t tell anyone.”
This may sound like an unusual way to operate a group, but people who have been together for thirteen weeks sharing their reality, the good news and the bad, sickness and celebrations, have reported time and again that long before the thirteen weeks are over, participants report that they find themselves becoming more caring for people around them outside the group, even difficult people and even in painful situations. But these feelings and attitudes of really beginning to trust and share are new and a little scary for people at first. And we are convinced they need a safe, non-critical place to report failures as well as successes. (We still attend such groups after all this time.)
This sort of group experience can create a spiritual culture of people who want to experiment with really trying to offer to God the living out of their eating, sleeping, working, walking around lives for Christ. (See Romans 12:1, The Message)
No group structure or process is for everyone, of course. But we have found that unless a large church finds a way for new people to learn to love each other and pray specifically for each other in a face to face atmosphere, over a period of time the back door of that church will become bigger than the front—no matter how gifted and committed the teaching pastors are. And our experience indicates that many group graduates go on mission trips after a thirteen-week group, or join a mission group in their own city, or teach a class in the church. They report that because of their experience in these groups, they find themselves listening to and praying for or with the people they are going out to help.
I have not tried to give you a comprehensive picture of the course content. If you would like to read about the course materials, click here.
And one last thing: because of years of being in adventure group meetings of various kinds, I realize that people are all different in their needs, hopes and dreams. And I have discovered that my job is not to change anyone—even any of you who may be reading this blog. So if what we have learned is not something that you feel comfortable trying, we won’t bug you. But this is just my answer to the person who wanted to know the purpose of this kind of group experience.
We are starting up again working in local churches after many years of working in different cultures here and overseas. If you choose to use this group experience as a part of your Christian formation effort, we’ll be glad to do what we can to help that happen.
***
“When they were off by themselves, those who were close to him, along with the Twelve, asked about the stories. He told them, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom—you know how it works. But to those who can’t see it yet, everything comes in stories, creating readiness, nudging them toward receptive insight. These are people—
Whose eyes are open but don’t see a thing,
Whose ears are open but don’t understand a word,
Who avoid making an about-face and getting forgiven.”
-Mark 4:10-12, The Message
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s.”
-1st Jn. 4:17, The Message
Lord, Thank you that you took the time to live the life of love with the few people you chose to deliver the Father’s invitation to the rest of us, so we’d know it’s really livable. Give me trust at this time to believe that I will get my work done if I risk interrupting my busy schedule long enough to live your life with a few others…again. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, a few weeks ago I watched as John Burke interviewed you at Gateway Church. I am an emerging leader at Gateway and have a few questions for you. First, specifically, why do you think the kind of small group you described is so important?
(You can watch the interview here.)
This one is a great question. And I’ll save your other questions to write about in another blog soon.
In the first place, I want to tell you that for most of my life I hated small groups and refused to be in one. I’m a classic loner in that regard—or rather I was until I surrendered as much of my life as I could to as much of God as I understood and started reading the New Testament. (1) What I discovered was that in Jesus’ three-year ministry the only “structure” he used was one small group of twelve—with the same membership. And that he spent approximately two-thirds of his time with that group of twelve. (2) The only subject or curriculum on which the group seems to have focused was “What is the God really like (whom Jesus called “Father”)? And “how (specifically) would people live if they surrendered their whole lives to the Father and became citizens of the New Kingdom of God (His “reign” over their lives) and how would they live out relationships with the Father, each other and everyone else?”
In that group they tried to do what Jesus did and told them to do, and they asked questions about everything. Since Jesus was living the life (as the first citizen in the New Kingdom), they had him and each other’s experiences to learn from. And besides hanging out watching Jesus, the content of their learning was largely made up of stories (parables, etc.) about how people who were committed to God would live and spread the life and love that Jesus was announcing and inaugurating before their eyes.
The small group was so important that after Jesus left them they chose another member, Mathias, to replace Judas.
And that small group was all Jesus left them. He left no money, no rich donors, no influential people, no buildings and not even a book. (The Old Testament was locked in the synagogue and there was no authoritative New Testament completed until the fifth century.) He had said that their life together could continue after he left because the Personality (the Spirit) they had experienced in him would still be in the midst of them to keep guiding and teaching them.
And it was the same with Paul. He first tried to use the existing churches (synagogues) as his structure but Jesus’ message (and the Christians’ lives) were so different from the life and attitudes of the people in the synagogues of that day that the Christians were usually thrown out. And when they were thrown out, all they had with which to invite (evangelize) the world was to start small groups and replicate the kind of group the apostles had been in with Jesus. He had told them that whenever two or three of them met in his name (i.e. as he would meet), he would be with them. The letters of Paul, Peter, and John were not theological treatises but mostly dealt with specific everyday problems and misunderstandings about how the Father wanted them to live in love.
And the new “family” spread clear across the Roman Empire—mostly one small group at a time—until the Father’s Reign became the “official” religion of the Roman Empire in about 25 A.D. During this time the apostles encouraged and taught the people in the groups by visiting them, writing letters to them and sending lay teachers (like Timothy) to encourage the small groups who met mostly in people’s homes. The subject of these small groups was still mostly about how to live for God, learning how to love Him, each other and other people as they delivered the Father’s invitation to an intimate and eternal life with Him and them.
The bottom line for Paul and John was the commandment Jesus gave the disciples, to love each other. This was so important that Jesus said it was their primary teaching and evangelizing asset. The way Jesus put it was, “Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”
So I came to believe that our first task as Christians is to learn how to love each other as Jesus loved. And as we experience being loved as we are and loving each other, warts and all, we will not have to be prodded to love the marginalized people Jesus loved, at least that’s been my experience.
Paul described how the transmission of the living/loving way of life that Jesus embodied and taught occurs. It is passed from Christian to Christian in these groups as Paul told the Christians at Philippi in a letter: “Put into practice what you learned from me; what you heard, what you saw and what you realized.” (Phil. 4:9, the Message)
The people in the groups heard Paul (and each other) say he was (they were) trying to live for Christ. They saw him and each other risk reputation and even life for Christ’s cause. And then they realized, “Wow! I can do that, too.”
So to answer your first question, I think that this particular kind of small group is important because this was virtually the only teaching “laboratory” Jesus used to get across how God wanted us to live and learn to enter into a Father-child relationship with God to whom we give permission to be in control of our lives (surrender). And out of that surrendered life we learn how to be in relationship with each other—a way to pray and read the scriptures. And then—out of this supportive, truth-telling, loving culture that develops in the group, we move out into the rest of the world to invite others to step into this loving culture of people who have surrendered their lives to God, and who are allowing God to transform them and the way they relate to others. We invite them to experience this life along with us. But if we are not being transformed ourselves, then the invitation we extend to others will most likely not reflect the reality and love we are being exposed to in the sermons and lives of our teaching pastors.
What I was referring to in the interview with John was a safe small group process Bruce and Hazel Larson and I created where people can go on the adventure of living for God experimentally for thirteen weeks in this kind of group and this perspective of how to live for Christ. The format is so simple that anyone who wants to live his or her life more as Christ wants him or her to live it can have an opportunity to try it in real time with a few others.
We have helped start hundreds of these groups over the years and more has happened to people who have been in these groups than in all the preaching, teaching and book writing we’ve done in the past fifty years.
P.S. Several people at Gateway have started and led some “Adventure” groups. After the closing prayer I have added a copy of a recent letter from a member of Gateway who led a group this year. If you’d like to get in touch with them, let us know and we’ll give you their contact information.
“This new plan I’m making with Israel isn’t going to be written on paper, isn’t going to be chiseled in stone; this time I’m writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts. I’ll be their God, they’ll be my people. They won’t go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons. They’ll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They’ll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean. By coming up with a new plan, a new covenant between God and his people, God put the old plan on the shelf. And there it stays, gathering dust.”
– (Jeremiah quote found in Hebrews 8:6)
Lord, sometimes I still wake up lonely and discouraged when nothing is really wrong. Thank you that you have invited us into your family style Kingdom where you can transform us into the creative, loving people you made us to be, so that we can know your peace and be happy living in our own skin. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Letter to Keith
Keith,
I’m writing to let you know of the profound change that occurred in my small group as a result of doing the 13 week Edge of Adventure group experience create by you and Bruce Larson. Our group went from an intellectual group of socializers to a caring community of honest people who love each other and are committed to walking through life with each other. This 13-week group experience taught our small group how to actively love and live as Jesus did resulting in a profoundly purposeful and vibrant life.
Before this study our small group was literally on the brink of dissolving. We had met together for 2+ years and were “sticking it out” out of a sense of obligation. We were a group of lonely self-centered people who wanted to change but didn’t know how.
As we started this adventure, I noticed an immediate change simply caused by implementing the expectations of this study. There was a safe environment created by the “no cross talk” rule. People who were normally quiet opened up because of the practice of giving each person a chance to speak by going around the circle to answer each question. The confidentiality requirement was a simple, yet critical, element that was referenced many times in the first few weeks as people began to open up and share.
Having you and Bruce on the audio tapes helped set the tone of each meeting in a powerful way. We were able to sense and be inspired by your passion for the discussion topic. We were also assured that it’s okay to have struggles and doubts and that there can be a very real sense of liberation that comes from honestly sharing these thoughts and feelings with others.
I believe that this group experience can be the tipping point for many small groups by helping them develop the community that God intends. When this happened for us, we began to experience a more deep, rich an abundant life. It’s not that life will always be fun and easy, it’s that life’s struggles now have meaning.
My small group was so moved by the changes that occurred during these 13 weeks that we want to share this experience with others at Gateway. We simply can’t hold in the blessings we have received as we feel called to share them with others. We want to share this in any way that would be the most appropriate and helpful. We could split up and each visit other small groups or we could all band together to lead this in a large group format. We would like to discuss this with you and the appropriate leadership at Gateway to see how we could be the best service.
Thank you for this course. It has been a blessing!
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith,
What have you learned as a Christian about death and dying? As an 84-year-old, how are you handling the fact that statistically your own death is not far off for you?
In the first place, death is real for everyone—Christians and all others. But death is also the most important deterrent to serious crime and abuse of others who are weaker than we. In fact, without death most of the morality we have could be lost. The fear of death keeps us from going too far since people could kill us. And with regard to the reign of God in human experience, death is like a beeper light at the end of every life reminding us all that we apparently have a limited time to consider God’s offer of a creative, loving and intimate relationship that starts in this life but extends beyond death. And because of this offer from God we can risk all or part of our lives loving and experiencing love that can transform all of life into fulfilling experiences of freedom from the irrational fears of rejection, injury and death.
I learned a number of things about death and dying between my eighteenth and twenty-ninth birthdays. During that time all of my family of origin either died or were killed. And I found myself planning funerals, picking out coffins and doing the paper work to clear up estates from age eighteen to twenty-eight. I had no idea how unusual that was. I just had to step up and do things because of the way things unfolded.
But I didn’t face the stark fact that I am going to die until the last member of our family—my mother, Mabel Olivia Davis Miller, died.
When she was sixty-three, she discovered she had terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. Since she was the youngest child of her family by fourteen years, her sisters and brothers had predeceased her, she was pretty much alone. When she had to be hospitalized, I asked the major company I worked for to transfer me to their Oklahoma City office (from Texas) so I could be with my mother who had been a sorority housemother in Norman twenty miles away.
I worked in the daytime and took the night nurse’s place for financial reasons. Because of that I got to sit with her while she was dying. And I was amazed. She was calm about her own death. She had me get a notebook so she could tell me what I would need to do as the last member of our family. She told me who to get for a funeral director—a friend of my father’s of whom I had never heard. Then she told me what to give to some cousins in Missouri whom I hadn’t known since I was a child. And she told me some people to notify when she died who would be hurt if they weren’t contacted—and she even helped me to pick out the clothes she’d be buried in—since I would have had no idea.
The bottom line was, here was a brilliant woman dying and in a good bit of pain who was thinking totally about other people. When everything was planned, a few days before her death, she said to me very calmly. “I wonder what death will be like. I wonder if there will be anything like consciousness and if Jesus was right when he said there will be a “place” for each of us—and if so, will we recognize those who have gone before.”
And I realized something I’ve never forgotten: that we learn how to face death by watching people do it with courage and trust.
But even with all that experience I never let my weight down into the stark fear and awareness that I am going to die—until after my mother’s death. After her funeral, I went into our family home in Tulsa and arranged for most of the things to be given to the Salvation Army. The last place I went to was the basement. There was a large room in the center and several smaller rooms with doors opening into the big room. When someone had died, what remained of their personal effects had been put in one of the separate rooms. No one wanted to go through them. But now there was no one else to go down those stairs to go through it all.
I remember sitting on the floor of that big room with boxes of family pictures and mementos of my dead family’s lives all around me. I felt helpless. I began to cry when I realized that there was no one left to tell me who the people and occasions in those pictures were. When I realized that I’d never know, I also realized that I’d just have to burn those last remaining evidences that these people had lived—people who had been so dear to my family and who had loved me. I felt lost and very sad.
That night I had a vivid dream. I was lying in a wooden box with my eyes closed. I sensed that someone was about to nail down the lid but I couldn’t get my eyes open or move my mouth as I realized I was being nailed in a coffin alive! I panicked!
Finally, with all my strength, I exploded my muscles and kicked at the top and woke up trying to scream “I’M ALIVE!”
The next morning as I sat on the basement floor in the midst of the boxes, I realized in a different way that I am going to die. And I thought about that. Then something occurred to me I’d never thought before and I said to God, “Whatever your plan about death is, if it’s good enough for them (and I indicated the boxes of pictures) it’s good enough for me.” And in that moment in the gray concrete basement I felt in some strange way that I had joined the human race. That was when I realized that death is like a red beacon at the end of the tunnel reminding us that if we want to live a good and loving life here on earth, we should get at it, since our time is limited.
Several months before my mother died I had committed as much of my life as I knew to as much of God as I knew in Jesus. However at that time I had not thought about my own death and how people who might see a picture of me might not know my name. And for me, those few minutes alone with the family’s past in that gray basement constituted one of the milestone steps in realizing that I had to begin to trust every part of my life to God in order to live in Reality.
Over the years I have been very healthy physically and I’m grateful about that. As a counselor I have also learned that everyone is afraid at some level—afraid of a few things or a lot of things. But I’ve also learned that Jesus left us an incredible Life Plan that is designed to free us from fear by teaching us to receive God’s love and acceptance and continual presence right now—without having to earn it. And realizing that I was loved by God somehow freed me to want to give other people who were lonely and afraid the same self-limiting love I felt from God and from other people I met the next few years who were attempting to surrender their whole lives to Him.
Since that time when I hear that someone I know has died, I realize that the best thing I can bring to their family is to be present during the time of the funeral. At first I didn’t want to see people who had lost a loved one because I didn’t know what to say. But then I remembered that Jesus didn’t promise to bring us brilliant or fancy gifts. He just promised to be with us—he promised us his presence. So now I can go and sit with a friend or family member without the burden of having something brilliant to say but just to listen to them tell what happened, how the sickness or death went, or whatever they want to say, if anything.
And over the years, I’ve learned that for me the acts of loving people, helping out if possible or just walking alongside them in simple ways by being present—all of these are parts of what Jesus promised each of us—as an aspect of loving us specifically. The bottom line is: we will never have to be alone again. He will be with us. And it is that love (not courage) that sometimes can cast out fear—even of death. (see John 4)
Regarding my own upcoming death, sometimes I wake up at night afraid. And when I do, I stop and surrender my whole life once more and thank Him for the remarkable years I’ve already had and for the people he’s put in my life to love. But mostly I’m filled with gratitude, and I’m more in love with my wife, Andrea, my grown kids and grandkids, great grandkids, old friends, and the crazy people I still meet with several times a week who continue to teach me how to live and love. So I’d like to hang around a while longer. I am very happy and love the work God has given me to do, as Andrea and I work together to finish a book about a new perspective that we have heard God offering in His story as we try to walk in it.
Lord, thank you that as we learn to love you and other people as you love us, you help us to trust our relationship with you and its continuance beyond pain and death—and the miracle is that we can begin to trust other people as you act toward us in trustworthy ways. Help us to surrender our lives right now—and then help us to look around and see who we might love and help for you today. Amen.
***
“You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live.” (Jn. 14:1-4, The Message)
“This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body—but only if you keep in mind that when we’re raised, we’re raised for good, alive forever! The corpse that’s planted is no beauty, but when it’s raised, it’s glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!” (1 Cor. 15: 42-44, The Message)
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” (1 John 4:17-18, The Message)
“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. (Matt. 5:8, The Message)
“You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all.” (John 11:25, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith,
Where and how did you learn to be open about personal problems all Christians face?
A “C-minus!” I couldn’t believe it! I’d been a good student all my life and had spent hours developing, writing, and editing this, my first sermon for a homiletics class in seminary. I was angry, but, more than that, I was confused. The sermon represented the way I had always thought preachers should preach: by sharing their own personal experience, strength and hope along with the biblical message. But my professor of preaching had dismissed my sermon as being unacceptable.
After pointing out some minor structural mistakes that I could agree with, he leaned back in his chair, drummed his fingers together, and said, “The reason your grade was a C minus was because you were ‘personal.’ You used the first person singular to describe the problems with which you were dealing.” He paused and then went on. “In the first place, using the first person singular in a sermon is not effective. And besides, it is not in good taste.” He pushed my sermon across the smooth surface of the large desk.
But try as I would I could not shake the notion that one’s own feelings and experiences of pain, fear, anger, guilt, shame, sadness, and joy could be drawbridges over which a communicator could carry the message and love of God into the deepest levels of people’s lives. I felt that the world and the church had become so depersonalized that people were growing more and more isolated. Somehow the stance of the “expert” communicator expounding abstract concepts or telling laymen how they should live seemed to further the depersonalizing process. Worse, the message of God’s healing, self-limiting love didn’t appear to be catching the attention of the modern world—even many of those already in churches.
I knew that what I needed personally was a model: someone who was seriously trying to be God’s person and to have intellectual integrity but who also faced the kinds of fears, problems, and failures that I faced. Evidently, this was not a combination to be found in a single Christian communicator. People seriously committed to God who were professional teachers or communicators either did not have the kind of struggles I had, or considered them too insignificant or “personal” to be mentioned. I had met some other strugglers who, like me, were trying to slug it out with this paradox, but we were all nobodies. I had never run across a communicator with any authority who admitted to this strange predicament of feeling unable to be continually whole and righteous, in spite of the power and joy to be found in the gospel.
Then, in 1965, Dr. Paul Tournier[1] came from Switzerland to speak at a conference at Laity Lodge, a new adult retreat center in the remote hill country of southwest Texas. I was director of the conference center. Although I had heard of Paul Tournier, I had never read anything he had written.
Many of the people attending the conference had traveled hundreds of miles for the sold out weekend. As we all gathered for the first session, I wondered how well Tournier would be able to cross the language barrier from his French through an interpreter to us. I had no idea what content to expect.
The first evening Dr. Tournier spoke, the “great hall” at the lodge was filled with psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors of all varieties, Christian ministers, and lay leaders from various professions. The air was almost electric with expectation, and I realized how much the conference guests were looking forward to hearing this man whose books they had read.
Then he began to speak. Within five minutes the room had faded, and we were transported into another world. We heard a little boy describing his struggle with loneliness and self-doubt almost sixty years before in a country several thousand miles away. You could have heard a pin drop on the stone floor. I sat behind the speaker near the huge fireplace and looked past Paul Tournier into the eyes of almost a hundred sophisticated American professionals. In those wide open eyes, I could see other lonely little boys and girls reliving their own struggles for identity and worth.
After fifteen or twenty minutes a strange thing began to happen, something I have never seen happen before or since. As Paul spoke in French, we found ourselves nodding in agreement and understanding—before his words were translated. We trusted him so much and felt he understood us so well, that we knew at a subconscious level we would resonate with what he was saying. He described problems, doubts, joys, meanings and fears—many of which still existed for him—and spoke of them naturally, as if they were materials God normally worked with in his healing ministry among all people, Christians included.
Before us was a man who did not even speak our language, a man in his sixties who wore a wrinkled tweed suit, and was exhausted from a whirlwind trip across America. And yet as he spoke fatigue, age, clothes, and language differences all faded into the background. He turned periodically to make eye contact with those of us behind him. I was conscious mainly of his sparkling eyes, his personal transparency, and a glow of genuine caring about his face. As he spoke I heard and felt love and the truth of God about my own life.
I found myself having to fight back tears—tears of relief and gratitude, and release. I was not alone because of my own struggles. I had sensed that to be healed we need more than good medical advice or even excellent psychological counseling. We need presence—vulnerable, personal presence. I knew the Bible claimed that was what God gave us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit: his own presence to heal and strengthen us. And I had felt that somehow we Christians were to continually embrace the personal realities of life and presence of God, and somehow be channels to convey that healing presence personally to other people’s lives through our own openness and vulnerability. In Paul Tournier I met at last a living model of the kind of communication I was trying in a stumbling, uncertain way to find. And he obviously knew a lot about the source and healing of psychological difficulties.
I made two decisions during that conference. First, I would go back to school to get some psychological training since I realized that I needed to know more about the source and nature of the problems people faced. Second, as soon as I finished the book manuscript I was working on, I would read some of Paul Tournier’s books. I was already in the process of writing a book for new Christians about living in a personal relationship with God in their everyday lives. Other books of this sort seemed to me overly pious, and they did not deal with the actual inner and relational “stumbling blocks” that had bothered me as a new Christian. After Tournier’s visit, I completed the manuscript of that, my first book, with great enthusiasm.
When I had sent that manuscript to a publisher, the next thing I did was read The Meaning of Persons. Again, tears. For years I had been looking for books whose authors were real and transparent so that I could identify with their problems and move toward healing in Christ. The closest thing I had found was Augustine’s Confessions (written in the 5th century), which is what had finally persuaded me to write a book about my own struggles as a contemporary Christian. But if I had read Tournier first, I might not have felt the need to write my own first book, The Taste of New Wine.
Knowing that a man existed who loved God, (and had apparently surrendered his whole life to God) who used the discoveries and methods of scientific investigation, and yet faced his own humanity did something for me. And knowing that, at least partially because of Christ, this man could afford to be honest about his own struggles, helped push me far beyond my own small horizons of security and faith.
From that day forward Paul Tournier became a mentor and friend, until his death in 1986. We traveled and spoke in conferences with other Americans and Europeans in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. His work has influenced me deeply. But more, his life and his way of personal dialogue gave me a direction for living as a Christian which has brought more hope and courage than I could have imagined—which is why I am writing this to you.
Dear Lord, Thank you for letting me see you in a man with a skin face, who had the courage to be himself—so we could see through him to the Father who created him—and the rest of us. Help me to trust you enough more often to share honestly the life I’m finding in You with people I meet along the ways you take me. And help anyone who may be reading this prayer to know how beautiful they are when they trust you with their lives—as scary as it is at times. In Jesus’ name, amen.
***
(St.) Frances prayed day and night that God would give all men the courage to be themselves instead of what others expected them to be.
He did not want men to enter the brotherhood… he only wanted them to be free, to be what they wanted to be in their own hearts. For God spoke differently to every man, calling one to marriage, another to virginity, one to the city, another to the country, one to work with his mind and another with his hands. But who was brave enough to look into his own heart and ask if this is what he should be doing, what he really wanted to do with his life?
-Murray Bodo
Francis: The Journey and the Dream
Hypocrisy is a strange slavery. When I do so much of what I do to gain the respect of others, I get warm feelings (when the respect comes). But when the respect and (or applause) are absent I am frantic and depressed—which tells me I am a hypocrite and a slave to an “audience” out there.
I don’t want any more of that.
-Keith Miller, Note from his journal
March 14, 1984
Honesty with oneself as laid down by psychoanalysis is the condition of man in which biblical revelation (can) touch him, in which the sense of guilt, the very mainstream of morality matures.
-Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace
What keeps us from being ourselves, Carl Rogers says, “it is always fear: of a conflict, of being rejected, or breaking up a harmonious relationship. But it is the very lack of congruence which stands in the way of the establishment of true relationships between persons.
-Paul Tournier, The Violence Within
[1] Paul Tournier (May 12, 1898 – October 7, 1986) was a Swiss physician and author who had acquired a worldwide audience for his work in pastoral counseling. His ideas had a significant impact on the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of routine patient care, and he had been called the twentieth century’s most famous Christian physician.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Keith, Are there specific ways of dealing with the awful feelings of guilt and shame that come over people sometimes in the middle of the night and prevent sleep, etc. Also, if one has these feelings, does it mean that he or she really isn’t committed to God?
That is a great question. I don’t know how many times I’ve wrestled with feelings of guilt and shame in the middle of the night, and wished I could find a way never to have to deal with them ever again. But I’ve come to believe that they’re really helpful experiences, warning systems for all human beings to help us to become what God wants us to be. And there is a way to work through them and learn where we may be off track concerning the way we’re living our lives.
Let’s just imagine that you have a warning system in your mind, like a burglar alarm. When the alarm goes off and you look at it, there are two panels; one is “guilt” and one is “shame.” The feeling is very similar—one of having no value, or as if you’ve been bad, are a bad person, that sort of thing. First it’s good to figure out which panel is giving me the signal: is it guilt or shame?
Andrea and I learned about these two emotions from Pia Mellody. Andrea wrote Pia’s first three books with her, and I consulted with them about connections to psychological literature that had already been written. According to Pia, in Facing Codependence, “Guilt is an uncomfortable or gnawing feeling in the abdomen about an action or thought that transgresses our value system, accompanied by a sense of wrongness. Guilt is often confused with shame, which is experienced as embarrassment and perhaps a flushed face, accompanied by a sense of fallibility.”[1]
For example, if I lie to somebody, or steal something, the resulting feeling is guilt. If somebody saw me spill my coffee all over my lap and the floor, the resulting feeling would be shame—I’m a fallible human being who makes mistakes, and mistakes can be embarrassing. The more you think you should be perfect and never make mistakes, the more likely you are to feel shame whenever a mistake becomes known to other people. In fact, trying to avoid feeling shame about a mistake (breaking a valuable vase, or damaging a car, or getting somebody’s name wrong at a party) often motivates people to try to conceal or camouflage mistakes by lying, blaming someone else, or omitting certain facts when explaining what happened. And in some instances, if a mistake is pointed out to a person, that person may react with anger and rejection because of being in the throes of what we call a “shame attack.” So if truth telling or treating others with respect and kindness are moral/ethical values, the hiding or raging often lead to feelings of guilt—which combines with the shame, making a roiling tide of painful emotion.
Dealing with Guilt
So if your alarm system goes off and you determine that the panel giving you a warning is the one marked “guilt,” you’ll be able to recognize what you’ve done to transgress a law or value. In this case, Christianity has a very specific way of dealing with guilt. You confess to God that you have broken the rule, being specific about what you’ve done, such as stolen something or lied about something or cheated on your wife. And that’s step one. The next thing to do is to make things right with that person. If you stole someone’s lawnmower, you take it back, and say “I’m sorry I took your lawnmower. I’ll pay you if I’ve damaged it in any way.” Jesus was pretty specific about this. He said that it’s more important to handle this feeling of guilt than it is to worship God. In the 5th chapter of Matthew, he said if you bring your gift to the altar, and you remember that somebody has something against you—that you have hurt or damaged someone in some way, then you leave your gift at the altar and you go and get things straightened out with the person first, and then come back and worship God. Because if you don’t get the guilt handled, you won’t be able to really worship God. It’s that important, Jesus said. (Matt. 5:23-24)
The Twelve-Step program has a wonderful way of handling guilt. There are definite steps whereby you surrender your life to God and then you recognize you’re powerless to handle guilt by yourself, as well as any addictions or compulsions you may have. Then you make a decision to turn your life and will over to God. Then you specifically make a list of all the things you’ve done as far back as you can remember that have broken the rules, ways you’ve hurt people, cheated, lied, stolen been disloyal, and things like that. Then you read that list to another human being—a sponsor or minister.[2] Then there is a process for going to the person you have offended and making amends.[3] It’s very important not to harm people by confessing to a misdeed to them or their families, or business associate. But when you’ve done these steps, the guilt is almost always gone. You transgressed a moral, ethical or spiritual value, you’ve recognized it, confessed it, and done everything you could, and then you’re clear.
Dealing with Shame
If you really can’t think of any specific law or value that you’ve transgressed, then the alarm panel marked “shame” is giving you the warning. For example, when I was a kid, I used to come home from parties and often cringe because I’d think I’d made a fool out of myself. There wasn’t anything specific. I just thought I’d been too brassy or silly. I thought my nose was too big, my ears were too big. Physically I wasn’t what I thought I ought to be. It was just a feeling of “not being enough” somehow. And this feeling chases people through life even if they are very attractive and very successful.
Dealing with shame is a different process because there isn’t anything to confess or make amends about. I have come to see that God specializes in handling shame through a community of people on his spiritual journey. And it seems to involve a process done in a group based on honesty and caring love. But unless you find a group of his people who are committed to sharing their lives honestly with respect and love, you may not find relief for shame. This may be why groups based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous may have constituted the fastest growing spiritual group in the world in the twentieth century.
I got in a group about twenty-five years ago. It was a Twelve-Step group. At first I didn’t want anyone to know anything bad about me so I tried to look like I just wandered in to check the meeting out. After a few meetings I heard people say that their healing and transformation began when they started to get honest about their problems and began to feel relief. I realized that if I wanted to get well from my addiction, then I had to face my problems by revealing myself. In these meetings I heard people tell about what they had done: how they had drunk too much and lied and hurt people, what their addiction caused them to do. At first I couldn’t reveal very much. The fact that I had done so many things that transgressed my value system brought a strong wave of shame over me every time I even thought about them. And telling other people about them seemed impossible—the wave of shame threatened to overwhelm me. But I noticed that no one laughed or looked disgusted or lectured anyone else who talked about these things. They listened with a quiet respect. So I began to talk. It was sort of like pulling a thread out of my mouth, something small enough that I could stand the shame. I looked around afterward and nobody looked away. They just nodded. So at a later meeting I pulled out a little more vulnerable admission—like a string attached to the thread I had started with. And then over a period of time of listening to honest sharing in a matter of fact way, I pulled out a rope, then a chain and then a whole bucket of things I’d made up my mind I’d never share. After I’d done this for some time, I realized that I didn’t feel so bad about myself. The shame had subsided, and I didn’t feel like a bad person any more.
These people seemed to love me more when I was honest about the fact that I’m very self-centered and have had some unethical and immoral behavior in my life that I’d never faced before. And the more they found out about me as I worked through the steps of the program with a sponsor, the less I felt alienated or not enough.
Having been a seriously committed Christian for more than fifty years, it seems to me that Christianity at its best is more equipped to handle guilt but doesn’t deal much with shame. And there may be a lot of Christians who wake up at night feeling awful—shameful. They feel their children don’t love them enough; they’ve been a bad parent, or whatever. It’s a more amorphous feeling of being a bad or inadequate person, or that one’s life is going by and amounting to nothing. But these thoughts that lead to shameful feelings are often not based on reality. That’s a firm conviction that I’ve discovered in biblical Christianity—that everything God created was good.
So now when my emotional alarm wakes me up at night (or any time it goes off), I look at the red blinking light and say to myself, “There’s something wrong I need to tend to.” I ask myself “Is this guilt or shame.” Often a picture will come up of something I’ve done, which indicates the feeling is guilt. And then I know what to do. I’ll confess that to God and share it with a small group of Christians I meet with and make restitution when possible.
And if I can’t think of anything specific, I’ll recognize the feeling as shame. Then I’ll identify the thought or attitude about being less-than, or having looked like a fool or made a mistake about somebody’s name—whatever I can locate. And I’ll surrender my entire future to God again, and remind myself that we’re all sinners, or so we claim, and go to a meeting and share—or share with a sponsor or friend on the spiritual journey. One definition of sin is that we have failed to hit the mark of perfection that we’re shooting at. We miss the mark and according to both programs, “all have sinned and fallen short” of God’s best for us.
But if we don’t face our own sins as Jesus advised us to, we have obviously decided that Jesus made a mistake in telling us how important it is for us to learn how to (as James put it) “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other, so that you can live together whole and healthy.” (James 5:16)
That’s just a very brief picture of our (Andrea’s and my) experience of guilt and shame and how these things can be handled in spiritual programs like Christianity and the Twelve Steps.[4]
Lord, thank you for your consistent love even when I take control of my life and try to make it work on my own. Forgive me for the ways I hurt others and myself (and you) during these times. Thank you for the feelings of guilt and shame that alert me to the fact that I have gone off on my own. Help me to pay attention to them when I feel them. And thank you for the loving welcome I receive when I get honest with you about what I have done and surrender to your guidance once again. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift.
– Matt. 5:23-24 (NIV)
Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.
– James 5:16, (The Message)
“The difference between guilt and shame is very clear—in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.”
– Lewis B. Smedes, Shame and Grace
“A guilty mind can be eased by nothing but repentance; by which what was ill done is revoked and morally voided and undone.”
– Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms
[1] Page 95
[2] There are important guidelines about finding a trustworthy person with whom to share this part of your life.
[3] See Steps Four, Five, and Nine, pages (pp58-103) Alcoholics Anonymous, Third Edition.
[4] If you want to read more about handling guilt and shame and how if not dealt with they can lead to serious control issues and relationship breakdowns—you may want to read: Facing Codependence and Compelled to Control.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Recently I was reading in the gospel of Matthew and ran across Jesus’ first teaching to the disciples. He starts it out this way: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope because then there is less of you and more of God and his rule.” What in the world does that mean? I mean, it sounds crazy. I thought you were blessed when you succeeded or things went well. What is Jesus trying to say here?
Good question. In fact, I believe an essential question for any Christian who would like to see his or her life transformed. I think the basis underlying this experiencing “powerlessness” as “blessedness” is that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate a new Kingdom of God (or Reign of God) in the people’s lives. The people had tried to have a geographical kingdom through military conquest and they’d tried political conquest. And Jesus was saying, “No, the Kingdom of God is going to be within you, inside your mind.”
If the Kingdom of God is going to be within our minds where nobody can see it, then before the kingdom can come we’ve got to establish God as king there. But our difficulty is that our dominant problem is Sin (with a capital “S”); that is, we put ourselves in the center where only God belongs. And we can’t see ourselves surrendering the driver’s seat (throne) to God. So we try to live our lives using our own happiness, fulfillment and way of doing things as the sovereign criteria for all of our decisions.. And when we’ve tried everything in our power, and we can’t prosper, can’t get what we’re trying to get, or be loved the way we want to be loved—we may get to the end of our rope. But it’s at that point we may get tired enough or lonely enough to be willing to surrender to God, asking God to help us become what we were meant to be as human beings. Also at that point we’re open to the possibility of letting God be in the drivers’ seat of our lives to help, teach, and guide us, since we’ve realized that we don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix our situation.
Jesus says we’re blessed when that happens because “then there’s less of us (and our self-absorbed ways of doing things) and more of God and his rule.” To me, that means that when I get to the place where I can’t handle life and hit a wall, then I can detect a doorway in that wall, with a handle on my side. And if I decide to trust God with my whole life, I can step through that doorway into the Kingdom of God.
Jesus goes on to list other circumstances we encounter when we try to run things under our own power that can be doorways to wholeness.
For example, he says “You’re blessed when you think you’ve just lost that which is most dear to you, because only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.” I did lose my success, my minor fame that seemed to major to me, and I had to face the fact that I couldn’t control other people’s opinion of me. I’d screwed up my life in a pretty big way, so I knew that I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of being perfect. At that point, I came to the place once again where I was willing to say, “Lord, I surrender my life to you—because it’s now clear to me that I can’t handle it. I am powerless to do this. I want to start over, and be your child. Teach me how to be loving, and how to be culpable.” And he has done these things, at least to a larger degree than I ever dreamed could happen.
As I began to live this way, I gradually began to relax, and eventually saw that I really was blessed, because now I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody (although sometimes I still catch myself trying to do these things). All I had to do was to be honest and culpable about myself and make what amends I could and do the next right thing in my personal and vocational lives. And I have this awareness that God is willing to help transform my life now if I will just come to him and surrender the outcome of my life to him and listen to his guidance concerning my decisions, my wife and children, to him. Then when I fail in any of these areas, he’s there at the end of my rope to guide and teach me, giving me some things to do, and teaching me how to have more integrity and to love and care for other people whether they love or care for me or not. These are things I never could have imagined doing naturally without God—and strangely this way of life has already made me happier and more loving than I ever thought I would be.
Jesus goes on to say that “You’re blessed when you are content with just who you are, no more, no less.” I’ve learned that when I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my life, I want to be number one. I want to be the best at whatever I do. If I’m going to be a Christian I want to be the best Christian around. If I want to be a businessman, I want to be rich and successful. And I have lots of ideas I want God to help me perform and implement.
But there is a different set of values in the Kingdom of God. Evidently the reason that Jesus came to announce and inaugurate this plan is so we could live in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, let him transform our lives, teach us how to love other people and tell them about him and his reign. When I’m content with just who I am, then I’m not all the time agitating for something more or better or different. Although I don’t like everything that I am, I’m content with who I am right now. And I want to be whatever God wants me to be. And that’s a switch.
Jesus goes on and says “You’re blessed when your witness to me elicits persecution. Because this persecution will drive you deeper into my Reign and my way of life.” Sure enough, it’s been true. It’s paradoxical that even when I’ve had church officials reject me, I have been calm as I try to hear them and love them because for me this is part of living in the Reign of God.
One little thing I’d like to add. It’s important for me to live in the present moment if I want to cultivate this intimate relationship with God. When I’m at the end of my rope or have lost something very dear to me, or can’t achieve the success I want, then I’m not concerned with little unpleasant things. I’m almost totally focused on the threatening situation that’s going on in the present moment. Somewhere along the way somebody told me that God never did anything in the past or the future. God operates only in the present. Anything that happened in the past was—at the time it actually happened—in a present moment. And so if I want the Kingdom of God and his Reign to be the dominant motivational purpose in my own mind and lived out in my life, then I’ll have to learn to live more in the present moment—instead of filling my present moments with fears about the future or regrets about the past. Whenever I see that I can’t do something in that moment, I can bring it to God and ask if it’s even the right thing to do. If it is, I ask for God’s power; and if it’s not the right thing to do, then I let it go and try to discern something else God wants me to do instead. This has given me a sense of enormous freedom.
I’ve come to realize that God made me in a certain way with certain gifts (and that each person is unique with certain gifts). And the more that I’m willing to surrender to God, the more I’m inclined and able to use these gifts for other people—to love them without trying to make them see and do what I see and do. I ask God to help me to quit counting to see how many good deeds or how many people I’ve helped or who have helped me. This is a freedom to me, and a sense of peace that I never had before because I was so restless and driven and prone to keep score.
These days I am loving the work I’m doing. I realize I’m not the best in the world to do it, and sometimes I feel like God’s made a mistake in having me do this particular kind of work because he could get a lot better people. But he’s let me know somehow that, although I was not necessarily the first choice, he’s chosen to guide me in it because I said “Yes” and am trying to do it. And when I fail and confess that failure or sin to God, he has let me experience his forgiveness and lets me begin again.
So I’d just say to you, Jesus is trying to describe a different, deeper more significant kind of “being blessed” than just having success or enough material goods. The question I’ve had to face was, “are you willing to surrender your life to God and let him be in the driver’s seat of your inner mind and life, to show you who you are and what to do? At that moment when you are ready, you are really blessed—because he’ll do it. At least that’s been my experience so far.
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God said, “Heads up! The days are coming when I’ll set up a new plan for dealing with Israel and Judah…. This new plan I’m making with Israel isn’t going to be written on paper, isn’t going to be chiseled in stone; This time I’m writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts. I’ll be their God, they’ll be my people. They won’t go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons. They’ll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They’ll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.
– Hebrews 8:6-13, The Message
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Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way.
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy spirit, ‘till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me.
– Hymn by Adelaide A. Pollard, 1907
P.S. If you are interested in learning how it might feel to actually take God this seriously, the story of how Keith began to take God consciously into the different parts of his ordinary everyday living and working lives is recorded in The Taste of New Wine.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, last year at this time my marriage was beautiful. We could tell each other anything, were very much in love, and enjoyed being together and with the children. We realized how good things were and swore we’d always keep them that way.
But a year later everything seems to have fallen apart. My husband and I can’t even talk about it without getting mad. We both love God and go to church. Is it normal for a good Christian marriage to change when neither party wants it to? Why would our relationship change so drastically?
Good question. Of course I don’t know why your relationship with your husband has changed. But I can say with some conviction that I would be very much surprised if it hadn’t. Good marriages I know about do change.
If one (or both) of the parties in a close relationship changes as an individual, then the previous balance of the marriage relationship is automatically changed. And in periods of rapid development in a man’s or woman’s life, which may include a significant promotion at work, the birth of a child or one party gaining important insights or changes in self-concept, the existing relationship in the marriage may be in for quite a storm. For instance, a man may realize he’s been acting like a little boy and avoiding some decisions he should make as a husband and father. So he steps up and starts making these decisions, and his wife is hurt—thinking he no longer trusts her to make them.
The most helpful thing I can do in our changing marriage is to keep communicating with my wife about what I am discovering and try to keep listening to her. But if we start being too busy to visit with each other alone, changes and irritations can build up until they are too big to handle easily. When these periods happen we often avoid communicating about personal discoveries and pains at all. It sounds crazy because we both know we should talk things through, but neither of us wanted to face the anger, etc. that can be part of the process. One thing that has helped is that we have located a counselor who understands us both, and we call him when we need to.
A very good aspect of this business of a “beautiful” period being followed by a hard one is that when two people get some problems solved and feel very close, a feeling of new security often develops in the relationship. And one party or the other may feel safe enough at last to bring out (or act out) problems which were “too dangerous” before the beautiful period—and all hell seems to break loose right in the middle of the peace.
Sorry I can’t tell you why things have changed for you and your husband. Everything is going well in our house right now, but next week I may be wanting to write to you about what happened to us. Keeping the communication lines open is not easy for busy people.
Lord, I don’t understand why good relationships can become difficult, and why it is so hard to resolve the problems that cause the difficulty. So often I’m tempted to sweep these issues under the rug and pretend everything is as good as “it used to be.” Help me to realize that hard times are “normal” in most relationships and lead to growth. Help me to recognize when things seem difficult for me and be willing both to talk to and listen to my wife instead of sweeping problems under the rug and faking it. In Jesus’ name, amen.
But Jesus said, “Not everyone is mature enough to live a married life. It requires a certain aptitude and grace. Marriage isn’t for everyone. Some, from birth seemingly, never give marriage a thought. Others never get asked—or accepted. And some decide not to get married for kingdom reasons. But if you’re capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, do it.” Matthew 19:11, The Message
“One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again.” Judith Viorst, American Poet and Author
“Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.” Phyllis McGinley, American Poet and Author
