Like every other person on earth, I have a strong desire to appear competent. According to personality tests, I have a stronger desire to appear competent than the average person. I want people to think I am able. I want them to admire me. Mostly I want them to think I am capable of managing my own life. I want to demonstrate competency.
So I have been fighting a war with bitterness. Sometimes I have not fought, I have simply let bitterness rule with no objections. In the last few weeks I have realized I became bitter without even realizing it. A few weeks ago, God told me, “Not to give the devil a foothold.”
This morning in my quiet time and through a conversation with a friend, I realized where my unforgiveness lies. I have not forgiven myself. The root of my bitterness is not towards anyone who has wounded me in the past or present. The root of my bitterness is directed inward.
I want to be competent, but I am not. I am broken. Incredibly broken. For the last twelve years of my life, I have been the broken person in the room. The one everyone knows has issues. I have demonstrated my brokenness and incompetency in a variety of ways. As an eighteen year old, it was by walking into a college classroom with no idea how to turn on a computer or who Tom Cruise was. My social skills were almost nonexistent. The walls surrounding my heart were a million miles high.
I moved here and there around the country. I was almost always the super quiet person in the room. The extrovert people thought was an introvert because of the walls of brokenness hindering my communication. At one point I became the member in the church small group the leader needed to have conversations with. I was too broken for the group. I was unlovable. They never said I had to quit coming; but it broke my spirit, and I did. In other contexts, I became the person who overshared, could not keep it emotionally together, or literally could not speak because a trigger point became so strong it disabled words from passing my lips.
In the first year after I hit rock bottom in 2011, God helped me work past a lot of fear. With nine years under my belt in “normal” society, I was becoming a socially competent person. Then I moved to Jersey. I promised myself no one here would ever know my story. No one would ever know I had a past because I had skills to hide it now. No one would know about my childhood. Had I known I was an addict, I would not have left anyone know that either.
Then God led me to Celebrate Recovery. I had no idea why because in my opinion I had moved on. Why would He want me there? I began to heal on a deeper level than I imagined possible, but my few months of feeling perceived as a functional person dissipated. Outside of CR I felt like the crippled one as I walked through processing years of pain. As I attempted to live a life of vibrant love, other emotions were awakened. I could not hide my inability to competently communicate with those around me. As I tried my best to build real trust and honest relationships, church became my strongest trigger. Week after week after week, I resented the way I responded to it. Why couldn’t I just get past it and communicate like I wanted?
This morning I learned I am bitter because I have never forgiven myself for being weak and wounded. My bitterness is not a year old. It has built up over more than a decade. A few weeks ago, I learned on the basis of science the neurons in my brain will never respond to emotion like a healthy person’s. On some level, I will always struggle to be “functional” and connect with those around me. I am wounded. My pride severely so.
But God has told me not to give the devil a foothold. The next part of my journey is going to be learning to be kind to myself and have compassion on the super wounded person I am. I am going to open my heart and not let pride keep me from building vulnerability and healthy communication with all the people I love. I will forgive myself for not being God. Only if I was God, could I have defended myself against the effects sin had on me all those decades ago.
I can choose bitterness and give the devil a foothold in my life, or I can choose healing and allow God’s power to shine brilliantly in my weakness.
What weakness have you never forgiven yourself for having? How can you release the unforgiveness and allow God’s power to work powerfully in your weakness?
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