On Sunday, I posted (“portion control”) about our tendency—as humans—to do whatever it takes to secure our own comfort instead of allowing God the time and space necessary to form us.

Exhibit A was the Israelites wandering in the desert hoarding manna in their tents because they just couldn’t quite trust that God was going to show up again the next day. Exhibit B is all the rest of us doing essentially the same thing: stunting times of soulmaking by wanting comfort instead of formation.

Continuing on in the discussion with a question: Why do we do this?

Here are a few thoughts . . .

We hate being in pain. Our knee-jerk reaction is to wriggle out of that place of pain because pain . . . hurts.

We don’t want to appear imperfect, affected, or struggling. These times of soulmaking cause us to be in need. I don’t like feeling weak or like I’m not coping well with my life. Most of us spend a lot of time wanting people to think we’re doing well.

We don’t want to look at the parts of us that need work. In the process of soulmaking, we are exposed. Our brokenness, our woundedness, our doubt, and our lack of emotional health. Always. Not very glamorous.

We’re afraid to relinquish control and trust God. It’s hard to think about what we might have to give up—our comforts, our escapes, our grudges, our contempt, our rights, our self-reliance.

Instead of numbing, escaping, hoarding, stockpiling, etc., I believe God invites us into three practices that are about participating in our soulmaking instead of shutting it down:

#1 Grieving. Grieving comes and goes in waves. One minute we feel fine. The next minute we feel like all we want to do is go crawl in bed. Grieving is a process, not a day’s activity. And grief isn’t just reserved for the death of a person. We experience some level of grief no matter what kind of loss we’ve experienced: a person, a job, a dream, a relationship, a home. Grief arrives when we realize we have lost something that might have been (John Greenleaf Whittier). Naming losses and grieving them plugs us back into our own lives.

#2 Waiting. Who in their right mind wants to wait? No thanks. Waiting is allowing ourselves to be in a state of active surrender. Again, no thanks. But engaging in waiting–when all we want is an immediate fix–can be very formational. (Not that I would know from personal experience, but I’ve read that this is a good idea.)

Love these words on waiting from Sue Monk Kidd (When the Heart Waits):

“I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means “to endure.” Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into deeper prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision” (14, emphasis added).

Waiting is entering the cocoon (a ceasing of striving and controlling) and allowing a work to be completed. The cocoon is fruitful, but the cocoon is also dark. That’s soulmaking.

#3 Desiring. Many of us have so entirely suppressed certain God-given emotions, convincing ourselves somehow that because they are so strong within us, they must be “bad.” Some of us believe that to follow God, we have to turn off our hearts and our will. And so we have these denied desires inside us, and we keep trying to numb them because they’re inconvenient and they’re messy and because we want to avoid disappointment at all costs.

Love this from John Eldredge’s Journey of Desire:

“Life provides any number of reasons and occasions to abandon desire. Certainly, one of the primary reasons is that it creates for us our deepest dilemmas. To desire something and not to have it—is this not the source of nearly all our pain and sorrow?”

If we make a habit out of stockpiling and hoarding in order to avoid having to face the dilemmas of desire, we miss significant moments in our becoming.

Of the above three – grieving, waiting, desiring – what’s the hardest for you and why?

For me, I think it’s got to be waiting. Delayed or deferred gratification is not something I do well. But I see how indulging my every whim can be one of the key things that keeps me from getting well.

What about you?