The slow work

“Maybe you’re believing lies.”

As I drove past the church sign where this message was displayed, time seemed to stop. You know what I mean, right? It’s sort of like hitting a pothole with your car only it happens in your soul. I wanted to turn the car around and go back, make sure I’d read it correctly, but that wasn’t an option.

Church signs usually make me groan. Sometimes, I chuckle. Rarely am I still thinking about the message more than a week later.

—

I’m itching to dig in the dirt. A month or so ago, during a restless early evening, the kids and I started clearing away leaves and debris from the flower beds. Winter was finally letting go of its grip on the weather, and I was ready for spring to show up and show off. There was little evidence–a few green stems–of the flowers yet to come, but I saw our work as preparing for beauty. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

We’re a little behind on our garden plans for the year, but I’ve been filling pots with packaged soil and planting flowers to line the porch. Even when the garden plot is ready and the vegetables have been planted into the soil, the reward will take its time in coming.

Still, we must do the preparing.

—

A friend, one of my best, graduated last week with a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. She is a busy mama and in her spare time, she takes actual physical stuff people want to throw away or don’t need anymore or have given up on, and makes something beautiful out of those things. Whenever I see pallets or doors or windows sitting outside a home or business labeled “free” I think of her and would pick it all up if I could deliver it easily. She has a gift for trash-to-treasure.

Her job as a therapist is not much different. I know from my own experience in therapy, as a client.

It took years but my therapist helped me dig through the dirt and debris I’d accumulated in my life to find the beauty that was growing there. This is a gift to humanity–the digging together and the beauty that emerges. My friend, and people like her, are helping people make something beautiful from their messy lives.

But it is slow work.

—

The debris started accumulating when I was in elementary school. I believed one lie about who I was, and that’s all it took. Lies are slow work, too. Over time this one lie wound its way around my heart until I couldn’t see the beauty underneath anymore. Once you believe one lie, it’s easy to believe one more, until one day, you can no longer untangle the truth from the lies.

This makes me think of kite string, especially after the kite has been stashed in the mudroom closet for a season. You pull it out thinking you’re going to fly it, only to discover that the string is twisted and tangled. (If kite flying is not your thing, how about a necklace dumped in the bottom of your jewelry box?) The fun is delayed and maybe you become frustrated. (Guilty.) I do not have a lot of patience for untangling things. Exhibit A: my cross-stitch threads. If they form a knot and it takes longer than a couple of tries to straighten it out, I grab the scissors, cut my losses and move on. Same for kite string. And I have more than one necklace I’ve thrown back into the jewelry box for “some other time.”

Untangling the lies you’ve built your life on is just as messy and frustrating. It’s definitely not what I would call fun.

But the freedom … the freedom is worth the effort.

—

When I started seeing a therapist, I thought I was there to untangle the most obvious knot. If we would just pull this string a bit, we’d loosen the whole mess and voila! we’d have a problem solved. Turns out, it’s not that easy. Or it wasn’t for me.

Sometimes we’d pull on a marriage string and other times we’d pull on a childhood string. Sometimes we’d be working with one section of the tangled mess and all of a sudden we’d jump to something else that I didn’t even know was part of it. The more untangling we did, the more painful it became. Those knots closer to the center were deeply formed and at times I wanted to just cut them loose. But my therapist showed me a gentler, more patient way. Cutting the knots out would have cut me off from something important. I would have lost a connection I could never get back and as much as I didn’t want it to hurt, I also didn’t want to forget. Not completely.

—

Do you remember the first lie you believed?

I’m not talking about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy or something your brother told you to mess with you (although that last one could be it, I guess). I mean the lie that sounded so close to the truth that you believed it enough to let it hitch a ride in your life.

I can’t tell you what it is for you, but I know what it is for me, and I know that believing it caused me to make decisions that I sometimes wish I could change. What would my life have looked like if I hadn’t believed that lie? I’ll never know.

What I do know is that the beauty was there all along, even when I couldn’t see it, and it took a lot of dirty work to discover it again. Now, I can’t stop marveling at the beauty that was buried beneath all the lies.

—

I spent a lot of years blaming God and other people for some of the stuff that’s happened in my life, and while there may be some truth to it, that’s a path that never led to freedom.

A couple of months ago, I decided to start forgiving myself. For not knowing better or different. For believing lies about my intrinsic worth and value. For the choices and decisions I made based on those lies.

“I forgive you,” I said to my younger self. And a weight lifted.

This doesn’t mean life got instantly better or I’m suddenly the person I always thought I could be. But it’s a step on the path toward healing and wholeness, which if I’m honest is some of the slowest work I’ve experienced. Sometimes I wonder if this is true: the slower the work, the more lasting it is. I don’t have a lot of evidence to support that statement, but it makes some sense to me.

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Trust the slow work, friends, and don’t be afraid or discouraged if the healing or transformation you seek takes time.