I'll go first
On the value of vulnerability, and the need for guardrails
We were near the halfway point of what would be a five-mile hike with a 4-year-old and two older kids when I sort of lost it.
I didn’t like that my husband was asking every person that passed us how much farther we had to go. I had my trails app open. I knew exactly how far away the giant-rock-overlook-thing would be. I had a plan. I had snacks. I had control of the situation. And his friendly-dad-on-the-trail vibe was getting in the way of my serious-hiking-family illusions. I tried telling him nicely to, ya know, not be so annoying, but (after a few days of togetherness in a cabin on a little family vacation) it may not have come out as nicely as I thought. No, let’s call a spade a spade: I was being cruel and petty.
Looking back, I know I could spin this story a variety of ways.
I could spin out about my frustrations in my journal, justifying myself until I feel a little bit better about how badly I behaved. I could re-spin the story to my kids, narrating it in a way that makes me look a little better than the grumpy teenager part I was playing at that particular moment. Or I could tell it like it was: the good, the bad… the ugly, irrational, hormone-induced irritability. And the redemption that came when I fessed up to it a few steps later, when we argued and then reconciled, right there on the trail. And I thought dad-joke kindness was embarrassing.
That’s the version of the story I told at Bible study this week. We were talking about how-in-the-world Jesus can say that it would benefit his disciples if he went away and the Holy Spirit came (John 16:7)? Do we really believe it’s better to have the Holy Spirit at work in us? What about when it feels like the Holy Spirit in us isn’t quite “working,” when he isn’t keeping us from doing the very thing we do not want to do, like railing at a spouse on a family hike?
Because I know my hormones aren’t an excuse to grumble at my spouse, but it’s hard to live within the boundaries of this part of my body, to admit I need space and grace I wish I didn’t.
It can be hard to go first, to be the one who says, “Listen, I know this is true, but it is not easy.”
Yet I think that’s what healthy vulnerability looks like. It’s not sharing the deepest darkest corners of your soul in a way that gets things off your chest. It’s sharing the ways you’ve had to wrestle your way toward belief, how hard it’s been to hold the tension between seemingly conflicting things, and to let it shape you meanwhile. Talking about this tension, living in it, it models something that we need to see each other model.
Consider the alternatives to this sort of honest wrestling, the ditches that I’m sure we’ve all fallen into a time or two. Or maybe you’ve been vulnerable and had these types of critiques lobbed at you in return.
One is to say: “I know this is true, and it’s easy.” We are so well-meaning when we try to take the sharp edges off of the gospel, when we say, “Listen, it’s really not that hard.” But “easy, simple, 7-principles-to-achieve-godliness-now” gospels are not the gospel. They are legalism.
The other ditch is to say something like this: “If it doesn’t feel easy, then it’s not true.” I’m sure you’ve heard a strain of this when you’ve expressed an area you’re convicted in and someone tries to talk you out of it. What you’ve shared has made them uncomfortable, perhaps even convicted them too. They understand where you’re coming from, because they’ve been there, but they’re not ready to call a spade a spade. It’s an “if it feels right then it must be” approach to faith, and it can be hard to combat.
At its worst, this approach looks for license to sin, placing one’s own feelings about what God requires above what he has said. At its best, though, perhaps the Lord’s kindness is beginning to lead that person to repentance, and your modeling of it is a momentary discomfort.
Being the one to go first can be hard, especially when the story you have to tell requires you to go low, be honest, get humble (and even a little embarrassed). But isn’t that the shape of the gospel? Isn’t this the way of following the one who stooped to wash feet first and was crowned as king on a tree shaped for torture? He “did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped or asserted [as if He did not already possess it, or was afraid of losing it]; but emptied himself” (Phil. 2:6-7 AMP).
Being found in Christ means we too can go low. Because he was sinless, we are freed from pretending we are not. We can be the first to say, “I missed the mark” without trying to move it. We can be the first to say, “This isn’t easy, but I’m going to keep at it.”