Stop crying!
“Stop crying. It doesn’t hurt that bad.”
Were you told something like this when you were a child? Unfortunately, parents might mean well, but this sort of reprimand actually underscores an important mistake about our emotional reactions. It suggests that someone else is the true judge of how we feel. If you think about this common childhood event, the truth is that the pain you experienced is your pain. No one else can feel it and no one else can judge its severity. It is a private experience. Other people might be able to relate to your private experience because they have had similar experiences, but the similarity is only analogous. The actual experience is totally yours.
Everything changes when you and I begin to describe that experience. The actual experience is private but as soon as we attempt to explain or interpret the experience, we enter the public arena where shared language is subject to public examination and critique. This is a very important point and a crucial distinction.
What you actually experienced is private and not subject to the judgment of others, but how you interpret that experience is open to public critique.
For religious experience this means that your encounter with God is not subject to my critique or criticism, but how you interpret that encounter is. So I can never tell you, “Oh, that’s not what you felt” or “That’s not how God speaks to people” or “You didn’t experience God in that way.” But I can ask you to explain what happened and then we can debate, critique and examine if your explanation matches my explanation or the explanation of the community.
Essentially what this means is that Christians claim to have an experience with God and no one is in a position to deny that, but Christian interpretation of that experience is open to examination on the basis of consistency with the Bible, culture, history and a lot of other factors.
What we try to do in this community is examine the explanations people give for encountering God. We do not attempt to confirm or deny the experiences people have. We are interested in how people explain the meaning of those experiences. That leads us to look at the historical, cultural, linguistic and paradigmatic contexts of explanation. But in the end, how you experienced God is yours alone. Just be careful when you interpret it.
How true
But I have had to stop explaining my ‘move’ to Torah/context/people/culture/history because all my family and most friends are stuck in their paradigms and allow no discussion! Put on top of that my recent ‘melt down’ / Job type experience perceived as a life not blessed.
I find it interesting that so many believers today still don’t engage with the fact that some people have severe, often incomprehensible trials which to the onlooker is your life not being ‘blessed’, instead of a season that Yah allows for his purposes. Often the test is so severe but one may not get to know why. I’m learning to say very little and trust that one day my experience will be a witness to the glory of YHVH. For sure I can say I have changed and learned endurance/patience/humility and more; for me that is His blessing. However when the test seems never ending it can be another test to take the opinions of why or what you should do etc of those around you …….like Job and his friends. I found ‘travels with Job’ very apt because of the way Skip unpacked the life of Job…….Job could do nothing of himself he had to wait on Yah.
Remaining in shalom whilst you wait for His answer is an even greater test…….this is my walk right now.
Christine, me too! Nobody in my world wants to hear my “explanations for encountering God”, either. My life looks pretty pathetic a lot of the time, too. SO, I have decided to share the struggle; to not even try to look like I have it all together.
I will have to say I was raised to be a hypocrite. My early training in religion was about faking my personal journey: don’t cry, don’t express doubt, don’t question, don’t – above all – don’t EVER expose anybody else’s hypocrisy! Let’s all pretend in unison. Now, if you think about it, how was I ever going to learn to process my experience honestly in such an environment?
Nowadays, I have embraced my messiness and my frustration and decided that is part of obedience to the ninth Command. I have decided that honesty is where the ability to process starts. If we can’t even be honest, we can’t even get to square one, which is confession of sin; of our fracture with reality. BUT, I have decided that I am not going to do it while hanging my head in shame: no, that is what those who don’t have access to the grace of God have to do, because they are stuck. I am not stuck! I am free to change from glory to glory, and I need to learn how to act like a child of the King. I can afford to guess-and-check; to forget and mess up and start over, too. Why? Because I have a great Someone Who can afford to clean up my mess and wash me in a vast Fountain filled with blood. Halleluah!
So, Pam, we are both “such a mess” but we are still ok. Right?
“Let’s all pretend in unison.” – This is so often what “unity” looks like to me. I admit that it’s my own personal issue. I haven’t figured out how to ignore it, but I do wonder why I pay attention to it. 🙂
We are miss Laurita!! , people may not understand how this can be a word of endearment but it’s music to my ears. We can walk this path together as ” such a mess”.
Someone once made a valid comment on an earlier blog.
It is not about unity or conforming to others it is about oneness in purpose and direction.
When I want others to first confirm to a standard I live by I have taken my eyes off my destination and am creating my own stumbling stone… It may because I created it myself that God cannot guide me over it or how to use it. When it is a stumbling stone God has set there I can learn from it and grow after taking a trip down to my sinful nature…
Thank you Skip and others who have commented. My wife and I have at times felt bereft, missing the moments of emotional “unity” as we were swept up in joint worship at Church. The thought that this was all a farce has at times been deeply distressing and once the initial excitement of this new discovery began to wane, we have struggled to pray and worship, looking for the old feel-good feedback loop.