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Part 06: Feeling Stuck

10/14/2008 7:21:36 AM

(Words in italics were added to help clarify or explain something.)

Journal Entry

4:30am, can’t sleep, focusing on little things about others.  I realize when I feel the need to control others, it’s because I’m resisting the movement forward of my life.  The sense of losing boundaries that protect me scares me, so I move to control others or situations who try to define who I am.  (If I no longer know who I am or what defines me, I have no boundaries.)

Thinking in terms of people like ---- who demand so much, and how I struggle to set clear limits/parameters with her.  If I do that as a way of preserving my identity, than my motive is different and she will sense my withdrawal of support; will see it as uncaring.

If I place limits because it is better for her that I do that and realistic—I can’t be responsible for her life, I can’t take that freedom from her in an attempt to elevate myself—then I can still support and love her.  And since I’m not fighting for my own survival (identity), maybe my actions will then be seen in a different light.  Even absence, when offered out of love, can be seen as a gift.

To be able to share in the lives of people, even the very needy, without fear of being swallowed up—they can’t do that, can they?  They can’t swallow me because we are separate and so I don’t have to fear closeness with them.

It’s an odd combination of being separate and unique, and yet united/bonded at a deeper level of life.  Setting boundaries can feel cold to others depending upon how I do it.  This is different, even if I can’t describe it.  It allows for a new kind or level of intimacy, because I don’t have to be afraid (of losing myself).

I can’t be lost.  I can’t be lost.  I feel so grounded saying that.  As though there’s no situation or place that can harm me or make my life complete.  My completeness stands alone, without need for something external.

And because of that, I can love and rely on others in a deeper, more immediate way.  Even the most demanding people can’t drain me.  It doesn’t work that way.  I’m not a limited construction I must preserve.

Is this self-emptying?  The ability to give without losing myself in the process?  To empty myself and yet remain complete—in fact, might not the emptying somehow make the completeness possible?  Not sure.  Neither comes before the other.  They simply are.

Even as I write this I feel anxiety.  My ‘self’—the self I want to define and hang onto—says, ‘are you sure this is quite safe?’  It feels awfully like the enmeshment/neediness of my earlier life.

That will be the battle, the fight for becoming.  I must be willing to let go of the need to clearly define myself.  Self-differentiation at its highest: being clear about who I am without rigidly defining or putting who I am in a box to be preserved at all costs.

It’s simply being.  Connected to all of life and yet me.  It all works together: my separateness and connectedness.  There can’t be one without the other.  They make me complete.

Journal Entry

I wonder if our own built-in ‘stuff’ makes us prone to latch onto a stage of growing and stay there?  My need for approval, to feel special: would that make me hang onto things that will keep me stuck, unwilling to let go of them in order to grow?

Journal Entry

I thought of my appointment with --- today, and realized how much resentment and anger I still carry about the ---- episode.  I need to be able to go deeper—to draw on the strength and love and transforming power of Jesus.  I can’t do it on my own.  Make me willing, Lord, to let go of my righteous indignation, which in reality is so often an attempt to justify the self.

Journal Entry

I’ve been angry and depressed.  I had a dream the other night that I fell into a toilet bowl and couldn’t get out.  I was terrified; felt locked in.  There was blood in the water, grouped in one spot.  I didn’t want to get any on me.

I looked up and saw this woman with black, dull hair and asked her for help.  She gave me an angry look and turned away.  I don’t remember how I got out, but I think I did it myself.

The toilet bowl=needs cleansing, poisonous attitudes.  The blood—life draining out of me.  Woman with black, dull hair=depression, which means the depressed, angry woman will not help me.  And that’s what I’ve been.  I know the answer doesn’t lay there, but within me, the truer me, who is strong and will come through this.

I realize that the transformations God has made in me in my personal life, he’s now doing in my professional life.  It sort of amazes me that there’s so many of the same steps for one person to go through in this process—that learning doesn’t automatically carry over to all of my life.  Is that because I’ve always compartmentalized so much?

I’ve been focusing on one group of people in the church, feeling angry and hurt again.  I thought I’d worked through that, so why this intensity, this focusing, which I know is causing my depression and anger.

I feel so insignificant right now, like I’m shrinking.  By fixating on these people and demanding that they recognize the truth, I’m trying to hold onto who I am.  And the more I feel the shrinking, the stronger the demand becomes.  I look back and see a person of strength and integrity, and want them to acknowledge this.  They don’t have to like me, but I do want them to approve of me as pastor.  So—the same old thing is operating in my professional life.

The more I resist growing and insist on hanging on to who I was, the more depressed and angry I become.  I really don’t know me right now.  But I’ve been through this enough to know I will know again.  I didn’t realize how strongly I was fighting the growing process.

I no longer know how this congregation and I relate.  But I think the question is larger than that.  I no longer know how I relate to the ministry, with any church.  Will I stay a pastor?  Will I be a teacher of pastors?  My ideal picture is both, but maybe that’s my attempt to sort out this confusion.

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