August 2019 – Jacob Harada

my journey 3: Certainty Paradigm

August 28, 2019 by Jacob Harada

My scarcity paradigm and my “old mind,” outlined in prior reflections, began to give way to a more hopeful worldview when God interjected into my collapse some rescuing words. These words had always been tenets of Christianity but they were pieces I had not found myself able to trust before or did not understand. Perhaps the cornerstone of my restoration was the most relational of these assertions: God told me that he loved me persistently.

I was open and desperate for that word in a new way, perhaps, having lost my strength again and collapsed on every level. In the total letting go of influence and performance and collapse into the long-coming burnout, God told me he is pleased with me, that he loves me. The lapse of my “effectiveness” did not worry him, he could take care of things without me. He could afford to, and was pleased to love me and remain invested in me even in my pathetic condition and even having “failed” a number of things. I didn’t have to work to re-qualify for God’s affection and investment. It had always been given, always been grace. Upon this insisted truth, God built a brighter world for me, uprooting the briars of my scarcity paradigm. As I began to trust that God did, that he could afford to love me despite my particular exhibition of weakness and “ineffectiveness,”(as I understood it)– as I began to trust that God loved me, I began to receive a hopeful world, a paradigm of certainty, confidence, and abundance.

When I asked, “What about the dying world?” wondering whether he was concerned about my inability to help him with the “mission”, he replied, “I’ve got this. All the world is mine and I consume it.” When I asked, “Do you still love me?” – when I collapsed and was unable to follow through on all the things I had thought had made me effective – when I asked if he still loved me he replied, “Of course” and admonished me for ever thinking that I had been securing his affection by my performance. No, his love had always been grace, always been given.

I had my old mind, the way I used to see the world, I had been trying to grasp affection, a scarce resource, from an anxious God. In this paradigm, God had been like a benevolent but exhausted parent stretched to his limit, too strained to show affection in any significant measure, needing his children’s help to accomplish his mission of reaching the nations. God was kind but was obliged to treat his children like machines in order to get the critical mission done. He couldn’t afford to let his children be children because he needed them to be as effective as possible. There was no abundance of time or energy for playfulness and no margin for rest. The children’s failures would break God’s heart. Too much had been lost already. God was trying to salvage as much as possible and until his children died (upon which event things would be better) they were supposed help him in that desperate salvage agenda. There was no other justifiable purpose for a Christian’s life than to help God out as much as possible in the effort. Superfluous enjoyment of life was shameful, it had no utility for the mission. The world of my old mind was supervised by a maxed-out, task-bound God.

I’m entering an alternative worldview as I’m slowly convinced that God is emotionally involved but not afraid. God compassionate, God saviour, is not unaware or apathetic toward his creation’s crisis. He has entered the fray, even allowing himself to grieve, as he did Lazarus’ death, and die in pain. He presses into our pain instead of choosing dispassionate surveillance. He’s involved and invested and vulnerable in the sense that he chooses to feel – or perhaps it is more inherent to his character to be emotionally open than we sometimes perceive. God is imminent to the world’s pain. What does that mean about his outlook?

When God feels what I feel, does he despair? When he sees how expansively sin spans across the world and how deeply woundedness and reactiveness defines humanity, does he despair? Does God get the nervous energy that I do when I see how much needs to be repaired? Is he resorting to contingency plans and emergency measures? Is he paralyzed by gravitous sadness? Is God reacting, to a bad situation? If he is, then I am necessarily an extension of God’s good-hearted anxiety, required to participate in the emergency salvage mission.

Is God afraid, or is the New Testament true? Is God in fact confidence and undaunted? Has Christ already been made ruler over all things? What does that actually mean? Is he making all things new? What does that mean? Is the total victory of God as inevitable and complete as Scripture reports as the truer reality? If God is confident, and not an anxious parent, then this is a sweeter world and a safer universe. If God’s “got this,” then maybe I can relax.

Reporting rapidly a few more of the sweet assertions of the Spirit to my soul: God told me that he doesn’t need me, but that he remains pleased with me. He can afford to love unconditionally. In other words, he can afford to love me regardless of my performance for him. Asserted also, he overcomes all history and all the world. It’s under his authority somehow. What that means I’m still figuring out, but it comforts me. God is not helpless or anxious. God is at peace, and God is faithful. He saves and he heals, and nothing is beyond his reach. God is free. He is not bound to any anxious necessity. What he does he does from freedom and with full confidence and autonomy. Furthermore, his grace is big enough to contain all the foibles of the Church. He is resourceful enough to use even our failure for his purposes. He’s astoundingly larger than all our strategies and maps of meaning. I’m back to mystery, and I think that’s how it’s meant to be.

God is free to love me if he wants to. Since he does, I am in the final assessment not a failure but I am a victory God won. I’ve been taken into a world of abundance, where everything that matters is secure and all that I truly need is in good supply. God’s goodness and its outworking are certain. I can only begin to conceive what heaven on earth and “all things new” really mean – the details are absolutely beyond me (and the details in Scripture are a mosaic, not a blueprint) – but it’s happening and somehow God has made me part of it (Rev. 21:1-5; Eph. 2:1-10). I begin to enjoy Habakkuk’s image of the knowledge of God covering the earth, “as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). I belong to a total victory and I have totally been defined by God’s enactment of it – particularly in Jesus Christ. God’s restoration of things is certain and my participation in that is certain, the certainty a grace non-contingent on my human capacity. I’m loved by the God who is free to do so.

Several confidences begin to grow from this first one. I become secondly confident that God saves. He just does, confidently, passionately, consistently. Legions told me otherwise, but somehow all of their stories now sit like the dissident notes in a symphony – in the context of the greater composition they are repurposed for beauty. God is strong enough to save. Nothing I could do could compromise his restorative agenda. I can participate or not but I cannot obstruct him. God will create avenues for his certain salvation. If I am unavailable, I do not lessen what God is able to accomplish. My unavailability may disqualify me from the privilege of participation or reward but it will not handicap God. God saves and will save the same with or without me. To believe otherwise is humanistic and anxiety-inducing.

As God loves me so also he loves his Church. He has shown his passionate and devoted commitment to us. The investment remains despite our failure because our failure does not worry him. Even the systemic issues of the Church will fall and do fall within the context of God’s redemption. God has not been tearing his hair out for two millennia, screaming at the Church’s ineptitude. No, he knew what he was getting into when he committed to sinners and is competent to accomplish his purposes through and despite a faulted Church. Some of the most beautiful stories I’ve heard recently are from those afflicted by a kind of spiritual abuse by the Church who later in life have been found by the healing love of God nonetheless. I suppose I’ve received enough anecdotal evidence to be assured that the Church’s wrong treatment of a person does not constitute the end of God’s power to save and love that person. God is strong and God saves. We will weep when embrace those we wronged and find that God was good to us both.

God is winning, or has already won (John 16:33; Eph 1:10, 3:8-13). The good news as received by the Church should not be anxiety inducing but exciting. It is actually good news, capitalizing on triumph rather than crisis and reporting God’s victory and the beautiful consequence of that for the world. He delights in our participation with him but is not exasperated when we fail. Christ’s enthronement above all powers is real. We do not have the power to make what is real unreal. The ramifications of Christ’s total victory will play out accordingly in any one person’s eternal salvation. God will act justly and in perfect freedom.

God is in conversation with every human soul. What revelation of God is offered in creation and in a person’s conscience is real and significant (Rom. 1:18-23, 17:26-28). Furthermore, we do not know all the ways that he has reached peoples throughout the ages. In the present day, Christ appears in dreams to Muslims who are far from the reach of the church. The stories are plentiful of how God providentially reached people. There’s almost a playfulness in some of the stories, suggesting that God is so absolutely in control that he can actually be creative, and playful in the way he romances a person. God is not crisis-compelled, he is compassion compelled and free to be creative. God is always free, it is in line with his character that he addresses the world’s corruption and pain. It is not something he is forced to by obligation. According with his righteous character, he is faithful to every person and deals with them justly.

It can be adequately argued from scripture that God judges people’s response to him according to the revelation they have received (Rom. 1:18-23). Consider for example how Paul reports to the Atheneans that God overlooked times of ignorance (Rom. 17:30). If all that a person knows of God is from what is provided in nature and provided within them, God will take that into account. If the only witness of Christ a person has received has been very poor, as from oppressive Christian colonizers or abusive Christian parents, God will take that too into account. If all that a person has received about Christ is untrue, surely God will not condemn them for their misinformed response to the untruth. God will judge in truth, rightly dividing a person’s understandings, experiences, motivations and decisions. That being said, let God judge a person to be worthy of condemnation if he will. He is free to do so. I only argue that he will judge fairly and that he seems interested in extending salvation and has done so competently and generously. It seems to me then, that in final evaluation a person may be condemned for rejecting God’s grace but not for never having been accessed by it. Perhaps God will condemn someone for they’re having refused to receive what he offers. He is not bound to condemn someone because he couldn’t get to them in time.

Since God is sovereign and unworried, he is not dependent on me in any way to accomplish his purpose. My Christian responsibility, then, is a participation in what God is already doing and not an actualization of what portion of God’s purposes he could not do without me. He is God. He is inviting his people to join him his restoration and herald his victory. Strong and confident, he calls each person into the mission to serve and love according to their capacity. He can afford to measure responsibility according a person’s gifts and limits. He is not bound to charge each child with duty that is beyond them. Since he does not operate in a state of emergency, he does not demand from his people that they burn out for him, expending themselves beyond limits because God needs them too. Rather he calls them to faithfulness.

Faithfulness is a privilege and an easy yolk. Faithfulness is not the boundaryless, exhausted service of the anxious minister but the humble, empowered, and excited service of the friend of God. Faithfulness includes rest and play, permitted because God is big enough to take care of us and the world. God can allow his children to be children and can patiently facilitate their growth and attend to their health. He’s not obliged by crisis to treat his children like machines. Faithfulness celebrates what is true and what is true is that God wins. A faithful servant and child of God commits to their call with vigour and submits the rest to the hand of God. They don’t need to take responsibility for what is beyond their capacity and do not feel guilty for the limitation of their impact. Their faithfulness is built on the faith that God is pleased with them and what they can contribute, and that God is able to take care of what is beyond them. They’re not making up for the limit of God’s reach, they’re gladly participating in his reach. Faithfulness, then, really is a privilege and not an extension of divine anxiety.

I abandon the humanism of “God needs me” for the theism of “God is God.” Creator and Saviour, he reaches out and redeems in freedom. Undaunted and un-fatigued, God is able to creatively repurpose even the failures of the Church for his redemptive purposes. Participation in God’s mission is a grace and not an emergency; God is not crisis-compelled but is compassion compelled. He moves in freedom. Our part in his work is an easy yolk and a privilege, not an unfortunate obligation which he burdens us with because he has to. God has remained faithful to that which he created and has remained in conversation – through revelation in conscience and creation – with every person. In the end, he is able to judge in freedom. He is not bound to condemn anyone because he couldn’t reach them in time or because Christians poorly represented his Christ. God can afford to love me with my weakness and ineffectiveness. Similarly, God can afford to remain passionately invested in those belonging to Christ – despite their pervasive issues. He doesn’t need them to be more than they are – he knew what he was getting into when he committed to them. He is able to refashion us in time into the fullness of Christ and his grace is able to contain the tension of the interim.

I begin, finally, to have peace and not to be anxious on God’s behalf. He can handle things and he is not despairing as I have. He is not overcome by tragedy as I have been. Though he does participate with me in the pain, he is not undone but remains confident. At the depth of his pain, he could cry, “it is finished.” He could scorn the shame of the cross for the joy set before him. God is optimistic, if you will, or perhaps he just knows with certainty that he has won. His victory is the real. That which opposes him is the passing shadow, the illusion of a moment.

I can finally allow myself to relax. My Christianity is empowered by a certainty paradigm. My God is not anxious. My role is a privilege. My God does in fact love me and remains in love with other Christians despite their failures. We are swimming in grace because God is abundantly able to supply it. I feel safe now. I feel like I can truly receive forgiveness. God doesn’t give it reluctantly. He gives in emphatically. He can afford to. I am like a clumsy toddler, learning to draw. All my best is like a toddler’s scribbles on a page. Since God is free and secure, he can afford to delight in me and my scribbles. He takes the scribbles and tapes them to the fridge. He will compel me patiently to develop and grow as does a secure parent. He is not like the insecure parent who demands that the child be more than they are. He is not compelled by crisis to treat his child like an adult. He does not have to place more on the child’s shoulders than they can carry. He can apportion to them that which they can reasonably handle and he will help them along the way. All the rest is absolutely in his hands. The child’s failures do not compromise his purposes or obstruct his plans – he’s bigger than that. Therefore, he can afford to remain invested in his child, forgive them, and train them. From the scarcity of my old mind I begin to emerge into the abundance of a certainty paradigm. My un-anxious God loves and saves. I get to participate.

my journey 2: Scarcity Paradigm

August 27, 2019 by Jacob Harada

“What about the dying world?” I did ask the Lord when he seemed to be inviting to be still, “like a weened child with its mother” (Ps. 131:2). Was God asking me to relent from trying rescue what I though must be rescued? I thought being Christian meant extending his reach to where he could not otherwise? Would he be able to do without me what I thought he needed me for? My visceral question revealed the base assumption: my responsibility as human and as Christian was to help God do what he could not otherwise do. I surprised myself upon the discovery of the assumption. I suppose I had found ways to deny what I had had believed: a piece of God’s mission depended on my performance. God needed me.

Good-hearted God desired for all people to come to know him and find salvation. The agents for that purpose, however, were a significant liability. The Church had the option to avail themselves to the mission or not to. Some do and some don’t. Even those who do cannot do so perfectly. Christians who do try to carry out God’s mission lapse in commitment routinely or have significant character deficits. Both of these things compromise their effectiveness for God’s mission. The lapse means that someone who could have reached now might not be. After all, how will they hear if someone doesn’t go? (Rom. 10:14). A Christian’s character deficit dulls the impression that the Christian makes on an unbeliever and therefore makes their “witness” less convincing. How often have unbelievers not turned to Jesus because the representatives of Christ – Christians – are morally decrepit? It seemed to me that this often was the case.

I admitted this year to living as though I was making up for the ineptitude of the Church. That was a cruel mandate to impose on myself. I owned the failures of the Church as I perceived them. Each new level of systemic prejudice, injustice or apathy that I discovered in my people added to the weight on my shoulders and dragged the baseline of my mental health closer to tragic fatalism. Church failure scared me because of its potential consequence – a consequence of eternal significance. Who were we losing for God?

At some point I extended my sense of responsibility to include people’s health as well as eternal salvation. Indeed, I had been shown in scripture that God seems to care about the whole person. True religion is apparently also a service of those in need, the marginalized in particular. In this arena as well there was so much ground yet to be covered. I had a strong sense that we were hardly effective in caring for the poor or for those with mental health issues. This was amplified by my own mental illness experience and a felt scarcity in the attention that my internal distress called for.

Perceived or felt scarcity is characteristics of mental illness in anyone. In my case, it happened that it became tightly woven into my Christian worldview. I saw scarcity everywhere. I’ll caveat that much good had been given me from the teaching of my youth. I must report, however, that in a very real way Christianity was to me a desperate, anxious thing. Under the trumpeting of victory and freedom – which I professed as well – there was a world of deficit and massive theoretical loss. We were not enough. We were not doing enough. We were losing so many so often.

The mission of God was compromised by the scarcity of Christian effectiveness. So many were not reached and most of those who were reached with the gospel were given a faulty version of the message by faulty representatives of the movement. Search Church history, friends, and see. Enter any church and find deficits of various magnitudes. It seemed to me that simply by choosing humans to be the agents of his message, God had lost a great deal. They were so inconsistently available to the Spirit given to them. Some who professed to be Spirit-led were actually imposters compelled by ego. I supposed that for some reason, God was bound to the choice he made. The Church is what he’s got – and it is riddled with holes. Scarce character and scarce effectiveness. Could it be said that millions were not reached because of a scarcity of Christian effectiveness? Could it be said that millions were deterred from the faith because of a scarcity of Christian character? To me, that seemed to be likely.

Is not the thought disturbingly tragic? God had lost millions upon millions because of scarce effort and character in his Church? In this paradigm, Christians are the limit of God’s reach, at least in most cases. Christians can help God reach farther or can fail to do so.

Ironically, attempting to be as effective for God as possible inflicted on me another scarcity: the scarcity of permissible behaviour. A (life-stiflingly) narrow swath of behaviour was useful for God. The rest – even though it may not be morally wrong – was not useful for reaching people and therefore not permissible. I had a persistent guilt about personal gratification or leisure. Behaviours that no-one would call wrong still felt wrong to me because I did not know how they were making me effective for God.

I consigned myself to religious perfectionism. There was no room for self-compassion. I had to be better; much was at stake. Failure was not permissible; the consequences were too high. Failure as a learning device never made sense to me. I had to get it right the first time. It did not give myself permission to develop or grow. God needed me to be effective now. My self-talk was commandeered by the need to be as useful as possible for God. I spoke to myself without mercy.

Notably, this ended up stunting my artist side. Everything I did had to have utility for the mission. Simple creativity fit very awkwardly in that space. I did not know how my desire to make music could be effective. Songs that weren’t about God were hardly justifiable. What use did that frivolity have for God’s purposes? I must make my artistry useful for the mission. I attempted to fit myself into the odd space that seemed to be the intersection between my gifts and optimal usefulness.

I never did manage to contort myself in the narrow box of permissible behaviour, that I thought would make me useful to God. For example, I never evangelized. I had no genuine desire or courage for it. I had persistent guilt, however, for the perceived deficit of my behaviour. I was ashamed. I was very ashamed.

I constructed an excellence in many things. Some of that excellence was in the direction of usefulness to God. Some, more to transcend the persistent shame that I didn’t really understand. My head was the arena of a perpetual clashing of agendas. There was on the one hand the need to be useful to God. On the other was a constant and inexplicable need to accomplish anything that made me feel significant. These two were often in alignment but often, also, were not. Neither came from freedom. They were both an obligation. One an obligation to not fail God. The other was an obligation to compensate for shame and attend to the basic, essential need for affirmation.

I perceived scarce effectiveness and character in the Church and perceived scarce regions of behaviour to be permissible. My own effectiveness – bound to my self-worth – was scarce. I was always apologizing to God and people. Very small chastisements cut to the depth of me and confirmed my persistent suspicion that I was failing. In that paradigm, what worth was I in the end to God?

Could God afford to affirm me if I was among those who could have helped him save many more had we been better? Could he be pleased with me? I knew abstractly that he loved me and actually had felt shots of it in real ways, but in the paradigm of reality I was working with I could not imagine that he could afford to truly have affection for me or be pleased with me.

I saw a scarcity in God’s capacity. Now that’s a confession. I saw a scarcity of God’s capacity for grace. He was bound to be disappointed. He’d reluctantly let me into heaven, but wouldn’t he be disapproving and grieving at the same time all those that he wanted not to perish who perished? I didn’t see him being able to really love me. A good portion of my life so far has been an attempt to qualify for it, unable to trust that it was already given.

I saw a scarcity also in God’s capacity to reach. As I mentioned, the Church was the limit of God’s reach. God could not save whom the church had not reached. He willed that all be saved but couldn’t accomplish that. That dream could never be. There was, in my mind, now a theoretical optimal number of people then that God would aim to reach considering the resources of his mission: the Word, Spirit, and Church. The word tended to require the assistance of the others. The Spirit was limited in movement to the Church, so the Church ends up being the bottleneck of God’s purposes. Perfect behaviour on the part of the Church would reach the optimal number. Anything less than that would lose people.

I saw a scarcity of God’s power. God had been obstructed, partly by the Church’s failure. God had saved some but failed to reach others. None of us were entitled to salvation but less received it than the number God wanted. He’d acquired a result smaller than his goal. I saw God exasperated. Perhaps I projected my anxiety and depression heavenward. God grasping for as much as possible. An anxious parent.

Cumulatively, the scarcities that I perceived told me that I belonged to a tragic story. I worried about whether I was part of the problem – an inept Church – or part of the solution. My attempts to be perfect were internally frantic. God needed my help but there was little I could give; I was so exhausted from already trying to maintain that narrow sleeve of behaviour by which I might determine I was effective. I thought perhaps that my music might make me effective but I could never be confident that it qualified as useful.

I came to recognize the absurdity of my life particularly when I received the question, “Would you want someone who isn’t a believer in Jesus to live the life you are living.” No. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Something is deeply wrong here. Either my religion is false or I’m holding it wrong. I’m across a chasm from the joy, confidence, and completeness that Jesus promises. What did I get wrong?

The seed of an answer came with a few assertions from the Spirit which I’ll elaborate in another essay. What I’ve outlined here is my scarcity paradigm: The entrenchment of my Christian worldview in a sense of deficit and a tragic fatalism. I ultimately felt like I, and God, were losing not winning. I belonged to a sad half-victory.

my journey 1: The Old Mind

August 27, 2019 by Jacob Harada

“Are you with me?” I would anxiously inquire of God. Behind the question was the question of whether God did, or whether he even could, affirm me. I knew I was going to heaven, but my paradigm of reality would hardly permit me to believe that he could be pleased with me. I and my church were too routinely letting him down to be worthy of approval. What indeed does God require of a man? Of a weak man? Of a flawed Church? How might I acquire any sense of accomplishment or affirmation in regions of responsibility which seem to demand so much more that I ever can offer? I might begin a series of blogs on Christian responsibility with an illustration of the topic’s importance to me and discussion of my mental illness’s interaction with my sense of responsibility.

A person’s worldview inevitably shapes their sense of responsibility which in turn influences how they determine their value to the world or to any relevant authority. Christianity provides a worldview which celebrates hope. The way it is presented in some circles, however, provides a worldview that is profoundly tragic. Consider also, that each person’s perception of any worldview is unique. One Christian may have mentally schemed Christianity as adjoined with a sad fatalism. The person carries an idiosyncratic faith system because of their unique experience and the particular collection of assumptions they have married to their Christianity, probably unintentionally. I, for example, report that Christianity felt at times more like a prison than an opportunity. It was always true to me – and it had the power to depress me.

In a later blog I’ll outline the tenets of my depressing Christianity and what I’m calling my “Scarcity Paradigm.” Here, however, I simply want to declare that one’s worldview mutually influences one’s mental health. This has been my experience, at least. I’m a few steps removed from the paradigm I belonged to for many years, and my mental health has ascended into a space that is comparatively blissful. For me at least, there’s an obvious connection between worldview assumptions and mental health.

For myself and others with anxiety, the condition is highly social and relational. Social “triggers” have huge power to affect one’s experience of reality. For me, I always felt in danger. I was hugely threatened by anyone’s disapproval; toxic self-talk was an unescapable swarm. I was on the alert at all times. I hardly feel disingenuous using these superlatives; the experience was nearly constant for many years. People had fangs. I knew on one level that people didn’t mean to hurt me and that they weren’t dangerous – but I experienced them as dangerous. My sense of self was too immediately vulnerable to feel safe with people. It was inflamed, if you will, like a sore throat or tendonitis. I accredit this vulnerability of my self-concept partly to my worldview, but note also that in turn influenced my worldview.

Raised on the Christian mission-field, I couldn’t help but absorb a certain value system (notably, however, my siblings did not experience things in the same way nor do all missionary kids). It seemed to me was essentially and eternally important to “reach” people for God. This involved telling the gospel and being a good representation of Christ to them by living virtuously. Convincing people to accept Jesus was a work worth giving up all else for. I believed by implication that people would not be reached if I didn’t do a good job of sharing the gospel and of representing God to the world. Ministry and a life of discipleship were together a necessary Christian performance in the endeavour to reach as many people as possible. Anything less then excellence would potentially be losing God someone.

I operated with this assumption. It was at times paralyzing and at other times feverishly compelling. An associated assumption is that God’s reach was limited and that he needed Christians to extend it for him. Some deeply saddening observations followed from this: Firstly, the Church did not seem to be doing a very good job – in fact most Christians were pathetically faulted – and therefore were actively losing God people that he would have wanted to reach. I observed secondly that most people had not accepted Christ. God wanted no one to perish but he had lost most people. This was partly the fault of the Church who had not been as effective as God needed them to be. Many had perished who could have been saved had Christians been more effective.

I belonged to this story. I internalized the narrative. I was hardly effective. I was deeply ashamed, for example, that I never learned the language of the people group that my parents were ministering to. I was ashamed also that I had little desire and no courage to go out and “reach” the people by trying to connect with them. I just wanted play video games in our house, and maybe read and garden. I knew, however, that God needed me to be a good Christian so that the people would be impacted, so I gave up my Gameboy to my brothers so that I could try to be more effective. I hardly knew what I was supposed to do; I simply had a sense that I wasn’t doing it.

Try as I might to make up for my lack of courage, I was most often scared and disconnected. My ostracization from the village kids – though realistically not my fault – I took as a personal failure. By the metric of success offered by my worldview, I was pretty pathetic. Already struggling with self-esteem for other very basic reasons (e.g. not fitting in), I now also berated myself with this evaluation: I was routinely failing God.

I was going to get to heaven, that was sure, but I’d be a disappointment. My eternal security was by grace through faith but my usefulness to God was not. That was up to me; and I was not enough. My sadness amplified when I would grow up and find deep systemic issues, ridiculous prejudices, and internecine politics in the Church. These failures also became part of my story, more ways by which the Church was falling far short of what it needed to be to reach as many people as possible. We must be reaching an unfortunately small percentage of those we should be reaching.

For a decade and a half, I asked God to forgive me most days out of a sense of shame. By the effectiveness metric of my worldview, I was worthy of disapproval. I was told that God loved me – and received some beautiful, relieving interjections of that truth – but on the whole, I felt unworthy of love and didn’t have the capacity to receive it. When it was given, affirmation didn’t stick. I couldn’t believe it. My internal affirmation cup had massive holes because of my perception of things. I thus lived in a perpetual deficit of experienced affirmation. My lived experience was hellish, even when circumstances were relatively OK.

My worldview created a dark lens through which I saw and experienced the world. Again, people had teeth and were dangerous. This is because even very small things that people did had the power to confirm for me that I was a failure. I needed almost constant approval to maintain any level assurance and self-confidence – thus I lived with a necessary perfectionism (I submit that perfectionism, while arrogance on the one hand, is also partly an attempt to transcend a wounded self-concept). I was very nice and high achieving. I had a broken social boundary system because I could be nothing less than heroic for others, lest I be ashamed. I flirted with burnout since high school because performance had become the drug of my self-esteem. My excellence was the prison I needed. I was exhausted because God needed me to be better. I was unable to rest while I rescued myself from toxic self-talk by social excellence and perfectionism in various regions of performance.

In my most recent breakdown, it was crushing to realize quite profoundly the vanity and self-perpetuating absurdity of the way I was living. The internal mechanisms by which I attempted to secure affirmation and self-assurance had harmed me for a long time and deprived me of the capacity to accept and present who I truly am. The worldview assumptions I carried guaranteed that I experienced myself and my world as a tragic story. This was truly a sickness of mind and the atmosphere in which fever pitch anxiety and dark depression could thrive.

The depression and anxiety, of course, were also influenced by chemical, social, and situational factors. They were not only the products of a worldview. They actually had some power to generate the negative assumptions of my worldview or at least push my worldview in a dark direction. Mental illness was like a pair of sunglasses I couldn’t take off which made even daytime look like night. It affected the way I experienced relationships, as I’ve noted, and the way that I evaluated my life. Mental illness compelled me to interpret my life’s events, world events, even all of history in a fatalistic and unfortunate way. Interestingly, it also affected the way I read scripture – it would highlight that which seemed to validate my hyper-responsibility and sense of failure and deficit. I would not have admitted at the time, but I couldn’t help but project that God was as distressed and anxious as I was.

I know that mental illness influenced my perception of reality largely because I now am living without a vast swath of the anxiety and depression I used to swim in. I have a new vantage point with which to evaluate my old worldview. The change is so distinct that I have come to call my prior condition my “old mind.” I could not know how strongly mental illness influenced my perception of reality without having emerged from a great deal of it. There’s much that a fish cannot learn about water unless it spends some time in the air. There was much that I could never know about my “old mind” without having stepped outside of it. I read the same words in scripture and don’t get the same anxious compulsion and sense of shame. I say the same prayers and have a sense now that God is pleased to hear them rather than disappointed that I hadn’t said them yet or said enough of them. The most prominent of changes: I look up and see a confident, capable, invested God rather than the anxious, distressed, disappointed God that I had previously projected he must be.

In a further blog I’ll outline in more detail the “scarcity paradigm” I used to live with. In another I’ll describe tenets of what has become my “certainty paradigm.” For now, I observe that harmful worldview assumptions can degrade one’s mental health and I observe that mental illness, however it develops, can shift one’s worldview into dark spaces. I wouldn’t be able to articulate this without having experienced a significant amount of healing. When you’re in the battle, you don’t have a bird’s eye view of it; you just fight, and pray between the assaults.

Monthly Archives: August 2019

my journey 3: Certainty Paradigm

my journey 2: Scarcity Paradigm

my journey 1: The Old Mind

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