How to be Free
There is this one book on my shelf that I just cannot bring myself to read.
I think of it periodically and imagine that inside of it there is great transformative power for me. But every time I call the cover to mind, I turn away because it just feels like too much. It feels like I am not ready to receive what it contains.
The book is by Henri Nouwen. It is one of several books my former pastor gave me in January 2020 as he flew excitedly around his office pulling books from shelves like they were spices he was gathering up in his arms for a deliberate recipe. I had just explained to him that I felt God had been calling me to write my whole life and I was just now trying to open up and live out that calling.
The affirmation he gave was something I will always treasure. Though my pastor is a good and faithful man, the most powerful thing that happened in that office that day had little to do with him as a person. What I could feel in his energy and response was that God was rejoicing in that room between us, that I'd finally surrendered my pride, my ego, my fears - at least to some extent - and invited him to work in this specific area of my life, to work through me.
I really believe that God speaks directly to us through others. It isn't any real special power that this particular person has, they are just being good and faithful and following God's plan for their own lives and then one day your paths intersect in some divine design and God uses them to speak directly to your heart. That was what this was.
I left his office that day with a stack of books that would alter the course of my life completely. It would be the very beginning of my deep faith study and storytelling.
This journey would lead me down a road of self discovery. With every concentric circle that brought me closer to God, he revealed to me areas of my life that needed work, cleaning up, and outright confession. It has been a growing, a formation, a building over time and there is still much work to do.
After my dad died, my family and I boxed up many of his things. In our deep, traumatic grief, we could not process what to keep or throw away, divide or keep together. We simply boxed it all up to revisit at a more stable time. I had a box I kept under my bed of personal things between him and me, photos, little notes he wrote, gifts he had given me.
For years, this box felt a lot like that book on my shelf, filled with powerful potential for healing, but simply too overwhelming for me to pull out.
I remember explaining to a mentor of mine, "There's just too much there. And it's not the kind of thing you can pull out and then be interrupted. It's too fragile, too vulnerable, I can't leave it lying around and I can't turn from it quickly. And it's too big to pull out completely and then put away completely in any decent amount of time." Thinking of my two small children, my precious interruptions.
This would continue to be true for many years as I tried to manage my healing on my own. But over time, the more I invited God to work in this area, the more I prayed for healing and comfort and the ability to move forward in life, the more I gained the capacity to just pull out a piece or two of his memory at a time.
Gently, slowly, compassionately, God led me down a pathway of healing. Sometimes, it was a note my dad wrote before running an errand. Remember how we used to do that for each other? Before cell phones had us constantly connected and aware of each other's whereabouts? The pain of wishing his absence was a mere run for milk would send me into a flood of tears. But this was something I needed to feel, in God's presence, where he could connect my broken past to my blossoming future and finally release me from this pain.
The book on my shelf is called, "Our Greatest Gift: A meditation on Dying and Caring." I suspect, and what has kept me from reading it, that it is at least in part about how our loved ones live on in the stories we tell and the lives we lead and that many benefit from this shared connection.
It's right up my alley, honestly.
By faith, I will get there one day, to the point where I can read it, reflect upon it, and recycle it however God intends to use it in my life. But I think I've got a little more work to do first.
I encourage you, and what I plan to do, is if there is something in your life that feels too big, too painful, too shameful, too overwhelming, too anything to face, invite God there. Personally, cordially, deliberately invite him to that very place and I promise you, he will get right to work, rejoicing all the way.
God loves to free his children.