That Time I Sat Down on the Floor of My Life

4/27/21

Dear friend,

We are getting into the nuts and bolts of it now.

Last week I mentioned several ways invitations can last a short or a long time or be concerned with our inner or outer worlds (and often both!), and I told you I'd be offering windows into the practical ways it can look to live into our invitations.

So let's talk about that, and let's use one of the invitations I mentioned last week: that time I sat down on the floor of my life for two years.

How did that come about, how did I know it was an invitation, and how did I actually go about living into it?

I said in last week's letter I was 19 years old when this particular invitation came along. It was the summer before my junior year of college, and I'd recently gotten married—to someone other than Kirk, actually (a different story for a different day!)—and I was living in an apartment on campus.

I remember wandering around the apartment a bit listlessly that summer, looking for ways to fill the days before the new semester began in a few weeks' time, and one day, in an attempt to fill the time, I pulled a book off the shelf that I hadn't read yet.

The book was called Singleness of Heart: Restoring the Divided Soul, written by a man named Clifford Williams and inscribed by one of my professors from the previous semester. I believe my professor had studied with the author, had a whole box of the books to give away, and was happy to give one to anyone in class who wanted one.

I remember the book interested me because it combined theology and classic literature.

Little did I know it was about to change my life.

The book talked about illusion—how we can think we're operating from one motivation but actually be operating from another. It talked about doubleness of heart and ambivalence—how we can be simultaneously drawn toward something and repelled from it at the same time.

These were new concepts for me, and it opened me up to the idea that I might not know my heart or my true motivation in my life at all.

There was a moment I still remember so clearly—a moment when something I'd skirted admitting to myself finally, after many years of avoidance, made its way to the surface.

That admission was this: Though I'd been a devoted Christian my whole life, I didn't really get—or even believe in—my need for grace or redemption or Jesus.

It felt audacious to admit this. I'd been a church girl and lover of God my whole life. How could I say what I just did?

But I did. It was true. And that book helped me see it and say it in a way nothing else ever had.

"I don't get it." That's the gist of what I said that day it happened. I remember letting the book drop from my hands to the floor as I mustered the courage to go deeper into the confession I'd been ignoring for years. "I don't know why I need grace or Jesus. I don't get my need for either one."

I'd been doing all right on my own. I'd been doing the right things—All The Things, really—so why did I need God's help? I knew the doctrine of original sin, but I wasn't buying it. Why was I so "depraved"? What need did I have for grace? Especially if I deeply loved God?

I'll pause here and say that I'm not sharing this with you to get into theological convos. That is not the point of this story.

The point of this story is to say that it felt like perhaps the most true moment of my life. It felt like saying The Thing That Should Never Be Said. But there it was. I'd said it, and I couldn't (and wouldn't) unsay it.

Thus began the two years I spent sitting on the floor of my life.

All the things I used to do that I now could see were efforts to prove my worth and worthiness? No more interest. All the plans I used to have for the person I thought I'd be in the future? Called into question.

If God's love was so unconditional, if grace was so unmerited and given freely, I wanted to know it. What was that kind of love like? What was it like to be loved in an unmerited way? Not for what I did or didn't do, but just for who I was. For being.

So I stopped everything—or nearly everything, at least. (I did stay in school. 😉 )

I stopped going to church. I stopped writing in my prayer journal. I gave up volunteer work. I considered smoking. I checked out of many relationships. I grew stubborn and cynical and argumentative. I let my language run a bit wild.

It was tame by many people's standards, I know. But it was markedly un-tame by mine, and by the standards and expectations others had of me.

I remember my then-husband bursting into frustration one night while we were driving in the car, about a year and a half into this long, dark period of mine.

"This isn't you!" he said. "This isn't the Christianne I know!"

He wanted the old Christianne back. The one who went to church and was driven and clear-sighted about the future. The one who got along with everyone and did what others expected of her. The one he thought he’d married.

Here's where I want to pause and look at you, my friend, to say that living into our invitations will not guarantee other people's understanding—even the people who are closest to us. Sometimes it will be something only we know is true.

I had to do it. I had to explore the limits of God’s love. I had to question the assumptions I had about myself. I had to look underneath the carpet of all the motivations I thought grounded my life. I had to follow that road.

Nothing was ever the same, and I can tell you I'm damn glad of it.

But it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy or understandable at all, except in the quietest place inside of me that knew it had to happen. That's the part that understood.

I believe God understood it too.

Have you ever had invitations like these? Ones you knew you had to follow, even though it might change everything? Even though it doesn't make sense to others and only makes the tiniest bit of sense to yourself?

It takes courage to live our invitations sometimes. That's one proof of their importance.

Yours in the courage-taking,
Christianne