IN THE MEANTIME

I saw a video recently where a guy used a video of a parent yelling at their child after a failed attempt at inaccurately trying gentle parenting with them. He highlighted that gentle parenting isn’t a passive voice and relinquishing all parental authority to pacify the child but sternly redirecting the child without the use of harsh punishment and yelling.

The thing he mentioned that I had never even considered on any level was how yelling at a child to not do a thing was counterproductive because you’re emphasizing the thing you want them to not do.

I had a moment while driving once, where a pedestrian was walking on the side of the road and I saw them from a ways off. For some reason, I began to fixate on not hitting them. Now, I’ve never hit a pedestrian before so it wasn’t as if I was avoiding a repeat or traumatized by some personal experience or anything but it felt like the more I focused on the pedestrian, the closer I drifted toward them. I don’t know if my car physically drifted closer to them in actuality but in my head, I was closer than I needed to be. Contrarily, these days when I’m in the same situation, it helps to focus on the line of my lane rather than fixating on the thing I’m avoiding.

Like the child in the video, having the thought of the thing I’m avoiding at the forefront made focusing on the thing I was trying to do that much more difficult. When I say I’m fasting and I specify what I’m fasting from, it becomes that much more difficult because our minds focus more on the thing rather than the instructions for the thing. “Don’t touch that socket” muddles into “socket”. Then all we can focus on is the socket. Then before we know it, our 4-year-old selves has some metal object making a beeline for the very thing we were told to avoid.

Similarly, when living a life of discipline, focusing too much on the thing we’re refraining from become counterproductive. We become fixated on our list of physical and emotional fixes. We buy every self-help book on the topic, watch the documentaries, buy all the diet paraphernalia, get memberships at two different gyms, write wellness affirmations on our walls, and binge our efforts only to burn out quickly and go back to everything we’ve been trying to get free from.

Setting intentions to do a thing is good. Following through with research is even better. The way we become obsessive about our goals, however, isn’t just unhealthy, it’s not conducive to longevity. Think about this in terms of who you’re aiming to become. How are your goals phrased? Is it more “I’m not going to do this anymore.” or is it, “I’d like to add this to my daily routine and see what comes of it.”

What I realized about my own process is that in the season of waiting for compatibility, I’ve been tempted to fixate on my fixes to avoid thinking about the thing I’m missing. Obsessively working on myself was a distraction from feeling relationally empty. The better I became in all the different areas of my life, the more confident I became that my aloneness was self-imposed and not because there was something wrong with me. There was a part of me that needed to continue to become the best person I’ve ever been to mitigate the sting of a season of singleness I didn’t yet understand.

Unfortunately, we all have to get to the other side of that for ourselves. I can tell you that no matter what in your life needs fixing, it doesn’t make you any less worthy of love but it won’t mean much until that understanding settles into your heart. I can tell you that there’s no amount of physical work that will make you feel sufficient enough to never question your worth again but it won’t make sense until you get to the place of emotional healing that is spiritually prompted by a relationship with the One who created you.

That relationship with God is what we’ve been made to think a relationship with our (earthly) father is. They talk about daddy issues like it isn’t possible to have a good relationship with your parents and still fall off the bone emotionally. The relationship that sets our identities right is the relationship that gave us our identity and just like the young man in the video explained, gentle parenting isn’t about being coddled by God. There’s a standard that we’re held to as believers, in spirit and in truth, the gentleness of God’s love isn’t in lifting those standards but in the grace we are afforded while we seek to get it right.

PRAYER

Father, Ours is the relationship I need to correct. I want to get to a place where it’s for all the right reasons but in the meantime, I need my self-esteem to be set right and I believe that getting a better sense of who I am, of who I was created to be can help to relieve me of the pressure to be anything outside of who I am until my healing sets in and until my mind is renewed. I don’t want to feel forced into change. I want to be inspired to become better. I don’t want to pressure myself to be different. I want to love myself into better habits. I want my meantime to involve healing and grace and comfort like I’ve never known. I want to feel known, seen, understood, and loved now, in a way that allows me to have hope that the partnership you’re preparing me for and preparing for me will mirror the relationship I have with you. Help me to spend less time criticizing myself for all I’ve done wrong and more time allowing myself to come into the knowledge of who I am as your child. Help me to accept your love. Help me to refine my love. Help me to heal in love. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

REFLECT

What is your process of self-improvement like? Are you a drill sergeant? Do you smack talk yourself? Are you extra critical and nitpicking? How can you become gentler with yourself in your efforts? How can you reframe your goals to shift the focus from what you want to quit to something you’d like to do to replace the negative? Write it down and come up with a few actionable steps to get started.