Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

grace

How to Forgive Yourself When You Have a Universal Meltdown

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I had a universal meltdown. I mean literally, a Universal meltdown.

Two weeks ago we spent spring break in Florida, with our first three days of the trip dedicated to visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando. I’ll tell you straight-up, theme parks are not in my wheelhouse. The crowds, the lines, the $29 hamburgers, the fact that despite my vat of hand sanitizer, chances are still good that I will succumb to the 21st-century version of Black Death as a result of the barrage of germs. And to say nothing of the expense! As I mentioned to my husband when we  clicked “Purchase” for the three-day park pass: “We could sponsor two and a half more Compassion kids for a year for this!” Not to put a big fat damper on the fun or anything.

That said, I was pretty psyched about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. My boys LOVE Harry Potter. We’ve read all the books, and watched all the movies ad nauseum, and plus, I’d heard really good things about the theme park (red flag: sky-high expectations).

Which is why, on our first morning there, when Rowan announced, “I don’t think I’m going to ride any of the rides. I think I just want to walk around,” things began to fall apart. Not at first, mind you. Initially I tried, really I did, to be The Rational and Empathetic Parent. We talked about his fears. I suggested we scale back to the tamer amusement ride options and ease into the more dramatic experiences later. We rationalized and hypothesized and psychologized and psychoanalyzed. But no, Rowan would have none of it. In fact, he was quite specific about which rides he would not partake in: “the ones with the conveyor belts.”

In other words, pretty much every single amusement park ride ever known to mankind.

We had basically remortgaged our house and our favorite neighbor’s house in order to purchase tickets to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, and my youngest child decided he preferred to “walk around” and “look at stuff,” and “maybe have some popcorn.”

People, can I just say, this is like visiting the Swiss Alps in order to drink hot chocolate in the chalet.

This is like flying from the United Emirates to the Mall of America to “window shop.”

This is like holding front-row Adele concert tickets in your hand and then deciding, “Eh, I’ll just watch one of her music videos on YouTube instead.”

Catch my drift?

Commence Universal Meltdown.

I’m making this sound funny, but believe me, it was not funny. Not Funny, in capital letters and boldface type. As Brad later described it, “We ride-shamed our kid.” There was whisper-yelling (mine). Threatening (mine). Bribing (mine). Guilting (mine). Sighing (mine). Eye-rolling (mine). Bitter retorts (mine). Shaming (mine). Pouting (mine). The Ice-Cold Shut-Down (mine). And crying (mine and Rowan’s).

In fact, at one point, as I sat on a stone wall next to Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls water ride and cried behind my sunglasses, I actually thought to myself, “There are 15,638 mothers in this park right now, and I am the only one who is crying.”

Ultimately we salvaged the vacation. Life dramatically improved when we left Orlando and headed for the beach. And we did actually have a few good moments at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (I captured all two of them and posted them to Instagram and Facebook, because, you know, even if we’re not having the time of our lives, it’s important that we at least look like we’re having the time of our lives, right?).

I apologized to Rowan. We made up. And as is always the case with Rowan, he was quick to forgive me and move on.

But here’s the clincher: I couldn’t forgive myself. I couldn’t move on.

A week after we’d returned from Florida, I was still inwardly berrating myself for my atrocious behavior. I prayed the exact same confession five nights in a row. “Please forgive me, Lord, for shaming my child and for being a terrible mother.” By the third night, I’m sure God was thinking, “Have we not sufficiently covered this yet?”

The thing is, God may have forgiven me the first time I confessed, but I didn’t believe it. I simply couldn’t believe my terrible-parent behavior was forgivable. I refused to trust the fact of grace.

I suspect I’m not the only one neck-deep in this struggle. I suspect I’m not the only one who has sinned and repented and yet still struggles to accept the real truth of God’s grace. In moments like these, grace simply seems too good to be true. In moments like these, grace seems possible for everyone else but ourselves.

Friends, let me remind you of what I’ve had to remind myself this past week (and Holy Week is a very good time for this reminder): Jesus Christ died for this very reason.

Think about that for a moment. A real person, a human being who is at the same time God, died a painful, humiliating, lonely death on a cross 2,000 years ago for this very reason: so that we would not have to continue to carry around our failures and our faults forever.

Jesus Christ died so that we could be free from the very weight I have insisted on clutching and carrying ever since we returned from Florida. He died so that we could be free.

Refusing to accept God’s grace, a grace that comes to us at the highest cost, defeats the whole point of Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Holding on to our guilt and our shame and our inability to forgive ourselves not only hurts ourselves, it also hurts God. Because Jesus died for this moment – this moment right here, the ugliest moment that feels impossibly broken, the moment that feels definitively unfixable.

When we insist on holding as tightly as we can to our guilt and shame, when we refuse to relinquish our sin and accept God’s grace, we deny the ultimate sacrifice God made for us. We deny his life. We deny his sacrifice. We deny his resurrection. We deny him.

I’m not going to lie. A big part of our spring break stunk like giant smelly deviled eggs, and it was almost entirely due to my own bad behavior. It hasn’t been easy to let that go, to forgive myself and hand every last bit of my guilt, shame and regret over to God. But that’s exactly what I am doing. I am handing it all over to him. I am allowing God to take it. And I am stepping fully and completely into his grace.

Why the More Things Change, the More They Really Don’t Stay the Same

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Soccer season has started up again, which means I’m back to walking Josie every Monday and Wednesday around the same loop that borders the practice fields. Last night as we walked, Josie sniffing, me tugging the leash impatiently, I thought about that age-old expression: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I thought about it while Josie sniffed the trunk of the maple tree, the same tree I’d snapped with my phone camera last October, flaming leaves set against a sharp blue sky. Its branches are bare now, a barely discernible bud on the end of each twig, waiting for the right moment to unfurl. But I know by September it will begin to flame again.

I thought about it when I walked past the fields – the middle school football team running the same plays, the lacrosse players swatting the same netted sticks, the tennis courts full again, thwap of yellow balls against racquets, the playground the same buzzing hive of small sliding, swinging, jumping bodies.

Another season, another six months passed, and here we all are, back where we were. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Look closely, though.

The boys on the field are taller, leggier. I can tell because some of them need new shorts, knobby knees and pale thighs extending below too-short hems. I suspect I wasn’t the only mother who gasped, pulling her boy’s shorts from beneath piles of long sleeves and jeans, holding them up by the waistband, knowing even before he tried them on that they’d be too small.

When we arrived home from Florida on Saturday, the first thing we all noticed were the daffodils. The day we left they’d offered the barest hint of yellow wrapped tightly within tissue-paper skin. A mere seven days later, bright heads bobbed in full bloom along the picket fence, perky faces trumpeting their early arrival. Next to them, lined up like wedding boutonnieres along the curb, crocus flowered lilac, white and sunflower yellow. Even the hyacinth was prepared to push its purple head up between green stalks.

Everything was new in just seven days’ time.

I admired my neighbor Karna’s pussy willow later that evening and asked to cut a couple of the branches beaded with soft fur. “You better do it soon, though,” she warned. “They’re already turning to seed.” When I looked more closely, I saw that it was true. In a day or two every furry bud will be covered with soft pollen-laden spikes, waving like tiny anemone in the breeze.

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I worried aloud to Noah as we walked Josie through the neighborhood. The buds were unfurling too soon. Glancing up at the oak and maple trees, pointing at the delicate leaves decorating the lilac bush, I fretted:  “One cold snap and they’ll all be dead. It’s too early, too soon.”

“It’s okay,” Noah reassured me. Most trees have the ability to produce several rounds of buds in a single spring season, he explained, usually two or three cycles. The silver maple can produce up to six bud cycles, so if its early, tender leaves are harmed by frost, it will push out another round of buds, and, if necessary, another and another, until the timing and the circumstances are right for the leaves to flourish.

It seems to me there is a divine metaphor in those tenuous silver maple buds. They remind me a little bit of the grace God lavishes on us – the chance after chance we are offered to bud again and again. Like the silver maple, we are given the opportunity to be replenished and reborn, to try once more and then once more again, perhaps when timing and circumstances are right to be born anew.

Those silver maple buds remind me, too, that the old adage really isn’t true. Things do change, but they don’t ever stay exactly the same, even when it seems on the surface that they do.

The daffodils are blooming in the same spot as always, but they are much earlier this year. The boys are playing soccer on the same field, but they are taller. And although we can’t know for sure, the silver maple trees may have already budded once or twice this spring, and quite possibly are being offered yet another chance to bud again.

Grace is Moving Toward

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During a class she taught at my church last week, my friend Deidra offered a definition of grace that settled deep into my soul.

“Grace is moving toward,” Deidra said — moving toward those we don’t necessarily want to move toward or even moving toward someone as they are, not as who we want them to be.

“Do you need to move toward a person and into their world,” Deidra asked, “intead of trying to force them to move into yours?”

When Deidra asked that question, I immediately thought of my two kids. The hard truth is, I haven’t always done a good job of embracing who they are as individuals, but instead, often find myself trying to shape one to reflect the other.

I realize this is Parenting 101. I’m ashamed to admit it’s taken me 14 years of childrearing to come to this understanding.

You see, I have two very different kids. One is quiet and introspective; the other is an effervesence extrovert. One is contemplative, the other is a man of action. One thrives in busyness, energy and excitement, the other requires a copious amount of stillness and solitude. But instead of embracing and nurturing their uniquely distinct personalities, here is where I have made my critical mistake: more often than not, I have tried to force one to fit the shape of the other. Instead of moving toward one child and toward his world, instead of embracing who he is and how God made him, I have often tried to move him toward me – or rather, toward his brother. I have tried to redefine and reshape each of my sons based on the qualities of the other or on my expectations.

Thankfully my attempts have failed abysmally. Each of my sons is still very much his own unique, quirky, individual self. Personalities are resilient and stubborn, it turns out.

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This epiphany about grace is important for me, not only as a parent but as an individual as well. Because the truth is, I often move myself toward the shape of others. Maybe you do this, too? Maybe you yearn to look like she does, or speak like she does, or be the kind of writer, or mother or wife or boss that she is.

Maybe you find yourself trying to push and pull and squeeze yourself and all that makes you beautifully, uniquely you into someone else’s box – to remake yourself into someone else.

Maybe it’s my tendency toward perfectionism, but I do this more often than I would like to admit. I try to redefine or reshape myself based on the appealing qualities of someone else. I think part of me assumes, “If only I could be like that, then it — I — would be enough,” which is a lie, of course – one of the biggest, fattest of all lies.

Deidra’s beautiful definition of grace is Truth, and we need to apply it to ourselves, too. Grace is moving more fully toward ourselves as the perfectly beautiful, unique individuals God created each one of us to be. Let’s give ourselves grace. Let’s move toward, love, and fully embrace ourselves, because who we really are is who God intended us to be.

God Chose YOU

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Often when I tell my faith story or give my testimony, I use phrases like, “When I returned to God…” or “When I came back to God…” or even, “When God found me.” That’s the way I’ve understood my story: I was estranged from God for twenty years, and then I slowly came back to him. Recently, though, I’ve begun to realize that while my understanding of that process isn’t wrong, necessarily, it’s also not the whole story.

The whole story is encapsulated in this one simple verse from John:

“You didn’t choose me. I chose you.” (John 15:16)

Sometimes I forget that God does the choosing; I forget that he chose me as his beloved child even before I took my first wailing breath on this earth.

I forget that the door into his love and grace was open from the get-go, a standing, open invitation to me – to all of us.

Remember the story of the prodigal son? We typically pay a lot of attention to the son who returns in that story. We relate to the son’s need to seek forgiveness; we see ourselves in his act of returning to his father and his home.

But think about the father in that story for a moment. Sure, he comes out to greet his son and to welcome him back after his long hiatus. But the truth is, the door to the father’s house was always open; all those years, the invitation still stood. The father greeted his lost son with open arms, but that son had long been chosen as beloved by him; that fact never changed.

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You are so loved

I tend to give myself a fair amount of credit for turning back to God after a twenty-year hiatus. If I’m not careful, I can easily slip into the misguided belief that I chose God. But as I mentioned earlier, that view is a subtle misrepresentation of the story.

The fact is, God does the choosing; each one of us is already chosen, right from the start. That invitation into grace, into the God-with-us life, is waiting for us on the day we are born. Our role is to say “yes.”

Jesus Doesn’t Chuck Us into the Trash

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I’ve kept an orchid in my office for two or three years now, the most profusely blooming orchid you could possibly imagine. In the last couple months or so, its spray of prolific yellow blossoms grew so heavy, I had to fasten the stem to the window frame with a hair clip, just to keep it upright. I’ve probably taken fifty photographs of this orchid over the years in morning, afternoon and evening light. I’ve never grown tired of looking at it.

I recently rearranged my office a bit. Inspired by Emily Freeman’s sunroom office makeover, I switched up my desk to give myself more workspace, Goodwilled a bunch of knickknacks and shifted the orchid from the top of the bookshelf to the corner of my desk. It provided a lovely symmetry with the lamp I set on the opposite corner.  I felt very modern and minimalist with my symmetry and my clean space and my white-painted furniture.

However, not long after I rearranged my office, I noticed an influx of ants, mainly on my desk, but some on the floor beneath it too. I thought at first they were emanating from my laptop. I’m a snacker-writer, so I worried that a few too many crumbs had fallen between the keys and provided a pantry of sorts for the ants.

But yesterday morning I discovered the source of the ants was not my laptop, but my beautiful orchid. When I gingerly lifted the plant from its plastic pot, I saw immediately that the root ball was swarming with hundreds of ants. They’d made a nest amid the moist, gnarled roots. Beneath all its prolific beauty, down at the root, the plant was a mess – decaying, rotting and full of ant eggs and ant babies and ant parents.

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Initially I tried to save the orchid, but as I stood over the kitchen sink with the plant in my hand and ants, precious eggs in their mouths,  scattering helter skelter across the counter and down the cabinets, I quickly realized my efforts were futile. Finally, ants running up my arms and under my sleeves, I dashed out the front door and dumped the whole plant, pot and all, into the trash can at the curb.

Here’s the question I asked myself yesterday afternoon as I sat at my desk, its white surface disinfected and clean of ants, the orchid gone, a lone white peony bloom in its place:

How many times in my life have I been wooed by the picture-perfect exterior — the intoxicating, alluring blooms — only to discover that my desires were actually rotten at the core?

Readers, numbers, book contracts, sales, achievement, success. I’ve wanted it all – a whole bountiful spray of blooms, bending heavy under the weight of abundance. And what have I found in my single-minded pursuit? What have I discovered at the core of my ambition?

My desires are infested with darkness. It may have all looked fine on the outside, but at the root, deep down beneath the pretty, lay a tangled mess. I allowed my God-given dreams and ambitions to be tainted by idolatry, the quest to please only myself.

Sometimes we rediscover something about ourselves we thought we’d “taken care of” a good long time ago. Sometimes we realize we’ve fallen victim to the same-old root rot problem again — the problem we thought we’d fixed, the problem we thought we’d already overcome.

Yet here it is, the unseemly underneath, exposed again. Kind of makes you want to chuck the whole thing in the trash can at the curb, roots and blooms and pot and all, doesn’t it?

It’s hard work, this beginning again, turning back, replanting and resowing. I’m not alway sure I’m up for it, to be quite honest. I feel like I should be further along on this spiritual journey by now, less inclined to succumb to the same old temptations, if that makes sense.

Yet I still come back to this, despite my frustration and dismay:

No matter how rotten our roots, no matter how dark and messy and gnarled and infested our hearts, Jesus doesn’t chuck us into the trash can at the curb, roots and blooms and pot and all. He gives us grace, again and again and again.

He graciously shows us the error of our ways; he gives us a glimpse into what lies beneath. He shines his light into our dark places, not so that we will recoil in shame, but so we can see his love, even there.

Jesus reminds us to turn once again from the work of our own hands. He redirects our gaze from the pretty, enticing blooms to the roots underneath that need tending and nurturing. And he reminds us that he is always with us, even there, even as we begin again.