Seeking God’s Approval IV
Greetings. Welcome to my post. How is it going when it comes to trusting God? Can you trust Him with yourself and find hope that God will make a way for you? Or in your Christian walk, have you found trusting God to be something in which you have to earn his favor by showing Him that you are a good Christian? Is this working?
When it comes to our walk with God, we always want to be answering this question: Am I real or am I hiding. Can I really trust God and show him all of me and not hide from Him? Can I be authentic and real with whom I really am? Can I also be real and authentic with who I am and how my walk with God is going?
As a Christian and therapist, I often find this to be a subject that scares many Christians. They do want to be real and authentic but they are afraid to tell God or others who they really are. The bottom line is this: Can I really share and tell you who I really am and will you accept me or will you not accept me? If I already anticipate that you will not accept me, then I will go ahead and hide. I will tell you what you want to hear but won’t tell you who I really am.
So you join the company of others and say you are doing just fine. Being fine and doing fine has been your strategy for many years. Those in the company of just doing fine often feel betrayed as they do feel this is not true of them but they don’t know what else to do. They compare their walk with God with others and they do feel that others are being more real or happier and they wonder how come they don’t feel this way. Part of the challenge of doing just fine is that your experience and your past has created a conclusion that you must never let anyone know about how you are doing. When others have hurt you, you do feel betrayed about your Christian walk because someone has hurt you and the person who did this was a Christian.
So now, because another Christian was mean and hurtful, and did not practice some of the one another’s, such as love another, be kind to one another, care for one another, that you now do feel hurt and betrayed by the Christian community. So when you feel betrayed, it probably means that someone has violated your trust, been false or disloyal to you, led you astray or deceived you, or divulged something confidential about you to others. Maybe this person was a spouse, a pastor, someone maybe in a Bible study, or someone from the church staff. So when you got hurt, you felt betrayed and given we don’t know how to resolve conflict very well in the Christian community, you decide to put on a mask to keep up an appearance that you now are just doing fine.
Being just fine is not working but that is all you know. Keeping up an appearance of doing just fine only leads to you concluding that putting on a mask and demonstrates to others that you are doing just fine, which only leads to the betrayal that you cannot be yourself, cannot be honest, cannot really tell people who you really are, and that keeping up a mask is the only alternative to coping with your pain.
So where do you take off your mask, stop the game of keeping up an appearance, and confess your sin and hurt by asking people to pray for you and care for you to be healed? To whom in your life can you let people know what is really going on inside of you? To whom do you trust to share yourself with? Can I help you as a fellow Christian to find ways to be honest so you can learn how to bond to others with all of who you really are? Will you let me in?
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