Happy New Year in Three Words (or less)

One would think that to write on the topic of either the old year just passed (especially one containing a worldwide pandemic) or the new one just entered into, would be a snap.

But as I have, the last few days, begun word document after word document with various opening statements, declarative assertions, and pensive ponderings, nothing seems to suffice.

Maybe it’s just been that kind of year: one, in the end, not for words (certainly we had our fill and overkill of them in 2020). 

And maybe that’s the best approach for the brand new year we are beginning: less words.

A 2021 that is minimalist in the push and pressure to post, picture and podcast. 

Twelve months, perhaps, of tuning in less and turning out more: more listening to music and meadows; more silence; more assertiveness on our part that lines up our ideals with our actions instead of just our words. 

And so with that, I wish you, in three simple but joyful words:

Happy New Year. 

copyright Barb Harwood

Thankfully, It's Christmas

God's Permission to Live Our Social Style

Attempting “to be” according to someone or something else’s paradigm eventually leads to burn-out, which dictionary.com defines as "fatigue, frustration, or apathy resulting from prolonged stress, overwork or intense activity."  

While it may feel authentic at the time, we later discover it was only the mind’s amazing ability to get along with other people out of a core sense of duty, or the thought that,

 "Maybe other folks have it right and I don’t, so I should probably try it their way in order to fit in."

This living at the behest of another person or organization's standards or worldview often perpetuates itself by seeming other-centered and open-minded, when in reality, it is a betrayal of both others and ourselves (even if that betrayal isn't understood until much later). 

In the end, the partnership cracks under the strain of inauthenticity and the no-longer-deniable evolving of one’s own value system.   

Always doubting that I could trust my instincts and embrace my social preferences, and lacking confidence that shyness and introversion have their place in a world that reveres consistent social interaction, I forced myself time and time again to "get out there” and be gregariously communal. 

Having been pretty much an amiable all of my life, it was no surprise that I would carry this tendency into my Christian contacts, program-involvement and new acquaintances.

I’ve heard it said that those who must spend hours speaking a language other than their native language are exhausted at the end of the engagement. 

That is exactly how these self-imposed social encounters felt for me. 

I could put on my convivial pretense and fool most everyone, to the point that even family members and close friends were surprised, even directly denying it, when I began to own and live out the reality of being an introvert who had some social anxiety.

It's not like I didn't try, really hard, to socially please. I gave it my best shot, over and over and over again.

From age seventeen to thirty-eight I drank my way through insecurity.

I felt my health deteriorate during the year I volunteered as a youth group leader. 

I experienced an increasingly oppressive anxiety as I berated myself for ever initially donning an insincere hat with church people that I could now no longer pretend with. 

I stepped out of the fray of family gossip and news and began more and more to just "shut up, show up and wear beige,” as they say, to family gatherings, not because I don’t love my family, but because large, frenetic group settings bring out the awkward in me. 

Finally at peace that I can, and do, have something to contribute in my way of quiet background presence has solved untold self-loathings post family gatherings. And it has freed me to find harmony in work and volunteerism (preventing burn-out as defined above). 

The allowing of respect and dignity for the long-hidden person inside became possible through the hard-won conviction to finally live within the social style God customized for His intended benefits both to myself and society. 

And the fruit of that work is flourishing in countless ways. 

As I have stepped into my own skin, for the first time in life, other friendships that had been tainted by the false friendships are becoming strong; rising to the surface like cream. I invested in them not by stoic intentionality or earnestness but by a pure, organic, unexplainable and reciprocal affection that continues to elicit contentment and yes, even happy anticipation for future get-togethers. 

See, I had come to think that perhaps I did not like any social interaction. But as I shed my false pretense and should-based attitude, I am discovering that I actually do enjoy people!

What these authentic friendships possess is a mutuality of agreement and comfort with the length, type and frequency of visits, conversations and activities—and an unexplainable simpatico granting an intimacy to speak freely without fear of offense. Our values do not always align, but we don't have to hide them. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but we can, in camaraderie, agree to disagree.  

These rare and splendidly small-in-number relationships soon revealed themselves to be the comfy slippers and favorite sweaters that I could now unapologetically abide with as favorites. 

In this just-right state of being, I am, ironically, freer now to talk with strangers, because I can discern when to let a momentary cafe conversation with someone new end there in the cafe, or when to let it become another meeting over coffee in the future. 

In other words, I trust myself with people now because I trust myself with myself now. 

Do I wish I could have avoided the pain I caused, and which I caused to myself, through the denial of an approach to life I initially considered less-than, or even wrong? 

Yes. 

But the gift God has handed me is already tested and tried by the fruit He is bearing in the unfathomable first inner calm I have ever known mentally, emotionally, spiritually and in the work and quiet life in which I now spend my days. 

Within that is His forgiveness and assurance that things take time, along with His always ever-present wisdom and strength to stay His course.

In this world of pushy, clubby and at times militant mandates of stylized conventionalized and stereotyped togetherness, I would hope for God to be the permission for whoever is reading this to hear and listen to, finally, that still small voice—that clarion call towards the social style and innate relational fit God purposed and intended for you—not a yoke of “shoulds”—but a resting in the joy of the unique and no-longer-perceived-as-opposing characteristics that make up each one of us. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

Legitimizing Indignation

Continuing from the last post, on verbal aggression, I think Paul Tournier, in his book, The Violence Within, nails the reason for the generally divisive state of being today:

“Everyone talks of dialogue nowadays, but true dialogue is extremely rare. What we get Is more the exchange of threats and reciprocal aggressiveness, a dialogue of the deaf, confrontation by adversaries each of whom is sure his views are right and anxious only to impose them—not conversation between partners desirous of mutual understanding.”

This, he further and so beautifully exposes, is simply because of the delusional perspective we carry of our own self:

“What I discover in the course of meditation and in reading my Bible is my own violence which I had been calling legitimate indignation. Yes, indeed, what the Bible reveals is that it is not a case of the righteous on one side and the sinners on the other, peacemakers on one side and men of violence on the other, with a clear line of demarcation between them, but that violence is in the heart of all men.” 

“Those who reject the biblical concept of sin always tend—logically enough—to minimize the problem of violence, looking upon it as a kind of anomaly, an exceptional deviation, confirmed to a few sick persons, and a few ill-disposed persons; and this is reassuring to the others. But they are astonished when events give the lie to this easy optimism.

Sin is a word psychiatrists do not often use. I understand them, nevertheless sin is what is involved. I understand them because the idea of sin has been radically distorted by moralism, and because psychiatrists see, as I do, far too many pious souls weighed down by it.” 

Weakness reacts in verbal aggression out of a blindness to one's own sin. 

Be it gossip behind the back of a person we are too stubborn to personally air grievances with, haughty posts on social media, saccharine patronizing, a civic "discourse" of shouting and humiliating, or the sideways needling and belittling of the passive-aggressive kind--verbal antagonism merely indicates a hardened attitude, not only towards others but towards one's own complicity and accountability. 

Strength, on the other hand, responds non-defensely out of a softened heart: willingly aware and comprehending of one's own sin. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

Verbal Aggressiveness

We live in what often feels to be an increasingly aggressive society, specifically in attitude toward one another. 

Paul Tournier, in his book, The Violence Within, provides a thoughtful explanation:

“Now, as the work of the biologists has shown, aggressiveness is not a death instinct, but a life instinct. It is the instinct of self-preservation which constrains every animal and every human being to constant self-defence, to ‘save his skin,’ to inspire respect by a more or less threatening display of strength.”

In this paradigm, he goes on to say, 

“One must defend oneself, one must be strong, even threatening, not to conquer and destroy, but in order to be recognized as a person and respected by others.”

Tournier states that the receivers of this strong-arming then must “have a sufficient dose of aggressiveness in order to stand up to the aggressiveness of others.”

So this form of aggressiveness only begets more aggressiveness, leading to a stalemate, or worse. 

Tournier contrasts this aggressiveness with true strength:

“The stronger one is, the less one needs to show one’s strength.”

So in essence, what Tournier is saying, if applied to today's increasingly socially-practiced militant verbalism—in which respect is no longer the first rule of public and private discourse—is that aggressiveness is really weakness.

True strength, on the other hand, which may or may not have begun in a state of aggression, rests, finally, in its calm refusal to be verbally threatened into submission, compliance or group think. 

True strength lives in peace amid differences because it allows for differences and does not fear them.

copyright Barb Harwood

Quitting is a Way to Begin

A few years ago, I decided to call it quits on dissension and divisiveness.

I began by unplugging, cold-turkey, the haughty (if not often on-point), talk show host, who ceaselessly conjured anyone of an opposing mindset an enemy. 

Cancelling cable followed, along with the cessation of viewing Network news shows.

I quit striving for significance, spiritual and otherwise, because of its unavoidable tendency to pit me against not only myself and God, but against others through a sense of oneupmanship.

I quit politics and organized religion (note the comment on oneupmanship above). 

I’ve been establishing healthy boundaries that keep chronic critics at a distance, and I no longer subject myself to the spiritually-extroverted peer pressure to be, act and think a certain, and increasingly awkward, way.

The impetus for this quitting was the gradual and very observable realization that most people do not care what I think, because they (like I, too have been and am trying to stop being), are more concerned with what they already think, which prevents them from hearing what anybody else says, no matter how well supported or stated.

So not only am I quitting the compulsion to get my two-cents worth in, I’m hoping, with every good intention, to just be quiet and hear. 

Jesus said to let our yes be yes and our no be no. This advice has served me well in the jettisoning of the toxic elements of life.

“Yes” to the conversations elicited in mutual respect of varying viewpoints and individual personhood—“No" to single or closed-minded religious, secular or political emphases and dramatic drumbeats of incessant critique.

A tall order, and I have only recently begun the climb, in fits and starts.

However, since I have embarked upon this lighter mode of travel, I do marvel that I laugh more; I chuckle to myself in reaction to things that previously would have upset or frustrated. 

I’ve tapped into an adult-like assertiveness that empowers in managing expectations and preventing future occurrences of “having to extricate myself.” 

I now take the time to discern, objectively, other people’s motivations so as not to take everything personal. Along with that, saying “I’m sorry” is becoming easier; less threatening.

In short, God is fine-tuning the portal to a realistic perspective. 

In the throes of a Chicken Little, back-biting and possessively-ideological world, I am finding happy retirement from trying to get others to affirm me or to be converted to my point of view. 

I have gladly checked out, moving into that very cozy, joyful ambition of leading a quiet life, minding my own business and working with my hands so as to behave properly (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12).

Copyright Barb Harwood

Reason Aiding Belief Made Possible Only By the Spirit

B.B. Warfield (1851-1921) makes the point that a person’s faith in Christ ultimately comes to pass from the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. Apologetics (defense of the faith, using reason and evidence) is an avenue through which the Spirit conveys truth to a soul prepared by God and willing to go where, if left on its own, it would never go.

Warfield states:

“Mere reasoning cannot make a Christian; but that is not because faith is not the result of evidence, but because a dead soul cannot respond to evidence…The action of the Holy Spirit in giving faith is not apart from evidence, but along with evidence; and in the first instance consists in preparing the soul for the reception of the evidence.”

“…the world of facts is open to all people and all can be convinced of God’s existence and the truth of Scripture through them (facts) by the power of reasoning of a redeemed thinker” (italics mine).

Faith, then, is “conviction passing into confidence” via the empowering and continuous enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Norman Geisler and Patrick Zukeran elaborate on this process further by paraphrasing the words of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) from Edwards’ book, Of Being:

“Notwithstanding all of his stress on rational and objective evidence, Edwards did not believe that either general or special revelations were sufficient to make depraved men and women open to God’s truth. In addition to objective special revelation, there had to be a subjective, divine illumination. Only ‘the Devine and supernatural light’ could open a person’s heart to receive God’s revelation. Without this divine illumination, no one ever comes to accept God’s revelation, regardless of how strong the evidence for it is. A new heart is needed, not a new brain. This is accomplished by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. This divine light does not give any new truth or new revelations. Rather, it provides a new heart, a new attitude of receptivity by which one is able to accept God’s truth.” 

The above quotes align with Jesus’ own teaching: 

“When the helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, namely, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, He will testify about me,” (John 15:26).

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and remind you of all that I said to you” (John 14:26).

Jesus explained to Nicodemus:

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit." John 3:5b-8

And Paul, too, confirms:

“Now we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. We also speak these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. 

But a natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:12-14).

Jesus plainly states that we are to love the Lord with all our heart, soul and mind (Matthew 22:37), and the Apostle Peter instructs that we are to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18a). 

If we are to love and grow in this way, then it makes sense that we are to begin to know in this way—seeking, finding, meeting God in Christ Jesus via the Spirit’s revealing of what was previously to us a mystery—a mystery now unfolding through the willing capacity of our God-given and Spirit-established hearts, minds and souls. 

Faith, then, truly is a spiritually intellectual and experiential “certainty of things hoped for, a proof of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Copyright Barb Harwood