Remembering, Mourning and Moving Forward

A defining process as you become an adult is that of thinking through the legacy of your parents and childhood. This is especially important if you find yourself about to get married. You have to ask the question "how has the person I am now been shaped by the influence of my childhood, either positively or negatively?" For me (and I hope this is also true for most people, though I know for a fact that it isn't) reflecting on my childhood leads me to such thankfulness. In so many ways I have been deeply blessed by the love, guidance and provision of my parents. There are certainly some funny things too, no parents are perfect, and as Jon and I have learnt how to relate to one another over the last four and a bit years there have been patterns of relating I learnt from my family that I've realised I need to change. That process involved recognising the fault, working out where I learnt it and how deeply it was entrenched but also taking responsibility for the reality that I am the one perpetuating the problem and deciding that I will change. I couldn't have got away with saying defiantly "Well, this is who I am! Take it or leave it!" That would leave the responsibility for most marital disharmony (which almost ended up being an amusing typo - "martial" - that certainly suggests disharmony eh!?) we would experience firmly on my shoulders!

Another legacy of my childhood that my parents didn't have as much to do with, was my experience of growing up in church. (A previous post that discussed a different element of this is here ) Again, when I ask myself how my church youth experience has shaped me, I can be overwhelmingly positive. I was surrounded by loving, older Christian role-models, I really engaged with God's word and learnt a lot about how to read the bible and teach it to others, I had a fantastic six years with an amazing group of Christian friends and I had millions of opportunities to try all kinds of ministry and service. Overwhelmingly it was an amazing time of learning and growth.

That said, over the past ten years since I left Year 12, I've been hurtling towards this state of spiritual epiphany where I seem to find myself now. It's been a slow process but I really understand it as God opening up my eyes to see a bigger picture of who he is. No disrespect to Sydney evangelicals at all but growing up in the youth group of a Sydney evangelical church seemed to mean that much of an exploration of the role of the Holy Spirit was pretty off limits. I think that mainly, at the time that I seemed to have learnt some of my most enduring, and most unhelpful things about the Holy Spirit, our youth group was reacting against a similar sized youth group at a different church where apparently kids were being led astray by too much of a focus on "experiencing" God (i think the emphasis there is on experience rather than on God). The sad consequence of this, even though it may not have been what was overtly taught to me, I learnt a deeply-held suspicion of anyone that talked about experiencing God in ways that were different to my experiences - of anyone that raised their hands while singing in church, of anyone who spoke in tongues, of anyone who spoke about God giving them peace about a decision, or anyone who suggested that God had led them to act in a particular way...

In the same way that recognising malformed elements of our adult selves leads us to mourn the problems that we've created or contributed to, recognising this deficiency in my spiritual understanding, and its ongoing repercussions in my life, has really caused me to experience a great period of mourning. I wept for the years of my Christian walk that have gone by where I have expected less of God than he is willing to give to me. I wept because I had not learnt to relate to God in the intimacy that I now know is possible. I wept over the many years in which I dealt with a "business-like" part of God and the bad habits I had learned in my youth of how to relate to God and weak expectations of how God would relate to me. Thankfully though, Jon was on hand for God to use and speak through to me. He pointed out to me that my sadness was manifesting itself as blame-casting and bitterness and helped me to realise that perhaps there were more elements of myself in this mix than I was willing to acknowledge.

Maturity for anyone means acknowledging what has happened in their past but also being able to move forward taking responsibility for themselves in the current moment and recognising that they don't have to let their past dominate their future. For me, that means recognising the part I have played, and continue to play, in holding myself back. The irony of all this is that when I get over my blame casting I am able to acknowledge the fact that the strongest legacy of my youth was a real encouragement to enter into great habits of daily bible reading and prayer. And here is where I need to confess to my brothers and sisters the reality that this is where I have been deficient.

In home group this week we were looking at Luke 11:1-13 and I was really struck by Jesus' assumption in verse 13 that we would be most persistent in praying for the Father in heaven to give us the Holy Spirit. And so this is the way that I hope to move forward, which isn't to say that over the last ten years the Holy Spirit hasn't moved me a long way forward anyway, in spite of myself, as tends to be His way! Here is another nice post (from the previously referenced author, not God, the one before that) that I read this morning, which really helped to acknowledge this reality that I do know, am still learning to know and look forward to fully knowing without second guessing.

p.s. The photo is from here Did anyone else see that beautiful doco on the Grafton Jacaranda Festival on SBS last night? I cried... not all that unusual actually...