you have issues surrounding your identity, those issues will not go away if you “make it.” They will be there until they are hunted down and identified and dealt with. We often live under the illusion that when we reach that goal and complete our mission, those issues that churn on the inside will go away.
But it’s not true.
There is a great saying in the recovery movement: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
That’s why when we talk with people who are just itching to leave town because they “just need to get out of here,” we know they will be back. Often they find out that whatever it is, it went with them. The problem is not the town. The problem is somewhere inside of them.
Success doesn’t fix anything. We have the same problems and compulsions and addictions, only now we have more stress and more problems and more pressure.
I used to think—and I’m giving you a window into my insanity here—that when the church got bigger, then it would be easier.
Easier?
I don’t know if this connects with you, but have you bought into any of these lies? The lies that tell you success and achievement will fix it? They won’t. You will be the same person, only you’ll have more of everything, and that includes pain.
In addition, there is always a mystery behind the mystery.8 There is a reason we do what we do, and often it is the result of something that is the result of something that is—you guessed it—the result of something. What happens is we try to fix things, but we stop at the first or second layer. We’re stressed and so we make adjustments in time management. But a better question is, why do I take on so much? But an even better question is, why is it so hard for me to say no? Or even, why is that person’s approval so important to me?
But that’s not even the real issue.
What I have learned is that the deeper you go, the more painful it gets.
We have to be willing to drag up everything.
I started going to counseling and discovered that there are things that happened to me when I was thirteen that have shaped me.
Thirteen?
In one moment of enlightenment, my therapist and my wife were helping me drag up specific events from when I was in my early teens. I was remembering them like they were yesterday. I remember the encounter, what was said, what I did, how I reacted, and what it did to me.
Now I come from a family where I was loved and supported, and yet I have junk from way back then. What we discovered is that some of these experiences produced a drive in me to succeed and prove myself and show others . . . sound familiar?
Part of my crash came from my failure to identify these forces until recently. I had been pushing myself and going and going and going and achieving and not even really knowing why.
It is easier to keep going than to stop and begin diving into the root causes.
I think this is why so many pastors have affairs. They don’t know how to stop. They are driven and are achieving and are exhausted and don’t know how to say they’re tired. They are scared to look weak. So they start looking for a way out. They know that a “moral failure” will give them the break they’re looking for.
As pastor, I spend a lot of timing dealing with other people’s pain. And when I am dealing with theirs, then I don’t have to think about my own. I think that’s why so many of us push ourselves so hard. As long as I’m going and going and going, I don’t have to stop and face my own pain. Stopping is just so difficult.
I learned that most of my life I avoided the abyss because it is the end of the game. There’s no more pretending.
It is scary. It is scary to hit the wall because you don’t know what it’s going to feel like. And you might get hurt.
But what happened to me in that storage room between the 9 and 11 A.M. services, in those agonizing moments of despair, was the best thing that could have happened.
I couldn’t go on.
Usually, we can go on. And that’s the problem.
We put on the mask, suck it up, and keep going.
We find some extra reserve of strength and pretend like everything’s fine, like that incident was just a minor blip that isn’t a big deal.
But it is a big deal.
It’s a sign that we are barely hanging on. And we ignore these little blips at the risk of our souls. It is only when something deep within us snaps that we are ready to start over and get help.
We have to let the game stop.
I realize this is not groundbreaking news, but when we get desperate and realize we cannot keep living this way, then we have to change. We have no other option, which is why we only change when we hit the abyss. Anything else is like window shopping; we may look for a moment or even try it on, but we aren’t taking anything home with us.
As I let all this come spewing forth the first time in my therapist’s office, he interrupted me. I was making lists of all the people I was working to keep happy. He said it was clear that there were significant numbers of people I was spending a significant amount of time working to please and that my issue was a simple one.
I was anticipating something quite profound and enlightening as I got out my pen.
He said this: “Sin.”
And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
The relentless pursuit of who God made me to be.
I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.
I was split.
I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other . . . people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn’t measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head. I had this idea of a superpastor—all of these messages I had been sent over the years that I had received and internalized.
Superpastor is always available to everyone and accomplishes great things but always has time to stop and talk and never misses anyone’s birthday and if you are sick he’s at the hospital and you can call him at home whenever you need advice and he loves meetings and spends hours studying and praying and yet you can interrupt him if you need something—did I mention he always puts his family first?
Now you are starting to see some of my issues.
I am not superpastor.
I don’t do well in an office nine to five.
I jump out
