Having felt close to God before, I thought my busy life, as a new mom (of two year olds at that time) had come between God and my love for him. I told God I wanted to bathe in his love, and I tried to seek him, still thinking my busyness was at fault for the distance I felt. I was dismayed when I realized none of my efforts worked. I could not really feel his love. I knew, in my mind, that God loved me, but something was blocking my ability to get close to him. Two years later my mom died, and my sister made one honest statement about my mom’s neglect, and a flood of anger and sorrow rushed into my mind and heart.
And within a year or two of bringing all that awful pain to God, I felt so much of God’s love again. I was surprised to realize I had been blocking God’s love by denying my anger and pain. Since I have been discussing the struggles of understanding God’s love in my most recent posts, I wanted to expose this problem I had experienced, in my hiding from God.
We may hide from God in many ways, but we always reap loneliness and never love. Like me, you may not have intended to hide from God. My becoming a mom triggered old pain I had denied for many years. That pain also came from my going along with lies others had insisted I believe. But I’ll go back many years to explain where the pain first formed.
Growing up in a legalistic home, I thought God expected me to be perfect. I also thought I had to agree with other people’s masks when they tried to act perfect too. I thought that loving others meant pretending to believe any lies other people presented about themselves. Even if I knew someone was being dishonest as they presented a false front, if that person wanted to look right or moral, I thought that agreeing was a way to respect and love that person.
But when I went along with other people’s deception (whether via direct lies or by other means of faking) we were both lying and neither of us truly or fully loved each other. When I went along with other people’s lies, I did not fully love God either. I was terrified of hurting or rejecting others, but when they acted fake, presenting a persona who they were not, I did not know any other way, except to go along with their dishonesty. I did not know this was like idolatry, idealizing a person and letting any belief I had, of that person, to come between me and God.
It is better for a woman to tell her spouse, children or siblings, “I need some alone time, and want to do this fun activity for me,” instead of telling a lie about the time she wants to spend alone. One man said his mom claimed she slaving away for the family, but it turned out she was having fun “me time” doing sewing projects her family did not need, but which were fun, artistic expressions. Unfortunately this mother needed hoards of time alone away from her family and often found time to do things for herself, and not for her family.
It is better for a mom to admit, “I let that happen, because I was scared or weak,” and then admit she has allowed some form of abuse or neglect. The neglect may include extremes like allowing a father and sons to beat the daughters, or not taking the child to the doctor when needed, or refusing to hug a child, listen to a child, spend any quality time with the child, or any other form of neglect. It is wrong for such a mom to blame the child and say, “That didn’t hurt you. You are a whiner.” Whatever a person neglects, it is still better for a parent to admit she did not do all she should have done than to blame the family member who suffered. Many of those things happened to me.
Friends and children are very forgiving, but how can they forgive what the other person will not confess? And if friends and family members pretend this other person has done nothing wrong how can her family fully love that person? When someone pretends to be perfect, he or she shuts out love, because people cannot love a puppet or caricature. People can only love fellow human beings.
So when the pain of my relationship with my mom, came to the surface, after I became a mom, I denied it. But I could not fully feel God’s love while denying that pain. I was being as fake as my poor mom felt she needed to be. While my mom (who did love me) was so afraid and prideful that she denied all wrong, I was fake for going along with my mom’s pretense. When I was a younger adult, I had tried, a few feeble times, to talk to my mom about just a few of my concerns. Those were some of the rare times when I saw my normally unflustered, stoic mom become livid with anger. She cut off that conversation and demanded I not say another word.
So I always backed down, but we both left being fakes. We both put up with a relationship that could have been so rich in love and forgiveness. My mom could have asked for my forgiveness, and she could have urged me to stop being fake with her too. I learned much of my “false happy front” from her. But as an adult, it was my fault that I continued to deny my pain and not try harder to be vulnerable with God and maybe even with my mom, especially when I became a mom and that pain finally came to the surface again.
I hold myself and my mom responsible for our “dance of deception.” We never grew as close as I did with my dad. He admitted he had wronged me and then worked on changing. I confessed my unfair anger against him and worked to stop expressing it and fully forgave him.
But I never realized my fake front with my mother would come between me and God. I didn’t even realize my sin in that mother-daughter relationship in which we both kept up a fake persona. I knew about my general sins, like getting grumpy and snapping at my mom and other obvious sins in our relationship. I apologized for those sins against her. But I had never considered it a sin to go along with my mom’s deception and act like I did not feel pain when my mom never apologized for things that hurt me badly.
When my sister, just once, admitted to how much this had hurt her, I felt a surge of emotion, like an avalanche that I could not stop. But unlike the destruction of an avalanche, those strong feelings cleansed my soul, because I brought those angry, hurt, confused thoughts and feelings to God. I told him everything. I also found a counselor, because my sister only spoke her truth after my mom had died. So I did not get a chance to talk to my mom about my concerns, though I am not sure if my mom would have wanted to listen then any more than she had when I was much younger and told her how I felt. I will never know.
So the counselor helped me express those thoughts and concerns. She helped me get out all the harsh feelings too. She helped me remember that I did love my mom, and she did love me. But this did not condone the significant neglect in our relationship, nor my mom’s duplicity. The counselor also challenged the lie my mom believed: “Parents never apologize to their children,” and the other lie, “Children must only say their parents are perfect.” Anyone, but God, who says “You must say I am perfect. You must never tell me I hurt you. You must never ask me to apologize,” is sinning. And admitting another person is sinning, when she is, is not a sin against that person. It is not disrespectful. It is not being unloving. It is not rejecting a person to call sin a sin. Doing so can be the most respectful, loving, accepting thing we can do, because sin separates us from God and from other people. Sin is like a wall between two people. I could never grow as close to my mom because of this. And when the pain finally came back to the surface, and I denied it, I was hiding from God, acting perfect too.
When I became a mom, I was forced to look at problems with my own mom. I could hide many problems from myself, until I became a mom. Then, as I cared for my own small children, I was forced to remember bad things that happened when I was a child. This was when the memories pushed up and caused me to feel distant from God.
I have learned that often, during times of transition, old problems may come to the surface. A man in his fifties became severely depressed. Then one day he realized his birthday was coming, and he was about to turn the age his own father was when he died. The man missed his dad and needed to work on some issues about his sorrow over his dad’s premature death. So my pain, upon becoming a mom, was also a transition, but an important time for me to admit to my deception, which in many ways was idolatry. Idealizing my mom (pretending she was perfect) drove a wedge between me and my love of God.
I did not mean to be dishonest. But I learned that I had not fully loved my mom by going along with her deception. And I had pulled away from God by being dishonest too. So now I tell God about all of my pain and ask him to show me if there is any way in which I am not being honest. I think of Psalm 139: 23-24 “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” I don’t want anything to come between me and God. And I don’t want to let any relationship continue if it is based upon deception. I want to heal that relationship. And if the other person refuses to stop lying, I will have to pull away and may even need to end the relationship. I want to live by the truth, so I can have God’s true love and offer it to others.
I pray I have blessed you with this week’s post. If I have uncovered any pain in your life, please let the Lord know, and if you would like, also ask me to pray for you. God is so good, fully true, and he can handle all of our hard feelings. We can be fully honest with him, and I pray we can also be that way with our friends and family.