Darling One: You Were Loved Before You Were Good
Jennifer Camp
8 min read ⭑
Take a step now. Just one. All you ever have to take is one.
Then that one. That one too.
Remember, remember.
I slip my toes into flip-flops, sling a canvas tote over one shoulder and turn right at the end of our drive. It’s Sunday afternoon, just on the cusp of September, August singing its final goodbye.
I pull my baseball cap lower over my eyes and feel the air warm on my arms, stepping over green-hatted acorns the oaks sprinkled like confetti along the hushed walk.
Be courageous now. Each step your own.
I breathe waning summer air into my nose and throat. Oh, lungs, fill, fill. And step, and step again, toward the crosswalk of our little downtown.
This is familiar.
Yes, it is familiar.
And brand new.
Yes, brand new.
I pull out my phone as I walk, eager to see my daughter’s face on the screen, hear her voice — tell her I am OK. (I want her to be OK.) She is the youngest, our only girl, and I knew I would know when to tell her about my battles with shame, my push and pull of repentance. A few years ago I told her about my abortion at 16 — and then the following struggle with even deeper self-contempt. But beyond confession, I wanted her to hear something equally important: a story of God’s healing and his promises for more.
I pull you toward me. Toward home. Toward goodness. More and more and more.
Yes, I feel you.
The screen shows her face as I walk: her bright eyes on me, soft; her kind lips pulled into a smile.
She is so sweet, Father. So sweet.
She is my girl. And your girl, too.
“Ab, I wanted to tell you things are good. God is so good. Things have been hard lately, and I know healing can be a long process. But I am so encouraged, so hopeful.”
“Mom, I am so glad. I am doing OK, too.”
Beth Stevenson; Unsplash
For weeks this summer, I had been praying fervently, seeking God’s closeness, asking him to come in more deeply and help me know him more. And then, on an otherwise quiet July afternoon, in the forests of Manton, California, at a monastery five hours north of our home in the Bay Area, where Justin and I had traveled to worship and retreat for two days with five Eastern Orthodox monks who live secluded from the world, I heard God’s clear voice: Let me tell you about deceit — words that, I know, will change my life forever, if I let them.
You lied to protect yourself. Why do you protect yourself, hide yourself, from me?
“We all have junk we need to deal with” is what Justin likes to tell me. And I agree, fundamentally, but in actuality, it seems I have grown quite comfortable with my “junk.” I may acknowledge it, sure. I may talk about it, say I will surrender, claim powerlessness and desperation and ask God to come in and get rid of it. But really, based on the fact that my junk has grown to be more junk, I think maybe what I really like to do is just organize the junk, move it around and talk about it enough so it looks like I am dealing with it. But not surrender it. Not look honestly at it. Not acknowledge my agency to choose God’s help, as well, or my powerlessness to fix it myself. And so, the junk has remained.
I am here. I do not condemn you. Be truthful. Keep going.
So often, I decide that settling for approval, the counterfeit of love, feels good enough, safer somehow. Throughout my life, I have sought opportunities to prove myself worthy … never to any avail, of course. And yet I have never stopped.
I want to stop.
Darling one, come here.
From a very young age, I believed people wouldn’t love me if they knew who I really was. I feared rejection. I feared not being loved. When I was caught messing up, I denied it. I lied about it. I blamed other people for it. I have no memory of a time when, off the bat, I admitted guilt.
Tell me.
At 6 years old, on a playdate, I fought with my friend in a camper. My nails scratched her arm, and she bled. When her mom confronted me, I held my ground. Yet I did it. I hurt my friend. And I lied about it.
At 12 years old, my metal desk chair pressing against the small of my back, my tongue burning from the Hot Tamales’ cinnamon sugar, I told Mrs. Lasley there was no candy in my mouth. Yet there was. I broke a class rule. And I lied about it.
As a teenager, I fabricated stories about where I was and who I was with. I spent nights in cars, in orchards, with boys I had sex with for fear they would leave. And then the most awful thing: I took a life to preserve what I believed was my own. I buried the reality of what I had done in my heart for decades. Yet I did it. I killed my child. And I lied about it.
For me, shame — sin — meant death, isolation, the end of love. So, long ago, I decided that to be loved I needed to be “good.” And, well, I knew I wasn’t good. But if people knew that, then who would love me? (I kept the secret about my abortion from almost everyone except Justin for 20 years.)
Oh, Jesus.
Look, raise your head now. Look at me.
I grew up going to church. I was baptized at 11, believing Jesus loved me and died for me and would be with me no matter what. But I don’t think I really believed it. Instead, I spent my life chasing pride and image. The idol of self.
And of course, lying is terrible for any relationship — with friends or parents or spouses or even oneself. But the thing is, when I was deep in the pattern of lying, I learned ways to sink in even deeper, slipping into other types of coping mechanisms, including dissociation.
Remember.
The day before God spoke at the monastery, I told my spiritual director about a time, now more than a decade ago, when my oldest son, Jackson, was upset. I got overwhelmed and shut myself in my room. Instead of staying and leaning in and reassuring him, I pulled away. He was young and sad and confused, and after too many minutes of not being able to fix whatever was wrong, I literally ran away.
I am here.
I told my kind-but-candid Jesuit spiritual director that I felt enormous shame about my behavior and wished that I had the maturity, in hindsight, to handle things differently, thinking that the point of my sharing was to illustrate an issue I have with control: I wasn’t able to make my son do what I wanted him to do, so I ran away.
I was with you. I was with both of you. Neither of you was alone.
As I described to him how I felt behind the door, my young son crying on the other side, I unconsciously used the third person: “She got overwhelmed. ... She locked herself in her room. ... Looking back, I wish she did things better. ...”
I carried on with the telling for a few more beats until the priest stopped me: “Wait, you are talking about yourself in the third person. You are talking about you as if you are not there, as if you are not the one who did it. You are dissociating. That is something people who experience trauma sometimes do.”
Deep breath now.
My head was spinning. What? To cope with shame, I tell lies — to myself and to others? I don’t want to see my sin? I don’t want to feel the shame? Like a coward, I separate myself from it, tucking it away in a separate place in my heart, telling myself the even deeper lie — if you don’t admit it, it didn’t happen. I am self-delusional, a poster child for sin begetting more sin.
These are not words I say to you.
Of course, God woos us with kindness, with conviction about our sin if we want it. And in the weeks leading to our trip to the monastery, I had been praying for conviction. I gave God access to my heart. I gave him permission to do whatever he wanted. I wanted more of him, more of his love, more of his life in me. And with the open heart came the waves of invitation after invitation — in the conversation with my spiritual director, in the whisper from God in the monastery. Each was teaching me how to be honest about myself, to myself and then with others.
I was so desperate to be loved.
You didn’t know you were … and were always … loved.
“In my deepest place, below my pernicious fears, deeper than my self-protective instincts, more than anything else, I long to love.”
This month I’ve begun a 12-step program for people with “hurts, hang-ups and habits.” The people I’ve met there are the beloveds: the humble, the meek and the beautiful. They are honest. They know who they are without God, and they know how, despite their sin, they are continually, without hesitation, loved. If you had asked me a few weeks ago whether I could include myself in this group, I wouldn’t have seen it. But now I do. I am an addict: I am addicted to my self-image and to other people’s approval. And, as an addict, a human, I am powerless to attain health and wholeness without God.
I am here. I am always loving you, and I am always here.
Justin tells me my deceit has never been as well hidden as I thought. He tells me he’s always been able to see the truths I’m trying to deny and ignore, that I make them plain with my actions if not my words. He says that we humans are pretty highly attuned to smoke out inauthenticity, but I’ve clung to that inauthenticity my entire life. And I know it’s gotten in the way of relationships — with him, with my siblings, with my friends.
C.S. Lewis, in his classic book “The Four Loves,” wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Oh, Jesus. Break me out of here, this place, airless and dark, where I’ve nailed the door shut.
I hold nothing back from you.
I am scared. I can’t breathe. I can’t find my way out. Where are you?
I am here.
I can’t see you. It is dark.
Is it? You can feel me, hear my voice. I see you.
I’m praying and pleading with God to rewire my neural pathways, to see vulnerability differently. He has to, and he is. I’m desperate to see vulnerability not as a door to potential (phantom?) harm but to love — to loving and being loved, to knowing others and being known.
Ah.
In my deepest place, below my pernicious fears, deeper than my self-protective instincts, more than anything else, I long to love. I long to love well. I long to love with a heart abandoned to wild, godly love. And I want to be able to receive all the love God, my husband, my family and my friends have for me. And I want to spend my life pouring it back out. All of it.
I love you, and I’m not leaving.
My call with my daughter is just a few minutes. My daughter’s love is a delicious balm I can never deserve. At the crosswalk, I step out into the street and look up, thick oaks flanking the sidewalk beneath the sky’s pale blue.
You are enough. I have made you always enough.
I know. I am trying to believe it. Teach me honesty. I am powerless over my sin, addicted to it, without you.
Jennifer Camp is a poet and listener who delights in investigating the deeper places of the heart. She founded Gather Ministries with her husband, Justin, is Editor-at-Large of Rapt and manages Loop Collective, a community for women who reject complacency and pursue connection with God.