But as I grew up, there was another pain. The kind of subtle, soul-killing pain. The kind of pain in the heart. After all these years..it was still lingering there, and no church camps could get me over it. I bloged about the pain in my heart here. The pain that lasted a lifetime.. The pain my face couldn't hide.. The kind of pain that I had to bear alone..(or so it seemed).. I posted it all here in my blog because I know that one fine day, I would find a solution. I knew I was not alone when I was going through all this. I knew that there were lots of other girls/women out there who were going through the same thing as me, or worse. It felt like a lonely journey, but I knew that there are people like me, and I wanted to help. I hated to be in this condition and all I wanted was out. All I wanted was to be painless. And I was sure that I will find an answer one day- something to ease the pain and make it all disappear. And I found it- after all those years.
I have been reading. First, I heard about the book 'Authentic Beauty' by Eric and Leslie Ludy and my friends told me how much it meant to them and made them cry. But it didn't make me cry- I'm not sure about you. You can try it.
Then later, the same friend(Xiying) who lent that book to me, gave me another book for my birthday- 'Captivating' by John and Stasi Eldredge. I seriously didn't think much of it when I first had it. I thought to myself, "Oh.. just another 'woman book'. Even Authentic Beauty didn't have much of an effect on me- how much more could this one?" But I have to be honest with you, -it's nothing really like Authentic Beauty. In Authentic Beauty, I was forcing myself to finish the book or at least that particular chapter.. (Sorry, Leslie.. it was just a little too solid for me.) But in Captivating, I finished 4 chapters in a row and thought I only finished one. Seriously.. Captivating was THAT captivating. The name speaks for itself. This book made me laugh like crazy the first 4 chapters or so.. and then made me cry like crazy the next 4 chapters or so.. When I reached the 8th Chapter, I finally saw the number '8' and I was like.. "Oh.. how come? 8th already??" (I thought it was only like the 3rd chapter at the most.)
By the time I was like in the 8th Chapter, the crying became so frequent that I lost count of all the times I had to put the book down just to cry and then later taking it back up again. It was as though the book was made for me. I felt like Stasi and I had gone through the same things when we were young- like she planned for me to get this book for my birthday, wrote it and asked Xiying to pass it to me. But like Miss Angeline always say, "It is all in God's timing." When I reached the 'Healing' Chapter, I thought to myself yet again, "Oh.. here comes the healing part. Although it may actually turn out to be a disappointment at the end of it like in other books, I need the healing badly right now.. so I'm not going to put the book down just yet.. I'm hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.."
During the healing chapter, I actually felt my heart instantly being mended back and was whole again since then. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I know it happened somewhere in that healing chapter, as I read the part where Staci's husband talks about guys' views and I had such a revelation from there. I realized why things happened the way it happened and then they talk about the devil trying to attack us and all. But by the time I got to the devil part, the healing had already taken place and I only realized it here. I thought to myself, "Hey.. where's the pain? I thought there was a pain in my heart- like somewhere.. somewhere.. There!.. Eh? Hey!..where is it? The pain is gone!.. oh... .... WHAT??~! THE PAIN IS GONE??? WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY, ANNA? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???" But no.. the pain really was gone.. then as I continued reading the devil part.. I kept checking my heart like stopping a few times in every page to check my heart in disbelief that the pain had actually disappeared- for good. No warning that it was going to go- it just disappeared,.. and I actually woke up this morning with the first thing in my mind.. "God loves me.. :)" and asked myself, "What the heck? Is something wrong with me today?- I feel weird- what is it?... Am I actually waking up thinking about God's love for me? What the heck is wrong with me?? But no.. besides that.. there's still something wrong.. what is it?... no.. no... it can't be!.. It is!! THE PAIN IS GONE!!! What??! It lasted until now? The pain is STILL gone? I thought it would have returned by now- like.. somehow.. you know.. maybe in my sleep or something.. like in my dreams? No? No dreams? No nightmares? No dreaming of my ex? No? .. WOW! That is one heck of a book! I'm still shocked.. I wonder how long this is going to last.. (God, please let it last).. because my heart feels so different without a hole in it. You really healed me this time. I HAVE to blog this.. I finally found a solution- it's a miracle! :)"
And I'm so happy... God,.. I'm so happy.. I really feel set free and really happy. But you really want to know what it feels like the most? It feels weird. Haha.. all those days of torment in the dark chambers and when I finally come out to meet the sun.. I feel weird. It's like... "Have I REALLY been to this place before? Or is it my first time here? Did I really feel like this years ago before I went in that dungeon?" Yes, I feel happy, but I think I am facing more of a culture shock here.. haha.. It feels so different.. I have been in there for so long that I can't remember what the sun tasted like anymore.. it's like.. "So.. that bright thing blinding me- that's the sun? Are you sure? This bright? This hot? So hot? Are you sure? So you mean to say that the sun will be shining like this everyday? You mean like.. the sun is always there? As in.. always?" It's so hard to believe. But I want to believe. I want to believe because it's so good. And there's nothing like it. There is nothing like a broken heart made whole.
OK OK,.. I can hear the girls screaming already, "Anna~!!! NOW STOP BABBLING ABOUT HOW GOOD YOU FEEL ALREADY, AND START TELLING ME HOW I CAN MAKE THIS PAIN GO AWAY~!!!" Ok.. yes, I feel for you.. I'm sorry... I really do.. But my book is in my room.. wait lemme go get it..
Ok, I don't want to plagerise here.. I do encourage you to get the book, because you will learn more. I only can give you a few quotes here and there..
When the world was young and we were innocent- both man and woman- we were naked and unashamed (Gen. 2:25). Nothing to hide. Simply... glorious. And while that world was young, and we, too, were young and beautiful and full of life, a corner was turned. Something happened, which we have heard about, but never fully understood, or we would see it playing itself out every day of our lives, and, more important, we would also see the chances given to us every day to reverse what happened.
--
Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the LORD God had made. "Really?" he asked the woman. "Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?"
"Of course we may eat it," the woman told him. "It's only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die."
"You won't die!" the serpent hissed. "God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil."
The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too. (Gen. 3:1-6 NLT)
--
Alas.
There are no words.
Wail; beat your chest; fall to your knees; let out a long, lonesome howl of bitter remorse.
The woman was convinced. That's it? Just like that? In a matter of moments? Convinced of what? Look in your own heart- you'll see. Convinced that God was holding out on her. Convinced that she could not trust his heart toward her. Convinced that in order to have the best possible life, she must take matters into her own hands. And so she did. She is the first to fall. In disobeying God she also violated her very essence. Eve is supposed to be Adam's ezer kenegdo, like one who comes to save. She is to bring him life, invite him to life. Instead, she invited him to his death.
Now to be fair, Adam doesn't exactly ride to her rescue.
--
Let me ask you a question: Where is Adam, while the serpent is tempting Eve? He's standing right there: "She also gave some to her husband, who was with her and he ate it" (3:6). The Hebrew for "with her" means right there, elbow to elbow. Adam isn't away in another part of the forest; he has no alibi. He is standing right there, watching the whole thing unravel. What does he do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He says not a word, doesn't lift a finger. [I'm indebted to Crabb, Hudson, and Andrews for pointing this out in The Silence of Adam.] He won't risk, he won't fight, and he won't rescue Eve. Our first father -the first real man- gave in to paralysis. He denied his very nature and went passive. And every man after him, every son of Adam, carries in his heart now the same failure. Every man repeats the sin of Adam, every day. We won't risk, we won't fight, and we won't rescue Eve. We truly are a chip off the old block. (Wild at Heart)
--
You can see this play itself out every day. Men, just when we need them to come through for us ...check out. They disappear, go silent and passive. "He won;t talk to me," is many a woman's lament. They won't fight for us.
And women? We tend to be grasping, reaching, controlling. We are often enchanted, like Eve, so easily falling to prey to the lies of our Enemy. Having forfeited our confidence in God, we believe that in order to have the life we want, we must take matters into our own hands. And we ache with an emptiness nothing seems to be able to fill.
--
To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband.
and he will rule over you."
To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you." (Gen. 3:16-18)
--
Now, it would be good for us to give careful attention to all that has unfolded here -especially the curses God pronounced- for the story explains our lives today, east of Eden. For one thing, the curse on Adam cannot be limited only to actual thorns and thistles. If that were so, then every man who chooses not to be a farmer gets to escape the curse. Take a white-collar job and you're scot-free. No, the meaning is deeper and the implications are for every son of Adam. Man is cursed with futility and failure. Life is going to be hard for a man now in the place he will feel it most. Failure is a man's worst fear.
In just the same way, the curse for Eve and all the daughters cannot be limited only to babies and marriage, for if that were true then every single woman without children gets to escape the curse. Not so.The meaning is deeper and the implications are for every daughter of Eve. Woman is cursed with loneliness (relational heartache), with the urge to control (especially her man), and with dominance of men (which is not how things were meant to be and we are not saying it is a good thing- it is the fruit of the Fall and a sad fact of history.) [I am also indebted to Dan Allender who first pointed out these insights to me.]
Isn't it true? Aren't your deepest worries and heartaches relational- aren't they connected to someone? Even when things are good it your vast capacity for intimacy ever filled in a lasting way? There is an emptiness in us that we continually try to feed. And can't you see how much you need to have things under your control- whether it's a project or a ministry or a marriage? Are you comfortable trusting your well-being to someone else? And haven't you felt "this is a man's world," felt your vulnerability as a woman to be a liability? Most women hate their vulnerability. We are not inviting- we are guarded. Most of our energy is spent trying to hide our true selves, and control our worlds to have some sense of security.
When a man goes bad, as every man has in some way gone bad after the Fall, what is most deeply marred is his strength. He either becomes a passive, weak man- strength surrendered- or he becomes a violent, driven man- strength unglued. When a woman falls from grace, what is most deeply marred is her tender vulnerability, beauty that invites to life. She becomes a dominating, controlling woman- or a desolate, needy, mousy woman. Or some odd combination of both, depending on her circumstances.
Every woman knows now that she is not what she was meant to be. And she fears that soon it will be known -if it hasn't already been discovered- and that she will be abandoned. Left alone to die a death of the heart. That is a woman's worst fear- abandonment. (Isn't it?) Rather than turning back to God, reversing the posture that brought about our crisis in the first place (which Eve set in motion and we have repeated ad nauseum), we continue down that path by doing what we can to secure ourselves in a dangerous and unpredictable world.
And down in the depths of our hearts, our Question remains. Unanswered. Or rather, it remains answered in the way it was answered so badly in our youth. "Am I lovely? Do you see me? Do you want to see me? Are you captivated by what you find in me?" We live haunted by that Question, yet unaware that it still needs an answer.
When we were young, we knew nothing about Eve and what she did and how it affected us all. We do not first bring our heart's Question to God, and too often, before we can, we are given answers in a very painful way. We are wounded into believing horrid things about ourselves. And so every woman comes into the world set up for a terrible heartbreak.
As a result of the wounds we receive growing up, we come to believe that some part of us, maybe every part of us, is marred. Shame enters in and makes its crippling home deep within our hearts. Shame is what makes us look away, so we avoid eye contact with strangers and friends. Shame is that feeling that haunts us, the sense that if someone really knew us, they would shake their heads in disgust and run away. Shame makes us feel, no, believe, that we do not measure up- not to the world's standards, the church's standards, or our own.
Others seem to master their lives, but shame grips our hearts and pins them down, ever ready to point out our failures and judge our worth. We are lacking. We know we are not all that we long to be, all that God longs for us to be but instead of coming up for grace-filled air and asking God what He thinks of us, shame keeps us pinned down and gasping, believing that we deserve to suffocate. If we were not deemed worthy of love as children, it is incredibly difficult to believe we are worth loving as adults. Shame says we are unworthy, broken, and beyond repair.
Shame causes us to hide. We are afraid of being truly seen, and so we hide our truest selves and offer only what we believe it wanted. If we are a dominating kind of woman, we offer our "expertise". If we are a desolate kind of woman, we offer out "service". We are silent and do not say what we see or know when it is different from what others are saying, because we think we must be wrong. We refuse to bring the weight of our lives, who God has made us to be, to bear on others out of a fear of being rejected.
Shame makes us feel very uncomfortable with our beauty. Women are beautiful, every single one of us. It is one of the glorious ways that we bear the image of God. But few of us believe we are beautiful, and fewer still are comfortable with it. We either think we don't have any beauty of if we do, that it's dangerous and bad. So we hide our beauty behind extra weight and layers of unnecessary makeup. Or we neutralize our beauty by putting up protective,, defensive walls that warn others to keep their distance.
Over the years we've come to see that the only thing more tragic than the things that have happened to us is what we have done with them.
I (John) have a confession to make: I didn't want to coauthor this book. Oh, I thought it ought to be written. It needed to be written. I just didn't want to be the one to do it. I knew it would require me to enter the world of women- and into my woman's world- in a far deeper way than daily life requires of me. To do any sort of justice to a book for women would require me to go deeper, listen even more carefully, study, delve into the mystery (okay- bloody-mess) of a woman's soul. Part of me just didn't want to go there. I had what felt like an allergic reaction. Pull back. Withdraw.
I was keenly aware of this going on on inside me, and I felt like a jerk. But I also knew enough about myself and about the battle a woman's heart that I needed to explore this ambivalence. What is this thing in me- and in most men- that just doesn't want to go deep into a woman;s world? You are too much. Too hard. It's too much work. Men are simpler. Easier. And isn't that just the message you've lived with all your life as a woman? "You're too much, and not enough. You're just not worth the effort." (And why is it such an effort? There must be something wrong with you.)
Now, part of a man's fundamental reluctance to truly dive into the world of a woman comes from a man's deepest fear, failure. Oh, he may joke about "the differences of men and women," Mars and Venus and all that. But the truth is, he is afraid. He fears that having delved into his woman's world, he won't have what it takes to hep her there. That is his sin. That is his cowardice. And because of the shame, most of the time a man gets away with it. Most marriages (and long-term dating relationships) reach this sort of unspoken settlement. "I'm not coming any closer. This is as far as I'm willing too go. But, I won't leave, and that ought to make yu happy." And so there is this sort of detente, a cordial agreement to live with only so close.
The effect is that most women feel alone.
Some of this is simply selfishness on the part of men. Lord knows men and selfish and self-centered. When Eve was first assaulted, Adam didn't do jack squat. Men sin through violence and through passivity. It's that plain and simple ...and ugly.
But there is something else. There is something even more diabolical at work here. We had an amazing meeting a few months ago that proves to be -for me at least- a surprise unveiling of this mystery.
Stasi and I had gathered with the men and women in our ministry who do the men's and women's retreats. The men's team wanted to offer our counsel and support and prayer to the women's team for their upcoming event. It was a chance for the women -and each of them are really, really amazing women -to just sort of open their hearts to us and process how things were going.
Our gathering moved rather quickly from external kids of issues -how long the sessions should be and logistical stuff like that- to the internal world of the women's team themselves. As we began to talk more intimately, something started coming over me. Just a sense, an inexplicable but strong impression.
Back off
That's what I felt. No one said it; nothing they were doing implied it; it wasn't a voice in my head. Just a very strong impression. I wasn't sure where it was coming from, but this strong "reluctance," this sense of maybe we shouldn't press further into this, this feeling of just back off was growing in me, or over me, every moment we moved more deeply into their lives. With every step took toward their hearts I felt a stronger impression to tend the conversation, withdraw, bail out. Watching this unfold, I knew I was onto something big.
I knew that, as a man, this wasn't my heart's true desire toward these women. love them. I want to fight for them. I have many times. I knew as well it could not be their heart's desire. They invite our engagement. So I interrupted the flow of conversation with what seemed like an unrelated question to the women: "Do you feel alone in this?" Silence. Then tears, deep tears, from some deep place within each of them. "Yes," they all said "We do." But I knew it was more than about the retreats. "Do you feel like that in your lives, too, I mean, just generally, as a woman?" "Yes, absolutely. I feel alone most of the time."
Now, you must understand that each of these women have deep and meaningful relationships in their lives. I knew that if they feel alone, my God -what must every other woman feel as well? And this strong message of back off -if we feel that after years of fighting for them, what must all the other guys out there feel? I bet they haven't ever identified it, or put words to it, but I'll guarantee they've felt it .. and probably just thought it was what they, or their woman, of both of them wanted.
Back off, or Leave her alone, or, You don't really want to go there -she'll be too much for you is something Satan has set against every woman from the fay of her birth. It's the emotional and spiritual equivalent of leaving a little girl by the side of the road to die. And to every woman he has whispered, You are alone, or, When they see who you really are, you will be alone, or, No one will ever truly come for you.
Take a moment. Quiet your heart and ask yourself, "Is this a message I have believed, feared, lived with?" Not only do more women fear they will ultimately be abandoned by the men in their lives -they fear it from other women as well. That they will be abandoned by their friends, and left alone. It's time to reveal this pervasive threat, this crippling fear, this terrible lie.
I'm reminded of a scene from The Two Towers, the second film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It takes place in the land of Rohan, in the hall of the king, in the chambers of the lovely Eowyn. She is the king's niece, the only Lady of the court. Her dearest cousin, Theodred, the son of the king, has just died from wounds he received in battle. he is grieving her loss when Wormtongue -supposed counselor to the king but a treacherous, vile creature -slinks into her chambers and begins to weave his spell around the unprotected maiden.
WORMTONGUE: O... he must have died sometime during the night. What a tragedy for the king to lose his only son and heir. I understand his passing is hard to accept. Especally now that you brother has deserted you. [Wormtongue arranged for his banishment.]
EOWYN: Leave me alone, snake!
WORMTONGUE: O, but you are alone.
Oh, but you are alone. This is the way of the Evil One toward you. He plays upon a woman's worst fear: Abandonment. He arranges for her to be abandoned, and he puts his spin on every event he can do to make it seem like abandonment.
* tRUST & OBey the LORD *
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