Already Included #31 – You

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By Sarah Nyhan

I think I know what Saul/Paul was doing for those first few years after his conversion. I think he had to go off and be by himself while everything he thought he knew fell away and was replaced by truth. Less of an intellectual exercise. More of a rebirth in the sense of so thouroughly experienced that every single cell is saturated with this new real life. Actually lived and alive versus simply conceptualized.

This is what has been happening with me. To use Paul Young’s analogy, I didn’t realize I had constructed and others had helped me build such a monstrosity of a facade. My entire identity was totally tied to what I did, what I had, and what I thought I knew. Versus truth. All of the facade is now being burned away.

I was ready to jump in and repeat the same old formula with this new-to-me “already included” knowledge. But I feel like God is saying, “No, baby girl. We’re going to do things totally different this time. I appreciate so much your heart and enthusiasm, but I have everyone else. What I want us to focus on for now, for this time, is YOU. You are important also. Your healing and wholeness is the priority right now. What eventually overflows will organically be shared with others in due time.”

This is TOTALLY different than the experience modeled for me by the church as an incorporated entity in society. What do most churches do that I have experienced? They have not been hospitals for the soul, even though they claim such. Instead they have been like labor camps. Oh sure, there is initial love-bombing if you are considered an outsider. But once you’ve converted then it’s all about what you can do for them, dressed up as what you can do for “god”. And then the only acceptable answer is: always more. To them, Jesus’ sacrifice was not enough; you also must die.

This is my new litmus test for truth: are you offering me anything? Are you invested in me as a person? Is relationship with me a priority? Or are you just doing the same ol’ dance with new clothes? You know the one. In its extreme form it looks like what we think of most televangelists. Although more subtle and maybe more insidious forms are likely manifesting in most local church entities. In my experience.

And although the damage is the same no matter the motivation, I suspect the great majority of pastors and preachers start out with absolutely fabulous intentions. I really believe that. Maybe even some seasoned folks still think this is the right way. I mean, it’s all they have ever known. Like me, it’s all that was ever modeled for them from the pulpit.

Though I suspect at some point, as I experienced, you encounter a crisis. If you pursue truth hard and long enough then you must eventually, even in short time, face a crisis. Where the religious machine fails and your heart has a choice to make. I can’t tell you what to do. That is between God and you. But eventually you’ll have a decision to make. Is your trust in the religious machine or is your trust truly in God?

And really, to be even more specific, is your trust in yourself or in God? Again, I never saw it that clearly in the beginning. But over and over and over, it’s been made clear to me that is the core problem. Religion says I am responsible. That I can’t really trust God all the way.

Let me tell you a story. A true story. The other day some people from the city came out to the property I manage. They wanted to cut some trees near the powerlines. Caught off guard, in the heat of the moment, I was convinced by the city workers to approve them completely removing the trees versus only trimming them. Later when I was not under their influence, I looked at the trees and regretted my approval. But I thought that it was too late to change my mind.

As I stressed about this, one day they entered the property while I was gone. However, the property owners just “happened” to also show up at the same time for a rare site visit. The property owners were able to speak with the city workers and save the trees. All without any help from me.

This is our God. Who knows that I mess up. And knows that I don’t know how to fix my mess up. And He cares for me. So He somehow makes the property owners show up at the last minute and save the trees. This is a God I can trust. To be way bigger than me.

This is the God that is interested in me. Not just what I can do. Not just what I can give. Whose priority is relationship with me. As long as it takes. Not so that I can do anything for Him.

I was reminded this week of the verse in the Bible where it talks about a good man leaving an inheritance for his family. Not the other way around. Who among us has even ever experienced that? With our biological or church parents?

And again, I don’t think most know any better. Just passing on what was passed to them.

But how different would it look if we cared more about healing the person and being in relationship with the person versus setting them up to be another cog in the religious machine? Versus stripping them of everything they can possibly give? Fleecing them. Until they can’t take it anymore and run away out of desperation. For their lives.

All I am saying is there is another way. All things work for good. We get there one way or another. If not in this life, then I am sure we will see clearly during whatever comes after. But why wait that long? We can choose life now. Jesus came not to build another religious machine. He came to give us life, and life more abundant!!! Right now. The kingdom of heaven is at hand – right now. Jesus came and showed us what we have been missing all along. What is available to us right now. Without having to jump through hoops of performance or poverty in all its various forms.

You absolutely will encounter loads and loads and loads and loads of trouble. But it will be different trouble. It will break your heart versus breaking your back. In that sense, there will be some dying. Of your ego mainly. As everything that is false is burned up. That is a dying without counting Jesus’ sacrifice as incomplete or insufficient.

In case you’ve never read anything I’ve written before, I am not talking about a legal or accounting transaction. Merely that WE needed to kill Jesus, the Son of God. So we would finally have proof that no matter what we can think of or do, God is always and forever for us. The resurrection proved that God is not the least bit intimidated by or ever against us. As individuals. Even as He drives out ever last bit of hell that we hold onto in our blindness.

God doesn’t destroy us.

Already Included #30 – Good

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By Sarah Nyhan

You can be right or you can be in relationship?

Maybe. Still figuring this one out.

Probably it’s more like one of my favorite quotes from Jane Austen: “You have drawn two pretty pictures; but I think there may be a third – a something between the do-nothing and the do-all.”

In any event, I am learning that my old way of labeling people as merely good or bad is not working anymore after letting this already included message sink in. Probably it never worked. I remember a former friend previously saying, “You’re so damn black and white, Sarah.”

I have realized that unfortunately people who do the most heinous things can also do very good things. And vice versa – those who are generally known to do mostly good things can do something really hurtful every now and then. This is being human.

I thought before that some people were good and some people were bad. You just had to find out who was who. Well, I’ll tell you how far that gets: eventually you end up totally alone and even loathing yourself.

I think everyone will disappoint you at some point. I heard I think Russell Brand say that expectations are akin to fantasies. And I have been guilty for decades of holding people hostage to my expectations/fantasies.

Now that is not to say that there isn’t good and bad behavior. Although even this has been challenged for me. I was raised to believe that certain cultural norms were good or bad. I have had to learn that just isn’t so. If a male wasn’t raised to open and hold a door for a woman, that doesn’t mean he is a bad person. That is only a cultural norm. Another example is even leaving the toilet seat up. Or sending thank you cards. Or not cutting in front of someone in traffic. All of these are just cultural norms. As America is diversified by people from all over the world, I have had to come to the realization that the world I grew up in has changed and many people are not going to do the things I was raised to do. But that doesn’t make them bad people. Or good people for that matter. I could continue on that subject, but not today.

Yet we know there are truly some good and bad behaviors. For instance, I’d say across the world humans know it is good to provide for children and elders. People across the world know it is bad to hit someone – especially if they are the weaker party. People know it’s bad to murder. Etc.

But there is a whole lot out there that I have had to take off the table. Did you know a person isn’t bad if they don’t go to church? And not good if they go to church every day either. Etc. You get the idea.

But that being said, why are we so compelled to label people as good or bad? I guess I can only speak for myself. For me, I think in truth, I am more so attempting to categorize people as safe or unsafe. And that opens a huge can of worms, gets to the heart of the matter.

This might change in the future, but for now I’ve determined that no one is categorically completely safe. This realization can initally lead to a lot of panic, anxiety, and depression. But I’ve learned that the more I accept this human state in all of us – the more personal responsibility I take for my own safety. This is opposed to failing in attempting to make everyone else responsible for my safety.

Now again, this is another can of worms. I would like to clarify that children are not responsible for their own safety. It’s the responsibility of ALL adults to keep children safe until they can do so for themselves. The same with others who need protection: the blind and those who are are challenged in other ways that leave them vulnerable in ways where they are unable to do for themselves.

But at some point most of us have the capability to keep ourselves out of a lot of trouble. But this means standing up, claiming our power, and saying no. Something that I have found is not taught or encouraged in group situations, including a lot of churches.

We can go on and on about #metoo. I think the conversation is very helpful. But women, at some point we have to stop tolerating the bullshit we accept from these men. We do ourselves and the rest of women a diservice when we allow a man to disrespect any of us in any way. I am first to say guilty as charged.

Hear me out: if I go down a dark alley at night in a mini skirt and get raped – it was NEVER my fault. I should be able to walk down a street naked and not get attacked. The attacker is the only one to blame.

But if I hear my girlfriend has a guy who cheated on her, hit her, and stole her stuff – and I am trying to get his attention – shame on him still – but shame on me also!

These are extreme examples to prove a point. But this plays out in everyday situations. How many times does our gut tell us something and we ignore it? Because the person looked normal enough or played the part. And then on the opposite side, we take this to unnecessary extremes and discriminate against people for simply how they look.

It gets even more complicated when you realize some people are safe only to a point. How do you balance interacting with them without encouraging them any further? Realizing they aren’t good or bad. They are just human – and yet every one of all the billions of us are uniquely different.

What does this look like day to day? Mainly what hills do we want to die on? What is important and why? Is someone actually being bad to me or is it my ego wanting to scream, “Off with their heads!”? Am I scared? Are there other options?

Nobody can tell YOU how to answer these questions. And the answers will probably change over time. You do better when you know better. Experience and life teach us new lessons every day. So we are always growing.

What this looks like for me now is setting my own standards for the first time in my life. Versus always looking to others for approval or direction. And not apologizing for that. Yet, being prepared to accept whatever consequences may ensue.

It also looks like allowing certain people back into my life but only to certain extents. You don’t give your car keys to a toddler. In like manner, people now have to earn my trust. Whereas before I gave them way too much benefit of the doubt and unfortunately some people knew and abused that.

I blame the church in some sense for this. I attended a church that taught love believes the best to the point where it allowed opportunistic wolves to fleece the flock at times. Or we preach forgiveness way past the point of again serving up the flock on a plate for wolves to devour.

There has to be wisdom and balance. It would be so nice to just be able to identify all the “bad guys” by a purple stripe on their palm or something. But life is way way way more complicated than that.

I am finding I have to reevaluate my thinking on everything and everyone all the time. People change and people have their limits. Even all of our cells are replaced every so often. Just because someone was doing great last year doesn’t mean they can’t be pushed to a different level this year.

Dr. Bruce Wauchope does a lot of work on explaining how our minds are corrupted in framing our worlds in terms of the good/bad tree. And I agree. He does a much better job of explaining this than I can do now. I recommend checking out his talks on YouTube.

But in the meantime, my thinking is changing from “Is this person good or bad?” to “Do I like what this person is doing? Why or why not? And if not, what am I going to do about it?”

To insist on labeling people as good or bad in my experience leads to the death of all my relatationships. This is probably a huge shock to those still living in the paradigms of thinking some people are in/safe with God and some people aren’t.

It’s “easier” to ask a few questions as a litmus test. That doesn’t require connection or relationship. That doesn’t require being present or opening ourselves up. That doesn’t require taking each new person as for who they are individually versus categorizing them.

To her credit, my ex who had a devil tattoo is still to this day one of the best people I’ve known in terms of almost everything. For sure she had her faults, but I lament dragging her to church one time and harassing her to go a million other times. I lament trying to “convert” her. For all her faults, she had real love, love we see in Christ, down more than 99% of people I know. Not a pushover either. She knew how to say no.

A real shame for all of us who sat in church for mutiple days a week year after year, decade after decade and it never changed our hearts. We thought all we had to do was say the right things. Never really risking real engagement.

There is so much more to unpack on this subject, but that’s all I have time for today.

Already Included #29 – Works versus Work

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By Sarah Nyhan

Life is so funny and God is so much bigger than the boxes I try to nail Him into. When I first started these “Already Included” posts, I had such a different idea of what I’d be talking about. My desire was and still is to be able to explain and expound on all the purely intellectual theological aspects of this already included message.

Much to my surprise, it was rather revealed to me that I spent the overwhelming majority of my life in my mind and now I was going to learn how to really rejoin the human race and learn how to live again. To really live. Something that I had forgotten how to do after so many years spent just reading the Bible and listening to preachers. Hours and hours every week.

I am confident that once I learn to live again, once I really am living then God will open my mind again to allow me to be able to fulfill these pressing desires I have, these heavy burdens I have to be able to first share what has happened for and to me. And then be able to explain this new-to-me way in terms that will be understood by those that are still where I was.

But first things first. Jesus didn’t say the number one law was to learn the Bible. Jesus said to love God and love others as you love yourself. All of those I’ve had to learn from a totally new angle. Start from the beginning. Back to basics, almost like a newborn. Hmmm. 😉

All to say my ideas of how I wanted to post were in short time thrown out of the window. Instead real life took and is still taking priority. This is a very good thing. But it took me a long while to come around to accepting it and seeing the good in it. To be able to let go of my plans. To let go of my ego also.

If there is one thing I hate, it’s being so sure of something and then having to eat humble pie with those I’d like acceptance from when things turn out differently. So frustrating. Sometimes I feel so humiliated. But even that is helping me let go and not tie my value to the acceptance or lack thereof from others.

Kinda needed in this business of going against the grain. Not that I aspire for that life; just how it played out. My Ezekiel experiences, as I call them. Funny from my perspective because most of the time I am clueless to the bull I can be in people’s china shops. A former pastor called me a pitbull more than once. Apropos in terms of my pursuit of truth, for sure. It’s taken me many years to realize others have a limit for truth.

I’m sure on some level I also initially resist difficult truths, but at the end of every day there is something so innocent in me that is truly relentless in determining what is real and what is not. In every situation. Realizing lately that the journeys I take in those efforts are not wasted time even if they take longer than others.

After the first decade of so of my life, after I saw hypocrisy in adults I previously took at face value, I have always needed to make everything add up. It wasn’t enough to just tell me. I needed to see it for myself. I needed to know how A led to B. I needed to know the why.

I would pray nightly: “Lord, please help me not to be deceived.” Be careful what you pray for. Truth is a blessing that sometimes feels like a curse. There is a certain appeal to ignorant bliss.

As much as I needed to know, this left absolutely no room for mystery. No room for God to be God and surprise us. Trusting Him has been the hardest thing in my life. Letting go and trusting His heart for me.

All the reading in the world won’t move your foot to step out into the water. I wish it worked that way. Real life takes God out of your head and makes all of this come alive.

Just like a baby cries when leaving the womb – every cell, every feeling in me aches as I stretch into this person I am fully intended to be. Not just a brain. But a heart, a soul, a body, a spirit. I feel set on fire sometimes. Every step out of my mind and into the moment like leaving a completely dark cave for high noon on a hot summer day.

Often I collapse in the real physical exhaustion of it all. But I sleep better these days. Especially as I learn to talk to God more versus allowing anxieties to paralyze me. Because there is so much to learn and do. So easy to get discouraged if you don’t stay in the moment and if you forget you are in God’s eternal embrace.

And these are things I still wrestle with: prayer and work.

I think for the majority of my life, my view of prayer was really wrong. I saw it more like a way to manipulate God into doing something. I still don’t know and haven’t had the time to dive into the old texts with this new-to-me lens. Maybe I’ll see things more clearly one day. But so far I’ve surmised that prayer, if we want to keep calling it that, is merely conversation. And primarily for the purpose of changing MY mind.

I used to do the whole prayer and fasting bit, but with what I now believe is the wrong way of going about it. I used to fast and pray for specific things to happen. Now fasting for me is more just a concept of isolating myself from distractions. And now the prayer aspect is just asking for God to help me see things His way, to see the truth. To clear my mind from all my own ideas and make room to see things as they really are. I have had such powerful experiences and successes in approaching prayer this way. It has been an absolute joy.

If only all of me would catch up and on. After so many years of doing things the wrong way, I find I still miss now more than I hit. But the times I hit are becoming more frequent. That is very encouraging. I am so blessed to have sojourners who have come alongside me and paved the way by their examples. We give each other grace, eh?

And so this work business. I don’t think I have it mastered yet. At all. But I certainly have come a long way from where I started. Thank You, Holy Spirit and those who have been patient with me. I really want to talk about what I think is such an incredible and important distinction that I personally feel was not adequately communicated in previous churches I attended. Actually, their rhetoric may have contributed greatly to how confused I became.

Because I remember I was not raised the way I turned out. I was raised to always work hard and take care of business. At least those that claim to follow Christ never approved of any kind of “crazy faith” or “prosperity gospel”. I have no idea how I fell into that. I imagine it was just little changes in language that eventually added up so that I was gradually led over a period of decades to where I ended up. And yet you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Which is this super difficult line for me to figure out.

As an example, I recently met with a former youth pastor of mine from the church I attended with my parents decades ago. He tried to tell me that any experience or feeling I have is basically inadmissible in the court of truth. Yet I’m sure out the other side of their mouths they tell people to have a relationship with Christ. How exactly am I supposed to have a relationship with Christ if I never experience God?! Ohhhh, do you mean I am supposed to have a relationship with the Bible instead? Or that only those in power have the authority to say that their experiences are valid but others’ experiences are conveniently not valid?

That is probably the kind of treatment that initially led me to be more and more open to other lines of thought. But I think I went to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum in my pursuit of truth. I ended up in a group where they preached basically that if I was good enough then God would provide everything I needed in the physical. Note, it wasn’t said exactly that way. Of course. But that’s basically what it boiled down to. If I had enough “faith”, if I “believed” enough, if I “followed Christ” enough, if I “died to myself” enough then God would provide for all my physical needs. And the real evil in that was there was this unspoken but understood condemnation that was communicated when your physical needs were not met: it meant you were doing something wrong or not doing enough. So the answer was easy: just do more, just be better. Because there is no end, eh?

I spent YEARS on that horrible rollercoaster. Fear consumed me because there was no love in that god we created through our own projections. It literally drove me to feeling suicidal and then eventually giving up instead of killing myself. Because even at my worst I didn’t kill myself for fear that would send me to hell before I had a chance to figure out the “right” way, how to get back to heaven. Little did I know my blindness was hell enough; no more hell was needed.

And in giving up, the pendulum swung again. I let go of thinking that I had to do anything for God to give me anything. And that was a good start. I finally realized, through Holy Spirit, that God’s perfect love casts out all fear. I accepted it like a thirsty man accepts water after walking through and almost dying in the desert. BUT… I only solved half the equation. I laid down works but I didn’t know yet how to value work. Only one letter difference but worlds apart.

If I could tell my former self what I know now, I’d say: start everything from the position of refusing to compromise on the fact that God is anything besides absolutely good! That has to be the beginning of any conversation we have. And so…

If God is always good, then it’s my perspective and understanding that is wrong if I’m doubting His goodness. This is where prayer comes in. Do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, go to God. And He will help you. Maybe not by providing you with the explanation you want, but always with the step you need to take next. Trusting His heart and thereby His timing and ways. I realize this sometimes seems like a trite statement in the faces of very real significant losses and pain. But I am sharing what has worked thus far for me.

So that’s what I did after I felt so disillusioned when God did not provide for all of my worldly needs in the ways that I expected after I accepted this already included message and rested from all my “works”. I was angry. I thought I had been given something really important. I didn’t understand why my desires to focus on sharing it were not rewarded in the physical in the ways that I thought were reasonable. This was an extremely difficult time.

Finally I stopped praying for God to do specific things and instead I started to quiet down and ask Him to show me what I was missing. Every time I felt abandoned in the physical, I would feel Him so strongly in the spiritual. There was no denying it. Even if I tried. What gives, God?

Slowly my mind started to shift. I started to understand that work is very different than works. Work is not “bad” in general. But “works” tend to not be great when commonly misused. Work is what you do to pay your bills and put food on the table. Works are things you maybe only unconsciously do in order to manipulate God into doing something for you.

Works can look like a form of religious superstition. Like I have to give the church 10% of my income in order for God to bless my business to make more money. We could go down a rabbit hole on this one, but to keep the focus, in practical matters – ONLY giving 10% to the church will not make your business successful if you sit at home on your laurels and wait for money to fly into your bank account. Work is also required. And work in this context is good.

I hate to go here because I still believe God does miracles, but I think it is cruel to preach from the pulpit that paritioners should ONLY pray away certain health conditions. I’ve heard some churches get crazy with this and attribute every negative thing to a “spirit”. To the extreme this can look like people praying away the “spirit of diabetes” or “the spirit of lung cancer”, etc. Unfortunately some of that thinking got into my head and I think it is wrong and kills people. Literally.

The alternative is to explain to people that it is ok to pray for miracles, but in the meantime we live in a physical world where if you jump off the edge of a skyscraper, probably 99.99% of the time you are going to die. Not great odds. And similarly if you don’t put in the WORK of stopping smoking and getting your diabetes under control then your chances of dying from those things are very high. All the Bible reading, serving at church, praying, tithing, etc probably ain’t gonna save your lungs if you keep smoking.

I’m one of the last to give up on a miracle, but I’m also starting to become one of the first to get to work doing what I can do in the meantime.

Does that make sense? Once you start to accept this, I’ve found you can experience a lot of anger. You can feel cheated out of sooo much by all these pastors that were more concerned about you helping build up their kingdoms while appearing completely unconcerned about how your life was being neglected and destroyed in the process. Countless people have burnt out physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. Others have experienced their families and marriages falling completely apart. Even suicides and worse. Now you know why I am so passionate about seeing people freed from wrong thinking!

They are afraid the pendulum will swing all the way back again. That we will give up on God totally. I admit some or my actions might lead outsiders to wonder. I haven’t picked up a Bible in a long time. I don’t have a church I attend. But these desires are slowly coming back in better measure. I’ve learned to look to God first.

I turned a really hard corner this week: I realized the feeling of love is not enough. It might sound unrelated, but it’s not. It’s easy to feel love for someone. It’s a lot more rare to find someone who does the hard work of being a loving person. To find a person who loves because that is their character whatever the weather. Versus a person who feels love but only behaves in like kind so much as serves their purposes. Then they jump ship and leave you high and dry.

Too long I have confused the two. Works and work. And those that feel love versus those that truly are loving.

As I accept this knowledge and move forward, I have enough work to do in minding my own business. But I share for any on the same journey.