This month’s synchroblog is called “life unfurling” and is centered on the things that we’ve let go of in our faith along the way and ended up finding freedom.  I have been letting go of a lot things these past few years, but this experience was really the beginning of all of that. If you like, you can check out the other contributions at the bottom of this post, and i’ll add more as they come in over the course of today. *********************************** So you may or may not know that I was saved in the Church of the Nazarene.  It was in a medium sized youth group that I met the girl of my dreams.  What does that have to do with getting saved?  Well everything, I am afraid. See I met this girl at church and then quickly realized that she was born into this thing, sort of like baptized out of the womb and if I was ever to be with her I would have to be like her in faith.  I knew all the scriptures having to do with being equally yoked, so it really was no mystery that on the same day that I got saved back in 1982 at that Youth Retreat somewhere in the Piney Woods of Texas, I confessed my love to this girl. She responded with a little fear and a little disgust, I think.  Well it seemed that way.  In a split moment we went from being buddies at camp that shared every secret to her distancing herself from me and I knew what this was amounting to.  Rejection.  See I had experienced rejection before and I knew what it looked like even from this little girl that I least expected it from.  See I had been lulled into believing that these poeple really did like me.  I had been convinced that I may have experienced rejection elsewhere, but these folks, they really liked me and she really liked me.  As it turned out her rejection of me was enough to eventually affirm in me what I knew all along.  There was something wrong with me. I realized that I would have to spend a great deal of time getting her to warm up to the new me so I just decided to set out to be the most excellent Nazarene there could be.  I was at the church every time the doors were open.  I studied my Bible and could quote it quite well and apply it to most of mine and my friends’ life situations. I sang in the choir and played guitar and led songs in Youth group.  I made friends with her Mom and Dad and her brothers and most of her friends.  I was devoted beyond a doubt.  I worshipped the ground she walked on and then there was Jesus.  I was still trying to figure Jesus out, but I knew he was good and had good stuff for me when I was ready. The toll that rejection takes on a teenage boy is tremendous.   I learned to get what I wanted from girls by either fantasizing about them in private or by dating a girl and then breaking up with her before she would ever even think about breaking up with me – all of this to avoid rejection.  All of these girls were temporary anyway just until THE girl came around. Another way I avoided rejection though was by embracing holiness as a lifestyle.  That meant always putting up a good front, because with my serious rejection issues there was no way I could truly live up to what I thought were God’s standards for me.  In my opinion God would reject me if given a good opportunity.  Holiness was my way of ensuring that God would not reject me.  I played the part and did everything right in an effort to earn grace from God and the girl.  I also gained approval from the adults at my church and approval is a good band-aid for festering rejection. Eventually the girl grew up and went away to college and I moved on in life, joined the military, got married, and had kids the whole time maintaining my public holiness.  The reason I say public is because the rejected me, the one that never went away but rarely got attention from me, was still there.  He was in a sense, a part of this split personality I had created-- a sort of Mr. Hyde that would come up at the worst private moments. Of course no one else who knew me, besides my wife knew about this guy.  I hid him quite well behind the holy John --  the Christian John. It is how I could be a worship leader and lead a church of people in song to the Lord every Sunday while having an online relationship with a girl outside of my marriage.  It is how I could preach and teach the Bible, and purchase pornography anonymously from the corner store.  The real John, having been hidden and suppressed regularly would leap out of nowhere and have me binging in the most embarrassing ways. I spent my life trying to keep up the holiness standard only to fail in my personal life over and over again with sex addiction and poor self esteem and a grasping need to be loved by women.  Until one day the two parts of me met at a Vineyard church in Texas.  It was there that I learned that I would have to kill the holy me in order for God to heal the sad, broken, rejected and hidden me.  Not only did I have to give up on the Christian me, I had to kill those old ideas of holiness in exchange for wholeness.  I had to destroy the super-Christian me so that the real me could step into his place and get all of the good that God had for me. That meant that I gave up on only listening to Christian music, only reading the Bible or books about the Bible, only attending holy events like churches and pageants and Christian musicals and such; only watching rated PG movies and only having church-friends.  It meant that I would have to put my whole self out there and trust that God and others would not reject the real me -- the one I had been hiding for all of those years. This was scary.  It meant I would have to give up everything I knew about Christianity in exchange for something that looked and felt completely different.  No longer would I have to worry about whether or not I was doing the right thing.  Instead I was more concerned with being the right kind of person.  No more would I have to obsess over what other people would think about me.  Instead I would be myself, just plain ole raw John.  Who cares what people think? I would not pretend to be better than I really was.  I would be authentic for once in my life.  I remember having this fear that if I chose to do this I would lose all of my friends and no one would want to be near me.  After all wasn't I rejected as a boy for being myself?  Was I really enough? Needless to say people accepted me as I was and appreciated my candidness and my down-to-earth approach to God.  Most of all God was finally able to affect those needy grasping desires I had and quell them with his all encompassing sufficiency.  For the first time in my life at the age of 37, I could just relax and be myself and I knew that God loved me and that for the most part I was actually love-able. So letting go of my kind of Holiness for me meant redemption, it meant freedom and it ultimately meant moving in the direction of true wholeness.  It reminds me of that old bumper sticker phrase “let go and let God.”  In a sense, that is what I did.  Thank GOD. *********************************** Read more about how life unfurling for others has been a good thing

• Beth Patterson at Finding Ground – What is Passed Over is Not Love
• Jeremy Myers at Till He Comes – Help, I’m Lost and Can’t Find Myself
• Ellen Haroutunian – Life Unfurling
• Marta Layton – On Burdens, Blessings, Babies and Bathwater
• Alan Knox at The Assembling of Church – Where Did I Go? (link not up yet)
• Crystal St. Marie Lewis - What Happened When I Let Go
• Pam Hogeweide - Letting Go Of a Church-Centered Me
• Ryan Harrison  at How We Spend Our Days – Scraping the Barnacles
• Kathy Escobar at The Carnival in My Head - Letting God Off the Hook
• Christine Sine at Godspace – Giving Up For God, What Does it Cost?
• Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – What Do You Do When You Are Not Sure
• Dan Brennan at Faith Dance – Letting Go for a Greater Good
• Elaine Hansen – Recovering Control Freak – Let Go?
• Wendy McCaig at View From the Bridge - Embracing the Grey
• Chris at The Amplified Life - Seasons of Life