Sometimes conversations just happen. Like an unexpected stream coming up out of the ground. The water flows freely. No one is telling the water where to go and no one made it start, it simply flows. I would like to recount to you a conversation that "just happened" and has encouraged me over and over each time I remember it.
I was sitting on the beach with my friend Bill and he started talking mid thought process as my friend Bill often does. I don't know what had made him think of it but he started recounting some time he had spent in a small group at a marriage conference with his wife. He described getting so frustrated when the moderator asked him to "be yourself." Bill responded, "I am so tired of that! It's something we just say. 'Be yourself, be yourself, be yourself.' What does it even mean?! Do we even know?"
The moderator responded, "What does it mean to you?"
Bill reluctantly answered, "It means doing what you love. Using your talents. Being in community with people who care about you. Doing what you're good at."
"So you think being yourself means being comfortable?"
Bill hung his ahead. Ashamed, feeling like he'd fallen for a trap. But the moderator quickly said, "No, that's a good thing. It is good to be comfortable. To care for yourself, be kind to yourself and put your self in situations where you can succeed. But where do you hide? What secrets do you keep? What are you afraid of? Where do you hurt? Where are you uncomfortable? Being in those places is being yourself.
I felt like I was in the room. Like I was Bill and as Bill spoke he became the moderator speaking to me as Bill, or Bill as me. My response would have been the same as Bill's but when I heard what the moderator said it means to be yourself I felt like I was catching my breath after being under water for a long time. It resonated. It was a relief. At some point this description of what it means to be yourself would have terrified me and I would have met it with self-protecting, defiant anger, but the more I sink into the depths of God's grace the less invested I have to be in covering myself. This uncovering. This idea of being vulnerable and uncomfortable it somehow feels right and I wonder why.
Bill goes on and begins to answer my why, "You know, I know some people would say this is heresy and totally disagree, but I think the dark places, the hidden places I think those are the places in us Jesus loves the most. There is something there." Again this resonates. I don't know if it's theologically sound, I don't have a verse to back it up but I know I have felt that. I have felt Jesus' tenderness and care and grace most acutely in the deepest, most hidden parts of my depravity. Bill says, "And I don't know why that is."
My mom sitting in a beach chair next to me says, "Because that's where we are. And he wants to be with us." Bill looks up, locking is blue eyes onto my mom's and nods in agreement. We are where we hide, and so Jesus loves that place. Not that he desires for us to stay hidden, quite the opposite. His love for our darkness, our trauma, our shame is the very thing that allows us to go to those places and not die. To be ourselves in the truest sense and not be condemned but instead received with love.
