Amy Boucher Pye

Tag: self-acceptance

  • Forgiveness Fridays: No Longer a Caterpillar by Claire Daniel

    I believe today’s contribution to our forgiveness series will resonate with so many people. I can certainly relate to that having a stream of thoughts and accusations running through my mind of things I shouldn’t have said or done. How can we forgive ourselves? Read on…

    Ten years ago, as summer faded into autumn, I experienced a season of overwhelming depression that upended every aspect of my life. It altered my very thoughts and feelings, and made my internal and external world feel utterly shaken. Overcoming this all-consuming illness was a difficult journey, where everything felt uncertain. Hope was hard to find, yet never truly lost.

    I now live daily aware, grateful for the changes that have occurred in me having experienced that season and in so many ways stronger, having been broken and restored. Yet still, at times, I remember. In moments of vulnerability, forgiving my past self is not easy. Unexpected things will trigger off a memory. I am reminded of things I said or did whilst ill and waves of guilt and remorse can still come flooding back into my consciousness. This usually happens when I least expect it and I still struggle to reconcile these memories with the person I am now. I cannot erase them, or forget. If I am absolutely honest, I am still working on how to completely forgive myself.

    I love the beauty and grace of butterflies but they also represent for me a powerful metaphor for the journey we take, in life and faith. Like a caterpillar, we need to go through a process of change, in order to be renewed and transformed. This often means experiencing times that are ‘dark,’ where we need to enter a ‘chrysalis’ season, where change feels slow or even halted entirely and progress seems slow.

    I was recently struck by a verse someone shared with me from Zephaniah. In looking at it in context, we see a book that seems so full of doom, yet is ultimately about a God of redemption. Zephaniah 3:17 says, in the NIV translation, ‘The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.’ It is interesting that in the Good News translation the phrase ‘new life’ is used rather than the word ‘rebuke.’ God will rebuke you no longer, but gives you a fresh start, a clean slate.

    Yet how often do we still rebuke ourselves? We berate ourselves for our actions, whether consciously or subconsciously. How can we truly say we live in freedom through Christ, yet continue to hold ourselves in contempt for something we said or did in the past? I think this is partly human nature but I also believe that forgiveness is a choice, an action. We can choose to hold on to the guilt that binds us and reproach ourselves or we can surrender it to God and ask him to help us forgive ourselves. We can make a conscious decision to let go of long-held feelings of shame or regret. When we recall our past behaviour we can strive to replace these with a real understanding of the truth – that we are loved by God and he rejoices over us, our past forgiven.

    When we place our hope in God, we can trust that he will keep on transforming us, replacing our disgrace with his grace. There will still be ‘caterpillar’ days or ‘chrysalis’ seasons where we feel we aren’t moving anywhere or we repeat the mistakes of the past. In these times God is still gently honing us, teaching us through the seasons where daily life and faith is a struggle and we feel so very far from becoming the ‘butterfly’ God created us to one day be. Even when we have moved on in our life, there will be vulnerable moments when we feel those feelings afresh. Memories will remain, though with time they will intrude on our thinking less often. It is one thing to know that God forgives us but to truly forgive ourselves can be so very hard to do, to fully embrace the freedom God has for us – no guilt, no shame, our sins forgotten.

    Part of my recovery from that season of my life involved reclaiming hope and believing afresh that I am forgiven and restored. I continue to daily place my trust in God, to refine me. If we have truly changed, like a caterpillar who has entered the chrysalis, the fact is we cannot change back. The echoes of past transgressions can be silenced by choosing to let them go, giving them over to God, when they threaten to darken our present. We can take a stand, refusing to let the memory of the past define us today or prevent us from being the person God is daily transforming us into – perhaps not yet a butterfly but no longer a caterpillar.

    Claire Daniel is author of 80 Creative Prayer Ideas and Prayer Journey into Parenthood and lives in Water Orton, Birmingham, with her husband and their two busy boys. She is passionate about prayer, supporting parents on their journey into parenthood and encouraging others to explore different ways of praying and meeting with God in every season of life. She provides support to groups, churches and organisations seeking to use creative prayer ideas in ministry or develop new ways to pray. She leads workshops on creative prayer and speaks about prayer and the journey of parenthood and faith at conferences, churches, and retreats.
    http://www.clairedaniel.org.uk/
    www.facebook.com/creativeprayer
    www.facebook.com/parenthoodprayerjourney
    Twitter: @Creative_Prayer

  • Becoming ourselves – Agnes Sanford

    I love hearing about heroes of the faith, especially those who might be overlooked today. One is Agnes Sanford, a pioneer in the healing-prayer movement in the twentieth century. Before she died at the age of eighty-four in 1982, Newsweek magazine hailed her as one of six people who shaped religious thought in the twentieth century. But before God used her so powerfully, she had to work through a painful journey of self-discovery and acceptance.

    Agnes Sanford photoAgnes grew up in China, the daughter of missionaries. Her struggle to release her true self came when she was living in the States, married to a pastor. Her husband Ted had been raised in a clergy household, and Agnes loved his parents, especially his mother. At first, Agnes modeled the role of minister’s wife on her mother-in-law, but doing so brought forth a crisis of identity:

    I had determined to make myself exactly like Ted’s mother, whom I adored. I would then be, I felt, the kind of wife that he liked. Therefore, I completely denied my original nature and devoted every moment to fruitless endeavor. And so I reached the depths because I was doing violence to my own soul. (Sealed Orders, p. 106).

    She thought she should be the perfect host and companion to Ted in his ministry. But in doing so, she was denying the deeply creative part of herself that wanted to give birth to new life, whether through writing, prayer, painting, or other artistic ventures. The false self was keeping her true self from thriving:

    My wounds were too deep to be healed so easily. And what were those wounds? If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said, first of all, that the real part of me was simply not living, the creative one who longed, not only for children, but also for the children of the mind to be brought forth.

    The basic trouble was that I had forgotten whence I came, and I did not know the sealed orders with which I had been sent to this earth. I sensed my thwarted creativity. I wanted to be a writer, and I could not, for all of my time and thought and attention was upon being a wife and mother.

    … At this time I came very near to the deepest depths and could easily have drowned in them…. I could no longer see beauty. And when one can no longer see beauty, one can no longer see God. (pp. 101-102)

    After a long struggle, Agnes sought counsel with a neighboring minister, knowing she needed to find a way out of the strangling depression. He brought clarity where she had been covered by a suffocating cloud:

    “Don’t you see you have been trying to be a square peg in a round hole? To make yourself into something you are not?”

    … “But nobody will like me if I am myself!” I cried. “Not Ted nor his family nor the parish nor anybody!”

    “They won’t have you, unless you let yourself be yourself,” said Hollis. (p. 111)

    With this, Agnes began to throw off the cloak of the ill-fitting clothes. Ted’s mother may have been created to fulfill the role of the “perfect minister’s wife,” but that garment didn’t fit Agnes. She would only be the best wife for Ted – and his parish – when she was living out of her redeemed self, that creative person whom God had called her to be.

    God sent his healing, but he wanted her to be involved as well: “I find that God will heal us up to the point of our being able to think and to pray and to reason, and from then on, while He still helps us, we must nevertheless fight the battles of life ourselves. I was becoming a new person: the original person whom I was born to be. And this was the exact opposite of the person whom I had tried for some six years to make myself – a perfect minister’s wife.” (p. 118)

    As Agnes stepped into her new clothes, she became that person. A writer, a painter, a woman devoted to prayer for people and the earth. And the world will never be the same because she flung off her rags and put on her royal robe, tailored just for her.

    Do you have a new set of clothes just waiting for you to don?