Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation (Transforming Resources) by Ruth Haley Barton

Author:Ruth Haley Barton [Barton, Ruth Haley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2010-01-13T23:00:00+00:00

Many of us cannot even register the kind of relational safety that enabled David to be so free with himself in God’s presence. Human beings’ abandoning each other is such a norm in contemporary relationships that while in our head we can acknowledge the possibility of such love and faithfulness, little in our experience indicates that complete love and safety really do exist for us. All of us have had normal experiences of abandonment—a best friend in childhood deciding they don’t like us anymore, a high school romance coming to an end. But there are deeper abandonments that have the capacity to embed themselves so deep inside us that they shape our ability to trust ourselves to the love of God, particularly when it comes to self-examination in God’s presence. Perhaps our mother or father withdrew into silence when we were bad, and we thus experienced love as a very conditional thing. Or one of our parents divorced the other and left the family, which caused us, in our childlike way, to wonder if some fundamental flaw or unlovable quality in us caused them to abandon us. Or later on, perhaps we had a spouse who walked out of the marriage because of some perceived flaw. Or there was a job to which we gave our best and then we were let go unexpectedly.

No matter what we believe with our head, such experiences shape us from the inside and determine what we know experientially. If we harbor any concern that we might be abandoned because of some lack in ourselves or some untrustworthiness in the other, it will be very difficult to give ourselves to God’s penetrating gaze. However, when we have come to a place of certainty in the steadfastness of God’s love and are anchored by a sense of the basic goodness of our created self, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain in inviting God to search us and know us to our very depths. Even the darkness is not dark to you.

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