Another Brick in the Wall

It's been a while since I've written, but I've been working through some thoughts lately, and I figured they were worth sharing. I've been trying to work out what it looks like to trust God to provide, rather than trying to take care of everything my own way, and it's puzzled me for a while.

Tonight at Bible study, we talked about unanswered prayer, which led naturally to the topic of anxiety, among others. And while there are a lot of ways in which my anxiety has decreased since I've been a Christian, I think maybe the possibility of unanswered prayer has done just the opposite (obviously it wasn't an anxiety before). But where does this anxiety come from?

Let me cast it yet another way, in terms of relationships. In a passage I read in Harry Potter tonight, Harry and the crew walk into Hogwarts and Professor McGonagall asks him to come to her office, and there's a remark that she tended to evoke feelings that he had done something wrong, even though he hadn't in this case. Or another fictional situation: the main character in the movie Lars and the Real Girl can't deal with any physical contact from anyone - he instantly recoils from anything. In both these situations, the characters are bracing themselves against other people. When Harry gets called, he braces against the possibility of being scolded, because it's happened in the past. There's an implicit backstory that Lars had probably also been hurt in the past, causing him to brace against any contact from anyone. Moving to real life, I've found that I brace myself in different ways against different people. With closer, more trusted friends, I am more open. My defenses are let down, and these friends are able to see more of "the real me" (though never its entirety). With newer friends, I tend to be more guarded, not knowing what to expect.

With authority figures (manager, pastor, etc), I have an automatic authority brace that kicks in, similar to Harry in the example. Even if a particular authority figure hasn't ever reprimanded me, and even if I'm unaware of any lapse, I still wonder if there's something I've done wrong. Will my boss fire me today, or will my pastor rebuke me for something or other? I don't know if this paranoia is at all normal, or where it comes from if it isn't, but any time I have a one-on-one conversation initiated by such a person, even against all rationality I brace against the possibility so that, in the event that it does happen, I'm less affected by it. But the cost is that I've erected a wall. I'm always guarding something and it's a hindrance to any true fellowship.

Romantic relationships suffer the same thing. One of the end goals, in my mind, of such a relationship is to ultimately end up with fewer walls than I have with even my best friends, and ideally none at all. But tearing down walls is a slow and difficult, and sometimes painful, process; and in the context of a romantic relationship, there are unique walls that don't even particularly apply elsewhere. I can be comfortable with my close friends as friends because I can reason they have absolutely no reason to spurn me. There's no limit to the number of friends they can have, other than those imposed by time commitments. The likelihood of a close friend just deciding at any point that we shouldn't be friends anymore is pretty small, so it's relatively low-risk to let those guards down. But in the end, you can only have one spouse. And even more in today's culture we have a mindset that we must absolutely pick the right one. So while I may get along great with a significant other, it's not at all unreasonable that at some point one person or the other will decide for some reason that this isn't the right relationship and end it. My natural reaction to this possibility is again to brace against it. Now all my interactions with a significant other are guarded against this, and ironically drive them away by my unwillingness to lower my guard.

Back to rationality. It's not difficult to see that these walls provide minimal benefit in the best case, and are dangerous in the worst case. The alternative is that I'll be taken by surprise sometimes. I won't be ready for the breakup, or the rebuke, or the firing (well, hopefully that one at least doesn't happen). I assume when I talk to someone who has some sort of power over me (economic, spiritual, interpersonal) that they will not exercise it. I trust them not to. By extending this trust, the relationship is deeper and more fulfilling. (The difficulty here is that a good friend will indeed call me out if I'm in the wrong, setting a "bad" precedent on the surface, which is beyond the scope of this post to deal with.)

Full circle. I deal with the Lord in exactly the same way. Again, as one who has power over me, I instinctively keep my guard up in interacting with Him. Moreover, because we interact not only as Lord and subject but also as Lover and beloved, the relationship suffers from my neuroses on both counts. While I know in my head that under no circumstance will my God abandon me, I brace against the possibility that He wants to "see other people". While I know in my head that the Lord gives good gifts to those He loves, I brace myself against the possibility that I'll end up with the short straw. While I know in my head that if He refuses me something I have my heart set on it follows that He has something even better in mind, yet I still brace against it simply because in my limited imagination I can't picture what could possibly be better.

So how do I tear down the wall? How do I trust? How do I give people the benefit of the doubt (or stop doubting, in the case of God)? Work. Conscious effort. Prayer. Faith. Hope. Love. At the root of all these walls is insecurity and anxiety. But God says "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." The perfect guard is already there - I don't need to build it myself.