Like Plastic Fruit Pinned on a Tree

Or, the prison of trying to appear perfect (The Forgiveness Series, Part 2)

(The following post relates my thought processing that took place primarily about 18 years ago. It is relayed in the terms of Christianity, because that is the background of my experience. I urge you to read it with the understanding that the lessons can be applied to any belief system, the cultured indoctrination of beliefs that we each receive or perceive from parents, family, peers, cultural history of nationality, teachers of every sort… broader and broader but concentric circles that have influenced us from our “roots” up.)

I thought forgiveness was something I’d already accomplished: a box I’d checked, a burden I’d laid down, a chapter I’d closed.

I didn’t know I hadn’t truly forgiven until I received a revelation—the answer to my burning question about how we are to deal with perpetrators of terrible harm. That revelation shook me to my core and exposed the unforgiveness I’d been carrying all along, hidden beneath layers of spiritual performance and self-deception.

If you haven’t read about that revelation, I encourage you to start with my previous post, The Forgiveness Factor, where I share what God showed me about true forgiveness and how it differed entirely from what I thought I’d done.

After that momentous experience of feeling like I was floating off my chair—the feeling of weightlessness following my desperate prayer that God would just do the forgiving FOR me—I sat stunned, silent, saturated in unutterable joy and liberation, tears streaming down my face.

Then another thought... rather, a whisper, a suggestion: “Ask again. Ask about his salvation.”

I had prayed earlier to know whether my grandfather was saved in the Christian sense, and received no answer. But now, after surrendering the forgiving to God, I asked again and received confirmation that he was, indeed, saved. And I was happy, thankful, and relieved to know it.

A New Understanding of God’s Love

Ok, then! THIS is how God deals with even the uglier sins. THIS is how much God loves each one. THIS is the love that Jesus came to demonstrate, so that people would know God as he knew God. THIS is a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone portrayal of God in Puritan Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God!”

I vowed that day that if God and Jesus love like that, then I want to love like that, too. And I knew it was possible through the indwelling Spirit and through the power of asking that it be so.

The Prison of Performance

Until that moment, I had believed that forgiveness was something that was mine to do. My burden. My battle. My responsibility. It had never occurred to me that God could or would do it for me. This was a big deal—the forgiveness thing is a BIG deal—and yet, through asking God to do the BIG thing for me and receiving that instantaneous response, I came to realize something profound about all my “righteous” efforts.

Even the small things I consider to be “right” are only an honor to ME when they’re done in my own strength, my own power, my own will.

When done in order to follow the rules, doing right things feeds pride, fuels comparison, and fosters judgment of others. It’s the classic Pharisee model, like stringing shiny, beautiful but plastic fruit on a tree. When the very same thing is done out of love for God and a desire to be like Him, the doing becomes a simply natural outflow, a product, a fruit of the be-ing.

This is the prison so many of us live/d in, whether specifically Christian or any other religion or conditioned belief system: believing we must perform our way to righteousness, accomplish our way to approval, earn our way to acceptance.

Compassion for the Struggle

What followed next was the understanding that if I did not know to simply ask God to do this big thing for me, then maybe that was the case with my grandpa, too. Maybe he, too, thought he had to “get it right” or “be right” BEFORE coming to God, and he failed and failed and failed again. Maybe he, too, didn’t know that he could ask God to do it for him—to surrender himself to the power of God so THAT power could be the strength for him, helping him to choose differently, to BE different.

Maybe this is what Jesus meant by “...they know not what they do.”

We had it flipped exactly upside down, believing we must fix ourselves before we can come to God; the truth is that the ONLY way to have God-like power is to ask and allow God’s power to work on our behalf.

This is the point on which I felt compassion for the strugglers—not just for my grandpa whose life was over, but for all others and myself, who struggle when we could surrender. The false beliefs and their attendant fears about an angry, punishing God keep us from bringing ourselves like little children to a loving Father/Mother God and allowing our Creator to heal us, help us, hold us.

I made it my intentional way to live going forward that if this is God’s kind of mercy, compassion, and love, then I want to have that kind of love, also, for every struggling fellow soul.

Because here’s the truth that changed everything: You don’t have to get it right before you come to God/Creator/Source/Whatever your word for the Divine. You can’t get it right on your own. That’s the whole point. Surrender isn’t weakness. It’s the doorway to the very power you’ve been straining to manufacture in your own strength.

The belief that you must perform, must accomplish, must prove yourself worthy before you can receive or be received into the Presence of Love—that’s the prison.

And the key has been in your hand all along. Just ask.