Sally's husband of seven years had called her from work, less than an hour before her appointment. He'd told her that he didn't want to stay married. There was no other woman. It just wasn't working out. He was apartment hunting, and would leave a phone number with her.
Dan's leaving was quite painful, but no real surprise to Sally. She had felt him slipping away since the first few years of the marriage. “There's always been a distance in Dan that I could never get past, she said sadly. “It's as if there's a wall around him. I don't even think he's really aware of it.”
Sensing Dan's isolation, Sally had made many attempts to become closer to him through the years. She had discussed the problem with him, read books, gone to marriage seminars.
Dan, however, had shown little interest in the various methods Sally used. The only problem he could see was Sally's constant dissatisfaction with their relationship. Obviously, her unhappiness had become a big problem for him.
Dan did leave Sally. He also left a question in her mind for a long time afterward: Why did Dan hide? What would possess him to conceal his heart from Sally, who would have cherished it? Why avoid the very closeness that he needed from a wife?
PEOPLE IN HIDING
Answering this question of why we hide from the very relationships and truths we need is one of the purposes of this book. For a variety of reasons, all of us to some extent live two lives: an external life, in which we learn the feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that are “safe” to express; and an internal life, in which we closet away our “unsafe” traits, which exist isolated and undeveloped.
Our tendency is to keep the “unloved” parts of ourselves forever under wraps, with the hope that in time, they will go away and not cause us more pain.
This pattern is like the frightened man who goes to see his doctor for an annual physical. He's been having sharp back pains for some time, and he's terrified of the prospect of back surgery. So, as the doctor probes and prods, he bites his lip on the pain, murmuring to the doctor, “Nope--no pain there, either,” in hopes that nothing will be discovered. He tries to distract his doctor by listing off his great energy level, good diet, and general fitness. All the while he desperately wishes that he'll get off without a diagnosis.
Jesus referred to our reticence to reveal our pain in one of His many confrontations with the Pharisees. He spent a great deal of time with hurting people. Once He had dinner with a tax-gatherer named Matthew--in our day, the equivalent of eating with an unpopular government official. Criticized for His choice of relationships, Jesus said,
“It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means, 'I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,' for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Matthew 9:1243)
Jesus point was that we all have problems and needs to be looked at, understood, loved, and helped by Him and His resources. But revealing these problems is often the larger problem.
We can call our efforts to conceal these problems defenses, which are anything we use to protect ourselves from danger. We put them up as spiritual and emotional “shields” to keep from being exposed or hurt.
This isn't to say that we have only one shield. Most of us use a variety of hiding patterns in different situations. We tend to select certain shields depending on two factors:
(1) what injured part of ourselves we're protecting;
(2) who or what we're protecting ourselves from.
For example, some people find that they have one defense at work and another at home. At work, an executive might hide feelings of rage and frustration behind a mask of compliance and high performance, especially when there is an authoritarian or critical boss. The compliance defense keeps the executive from speaking the truth about how he really feels toward his boss's critical nature.
Then when this executive walks in the door of his home, a shift often occurs. He may continue hiding his anger but may also be feeling ashamed of his encounter with the boss. This can easily lead to his withdrawing to the television or newspaper: a withdrawal defense. Worse, he may blame his rotten day on someone in his family: a displacement defense,
Notice the difference between home and work. At home, the overworked executive no longer protects himself from his rage at the boss; instead, he shields feelings of shame and worthlessness from the family.
What is it that sends us into hiding? To understand this pattern of building defenses we must go back to foundational issues. I think life is basically about solving problems. We need to do some problem-solving at the roots in order to understand what's going on above ground.
I believe that the reason why we tend to hide our problems and struggles can be traced to two basic problems in life:
(1) we're unfinished people;
(2) we fear the very things we need to restore us.
Let's take a closer look at these problems that cause us to become people in hiding.
PROBLEM #1: WE'RE UNFINISHED
Our fundamental problem is that we are an unfinished people. As Christians, all of us are somewhat like a beautiful but damaged home under restoration.
Have you ever walked past a house under renovation near your neighborhood--one that was close enough to your usual pathways that you could see it in its various stages of development? I can remember such a home when I was growing up. Though I wasn't aware of it at the time, it had been a grand mansion. Years of weather and neglect had sent it into disrepair.
Then new owners bought the house with the idea of restoring it to its former glory. These “house lovers” poured large amounts of time and money into rebuilding the mansion with materials as similar to the originals as possible.
Several times a week, I'd pass the large lot where the building activity went on. I always made sure I looked at the house from the same spot on the sidewalk (a little to the right of the front door) and at the same time of day (late afternoon). The process of gradual change and growth were a mystery to me. I was fascinated to watch the step-by-step changes in the home as it “grew” over the months. It was like having little sequenced snapshots of the building in my mind.
What struck me were the tremendous variations in the house's appearance over time. Some days it looked like a burned-out bomb site, with piles of lumber and sacks of concrete surrounding truckfuls of dirt; yet on others I could glimpse the heartbeat of its architect in its lines, its grace, its columns, and its large bay windows. And then there were days when both the breathtaking beauty as well as the fragile incompleteness of the site would stand out.
That unfinished home had a wonderful past, and a hopeful future upon completion. Its past was rooted in the dreams anti desires of the family who had bought it, as well as the vision and skill of the architect who designed its renovation. Its future--which is now its present--has been a good one. It has stood tall and beautiful for a long time now, a host to several families over the years.
This process is similar to how God sees us. Like the mansion, we have a past of wonder. Chosen and designed by God “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4), we have been created to take on certain aspects of His character, such as being loved and loving, and being productive. This is what it means to be created in His image. We all have an Architect's blueprint inside our hearts. This blueprint is in the process of being developed.
Like the mansion, we also have a future of hope. Our destiny is to one day be like God in our character: “We know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is” (I John 3:2). The Bible calls this maturity: “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature of which belongs to the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
But what about the present? Like the mansion under construction, we are all in various stages of spiritual and emotional immaturity and disrepair. At times, we may feel like a burned-out bomb site; sometimes we can see a glimmer of the image of God in us. And sometimes both are apparent.
We have both a heritage established and a future planned by One who loves us as a parent. And our present is the link between the two. Our present is the time period in which the development and restoration of essential parts of our soul is to occur. It's that season in which blueprint (past) is supposed to become a completed project (future).
For most of us, the present can be a painful time of struggle. It's a period of being “under construction,” and sometimes the process hurts. The Bible compares this pain to what a woman experiences in childbirth:
For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. (Romans 8:22-23)
People who have suffered great loss in their lives understand this passage. Being “under construction” means having to endure much.
Our basic problem in life is that we are an unfinished and damaged creation, somewhere in between the blueprint and the final whisk of the cleaning cloth. Just as a contractor provides labor and materials to build the structure, we are to be active participants in our own growth. The solution to our problem is to find our areas of spiritual and emotional unmaturity, and to enter into the process of restoring those parts to their renovated condition.
THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF RELATIONSHIPS
The fundamental problem of being unfinished has many kinds of effects in our lives. One area of growth that many of us struggle with is a need for genuine, deep, warm personal relationships. Sometimes this need is manifested in a deep sense of not “belonging.” of not “fitting in.” It seems there is a void inside our hearts that just will not be filled.
The Bible proclaims our need for connection. At the deepest spiritual and emotional level, we are beings who need safety and a sense of belonging in our three primary relationships: God, self. and others. We begin life in a terrified and disconnected state. Disconnectedness is the most destructive result of sin's entrance into the universe. It is the deepest and most fundamental problem we can experience.
This disconnectedness is a violation of the very nature of God, of what He holds primary. God created us for a life of closeness and attachment. Jesus declared that the entire Hebrew Scriptures rested on loving God and people. Perhaps the number one root of emotional disorders is that some part of the self is isolated from relationship.
Jesus referred to our need to be close to Him in His picture of the vine that nourishes the branches:
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches: he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit: for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:4-5)
The Bible teaches that we are to form attachments with people, not only with God. We are to learn how to feel loved and experience a sense of belonging by being in relationship with others. That's why John emphasizes our people-to-people relationships:
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar: for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20)
John is declaring that our closeness to people is a measuring stick, to some extent, of our closeness to God. It is the rare person who can be deeply intimate with God and yet isolated and disconnected from His incarnate Body.
We are left with what may appear to be a simple formula:
Problem--our need for attachment.
Solution-- find intimate relationships.
To the casual observer, this might seem uncomplicated. “Just find a good church with supportive people and begin to get involved: it can't be that difficult,” one might conclude.
It's a different picture, however, for those who have had painful experiences or little experience of close involvement with others.
In many cases, believers suffering from isolation may even attend growing, healthy, biblically oriented churches that put a premium on caring relationships. They may be quite active in their fellowships, spending a great deal of time, effort, and money to be involved in a community of believers. Yet these same folks also report feeling disconnected, detached or “dead” inside, often while engaged in “fellowship activities.”
“I tried changing churches,” one person told me. “I thought if I got around different groups. I'd develop closeness. But the problem was the same at all the churches. I never really felt a part of things. So I decided to get in a good church and settle in --you know, make a commitment. I was at that church for five years. And now, half a decade later, I still feel on the outside. I thought at first it was people. Now I'm beginning to think it might be me.
Meeting our emotional and spiritual needs is not as simple as it looks. This “added complication” in God's growth process is the essence of Problem #2: In many ways, we hide from what we need to be whole.
PROBLEM #2: WE FEAR WHAT WE NEED
One night, a policeman walking his beat encountered a man on his knees underneath a bright street lamp, desperately scouring the sidewalk.
“What's the matter?” the policeman queried.
Without looking up, the man cried, “I lost my wallet!”
“I'll be glad to help, sir,” replied the patrolman. “Give me an idea of the area where you lost it.”
“Oh, that's easy,” said the distraught searcher. “It dropped out of my pocket about halfway down the block.” The man pointed to another part of the street.
Puzzled, the policeman asked, “I'm confused--then why are we looking over here?”
The man answered without hesitation, “The light's better.”
This story sums up the essence of the problem of hiding. The poor man who found himself walletless was frantically looking in the wrong place for the right thing. We have a similar malady. For a variety of reasons, many of us are afraid of exposing and repairing the broken parts of our souls.
That's Problem #2: Though we are an unfinished people, we tear and avoid the very things we need to restore us. We hide parts of our soul from love.
Notice I said “parts.” not “part.” Just as our bodies have many different muscles and bones that can be hurt, God has created us with different aspects -- parts -- of our souls. These various aspects can be loved and developed. They can also be isolated and immature. Each of us is a complex arrangement of such “parts” that together create a unique whole.
We will be dealing with our varied spiritual and emotional developmental needs later in this book, but it's important for each of us to realize that we're not the product of some cosmic cookie-cutter. We're individuals. David affirms this when he thanks God for supervising his own creation:
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. [Psalm 139:13-15, NIV)
Because of the effects of Adam and Eve's fall from innocence into sin, those “inward parts” made by God have been damaged in their ability to function in some way. Let's face it, sin injures us! And untangling the combination of “what's broken and why” is a major task we must undertake if we're to see those injured parts healed.
WHAT ABOUT ME?
Someone might ask at this point, “How does this describe me? I really try to be open and honest. My problem has more to do with relationships in which the other person is hiding.”
I have a couple of answers to this. First, hiding isn't always a conscious process. Sometimes, our deep hurts and immaturities have been isolated from relationship for so long that we no longer have access to certain thoughts, feelings, or memories. In this case, hiding is a device used to protect us from overwhelming pain when we aren't ready for it.
A few verses after his prayer of thanks, David now asks God for more access to his “hidden parts”:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way. (Psalm 139:23-24)
David prayed for awareness of the truth about himself that he needed to look at. He didn't want to walk off a cliff blindfolded.
A second answer to the question of how this fear of exposure applies is that different people hide different parts of the self. Some struggle with being open about their needs to beloved. Others have difficulty bringing their more autonomous, sell-directed parts into the light.
Sally, whom we met at the beginning of the chapter, didn't consider herself to be a withdrawn person. She was outgoing and expressive. Yet as she began working on important personal issues in counseling, she began realizing that an aggressive, decision-making part to her personality had been lost years ago. For Sally, this independent part of her soul was hidden from love and truth.
I'm writing to those of you who are hiding parts of yourself from relationship, whether or not you're currently aware of it. I want to help you uncover and bring before the grace of God and His people the wounded aspects of yourself that have been in darkness. God Himself and the Body of Christ can heal your hurt places.
Think over the past few years of your life. Review the “regrets”: those relationships or opportunities that you wish had turned out positively. Many of us can date our problems in important relationships to a point at which we began to conceal parts of ourselves from God, self, or others.
HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I'M HIDING?
Many of us, like Sally, often don't truly know whether or not we're being defensive in some way. But we have a genuine desire to mature and develop the relationships we've been missing. Then how do we become aware of what's hidden?
A scriptural teaching can help us here. It's the principle of roots and fruits. God has designed the universe so that we can identify problems based on their effects on our lives.
For example, suppose you discover water dripping from the ceiling in your living room, mining the carpet. You'll probably respond to this problem in one of two ways. One way is to engage in damage control. You'll keep empty pots and pans wherever the water is leaking and scurry around to keep them emptied. If you live in a rainy climate, this could become a full-time job. Plus it's hard to cook without cookware.
The second method of response that you might choose is to hire someone to come in and fix the leaky roof. This may cost more, but it will truly solve the problem.
The soggy carpet is the evidence or “fruit.” It tells us that there's a serious problem in the structure of the house. The “root” is the leaky roof. If we don't pay attention to the root, we're likely to have much more bad fruit, such as thousands of dollars of damaged carpet and flooring.
Jesus talks about the principle of roots and fruits in Matthew 7: 17-18:
“Every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.”
In other words, results always point to causes. Children are a good example. A family with loving, successful children is generally a sign of some good roots, such as parenting style, environment, and support. The family with troubled children is often a sign of some sort of struggle in the parents' lives.
The same is true in our lives. Our spiritual and emotional fruit points to our roots.
Lets look at another term to describe fruit: symptoms, a word used by physicians and therapists to mean the same thing: results or effects. Symptoms point to a root cause.
Hiding always has some fruit, or symptom. In other words, you and I can detect hiding in our lives by the problems it causes. When we hide, a part of our character is pushed away from relationship into a spiritual darkness called isolation. The isolation of some part of our soul from love will always produce a problem. This makes sense, because whatever is isolated from nourishment remains broken and undeveloped. In the physical world, we call this malnutrition. Spiritual and emotional malnutrition are just as destructive.
Symptoms can range from a failed marriage -- like Sally's -- to depression, anxiety, guilt feelings, shame, eating disorders, substance abuse, career conflicts, physical ailments, and many others. Remember, however, that symptoms can be our friends. They're doing the job that God intended for them, which is to tap us on the shoulder and say. “There's a problem--it's time to take a look at it.”
But suppose there are no detectable symptoms in our life? Should we take a look at our defenses anyway? Certainly, prevention is better than cure. Recall David's prayer in Psalm 139. He asks God for awareness without mentioning any symptoms. It's likely that he's taking a preventive look at himself. So even if we appear to be without symptoms (which really isn't possible in a fallen world), we're wise to stay awake, spiritually and emotionally.
Awareness is not all we need, however. We require an environment of safe relationships in order to come out from hiding, no matter how much insight and information we have about our spiritual and emotional makeup. This is how God designed it.
This point is often missed in our Christian circles, where it is often assumed that doctrinal exposure to the truths of the Bible is sufficient to ensure solutions to all problems. Yet Jesus Himself stressed the necessity of relationship in order to take in truth. His statement “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) is one indication that knowing a person is necessary to knowing his truth. To know here means to understand personally, not just intellectually. This “knowing” applies to relationships with people as well as with God.
The heart of God places great value on our needs being met. Jesus' anguish over His people's turning from His provision is a poignant picture:
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling” (Matthew 23:3 7)
God wants to help His people in their struggles, dames tells us God is a gift-giver:
Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow. (James 1:17)
The Bible presents God as a Father who is anxious to see His children taken care of. He delights in helping us, in providing for us.
Then why do we feel so bad so often?
That's the irony of the hiding problem. We all have needs: we're all unfinished. God has provided what we need to enter the healing and maturing process--becoming like Him. Yet in many areas of life, many of us feel spiritually and emotionally bankrupt, in pain, and unable to cope with life as we would like to. We're inherently unable to see what God has provided as good. It's as if He has laid out a banquet table for His children, inviting us to fill up, but something inside sees danger in the invitation and causes us to turn away.
This danger signal is the same one operating in our illustration at the beginning of the chapter: It caused Dan to turn from his need for caring, and Sally to avoid her need for autonomy.
Eating problems provide us a helpful example of the hiding dilemma. Several years ago, I was working in our hospital program with Rachel, a young woman with an eating disorder. Rachel had almost died from malnutrition several weeks before coming for help. She exercised obsessively, ate almost nothing, and worried that she was too heavy -- at only eighty-five percent of her normal body weight. All of her family's and friends' efforts to get her to eat had failed.
Rachel's obvious problem was malnutrition. The “simplicity formula” would say: Problem-- Rachel suffers from malnutrition. Solution--She needs a lot of good food. Yet she could not make herself take in the meals provided.
As I got to know Rachel. it became obvious there was much under the surface between her and her food. Let's go back to Problem #1: We are an unfinished people, in need of maturing. Rachel had come from a well-to-do, high-achieving Christian family. She was expected to follow her parents' lifestyle and career leanings. Her family had provided a safe structure of providing for her physical needs, but had placed little value on teaching Rachel the concept of thinking for herself. They had done too much for her and at the same time kept a tight rein on her behavior.
Over the years, Rachel had begun to symbolically equate relationship with food (love can also be symbolically confused with many things besides food, such as sex, performance, and admiration). She had begun believing that all people were as tight-reined as her parents were. In Rachel's words, “For me, to eat was to allow more of their control inside me. To refuse to eat was the only way to have any sense of control over my life. Food became the enemy.
Rachel came by this concealment of her own needs naturally. It's inbred in all of us. To understand the roots of our two biggest problems. we need to go back to the very first story in the Bible.
OUR DEEPEST ROOTS
Adam and Eve planted those first roots that keep sprouting into our hiding problems. When they ate from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they became acquainted with evil. This experiential knowledge of evil was something we weren't meant to have. That's the essence of Problem #1: a break in relationship with God, self, and others.
The roots of Problem #2 were planted shortly thereafter:
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked: so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man. “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3:7-10, NIV; emphasis added)
Adam and Eve hid from God's restoring, forgiving, healing love. Notice the emphasized phrases. Adam and Eve had just moved out of a state of perfect attachment and obedience to God and into a state of separation and sinfulness. Yet the power of sin was already at work, shown in the solutions they conceived. First, they covered themselves. They put on the appearance that they did not have private parts. Second, they withdrew.
Why didn't they run to God, tell Him what they'd done, and ask Him to help them? They mistakenly saw God as someone who would hurt and not heal them. So they hid.
The story of the Fall presents a picture of the two main problems of living: the task of growing up, and the obstacles to growing up.
We can all relate to the conflict of our original parents in our sense of having a “secret,” which is either our own fault or our own shame, so frightening that it would be inconceivable to tell another about it.
The writer of Hebrews calls us out of our life in hiding:
Let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. (12:1)
Our subject is those encumbrances to our growth: where they come from, how they operate, what they tell us, and what we can do about them.
The process of spiritual and emotional maturing is difficult enough in itself, even without hindrances. Near the end of his life, Paul called himself “foremost” among sinners, an indication of how much work goes into anyone's growth.
But this difficult process is paralyzed when -- because of past experiences, fears, shame, and pride--we withdraw from the very relationships anti truths that would mature us. Our 'fig leaves keep us isolated from God, self, and others. They perpetuate not only our destructive patterns of living, but also our symptoms.
The safety of the walls we build as children can become a trap in our adult lives, as what was once a protection now becomes a prison. We build a safe place for ourselves when we hide, but those walls can prevent us from entering into the good things God has for us.
REMEMBER JENNY
Ideas are like prescription pills. They go down better with some sort of coating. Jesus explained many important spiritual issues in parables. His tales helped people understand concepts in terms of pictures.
The “coating” for our exploration of hiding from love is Jenny's story. Jenny represents all of us. She'll appear at the end of each chapter, fleshing out the truths we're learning. I hope that as you get to know Jenny, you'll recognize your own hiding process in her story.
We all have parts of our character that, like Jenny, have retreated deep inside the Deep Woods of our hearts. There those parts remain. For decades, perhaps, these hidden parts have been kept safe from abandonment, ridicule, or annihilation. Yet they have also remained frightened, disconnected, undeveloped, and unloved.
Jenny is a picture of the state of humanity since the Fall--desperately needing restoration, but terrified of exposure. We'll discover in the next chapter how these problems can open up opportunities for growth.
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