I am now in that upper middle-age category. You know when everything feels like it’s falling south and things aren’t what they used to be. I used to laugh when I heard women complain about all the unwelcome changes of aging…now I’m here! Through the years, I’ve often heard about how easy it is as we age to “let ourselves go.” We hear it mostly applied to the physical: we no longer exercise, we’re careless about what we put into our bodies, we don’t keep our appearance up like we once did—and fashions with stretch now fill our closets. It’s hard to make the effort to change because, when we let ourselves go, it often takes a long time to get back on track. Likewise, we can let ourselves go spiritually. It’s something that can happen gradually, almost without notice. We can get lazy in our time with the Lord, move into prayerlessness, apathy, and eventually a cold heart. What once would describe our relationship as passionate has now fallen flat. And many things can get us to this place.
Looking in my spiritual mirror, that’s the assessment God gently made of me: “You have let yourself go spiritually.” This truth is really hard for me to admit; it’s hard for me to write. I’ve been a Christian since I was 13, I’ve been a ministry leader, I have a literal lifetime of rich Christian resources that I have fed on including the Word, have prayed thousands of prayers and yet; if I’m honest, I’m a spiritual mess. How do we arrive at such a place? For many reasons, but it results in failing to tend the fire of our spiritual lives. The joy of our salvation flickers away until there is no light left. Only numbness is left behind.
Sometimes it’s easy to identify how you come to this place and other times it’s not. Or you can find yourself in a spiritual wasteland out of nowhere. Looking back, I know how I got here: many. many, years of intense medical storms leaving me busy caring for everyone else but myself. Storms that have taken me through a faith crisis, unrelenting disappointments, years of unanswered prayers, crying too many tears to count—just plain hard stuff that has drained my spirit and taxed my faith. While I was in the Word and prayer a lot during those years, at some point I erected a wall around my heart that became my way of protecting myself from the things I knew to be true about God and my faith—and my reality. My experience no longer reflected the truth of a God who loved me. Unfortunately, that wall created a distance on my part leading me, ever so gradually, to the place of letting myself go spiritually. Not caring anymore because the effort became too great at times to push through. Because the dark night of my soul tarried on and God’s presence appeared absent. Because my prayers felt like they shot out to a dark abyss where no one was listening. I stopped enjoying the lover of my soul; I stopped delighting in Him. Instead I let the overriding disappointments become a hurt I carried between me and God. I was even really mad at God at times interrogating Him for answers to all my big why questions, although I never owned up to it. So instead of regularly feeding on His Word and prayer…I only occasionally grazed. I only occasionally let Him feed and heal my bleeding heart.
When I look in the mirror I don’t like what I see—it’s not the person I want to be. It’s not the relationship with God I want to have. I want back the joy of my salvation. I want to start taking care of myself spiritually again.
RESTORING OUR SPIRITUAL HEALTH
So how do we get back on track? It’s not going to be easy, in fact it can be outright hard. Much like getting back in good physical condition, it’s little daily intentional steps of progress prefaced by admitting where you’re at and why.
Here are some other steps I’ve been working on…
1. Dare to open your soul up to God.
No more pretending, no more going through empty motions. This is the time to be real before God. Lay it all out on the table with Him. He knows anyway. Be real…be raw…tell it like it is. Pour your brokenness out to God, tell Him you’re angry, share your doubts, express the pain of unanswered prayers and unhealed minds and bodies. Tell Him your fears. He can handle it. Pray through the famous lament psalms along with David. Take the time necessary to do your lamenting. We can’t change what we don’t acknowledge and we can’t tear down walls in our relationship with God if we keep pretending. Tell Him your heartache…tell Him about your disillusionment and doubts and sadness. Share the honest cries of your broken heart. As singer Amy Grant sings, “Honest cries of broken hearts are better than an Alleluia.” Don’t let another day go by without baring your soul to the One whose love never changes.
Practically, take a notebook and list every single disappointment, hurt, disillusionment, grief, doubt—every cry of your heart. Settle it between you and God. So often we think a good Christian shouldn’t think or wrestle with such things. It’s the enemy’s lie that keeps us burying those struggles and the unspoken pain deep within our souls so no one can see them, keeping them from ourselves resulting in a distance from God—and so we let the pain and disappointments back up someplace in our souls.
2. Enter Back into God’s Presence.
Stop hiding, stop avoiding, stop ignoring. Step by step begin to repair the distance as you let Him pour His words of life over your dead soul, and let Him use your prayers to breathe healing into the empty space that was created when words went unspoken. Let God’s Spirit draw your heart back to the lover of your soul as you sit unjudged in His presence and love.
3. Let God Heal Your Soul.
Let the pain and sorrow, and the distance and disillusionment bleed out of your soul into God’s healing hands. Let Him cradle your broken heart. Let Him rub the healing balm of His deep love into your wounds. In the words of author Sue Monk Kidd, “What are the wounds that need to be healed? What ‘lost sheep’ in me needs to be shepherded?” Listen to your soul. See the darkness, the deadness as an invitation from God to discover Him in a deeper way and to a pathway of healing for the unspoken pain you have carried alone for far too long. Paul Miller said, “The very thing we are afraid of, our brokenness, is the door to our Father’s heart.” Who better to heal your wounds than the God who has been wounded and bleeds with us?
4. Let God Love You.
In assessing my relationship with the lover of my soul, it became glaringly apparent that the focus of my relationship became very one-sided—me loving God. A lot of years were spent trying to earn God’s love, although I didn’t recognize it. When I failed to hold my neatly obedient life all together, God’s love broke through. It was my brokenness that opened the floodgates of His love. I had gotten it mixed up. God loved me first, while I was yet a sinner (Rom. 5:8). But I had made it all about me and my love for Him instead of how deep and wide and great is His love for me. In letting myself go, I began to experience God’s incredible love for me in a way I had not understood before—a love not based on what I did for Him, not based on my worthiness, but on me in my messiness, just as I am, the beloved daughter of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords! Romans 8:35-37 says, “Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity…? No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loves us” (NLT). How many times have I heard that? Now, for the first time I started to really believe and experience that. Nothing…not weariness, not brokenness, not missing a quiet time, not my worst version of myself, not letting myself go. God loves me. Period. God loves me despite myself. Here is the paradox, says Ann Tatlock, “We can fully embrace God’s love only when we recognize how completely unworthy of it we are.”
5. Rediscover things you once enjoyed.
I had given so much of myself in the process of caring for others, that I had lost large pieces of my soul. It became hard to even remember what I loved to do before medical illnesses and its subsequent brokenness took up residence in my life. Make a list of things you enjoy doing and try to do one each day. Proverbs 13:12 reminds us, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
6. Find someone to pray for you.
Too often, I allowed myself to struggle alone. I was too ashamed to share this deep soul struggle with anyone—even myself. But we can’t go it alone. To keep ourselves spiritually fit, we have to have cheerleaders along the way. We need that friend to help us hold our arms up in the battle, in the moments of crushing defeats and setbacks, in the moments when it looks like we’re not going to win.
Getting back into spiritual shape will look different for each of us—and takes time. But we have an incredibly patient and loving God who wants us back under the shelter of His great love for us. He sees our struggles, our pain, our distance—our letting ourselves go—and nothing can separate us from His love. And as we start to take the walls down and be honest, He welcomes us back into His arms again.
