mulholland.

This week in Student Leaders, I took my kids through this passage in a book I have been reading for one of my classes. I read this passage a week or two ago but I have not been able to get it out of mind. This speaks to me. This echoes the desire of my heart...

Here is where we begin to let the Spirit of God reveal to us aspects of our inner being that have been invisible to our view but that now we begin to see as hindrances to our growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ. God is very gracious in revealing these things to us, not all at once, but only as we are able to deal with them… We think that we are holding nothing back, and that we are not clinging to ourselves or to anything else. We should rather die than hesitate to make a complete sacrifice. But, in the daily round, God constantly shows us new areas. We find in our hearts a thousand things, which we would have sworn were not there. God only shows them to us as he makes them appear. It is like an abscess which bursts. The moment when it bursts is the only one that horrifies us. Before that, we were carrying it without feeling it, and we did not think we had it. However, we did have it, and it only broke because we had it. When it was hidden, we thought that we were healthy and quite as we should be. When it breaks we smell the stench of the pus. The breaking is healthy, although it is painful and disgusting. Each of us carries in the depth of his heart a mass of filth, which would make us die of shame if God should show us all its poison and horror. Self-love would be in an unbearable suffering. I am not speaking now of those whose hearts are gangrenous with enormous vices. I am speaking of the souls which seem honest and pure. We should see a foolish vanity which does not dare to come out in the open, and which stays in shame in the deepest folds of the heart. We should see self-complacencies, heights of pride, subtle selfishness and a thousand windings within, which are as real as they are inexplicable… At this stage God begins the process of disclosing to us those deep festering sores of our being in order that we may offer them up to God through the disciplines into which we have been led for their healing.

_Mulholland
Invitation to a Journey, pg. 84-85

Here is where I struggle. It is those deep, festering aspects that I don't want to deal with. I know I have to come to grips with my reality sometime... but fear holds me back.

"When it was hidden, we thought that we were healthy and quite as we should be... Each of us carries in the depth of his heart a mass of filth, which would make us die of shame if God should show us all its poison and horror."

This sentence puts a knot in my stomach every time I read it:

"I am not speaking now of those whose hearts are gangrenous with enormous vices. I am speaking of the souls which seem honest and pure."

This is me when I am real. I am a soul that seems honest... and pure... and OK. I got it all together... supposedly. Or at least... I force myself into believing the myth. I trick myself into believing I am healthy and everything in my being is quite as it should be.

So I am at a stage of submission. A crossroad.

"At this stage God begins the process of disclosing to us those deep festering sores of our being in order that we may offer them up to God through the disciplines into which we have been led for their healing."

Thank You God.