As I sat there listening, still detached from my body, those words somehow reached me.
Wait, he’s not leaving me. Then what is he saying?
I love you. But I can’t find you.
I could not make sense of this message.
On one hand, it sounded as if he was saying the exact words I feared — he could not see me. On the other hand, he was saying something new, words I had always longed to hear.
I won’t leave you. I want to find you.
The shame lingered, but I smiled and nodded through the rest of our dinner.
The next day, the battle within me began.
That jerk! What gives him the right to tell me to work on myself? Look at all his flaws. They are way worse than mine.
I’m being like Jesus by always focusing on other people. What does he have to say for himself?
Tempted to pick up the phone and download all the terrible things about him to my friends, some part of me wouldn’t let me. (Well, maybe I did a little bit.)
“He’s not wrong,” I wrote in my journal.
Something deep inside me knew that he was right. When you have lived decades of your life camouflaging who you are — even while you’re doing “good things for God” — you get that it might be hard for someone else to find you, to know who you really are.
Joe had my attention.
God had my attention.
But here was my dilemma: How in the world do you stop being camouflage when it’s all you’ve ever been? How do you let someone in when you’ve worked overtime to stay hidden?
I had learned to cope in relationships — and feel like a valuable person — by always focusing on others. Yet God had brought into my path a man who had exactly zero interest in all my efforts to focus on him. To experience the kind of love I actually wanted, I had to learn to make myself visible.
Understandably, part of me experienced Joe’s words as a rejection. But he wasn’t rejecting me. Instead, he was desperately trying to get a message to the hidden me buried deep within:
- I want you.
- I want the real you that is hiding.
- This camouflage keeps me from the person I want to spend my life with.
I knew he was right. He wanted to know all of me — not just the pleasing, helpful perception of me I was so good at creating. And I was the only one who could open that door. Instead of focusing on others, I had to start focusing on the deep, life-changing work of bringing forth the person I really was.
- In order to be known by other people, you have to show up as your true self. In order to show up as your true self, you have to face your wounds.
In my case, it was Joe who served as a catalyst for me to dig deeper into the work of facing unhealed wounds and confronting aspects of my conditioning that had encouraged me to hide. But the truth is that
- God was the driving force behind the healing I would subsequently find.
In the same way, God wants to heal and draw out the real you, including the parts of you that have learned to stay hidden. To join God in this effort, you have to start paying attention. You have to become aware of the ways you’ve been wounded, the methods you’ve used to cope, and the countless subtle and not-so-subtle messages of your conditioning. This work is tender. It requires compassion, courage, and care. And it requires a strong foundation of trust, the cornerstone of which is developing trust with yourself.
After all, how can you trust someone else with the real you if you aren’t sure what they’ll find?
- Ephesians 6:10.
Excerpted with permission from The Best of You by Allison Cook, copyright Dr. Allison Cook.
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