All I Need Is Jesus and a Good Pair of Jeans: The Tired Supergirl's Search for Grace (8 page)

Of all the terrible, truthful things to say to the woman who bore your unbelievably large children (all nine pounds and over). How could he say I have no grace? Maybe because he has lived with me for over ten years. That is a lot of years of towing the line. And I recognized in that instant what he has known all along. I don’t have a whole lot of grace to pass around. Even for the ones I love best.

Why is it so hard for us supergirls to be grace givers? We want God’s grace for ourselves, but we don’t want to share it. We want the forgiveness, the pardon, the joy of living free. We want Jesus to pay the price for our sins, but we want others to pay the price for their own. We want to hang on to past hurts and point out other people’s junk even though we want them to forgive the hurts we’ve caused them and excuse the junk that clutters our own lives.

Supergirls everywhere—beware of the Judge! He sits at the ready. Right within earshot, pounding his gavel and handing out judgments at will. Saying things like,

“Docket #43, last week Sally snubbed you at playgroup. She’s no good. Don’t forgive her. Four weeks snubbing minimum sentence.”

“Case #71 being heard. Two years ago your boyfriend lied to you. Don’t ever trust him again. He’ll never change.

Sentence? Bring up his shortcomings every chance you get.”

The Judge is ruthless. He never takes into account things like that maybe Sally was hurting and she didn’t mean to be rude but she is quite possibly at the end of her rope. Or that your boyfriend was scared to tell you the truth and was afraid of how you would respond. There is no give in the Judge. He lis absolutely graceless.

And here’s the thing. It’s not pretty. The judging. It is ugly and hard and Jesus is not in it. When Jesus talks to the crowd about judging during the Sermon on the Mount, he says,

Don’t do it. It’s not good, and how you treat others will come back to haunt you.

Stop judging others, and you will not be judged. For others will treat you as you treat them. Whatever measure you use in judging others, it will be used to measure how you are judged. And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying, “Friend, let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,” when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log from your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.

Matthew 7:1–5

Personally, I prefer the verses before these ones that say I don’t have to worry about what I wear or eat, that God will take care of me. I usually coast right by the judging verses, and read on to where Jesus says that if I ask, I will receive and that God gives good gifts to those who ask. But Jesus supergirl paraphrase doesn’t fool around when it comes to judging others. Because he knows, first, that he is the only one qualified to do it, and second, we aren’t able to help others with their mess until we’ve dealt with our own.

I wear contacts. I love them. They are less cumbersome than glasses and I have far better peripheral vision when I wear them. I tried to get lasik surgery, but they told me my corneas were too thin. Too thin. A phrase that would have been a compliment in reference to my upper thighs, the backs of my arms, or my post-baby midriff, but I digress. I have skinny corneas, so I wear contacts.

The only downside to wearing contacts is when I get something caught under one of them. Heaven forbid that I get a piece of fuzz or a wayward eyelash trapped under one of them while I am driving, because I will go careening off of the road, clawing at my eye. It is excruciating. Everything stops. I can’t move, I can’t focus. I can’t do a thing until I have ripped the contact out of my eye and gotten rid of the offending party. Supergirl or not, a strategically placed piece of sand has been known to incapacitate me for a good fifteen minutes. I’m not kidding. Don’t get me started on the evils of fuzzy sweaters and airborne pollen. These microscopic terrors are a bane to contact wearers everywhere.

And according to Jesus, I am not dealing with a wee bit of fluff here. Apparently, I have a redwood sticking out of my eye. Not in the least bit microscopic. I have to agree it would be difficult to help someone else out with their piece of lint because I would be bumping into them with my tree. Jesus keeps bringing it back home. We have to take care of our own problems before pointing out other people’s problems. We supergirls are incapacitated by a lovely forest of elms, poplars, and, my favorite, maples, which are sprouting from our retinas. We cannot see our way clear until we ask Jesus to help us with a little trimming.

And let’s be honest. Would any of us actually have time to point out the sins of others if we were knee deep in resolving our own issues? The Judge is hemming and hawing, pounding away, trying to get our attention . . .

“Your co-worker is gossiping about you again! The sentence is . . .”

And you are saying, “Well, if it please the court, actually, I tend to gossip frequently myself and I was just asking God to help me in that area. . . .”

Or the Judge points a knobby finger at your boyfriend: “He lied to you again. Don’t give him the chance to explain. Three years . . .”

And you cut him off, saying, “Well, actually, Judge, could you go easy on him because in high school, I skipped class once and wrote myself a note, pretending I was my mom, and my counselor called me in and . . .”

The Judge cuts in with a “Give me a break! Court will be in recess for however long it takes you to come to your senses and give these people what they deserve.” You get the picture.

Then an unbelievable thing happens. When we focus on our own sins, our own struggles, our own inconsistencies, our own weaknesses, we tend to be softer toward others. And if by chance, we supergirls ask Jesus to begin clearing out the trees in our eyes, he will pour in grace and forgiveness, and the way we see others will begin to change. I think perhaps we will see each other the way he sees us. Through a lens of mercy and freedom and love. And as for the Judge? Case dismissed.

10

I HAVE
ANGER ISSUES

S
ome days I am a happy tired supergirl. Some days I am a melancholy tired supergirl. But today, today I am an angry tired supergirl. Angry. Mad. Irritated. Upset. Whatever word you want to use to frame the thought, that is me. Maybe it’s the heat of this summer afternoon in my non–air-conditioned house. Maybe it’s the fact that no matter how hard I try to block out time for writing, something interrupts me. Or maybe it’s the twenty minutes I spent online, when I planned to be writing, trying to access a cartoon for my kids to watch and a website kept bouncing me back to the home page. Repeatedly. Or maybe it’s the list that looms large in my head of all I want to squeeze into each day that is squeezing the life out of me right now. I’m sure it is all of these things and more.

I’m right there at boiling over. All the feelings of this sweltering day have been simmering inside of me. I’ve been trying to keep my anger buckled down. I’ve been trying to hold it in. That heady explosive thing in me. That feeling that I may not be able to control what comes out of my mouth. That something hot and wrong is brewing within my body and I am about to let loose on someone and tell them what I think about it. My anger tends to take the form of searing words.

Some supergirls let loose with their anger using their fists, raining blows on the world. Some supergirls turn it inward, letting it ruminate and harden and color their whole outlook with bitterness. Some supergirls are on the edge most days, barely hanging on by their finely manicured nails, and letting go with short blasts of scathing repartee to any hapless passerby. Some supergirls are so overheated with anger, they get cold and freeze everyone out with their chilly silence. And some of us supergirls let it build and build over days and weeks to a blowup of volcanic proportions, leaving chaos in our wake.

I have a vivid first memory of my anger. I was four years old.

I was trying to put on a plaid turtleneck, putting both my head and arm through the same opening, and I got stuck. And furious. My little body was tight with rage, and I screamed and cried and stayed in the vise-like grip of that turtleneck. I couldn’t see my way clear, and I was beyond the normal itch of frustration. I remember I felt like I was about to burst from the inside out.

And that is how the grip of anger feels. It feels out of control and explosive, like a shaken-up bottle of Coke. The pressure builds and builds and then BAM! Here we go. And when it is all over, when the top has blown and the sticky spray is covering all that is around us, we supergirls are spent. And sad and ashamed. And left to clean up the mess we have made. Whether it is apologizing to our kids for letting sarcastic words fly at them like little stinging pellets or to our roommate for screeching about the dishes that can never find their way out of the sink. Our anger gives them an unforgettable show of the dark places in our not-so-super souls. There is always a mess to be cleaned up.

Because that is the way the Instigator likes it. Messy. He is that voice within your head. The voice that says yes to your anger. Yes to exploding. Yes to venting. Yes to screaming. Yes to throwing things. Yes to not thinking about what comes after the anger is over. Yes to fighting. Yes to the silent treatment. Yes to the mean looks and eye rolling. Yes to everything raw and unedited and cutting that you want to say. He wipes out the “inappropriate” sensor and gives the thumbs-up to your irrational, hurtful, untamed behaviors. He encourages you to feel the heat of being upset and go with it. He’s not a whisperer. He has to have a loud voice to be heard above the roar of anger in your head. He likes to use key phrases like:

“How could he do that to you? Don’t let him get away with that!”

Or “You are totally right to feel angry. Nothing ever goes your way.”

He prods us to feeling justified in our wrath. And most definitely squelches the voice of reason or goodness or Jesus when you are in the angry situation.

There are different triggers that lead to anger. Mostly it is sparked by a negative event or emotion. Envy. Jealousy. Stress. Humiliation. Fear. Being wronged. An unkind word headed your way. Pain—both emotional and physical. Just the other day, I was head butted, by accident, mind you, by little boy number two. I was blinded by the unexpected pain. And I succinctly remember the voice of the Instigator >saying, “Grab his head and squeeze it off.”

And in my pain, it truly seemed the right thing to do. And as I reached for his curly blonde head, I had to mindfully think,
No, your second child needs his head. Leave it
where it is.

And I had to take long sucking breaths of air as I clutched my bruised cheekbone. It was reactionary.

Few of us supergirls are truly thinking when we are reacting. We are in the moment, acting out of our pain. The pain that comes from feeling out of control. Things are happening that we can’t control, and we lash out because we don’t like it. We don’t want it. And we can’t see our way clear to any good solution. Do you think that if we supergirls were thinking clearly, we would use words that hurt the tender hearts of our children, bruise close-knit relationships, and create gaps and rifts in our communication with the people who deeply care for us?

In Psalm 37:8, David says this: “Stop your anger! Turn from your rage! Do not envy others—it only leads to harm.” And he was right. Anger left alone to find its own solution goes the way of violence. War, riots, divorce, murder are all born of anger. The Instigator wants us to look at a wrong situation and make it wrong-er.

But here’s the thing. Anger in and of itself isn’t wrong. It is an emotion. Like happiness or fear. We all have it in us. The craziness comes when our anger takes a left turn. The problem comes in the path we choose to follow when our anger blazes within us like a torch. So how is it that Jesus was righteous in his anger? How did he use that boiling feeling within him to bring about God’s glory and rightness to something gone wrong? Jesus looked at a wrong situation and allowed his anger to help him make it right.

Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the merchants and their customers. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the stalls of those selling doves. He said, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a place of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!”

The blind and lame came to him, and he healed them there in the Temple.

Matthew 21:12–14

Taking care of his Father’s house is his business. He walks into the temple, this place that houses the presence of God himself. The religious folks are making a mockery and a mall out of this sacred place. This doesn’t sit well with the Christ. In fact, he can’t let it stay the way it is. He is seeing clearly in his anger. He is not blinded by his fury. He is propelled by it. And he begins sacking the courtyard. Throwing tables. Spilling money. Freeing doves. The merchants scatter, and the birds soar heavenward. And as the dust settles, as the passion of the moment is spent, something very right happens. Jesus begins healing people. He has righted the wrong. The temple is ready to do what it is meant to do: restore the people to right relationship with God. Jesus, God in skin, has walked into his house and set it to rights. That’s good stuff.