The Voice of Truth

Out of all the voices calling out to me

I will choose to listen and believe

the voice of truth 

~ written by John Mark Hall

sung by Casting Crowns

 

This week I had a wake up call. A long time friend decided she needed to take a few steps back from our friendship - be friends from afar - because she can no longer tolerate the denial she sees in me. She doesn't want to point it out, doesn't believe it is her place to point it out, but at this point needs to be a friend who loves me from afar.

On the one hand, maybe I am in so much denial that I simply can't see it. Despite all of the introspection and work that I do on myself maybe I am just spinning my wheels from one thing to another in order not to focus on the thing - whatever that is - about which I am in denial. It is certainly not the first time I have heard this theory. My trainer also believes I am hiding from something. 

Are these two both the voice of truth?

On the other hand, I have worked so hard on myself for so long that maybe the wake up call is really that I need to get over myself. The idea that I am someone that someone else has to stay away from is ridiculous. Absurd. And yet I treat myself that way, don't I? I treat myself as if I am a mass of broken parts that need to be fixed, that at the same time are too broken to ever be fixed. Possibly I have been loving myself from afar for a long time and it is time to stop the madness that is Project Ginny. Maybe there is no deeply buried anything that needs to be faced.

Is this the voice of truth?

Surely you see my dilemma.  This reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  After being poisoned by a demon Buffy comes to believe that she has been in a mental institution, and that her life as a slayer has all been a hallucination. She sees her parents still happily married, not divorced, and she begins to prefer this new non-slayer life. Buffy keeps falling back into her slayer "hallucination", and eventually decides that the slayer life is her true life. It was heartbreaking watching her say goodbye to her dream mother, but she had to decide which road to take, which life to live.

And so, which road do I take? Do I take the one that tells me that I am in denial, hiding from something that has been plaguing me, pursuing me, for most of my life? Or do I take the one that says I am fine? Which is the voice of truth?

Maybe what I'm in denial about is that I am fine, and that I always have been and always will be. That seems the easy road, doesn't it? But is that me choosing to stay in the happy parents-are-still-married-and-demons-are-not-real world?

When am I awake and when am I asleep?

I woke up in the middle of the night last week with a single clear thought in my head.

"I need to let go of the things in my life that are holding me back in order to make room for the things that God wants to put there."

There was no background chatter, no sensation of waking up and remembering. It was simply coming to a complete and sudden wakefulness with this sentence in my mind, over and over, as if asleep me wanted to make sure awake me knew it was important. Above all thoughts of addictions to food or alcohol, more than any ideas about shortcomings or weaknesses, I have lived my life holding on to the belief that I am too broken to be fixed.

The voice of truth tells me this is a lie. 

All of the other voices, the ones in my head and the ones from my friends, are lying to me. There is a strong pull to believe them instead, but that road has led me no where. No, that's not entirely true. That road has led me here, right here, to where I am, believing that I must no longer love myself from afar.