Fearlessly Exploring What Keeps Us from Giving and Receiving Love
February 14, 2006
Thanks for the good feedback about the value of an ongoing conversation about being loving people and becoming a loving community. I hope that you are continuing to talk with and pray for each other as we press into this journey.
Jesus says that love is what life is all about – Paul confirms that in I Corinthians 13 – but most of us have lived in very broken families and have never experienced the deep, healing intimate connection that God intends for us to have with Him and with others. So, we are learning – together – how to love.
For the last couple of weeks we have focused on the things in us that keep us from giving and receiving love. Hearing Jesus’ words that we will love others as we love ourselves, we have been exploring our shame and guilt. One of the tools that we use as a community to do this exploring is the 12-Steps as they are expressed by Keith Miller in A Hunger for Healing.
This week, I want to encourage all of us to explore the 4th Step – making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Hear these words from Keith Miller found on pages 61-62 in A Hunger for Healing.
In Step 4 we call it a moral inventory because we compile a list of traits and behaviors that have transgressed our highest values. We also inventory our good traits and the behaviors that represent them. In our life’s moral inventory, the defects or dysfunctional behaviors might include some that once worked; some dysfunctional behaviors may have saved our lives as children, but they are now out of date, self-defeating, and cause us a great deal of trouble when we use them as adults.
Most of us don’t realize that we are still doing many self-defeating things that keep leading us into painful situations and complicating our attempts to control other people, ourselves and God.
Setting out to do this inventory is not always simple. Lurking at every turn on this adventure is denial – a dark cloud that comes over us and blinds us to certain things about ourselves and what we do or have done. So in Step 4 we actually list what we can see about our character defects and our good points. As we become willing to own each item, our awareness grows and gradually more and more of our inventory becomes known to us
How does a fearless moral inventory relate to our previous conversations about toxic shame? First, it helps us sort out real guilt from false guilt, valid shame from toxic shame. For many of us, in our brokenness we feel guilt and shame for things that we are not guilty of and should have no shame over. I’ve told the story many times of some violent episodes that I inflicted on my family when I was in my 20s. I was guilty for that behavior and shame was an appropriate response. I’ve also told you about growing up with a very distorted sense of what it meant to be a man – feeling always ashamed of my body – convinced that something was terribly wrong with me. Though I felt guilt and shame, those feelings were not valid. That was false guilt and toxic shame, and that stuff plagued me for many years.
Sorting out what is real and what is not is a very freeing process.
Second, actually going through the discipline of writing this stuff down and sharing it with God and another person (which is Step 5) is clarifying and healing. At Harbor we are deeply committed to walking in the light with each other. The inventory is never done for the purposes of judgment or condemnation – there is none of that in Christ. It is done in other to bring prayer support, wise counsel, and accountability into our lives.
This Saturday night we will hear from some folks who have actually done a 4th Step; and, for those who are willing to conduct such an inventory, you will be given some tools for helping you start that journey. In the meantime, keep talking with one another. Keep practicing the things love does. Keep praying for God to grow us up to the kind of community that the world recognizes as His disciples because of the quality and depth of our love for one another.