Grace, Shame, and Our Need for Relationships.
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This month we’re looking at the things that make a spiritually disciplined life feel difficult. Last week we talked about how speed is no friend of life with God, and the acceleration of our daily lives is a direct threat to the depth of relationship we long for at every level.
Next week we’ll talk about our expectations of the Christian life and how needing less to be okay can simplify our daily lives.
This week we’re looking at relationships with God, ourselves, and others.
One of my favorite ways to read is to choose books that are all variations on a theme and then let them simmer together for a while. For the last few years, my mind has been stewing around our God-designed capacity for relationship, the impact of our fallen human nature on our ability to relate to God, ourselves, and others, and the restorative grace found within the community of Christ.
Last fall I wrote several times about attachment science, the field of study that demonstrates how our fundamental caregiving relationships shape how we relate, self-regulate, and enter the world. I have been most interested in how attachment science impacts the way we relate to God, ourselves, and others.
Here are explanations of three general types of attachment (anxious, shutdown, and shame-filled).
Then there are the three things we all look for in relationships, and how they impact our broken patterns of attachment: stability, security, and health.
Last weekend, Carly and I both listened to Harrison Scott Key’s work, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. It’s a retelling of their journey through marital infidelity (twice), the work of maturing past learned coping mechanisms, and the beauty of being known at your worst and allowed to be in process. It was heartbreaking, it was sobering, it was honest. The last two chapters were among the more direct Christ-focused marital advice I’ve heard about the hardship and beauty of living with another fallen person, of dealing with life as it has been when it conflicts with life how you wish it would be.
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