Pardon Me, Do You Validate?

When I was a kid I had a book called “Are You My Mommy?’ by P.D. Eastman. This little bird had apparently gotten lost and went all over the place asking a collection of unlikely animals if they were his mommy. It seemed silly as a kid, as I’m sure was the intention. The little bird, however, apparently had no clue what he was so it didn’t seem at all absurd to him to approach a rhinoceros or a dog to see if they were his mommy.

In my ruminations about validation and purpose, I remembered that book. I can totally relate to this little bird. When you don’t know who you are or what you’re supposed to be, you are constantly looking for yourself in other people. Maybe you’ll see something there you can call your own, or maybe they will be the one who will be able to tell you who you’re supposed to be.

Until recently, I have spent my whole life trying to find myself in other people, which seems a fairly absurd exercise for someone as intelligent as I hear that I am. After all, other people are other people and I am me. Or am I? And if I am, what the hell does that mean? Who am I? Who do I belong to?

The question that’s really being asked, though, goes quite a bit deeper than that.

I believe that God has spoken very clearly about love and how powerful it is. Jesus pretty much focused His entire ministry on love. And we know from the Bible that, of faith, hope and love, love is the greatest. So that tells me that God has instilled within us the ability and desire to do at least three things: to believe, to hope, and to love. Our ability and desire to love, however, will be the strongest of the three.

I believe the reason love is the greatest is that it is relational. You can have faith and hope and still wander this world alone, but to love requires someone else be involved. I believe that God intended for us to be in relationships. Why else would He have designed our bodies to reproduce as a result of coupling? Relationships are absolutely the highest priority to God. Our relationship with Him was broken and He sent us His son, not only to mend the relationship with Him, but to teach us how to connect to each other; to teach us how to love.

One of the only things I know for sure about love is that it needs a target. It needs to go somewhere. Or more accurately, to someone. Humans are supposed to love other humans. We are told to love each other as God loved the church, or rather, as God loves us. That’s a pretty powerful love. God loves us more than anybody, even when we act horrible and spiteful and childish, He loves us more than our human minds and brains can even comprehend, and we are supposed to love each other in this same way. I believe that God wouldn’t tell us to do anything He didn’t give us the ability to do. That must mean that we are, or were originally, designed to love each other this much, in this way. Freddy Mercury, in Queen’s song, “Somebody to Love”, isn’t crying out for somebody to love him, he wants somebody to love. It’s a desperate need within us.

And, as it seems with anything of great value, there is great risk involved. I don’t necessarily think the original intention of love was to be risky and difficult, but perhaps that aspect of it is just another by-product of our brokenness.

Typically, the very first people that humans ever know are their parents. The ideal situation is that parents love their children and raise them in a loving environment, and the children’s initial target for the love within them in their parents. This ideal system teaches children how to love and how to recognize healthy love, the kind of love that God has for us, the kind of love we’re supposed to have for each other. But what if that’s not what happens? What if one or both parents are missing? What if they’re not loving? What happens to all that love that is within us?

In my case, the one missing was my father. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother left him when I was a toddler. All children, but perhaps girls most of all, need to see themselves reflected through the eyes of a loving father. I am a girl and I have a sister and two daughters, so while I am certain that boy children have their own needs and issues with their parents, girls are pretty much what I know. It is widely known and accepted that girls who do not have loving, healthy relationships with their fathers carry this baggage with them into every relationship they have.

For me, I think it was even more significant because I am made up almost completely from genes from my father’s side of the family. It was so strange for me being raised by my mom and interacting with her side of the family and having virtually no contact with my dad’s side of the family until I was around 12 or 13. I have likened it in the past to a giraffe being raised by a bunch of elk—similar, but not at all the same species. I mean, we all had two arms and two legs but my arms and legs never looked like those of my mom’s side of the family. My mom stands about five feet four inches and has always been petite. Her side of the family are about that tall and also petite. My mom is also a blonde with blue eyes. I, on the other hand, am five feet seven inches tall, dark hair, hazel eyes, and built more like Mae West. My mom and I have similar facial features, but that’s where the similarities stop.

My mom remarried when I was five and ultimately had my sister, who is genetically a lot like her dad. I guess my mom’s petite genes just couldn’t get a break. So here I am, in this family with a mother who looks nothing like me, a father who is not biologically connected to me, and a sister who looks like him. We moved back to the town where my mom’s whole family lives when I was about twelve, so it really hammered the fact home that I was nothing like these people. I just never felt like I belonged there. And while they probably never did, I swear I always felt like they were looking at me like “who is she? where did she come from?”

Not only do I look different from everybody on my mom’s side of the family, I am also different in virtually every other way as well from anybody on either side of the family. God makes us unique and individually special, but I promise you, He really did a number on me. One of the unique things that God gave me is my voice. It is loud. And when I tell you it’s loud, I mean it is loud. God gave me a voice designed to be heard in the cheap seats. Now this has served me well in my singing and hopefully someday, if I ever make any money being an author and actually get to go out into the world to talk to people about the things that I’ve written, it will be a benefit. But growing up in a family of Lilliputians with soft voices, it was a curse. I cannot tell you how many times I heard, “I’m right here, Sam, you don’t have to yell.” To this day, my husband thinks I’m yelling at him even when I’m not.

I also have a completely different sense of humor from anyone else in my family. They are a fairly conservative, fairly straightforward people. I lean toward the outrageous and ridiculous. I love British humor and it just makes my mom get a look on her face like a confused cocker spaniel. When I was a kid my favorite shows were The Bob Newhart Show and Benny Hill. I have always believed that sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, so I sometimes tend to say things, purely in an effort to lighten the mood, that other people think are shockingly inappropriate. ‘Gallows’ humor’, I think they call it.

One of my favorite books growing up was “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, which, I’m sure you’ll recall, was about an Emperor surrounded by people who would not tell him the truth. People kept blowing smoke up this Emperor’s skirt, so to speak, convincing him that he looked fabulous in his new clothes, even though he was buck-naked. Nobody wanted to be the one to break it to the Emperor that, not only was he naked, he had been rooked by this traveling “tailor”. This book made a pretty big impression on me, so I am the one in the family who will just say it. My whole family is very non-confrontational, but I have never been afraid to say that the Emperor had no clothes on.

Add to that the fact that nobody else in my family (that I knew of at the time) had a father that was an alcoholic or a step-father that was abusive, and you’ve got one seriously black sheep. I had had absolutely no say in either one of these choices in men, absolutely no say in how I was made or the fact that I was so different, and yet the message I kept feeling from everyone is “why can’t you just be more like us?” How could I? I wasn’t one of them, anymore than a giraffe can be an elk. A giraffe can run and eat and even live amongst the elk, but when the rubber hits the road, it’s still a giraffe.

This huge mess did not alter, however, the fact that I was a human being with all that love I just talked about that needed to be dealt with. I had this father-love deficit anyway, given my absentee alcoholic father and abusive step-father, and then the love that I had within me that was designed to be given to a father had nowhere to go. I grew up like some sort of maniacal machine, with the need to give and receive love at critical levels. Naturally, I just tried to give it to anyone who didn’t get away from me soon enough. I remember this dog food commercial where this big tough-looking bulldog was walking down the street at a steady pace, and this little tiny dog is bouncing all over the place around him, panting and trying to talk to the bulldog and get his attention. I always think of that when I think about myself and how I’ve tried to love people. “Want some love, Butch? (pant, pant, pant) Huh, do ya, do ya Butch? (pant, pant, pant) Do ya? I got some love right here, Butch, ya know? (pant, pant, pant) Got it right here.”

Not only did I try to give my love to anyone and everyone, I tried to find myself in those people also. Humans don’t just need love, we need validation. It is my fervent belief that we were supposed to find that validation in the love of our God. It was intended to be a perfect love relationship wherein we were always going to know who we were, what our purpose was, and how much we were loved and how much we meant to our heavenly father. Donald Miller talks about this subject exquisitely in his book, Searching For God Knows What. Because of the original sin, and because every generation since then gets a little farther away from that originally-perfect love relationship, our knowledge that we’re supposed to find ourselves, to find that validation, in God, is buried so deep within us that some of us never realize it. What we do realize is that we need it. The thing that remains after all this time is the original need to feel like we matter to someone, to something. We have a desperate need to feel valued and important.

Despite the original sin separating us from our heavenly father, I believe some of this validation and love was meant to be given to us by earthly fathers. In my case, though, and in the case of so many other children in this world, there was no father. There was no positive male role model at all. Every man who walked in front of me was a potential candidate, but I had no idea what that kind of love was supposed to be like, and since I had no idea what it was really supposed to look like, my choices didn’t seem so absurd at the time. Every man who showed me the slightest bit of kindness was immediately both a potential source and target. Like the little bird in P.D. Eastman’s book I went from man to man, trying to find not only the one to whom I belonged, but the one who could tell me who I was.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t happen. I kept trying to put huge, heavenly expectations on mere humans. You can imagine how well that worked out. Perhaps if I had been the only broken person on earth it might have worked out better, but of course we are all broken. So many of us wandering around, searching for the one who can tell us who we are and what we’re meant to be doing.

I wish I could report that life is like the movies and I found myself in one big sixty-second epiphany, but that’s not how it happened. After a lifetime of trying to be whatever it was that would make everybody else happy and want to love me, it took more than a minute to get to know myself. I went through a really bad time for a long time. I now see that even then, even in my lowest points, even when I was telling God how angry I was with Him and how much I didn’t want to talk with Him, He was still in control. Looking back on it, it reminds me of that scene in the Horse Whisperer where Robert Redford’s character Tom is working with the injured horse, Pilgrim. Not only has the horse been severely physically injured, he has been emotionally wounded as well. He is hurting and confused, feeling like he can no longer put his love and trust into those whom he has loved and served and trusted for his whole life. Tom has Pilgrim in the ring, working with him, and ultimately lassoes him. This is a climactic scene as Tom has been working with the horse for a while, earning his hesitant trust while working to restore him physically. Tom insists that no matter what happens, Grace (the little girl that was injured in the accident with the horse) must not interfere. He promises her that what he does won’t hurt the horse and that it’s necessary for Pilgrim to be able to get beyond what has happened.

Once he has the rope around the horse’s neck, he begins to pull on the rope, forcing the horse’s head down. He forces the horse onto its knees and ultimately onto its side. As the horse is lying down, Tom steps up onto the horse. It’s almost impossible to watch, not only for Grace, but for anyone watching the film. One thing that is obvious, though, is that Tom is never harsh or cruel with Pilgrim. Even as he brings Pilgrim down, it’s obvious that love is the prevailing emotion.

Tom explains to Grace that Pilgrim has lost his place in the world, that he no longer knows what is true and what is not. Essentially that everything Pilgrim ever believed in disappeared the day of the accident. He is telling Grace that Pilgrim no longer knows who he is and what he’s meant to be doing. The exercise of laying Pilgrim prone was designed to show him that not only is he not in control, he is not supposed to be, that he is not responsible for that, that it is not his fault that he is broken. Even as Tom brings Pilgrim down, he is whispering reassurances to him, asking for Pilgrim to let go, to trust him, showing Pilgrim that although he must yield control, the one to whom he yields will never hurt him and will always care for him.

I see now that God brought me through that very same experience. I was so broken, so unbelievably broken. I was so confused and I was hurting myself. God loves me and I am His child and He could no longer allow me to continue to hurt myself. Everything in my life came full-stop. He brought me gently down to my knees, and then laid me down until I stopped fighting, until I could finally listen, finally hear Him whispering to me that He loved me and would never let me go. It was so terrifying at the time, so heartbreaking, so confusing, but it was the most beautiful and powerful thing I have ever experienced.

Unlike the movies, that wasn’t the ending, but just the beginning. It was a beautiful beginning, though, and there has been such amazing freedom and peace in letting Him lead me. By journaling, I have gotten to know Him on such a deeply personal, intimate level, but equally important, I have gotten to know me. He tells me in those conversations who I am, He takes me gently by the hand and shows me myself, shows me things about myself I never knew, and I am delighted by all of them. He tells me not to worry, that I am doing a good job, that He is proud of me. He is honest with me. He does not set me up with false hope. One of the things He tells me over and over again is that “it will not be easy, but it will be done”. He calls me his Warrior Princess and He calls me His “Little One”. I’ve never been anybody’s “Little One” and when He says it, I feel how sincere it is, how much He means it.

I asked Him one time what His name was for me and He told me, “Mary Magdalene”. I was so blown away by this. She was so strong, so beautiful, so devoted. She had apparently been through much in her own life and Jesus had brought her out of it, just like He had brought me out of it. People thought she was a whore and I’m sure people have thought the same thing about me. Some people think that she was actually one of the disciples, that she may have been the one referred to as “the one whom He loved best”. Certainly they were very close. And this is how He sees me? Is that possible? Turns out it is.

An amazing thing happens when God and Jesus tell you who you are and show you things about yourself you never saw before. Eventually you find that you can believe it. You want to believe it. You want to make your heavenly father proud. You want to prove Him right. Eventually it sinks in that you no longer have to look to the world for your validation. It no longer matters what others think. Once you receive validation from the highest possible source, you begin to realize how much time is wasted in looking for it anywhere else.

I know the voice of my shepherd now. I recognize it. I see myself through His eyes, no longer enslaved by my own or anyone else’s vision of me. Like the little bird at the end of P.D. Eastman’s book, I have been found by the One who made me.