Category: Dear Beloved

Dear Beloved,

You are trying to live from a place of confidence and trust, but habits long-formed continue to get in your way. Some of these are ingrained in your way of being and your way of thinking that you do not even notice when they take hold of you. Yet despite their subtlety, despite the “naturalness” of such practices, their impact runs deep. It shapes the manner in which you think about and see yourself.

One of these habits is your tendency to see yourself through other people’s eyes. When you think about your past, your current situation, or a particular choice you have made, you often think of what others would say. Sometimes this manifests itself in visualization. You see the face of someone you know and you hear their voice responding, speaking some brutally honest judgement of your decisions. But other times, this projection of other people’s thoughts is not so explicit. Instead of actively imagining a situation, you think like the other person. In a strange sense, you seek to enter into their mind, to break into the stream of their thoughts and then to be pulled along by the current.

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There is no life so tattered or spirit so broken that God cannot use it for His good. You are still trying to hold onto your life and as you grip the edges with white slipping fingers, you find it still eludes your control. You blame yourself, you shame yourself, you look to the future and past, and ever before you as you close your eyes is the unfathomable void, the as-of-yet unarticulated disaster towards which you see your life heading. In this moment, you have a choice. You can continue to live hunched over, crippled under the weight of what you were never meant to bear. Or you can let go, acknowledge your own fallibility, and cling to another surer sense of security. 

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Dear Beloved,

You are much stronger than you know. You know things that you have forgotten that you know. You have gone places where you have forgotten you can go. You are not as alone as you think you are. There are so many things about the real that your mind has gotten twisted, so many ways that your fears have taken hold of you and unseated your intuitions. 

You can trust yourself a little more. You can blame yourself less. Those places you were in the past – there was a reason for your being there and there was a reason for your being there then. But you are not there now. You are here. And there are gifts in this moment of which you are worthy. There is strength for this moment, which you can claim. You deserve to be happy. 

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Dear Beloved,

It is hard for you to look at yourself and see something that is beautiful. This is because you see only the separate component parts and never the whole. You isolate a particular physical feature and analyze it as though it can be stacked up against others of this kind. But as soon as you remove this feature from the living, breathing whole, it becomes lifeless and flat. On its own, this one “part” of you is nothing, and yet when seen in the fullness of its context, the whole self radiates through, and the brilliance and uniqueness of this self overshadow so-called objective “imperfections.” 

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Dear Beloved,

If others perceive you wrongly, this does not alter the truth of who you are in any form. You are still too concerned with what other people think of you. A sense of ‘justice’ burns within your spirit as you listen to words you do not think are true, words that seem to belie the integrity or complexity of your character. But these words (and false impressions) are only meaningful insofar as you allow them to affect you. There is nothing wrong with advocating for truth, but there is a time when it is worthy to so act and a time when this staunch defense of truth derives more from your own insecurities or fears than  from anything else. 

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Dear Beloved,

Be kind. There are many things that seem to matter, but few things that do, and this is one of them. Never underestimate the difference a little kindness can make on this world. It is not just about doing kind things or listing off acts or accomplishments as concrete displays of kindness. It’s about being kind. Perhaps you are kind to a stranger you will never see again or to a person who will never appreciate your kindness. Kindness does not exist because of visibility. In fact, unseen kindness is often the most beautiful, because it is guided only by love. And kindness cannot be measured – there is no way of determining the exact impact of a moment of kindness, but it is true that God gathers up each little kindness in His hands and never lets a single one go.

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“Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.” -Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

In this new series, beginning with the post below, I want to reflect on the idea that each one of us is the Beloved – we have a value that cannot be taken away and that is rooted in our dignity and uniqueness, a worth based on being and not contingent on what we do or have not done. With this in mind, I wrote these letters to myself but also more broadly to all of us, to each individual who desires to love and be loved, who has felt that thrumming doubt within them – the voice that says perhaps you are not enough. In these letters, I want to listen to a different voice – one that says you are set apart and loved, and can love yourself as well; that your value does not rest on anything other than being, and that you can rest in this truth and feel at peace.

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