What if You Could Trust Yourself?
a conversation with a friend
Issue #50/Good and Beautiful Things
This week I’m trying something new, an experiment of sorts.
My long-time friend Shannon and I live in the same town, in fact, we meet up every week. Shannon is also a fellow writer so recently when something came up in my life that I wanted to talk to her about, I suggested that we write letters back and forth and share them with you here rather than talking about it in person.
With great effort we’ve managed to avoid today’s particular topic during our weekly coffee dates so this correspondence would be authentic and fresh.
Here’s my first letter and her response is linked at the end.
Dear Shannon,
I’ve been meaning to write this letter for a while now but something I heard this morning prompted me to finally go ahead and start it.
On her podcast, Emily P. Freeman asked the question: What if you could trust yourself?
Her question reminded me that I’ve been pondering the relationship with our hearts over the last several months and when I thought of the best conversation partner for the topic, I thought of you.
As you know, six years ago I started dealing with health issues that took over every part of my life. Our family prayed fervently for my body to be healed but instead my full-time job became managing the anxiety, the pain and the doctor’s appointments.
As I walked alone one day, praying to God for help, he gave me this answer: “I am healing you but I’m healing the inside of you not the outside.” The way I understood his message was that he planned to tend to my heart but not my health problems for the time being.
It was a hard answer, friend, and not the one that I wanted. But enough time has passed that now I can see God’s grace in allowing the circumstances to draw me toward a path of heart healing. While searching for answers to the chronic pain, I found a link between the physical pain I was experiencing and the emotional pain I’d been storing up for decades.
Through counseling and books and friends, God helped me to see how hard I’d been working to get life right for four decades. He showed me the pressure I was putting on myself to “suffer well” for his sake. As my understanding of his love for me shifted, my heart learned about rest. He offered me the gift of self-compassion instead of shame. He taught me how to find my worth in him and his love and how to let go of the labels I’d been given by others. The tender care and heart healing (though far from complete) has been worth the physical pain–and that’s not something I say easily or lightly.
Maybe you know from our conversations over the years that before all of this happened my relationship with my heart was very different.
As someone who grew up in the church, I’d been warned against my heart from the time I was young. Be wary of your emotions. Be suspicious of your desires. They are out to get you, to trick you, to cause you to fall.
I was in my early twenties when Matt and I married and moved into parenting. Unsure of ourselves, we gave over the formation of our parenting philosophy to wise, older friends and the books they gave us. “We’d read the encyclopedia if they gave it to us,” we would say. The books pushed us away from the wisdom of our hearts by promising us our children would be Christians if we followed the books word for word.
I remember when our first child was just a baby and I was desperate to be a good mom, a friend and mother of three told me, “I’m getting rid of the books and I’m just going to look directly to God for wisdom.” I was silently horrified. How could she be sure she was hearing from God if she didn’t read it in a book?
It wasn’t until we had our third child that I recognized that God had given me instincts, that I actually had a GPS inside of me. On the whole, though, we kept agonizing over life decisions and I continued seeking out resources and opinions, anything but listening to the voice of my own heart.
Life continued and the challenges rolled in one after another, health problems with our daughter, mental health issues with my father, and my heart learned to function in survival mode. And friend you were there, bringing me meals or books during so many of these difficult moments. Then before I knew it, I was thirty-nine.
Which brings me back around to the struggle of the past six years and how God forged a new relationship between me and my heart. I’ve got to say, I’m turning into a pretty big fan.
I’m aware that this affection for my heart could be mistaken for the self-discovery journey so popular in our world, a path crowded with Disney princesses. It may sound similar but really it’s not the same at all.
I believe I can trust my heart because I know the hand that made it.
My heart is crafted by the same hand that created the astonishing world as we know it. In the same way that I can see God in the expanse of the ocean and colors of the birds, I can see God in the shape of my heart. Ecclesiastes says “He put eternity in our hearts” and I believe that our hearts, though sinful, keep trying to make their way back home, back to safety, truth, and beauty.
As Emily P. Freeman said, “What if you could trust yourself? Not to the exclusion of God and everyone else, not trust yourself and yourself alone. But what if you could actually trust yourself like you were your very own friend? What if you weren't the arbiter of catastrophe? What if we could trust that we are discerning, caring, aware, and able to move in a direction toward our next deeply right thing?”
For me, growing to know God and his love more deeply during these difficult years has helped me learn to know my own heart, and knowing my heart has also helped me know and love God more. I don’t know how to separate the two.
So by now you’re probably wondering why I’m writing all of this to you in the first place?
A few months ago I was talking with some Christian friends and the subject of the heart came up. We read this verse during our Bible Study: “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked”.
I told them that the verse irked me a bit because it’s just one verse in the Bible and if we took a wider look at scripture, like the verse about “eternity in our hearts”, we’d see a different picture of the heart. But the overall consensus from the group seemed to be that the heart was deceitful and not to be trusted. The conversation hit a tender, not-yet-fully-healed spot and even though they were willing to talk through it more, I said I needed to pause.
When I thought of someone to discuss this with I thought of you. Our weekly conversations usually involve the journey of our hearts. When I look back I think you’ve had a more trusting relationship with your heart than I have. I’m sure it hasn’t been perfect but when I was highlighting passages in the parenting books, you were looking inward and upward. And now your role as a spiritual director involves listening to hearts every week.
What comes to mind for you when you hear the words “trust” and “heart” together? Do you believe the heart is deceitful more than anything else? Do you think becoming a Christian and joining the church in your 20’s instead of my experience of growing up in the church, affected your relationship with your heart?
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts,
-Aimee
Click here to read my friend Shannon’s response(!)
My hope is that you’re able to receive these letters in the way they were intended…not as a theological discussion but as a safe space for two long-time friends to ask questions and swap stories.
If you have questions or stories to add to the conversation please join us in the comment section.
Blessings from the Guest Nest,
-Aimee
“But what if you could actually trust yourself like you were your very own friend?” I appreciate her posing this question because so many of us seem to be our own *worst* friend, and make a virtue of it! Being married has been a wonderful opportunity to learn how to be a friend to myself in that my husband is so kind and generous, I want to be more that way too.
Thanks for sharing these letters!
This question made me gasp and involuntarily raise my hand to my heart. I cannot begin to tell you how much I needed to hear this. Thank you, dear Aimee.