Punishment or Pruning?
“Why me?”
“Why is this happening?”
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“That’s it. I’m done. It’s over. I’ve lost everything.”
“Please, God, please, please forgive whatever I’ve done and make this go away. I’ll do anything you say.”
This is a very short list of the thoughts, pleadings, and prayers that I and more than seven billion people on the planet have experienced throughout our lives. When we are at the lowest and most desperate times in our lives, they consume our every thought. At these times, despair, fear, embarrassment, and shame congeal into one horrific belief that everything we hold dear is coming to an end or already over. It’s just a matter of time.
Anxiety was at the center of my first blog post, 3 Threads, and it is certainly a big player here, but in this post, I want to discuss how the loss of hope often goes hand-in-hand with anxiety and can lead to two very dark places…“I can’t take it anymore,” and “I don’t want to be here anymore.” The word “anymore” implies that something either has or is about to end. And it is at this razor’s edge of despair that we begin to ask God questions like “Why me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” “Why am I being punished?” Well, the truth is, we aren’t being punished, we’re being pruned
Punishment
We have all been raised to believe that God has given us the gift of free will and that it’s up to us to choose wisely and do the right thing. However, that doesn’t always happen; sometimes, we do hurtful, risky, selfish, and stupid things. Things that eventually come back to hurt us, and that’s when the “punishment” starts, and we find ourselves cowering on the very edge of an emotional black hole. But what if I told you it wasn’t punishment? What if I told you that God gave us a second gift? Well, he did and it’s called “pain.
Pain, whether it’s physical or emotional, is the single most effective warning system we have. If it’s strong enough, it will stop us in our tracks and prevent us from taking another step. This is when pain has its chance to scream at us that something is wrong…something is broken…something needs to be fixed…something needs to change! Whether or not we listen is entirely up to us. I spent 26 years ignoring my pain and the pain I was causing everyone around me because I was confident that I was sufficiently clever, strong, and stubborn enough to overcome my addictions by myself. For 26 years, I was wrong, and I was wrong because I looked at the pain as a hurdle instead of a signal.
In my lifetime, my world has come crashing down around me four times. Sadly, it took multiple catastrophes before I was finally capable of understanding the difference between being punished and being pruned. I now know that none of us are ever being punished. But before I could experience this epiphany, I had to first understand the difference between “growing up” and “grown.”
When we are young and growing up, and mom and dad are out of the house. We do things we’re not supposed to, and sometimes, we break things. For example, once, when I was a kid, my sisters and I were playing “The Floor Is Lava” when I tried to jump from the couch to a chair. The chair was next to a table and on the table was one of my mom’s favorite lamps. You guessed it, I knocked over the lamp and broke it. When she got home, she was livid, and I was sent to my room to “wait for your father to get home.” The mental torture of waiting for my dad to get home was almost as painful as the subsequent spanking I got. Afterward, I was told my allowance would be given to my mom until a new lamp could be purchased. Not getting an allowance for several months sucked, but when I walked out of my room, life had returned to normal. I did something wrong. I was held accountable, punished, and then forgiven.
However, when we’re grown and do much more serious things than breaking a lamp, no one’s there to hold us accountable or punish us. This wreaks havoc on both our conscious and subconscious brains. We want things to be okay again, to have a clean slate, but that’s not possible because no one’s punishing us. So, we have no choice but to punish ourselves. We do this through a variety of methods. We run away, we hurt ourselves, or we become addicted to alcohol and/or drugs. Sadly, none of these relieve even the slightest amount of our self-loathing, shame, and fear. So, with no relief in sight, we begin to perceive our pain as punishment. God’s punishing us because we did something bad and are bad people. We are wrong.
Pruning
I realize that nothing I’ve written here is going to instantly change anyone’s life. But that isn’t my intention. My purpose with this and every future post is to challenge your viewpoints and preconceptions because they, in my personal experience, are the two most prominent sources of emotional pain, addiction, and mental illness.
So, why do we believe we’re being punished? It’s simple because it’s the only way we can make sense of the extreme amount of emotional pain we’re in. “This hurts so bad, and it’s not getting any better, so I know I’m being punished.” But, to borrow a line from my first post, that’s not how God works. It’s through pain that we are made aware of a shortcoming or hurtful trait and/or action. With this knowledge, we’re given an opportunity to change. That’s not punishment. It’s pruning. Our broken and diseased actions and attributes need to be removed from us by us. It’s a choice we have to make to move forward. We’re human, and we sometimes make horrible choices, and those choices hurt us and, often, those we love most in life. So, to become who we’re meant to be, all of our hurtful convictions, habitual actions, and purposeful ignorance need to be removed from our lives.
Pruning requires accountability, humility, and forgiveness. Accountability to accept ownership of what we have done. Humility to accept what consequences may be on the horizon and to wholeheartedly commit to whatever is needed to change. Forgiveness of those who have hurt us and, most importantly, forgiveness for ourselves. None of this is easy. Pruning is hard because it does hurt. Our anxiety and fear don’t suddenly go away the minute we say, “Well, at least I’m not being punished.” They fade into the background one day at a time.
Pruning is both a perception and a realization. My intention here is to challenge you to look at your life and your circumstances as well as your future, in a different way. To be clear, being accountable, humble, and brutally honest isn’t going to instantly “fix” anything. But the very moment you can say, “I screwed up, and I’m going to do whatever I can to never feel this way again,” (and mean it) you will be able to take a breath that is just a tiny bit deeper, and the crushing weight that is engulfing you will become a few ounces lighter. I promise.
Changing your perception while you are in the middle of a crisis is one of the hardest things you will ever do. This is because you’re in panic mode almost every waking moment of every day and all your brain can think about are the worst possible outcomes. Over and over and over. It’s telling you you’re going to lose everything, and the world as you know it is on fire. It will take a concerted effort on your part to alter how your brain is handling the nightmare. The only way you’re going to survive is to release every ounce of ego and pride you possess and then embrace one simple fact...the sun will come up tomorrow.
Fourteen years ago, while I was hanging on to my sobriety by my fingernails and hating every minute of every day, someone who was fed up with me being an asshole told me something that has stuck with me ever since. He was sick and tired of my catastrophizing and complaining and pulled me aside one night after a meeting and said...,
“Holy shit, Steve, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just Tuesday!”
Those two sentences were as if he had punched me in the nose. They stopped me in my tracks. For a few minutes, I stood next to him, silently contemplating what he had said and what he meant. Then it hit me. He was right. No matter how angry or scared I was, no matter how much pain I was in, no matter how hopeless everything seemed, the sun was going to come up tomorrow. And, if the world wasn’t going to end, then maybe nothing was an accident. So, just maybe my waking up wouldn’t be an accident either. And, if my waking up wasn’t going to be an accident, then my being alive wasn’t going to be an accident, which meant there was a plan in place for me. But to reach that plan, there were going to be things I needed to do. I needed to listen to my pain, drop my ego, make amends where needed, and turn my back on the old habits and tendencies that were destroying my life.
So, the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming train. It was a new start, and all I had to do was get to the end of the tunnel! Sadly, I soon discovered I couldn’t run toward it or even take a leisurely walk in its direction. To get there, I had to be still and allow myself to float under someone else’s guidance, my friends’, my family’s, my wife’s, and God’s. Once I reached the end of myself and committed to change, the next step (while I was learning to float) was to begin inserting three truths into a brain that was flooding me with lies every second I was awake. The three truths are:
1. Everything IS going to be okay.
2. This WILL end.
3. Something AMAZING is coming.
Inch by inch. Day by day. Week by week. The fog began to lift, and my anxiety began to subside slowly. It wasn’t a “light switch” moment because it took time for me to learn what I needed to learn and develop new routines and habits to replace the ones that had pushed me so far from my intended path. This, in essence, is pruning. I’m changing and growing, and it’s painful and scary because I cannot see into the future and see when things are going to change. I simply have to continue to take solace in the three truths because every time I’ve reached the end of a tunnel, the result of my anxiety, pain, and blind trust has been worth it. My destinations have all been better than anything I could have imagined. It can and will be the same for you. You’re being changed, not punished. Because that’s how God works.
