Seeking to Understand Belovedness in a World of Self-Actualization - Reflections by Caroline Carr Grant '20
As a child every night one of my parents used to sit on the edge of my bed and say a prayer before I went to sleep - a kind of spiritual “wrap up” to the day. These sweet prayers usually followed some kind of pattern - thanking the Lord for the day, for our family and friends, and finally for the “wonderful plan He has for my life”. And while this may not seem unusual or even particularly noteworthy, for many parents or guardians partake in the same kind of ritual every night, as I navigate my last year of college and am finding myself in a season of constant change - I have been thinking of these prayers a lot.
Fourth year is a funny thing - knowing that our time in college has an “expiration date” of sorts. Knowing that I am moving in a couple of months - just not knowing where or why. And while this is a season filled with lots of excitement and joy, for me it has also been a season of just praying, quite desperately at times, for the Lord to reveal to me, even in some small glimpse - the “wonderful plan He has for my life”.
However, the great fallacy of this prayer may be that what I actually seem to be asking the Lord for is not for him to reveal His plan to me - but rather to give me the control or sense of agency in my own life that I so crave. What I am really asking for is for Him to hand it all over to me - because my pride has tricked me into believing that I alone know what is best for my life. What I am really searching for is not a path to discerning the Lord’s plan for me but rather a path to self-actualization.
Amidst all of these things, these misguided and intimately human prayers, I have come to find myself living in a season that may be most characterized by tension. A tension between the voice of grace that whispers in my ear that I am the beloved of the Lord and in that truth I am meant to rest, and the other voice of my pride that tells me that I need to do it all, and actualize this “great plan for my life” myself.
However, as all too many of us know - at the end of the day the business of self-actualization is nothing shy of soul crushing work. It is wholly exhausting, and unfailingly impossible. Which for someone as prideful and controlling as myself, is a huge (continual) blow to my ego.
If you have spent any time with me over the past year you may know that I have been reading and re-reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved. Finishing it, and living on the high of the inspirational and comfortable words of belovedness for about half a day, to just then come crashing down - falling back into old patterns of seeking affirmation for the life I live and the person I believe myself to be. However, I pick up this text again and again because in each and every “crashing down” (note - not in the “high”) - I do indeed learn a little bit more about the ways the Lord has called me His beloved. The ways he has freed me from my own pride, even when I don't want to be freed.
Nouwen tells us that “we were intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved us or wounded us”, and that this is “the truth of our lives”. Nouwen insists here that we were loved and chosen by the Lord long before we could even conceive of achievement, or pride, or GPA’s, or “wonderful plans for our lives”. And while I thank the Lord that this is true, I don’t want to gloss over the ways that this can be a hard pill to swallow. It is hard work to look at yourself in the mirror and reconcile with yourself (and the success obsessed world that we live in) that the truth of our belovedness, in all honesty, has nothing to do with us - and everything to do with God.
This is hard work - but if we are to exist in this world and not be crushed by the weight of it - it is important work. For me, in this season of uncertainty and prideful searching for answers to what constitutes this “plan for my life” I have found that attempting to cling to the truth that no matter where I am headed ( or not headed) come graduation in the spring, and no matter how many times my attempts at prideful self actualization continue to fail - the fact that I was loved by the Lord long before I knew of things like “consulting jobs” or “research fellowships” is not only never failing, it is perpetually freeing.
Recently I heard someone say that “God does have a wonderful plan for your life. But blessedly that is not the point”. Praise be to the Lord that it is not the point - but that undertaking the lifelong journey of claiming the truth that we are beloved by God is.