What Bryan Taught Me

Earlier this week Tommy and I gathered with a number of others to celebrate my friend Bryan.  Bryan is moving back to Texas after ten years here in the greater Chicago land area.  I met Bryan five years ago.  He was the director of the ministry internship program I participated in.  I sat in his office for the first time on a cold morning in February.  It was the first in a long day of meetings with all sorts of ministry leaders and interns.  Outfitted in my new brown boots and my favorite burnt red J.Crew dress, the one that was professional but not stuffy, I was in full on interview mode.  I desperately wanted to be accepted into this internship program.  On the precipice of a career change I saw this opportunity at a well-known mega church as the door-opening venue I needed to make the move.   Having sat across the desk from countless principles during interviews for teaching jobs, I knew the drill.  Put your best foot forward, be likable, relatable, professional, and above all competently pulled together.  

So you can imagine my surprise when Bryan started asking me all sorts of feeling questions that morning.  I faltered with these questions, not sure how to respond.  Feeling questions were vulnerable, risky and not interview appropriate.  My honest response to these feeling questions did not exactly reveal a competently pulled together me.  I tried to answer as competently and honestly as possible without revealing too much of the catastrophe that was the real me.

Months later, after hours spent in that office answering a million feeling questions that elicited a billion tears, Bryan would tell me that their one big hesitation in accepting me into the internship was their uncertainty that I could be open, vulnerable and honest with regards to the emotional journey of the internship.  In short they worried I would try too hard to look together.  #interviewfail.

Anyway, as I sat next to Bryan on Tuesday night surrounded by other people whose lives have been profoundly affected by him I felt the way I always feel in Bryan’s presence: supremely grateful, awkwardly emotional and on the verge of opening my mouth and spewing all my most vulnerable thoughts and problems in an inappropriate display of verbal diarrhea. 

The thing is, without being overly dramatic, Bryan changed my life.  It didn’t take long for me to give up the “I’m totally pulled together and competent” façade with him.  Bryan has a way of drawing out people’s most authentic selves.  He doesn’t do it in a harsh, confrontational, “I see through your bullshit” kind of way.  You just can’t help but let your guard down with him.  Bryan has a way of making everyone feel that there is something likable inside of them.  He is perhaps the safest person I’ve ever met.

I sat in his office week after week revealing the truest, most loathsome, hardest parts of myself.  I cried the ugliest of ugly cries and left his office puffy eyed and snot nosed more times than I could count.  I spoke aloud all the thoughts I kept under lock and key for fear that bringing them to light would result in my complete banishment from society because no one could still like someone who harbored such beastly thoughts and feelings.

And with each repelling truth I flung his way Bryan responded with pure grace.  More than that, despite knowing my most repulsive truths, Bryan still seemed to like me.   He didn’t distance himself, or turn me into a project, kick me out of the program or deem me an unfit Christian leader.  In fact the more Bryan learned about my most authentic self the more he seemed to like me.  It took me a little while to trust this reality but once I did a strange thing happened.

I started to think maybe God might like me too.

I spent years assuming that God was perpetually disappointed with me, frustrated with this child who couldn’t ever live up to his expectations.  Unlike everyone else, God knew all the monstrous thoughts I hid from the rest of the world, so naturally he wasn’t pleased with the real me.  This notion that God might not be tallying up all the ways I wasn’t enough, that he might still like me despite my shortcomings, was hard to swallow at first.  But slowly, with Bryan’s help, I began to shrug off the heavy cloak of shame I wore, suffocating me and my relationship with God.   It was hard work, accompanied with set backs and tears and distrust.  God had been a cold, distant, displeased father for so long.  I didn’t really know who he was if he was no longer that. 

But here is the greatest lesson I learned from Bryan: Shame, when brought to light, loses all its power and this has an opposite reaction from what you fear.  For years I stored my most shameful truths inside, terrified to be found out.  I thought if I could just keep a lid on it, eventually the shame would go away.  If I were to be found out, my shameful truths revealed, it would repel everyone who loved me.  But in that kind of secretive, fearful environment shame grows exponentially, gaining power with each unused opportunity to expose it.  But speak your truth aloud to a safe source and shame is diminished, extinguished over time.  The heavy burden of shame is lifted and light prevails. 

What Bryan did for me, extinguishing my shame and teaching me that God does, in fact, still like me, changed my life.  I continued to meet with Bryan after the internship ended.  After each meeting I walked to my car feeling lighter, more hopeful, closer to God.  It’s Bryan’s gift.

Ultimately Bryan taught me that God liked me.  But the greater lesson lies in how Bryan taught me this truth.  I don’t remember Bryan telling me that God liked me.  I’m sure he did, but the words weren’t the catalyst for belief.   Bryan convinced me by liking me in spite of my many faults.  He didn’t talk about grace he embodied it.  It is important lesson for me, wordsmith that I imagine myself to one day be.  I’m a words person.  I enjoy crafting witty and transformative sentences with them.  And while words can carry significant power they are nothing in comparison to the influence of my actions.  The way that I embody a truth can change a person’s life.  I can write thousands of posts about how God likes you, but you are more likely to believe this truth because of the way I show you how much I like you.  Words are important, but actions are life changing.

And thankfully my path crossed Bryan’s at just the right time for his actions to change mine.

So this is what Bryan taught me and it’s why I find myself so emotionally grateful when I’m around him.  He changed my entire relationship with God and taught me how to help others do the same.