Repenting my Independence

I recently spent some time studying and seeking God, an admittedly rarer occasion in its intentionality, for me, than I like to confess! I’m working my way through a book called “The Way of the Wild Heart” and I found my beliefs disrupted by this passage:

“…we turn from our independence and all the ways we either charge at life or shrink from it, this may be one of the most basic and the most crucial ways a man repents. I say ‘repent’ because our approach to life is based on the conviction that God, for the most part, doesn’t show up much. We must be willing to take an enormous risk, and open our hearts to the possibility that God is initiating us as men – maybe even in the very things in which we thought he’d abandoned us. We open ourselves up to being fathered.”

A strikingly different interpretation, for me, of the term “repentance.” I mean, don’t I repent of the things I’ve done wrong? Of the mistakes I’ve made? What in heaven is this idea that I should repent of my “approach to life?”

At church this past Sunday our pastor delved into the 4th chapter of 1st Corinthians – a chapter that has Paul asserting himself as a father might assert himself to his (wayward) children. I was reviewing this in “The Message” and found Paul chiming in with a similar theme: “There are a lot of people around who can’t wait to tell you what you’ve done wrong, but there aren’t many fathers willing to take the time and effort to help you grow up. (within 4.14-16)” And then, in 4.20, he says “God’s Way is not a matter of mere talk; it’s an empowered life.”

So I’m staring at this page in a workbook that is asking me to consider “What must I repent of?” and I’m struck by the utter frankness of it. That my “repentance” has, for most of my life, been a very shallow and childish thing. Something I felt in earnest and sought faithfully for the errors I made; but something I never dove deeply enough into to truly be washed clean. Rinse, wash, repeat. And now, here is someone essentially saying, “your attack plan for life – running into the battle against your fears or succumbing to them, either way – it is all built on your false, fatal notion of independence…you have been ‘repenting’ of symptoms and overlooked your illness!” Not just that, but because I haven’t recognized my fundamental, basic distrust of God… my basic belief that He “doesn’t show up much”… I’ve broken my relationship with Him in a way that makes me feel abandoned! In a way that makes me fatherless. In a way that makes me un-empowered.

And so now this new repentance is not just a command: Repent of Your Sins! It is an invitation to disavow the lie that I am independent and begin living the truth that God is involved and that He wants to initiate me as His son! Is it selfish to seek repentance for this, apparently “truer,” sin when my real motive is to clamor over it as a hurdle, a wall, a mountain, that keeps me from God? My repentance of things has always seemed more meek, more self-effacing than this! Or is it the truth: that repentance isn’t about feeling bad for my failings, but grieving my brokenness as it separates me from my Father and rushing toward Him in the desperate hope that He will open His arms and embrace me, completely, with His love!? Isn’t THIS the hope (and the promise) of the Prodigal Son?

I do not in any way profess to have this “figured out,” but I’m on a journey of discovering the truth: I really can trust God, He really does show up, He really wants to be my father and to initiate me and to see me more whole and more empowered and more alive tomorrow than I was yesterday. And when I am journeying into that new and growing belief, the failures that so recently seemed to own me – the symptoms that I so frequently “treated” – have little, and lessening, sway in my life.

We happy few...