The cost of A Divided Life

From “The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts” by Jeff Crosby

Your dis-integration list will likely be different from mine, but the following loudly sound the siren:

  • Unending busyness or its opposite, lethargy
  • Exhaustion
  • Situational depression
  • A hurried and harried life
  • Endless ruminating on words I’ve said and others left unsaid, how the words I’ve spoken were received
  • Continual fear of being less than what is expected of me by some mysterious “other”
  • A sense of not measuring up to some mysterious standard
  • A fear of being considered a fraud
  • Defensiveness in response to understandable questions or reasonable suggestions
  • The absence of patience, kindness, and gentleness
  • A fear of disappointing God

When these signals, among others, appear and I am alert to them and willing to attend to them, the gap between the inner and outer life heals and regenerates. When I avoid the signals’ sounds, I put another brick on the wall.

The cost of a divided life, Palmer warns, is high:

I pay a steep price when I live a divided life – feeling fraudulent, anxious about being found out, and depressed by the fact that I am denying my own selfhood. The people around me pay a price as well, for now they walk on ground made unstable by my dividedness. How can I affirm another’s identity when I deny my own? How can I trust another’s integrity when I defy my own? A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open – divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within – things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.

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