The Gifts of Imperfection: We Are Worthy by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Patti Lusher)

I am not a perfect mother by any means. Many days I look at my children and I wonder what I am doing to mess them up. I can be pretty self-critical. Like most parents, I am aware that even with the best parenting you never know how your kids will turn out. Kids from the best homes can end up with addictions or marriages that end in divorce. They can end up with values completely opposite from their parents. And yet Kurt and I try to be the best parents we know how to be.

Writer and researcher Brene Brown tells us that kids are born hard wired to struggle. It’s basically the human condition to struggle. The exception to the rule is the person who sails through life, never facing any personal challenges. So, we have a couple of choices as parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and church members who promise to surround children and support them. On the one hand, we can protect them from struggle, walking in front of them and guarding them from any harm, giving them the illusion that life will be perfect and they will all end up attending Ivy League schools and get great jobs and marry well. Or, on the other hand, we can stand next to them in the struggles as they learn to make their way. We can cry with them. We can say, “Yes you are imperfect, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

Brene Brown says, and I would agree, that second way, the one about imperfection, is the better way to go. It’s the message of Jesus that we give around here. The reason we wear t-shirts that say: “No perfect people allowed” is because here at The Village we understand that life has its up and downs. We don’t want to promote some fantasy that being a Christian means that everything will be peachy keen in your life. What we do offer is the message, that even though life can be hard, God is with us. And we are worthy of love and belonging. And by the way, there ARE times of great joy and gratitude in life, which balance out the times of fear and difficulty.

In this short scripture that Kristen read to us, Jesus got it right. Of course, he got it right. He was the Son of God after all. The disciples were trying to keep things under control. They didn’t want Jesus to be bothered with the unruliness of children. You know, children can be annoying. They can say the darndest things. They can be inappropriate.  I flew home last night from Houston and there was a child who cried for 40 minutes. 

People wanted to bring children to Jesus for his blessing and the disciples said, “Oh no, keep those children away from the master. He is too important for children.” But Jesus said, “Bring them to me. They belong to God. They are worthy.”

Because you see, in children we see our vulnerability. Children have not yet learned the ways of the world. They have not learned to be adults, to be in control. They have not learned to hide their feelings. They tell us when they are afraid. They cry when they are sad or scared. They love boldly. And they do not suffer in silence. Jesus said: “These children are worthy. You adults would do well to be more like children.”

Children live in what Brene Brown calls “whole hearted living.” They feel deeply. They do it without knowing it. They just are.

Brene Brown stumbled upon this thing she calls “whole hearted living” while she was doing a 6 year research project as a social worker. She wanted to study connection; the way people connect with one another. She was curious about that question: How do people connect?

She discovered that as she began to talk with people, and interview them about connection, they began to tell her about disconnection. They told her stories of broken hearts, and the fear of being disconnected. Isn’t that interesting? She wanted to learn about how people feel connected and she got the opposite.

What she found in her search for connection was the basic human condition of shame. We all feel it. A simple definition of shame is the feeling that there is something about me, that if people knew it, they would not want to be connected to me. I would not be worthy of being in a relationship. I’m not good enough; I’m not ___ enough. Underneath shame is what Brown calls excruciating vulnerability.

         Underneath thousands of stories and thousands of pieces of data, she said everyone in her study fell into two groups:

·      Those who have a sense of worthiness

·      Those who struggle with worthiness.

         The difference is this. Some people believe they are worthy of connection. These are the people who are not buried under the shame of not feeling good enough to deserve connection. She coined the phrase “wholehearted” for the people who felt worthy of connection. And she identified some traits among those people.

1)     They have the courage to be imperfect. Whole hearted people know that they will make mistakes, and they are okay with that.

2)    They make connections when they let go of who they should be and live with authenticity.

3)    They embrace vulnerability, in fact they think that is what makes them beautiful. They understand that it’s necessary to be vulnerable.

         Now for some of us this vulnerability thing comes naturally. We were raised in homes where vulnerability was valued. (Or we spent hours and thousands of dollars in therapy learning how to be vulnerable.)

But for many people, this is not normal. American culture does not value vulnerability. We value control and keeping our emotions in check. This is evidenced by the fact that we use a variety of numbing agents to avoid any attention to suffering and vulnerability. Brene Brown lists some of the most popular numbing agents: we shop ‘til we drop and run up consumer debt, especially on credit cards. We have addictions to alcohol, illegal drugs and prescription medications, and we are obese.

And here is the problem with these numbing agents, according to Dr. Brown: We can’t selectively numb. We can’t just numb ourselves to the suffering. When we try to control everything and numb ourselves, we also numb ourselves from joy, gratitude and happiness.

I would say we become the walking dead. We are not living what she calls whole hearted lives. We are existing. We may be breathing. But we are not living.

We are not living with purpose and passion. We are not living the lives God put us on this earth to live. We are not living as people who know we are worthy of love and belonging. We are just going through the motions.  Getting up, going to work, going shopping, taking drugs, going to bed.

So over the next few weeks, in worship, we are going to look at some of the practices that Brene Brown suggests that we use in order to cultivate whole hearted living.

She says that in her research, she has not come across anyone who has exhibits a sense of knowing they are worthy, and being able to get past shame without a sense of spirituality. Now she is a researcher and a social scientist. She is not a pastor, nor a theologian. So this is not a theory she was trying to prove. She just says that is what the data shows.

In order to get past shame, that sense that there is something about us that makes us not enough, not good enough, smart enough, fast enough… you fill in the ___, we need a higher power.

We need the assurance from God that we are enough. We are worthy, not because of what we have done, or even of who we are, but just because we are. This is what God says: because we were born, we are worthy of love.

Everyone deserves to be loved and to have meaningful connection with other people. This is what we practice here at The Village.:  treating everyone as being worthy of love because we breathe, and taking that message to the world.

Jesus gave that message to the children. “Come to me, for a blessing, Jesus said. You are worthy.”

That is what Jesus says to us too. Whatever you are ashamed of – it does not matter. You are enough. You are good. You are blessed. You are loved.

Receive that gift today. We are worthy.