Ephesians 4: 22-24
You were taught, with regard to you former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Step 4
I choose to join God in my transformation by doing the heart work required of me.
Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord. (Lam. 3:4)
Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8
Step four has been all about undoing. Undoing the lies. Undoing the patterns. Undoing the ideas we had about ourselves. Undoing takes a lot of work. We had to get in touch with pain from the past that invades our heart and darkens our light. This is time consuming, and it takes commitment. We have been stuck for so long in the way things have “always been.” During this process it might seem like we are working against ourselves sometimes. We had to intentional chose to walk in the pain instead of away from it. And it is scary. What will we find when we go digging around in our past, in our shadow, in our pain, in the walls we have built up? This class has meant so much to me, I can’t even express it fully. I have grown so much surrounded by grace and tenderness of my sisters in Christ. I have been set free from so many prisons. What I have learned is that the “undoing is part of the remaking.” This is a quote from Richard Rohr, and it explains what happens in our class. The pain of the undoing births a remaking of ourselves. We learn what Paul meant when he talked about being a new creation in Christ. The undoing wasn’t tearing us down - that is what the world does. The undoing is different because we aren’t doing it alone. The undoing has a purpose, and the purpose is good. We cannot be remade unless we are undone.
This week, we would like to go back to the paragraphs we wrote about the resentment we are holding on to (lesson 16). Review those and decide if there is anything else you would like to add, remove, or change in that paragraph. After diving deep into destructive responses, is there anything that you want to add to the sentence “It activates_____”? Does your paragraph accurately reflect your resentment, how it affected you, how you responded to it, and how you feel about it. Remember that your paragraph should only say the other person’s name and what he/ she did to you in the first sentence. Everything after that is solely reflective of you. If you hear echos of the other person after the first sentence, then that is an indication that you need to go back and add more to your narrative.
We have discussed the power of confession in this class. Now we will feel its power as we share our paragraphs aloud with one another with the people in your group.