It recently came to mind after teaching a seminar about parent-child attachments. The seminar, entitled “Parental Attachment and Your Relationship with God,” went into detail on Attachment Theory: how we carry our attachment formed in infancy into adulthood, how that may impact our perception of God, and ultimately, how God meets us and changes us across time through his gracious, unfailing presence. 

For further context, especially for those new to this, Attachment Theory reflects a person’s internal system of emotions, behaviors, and thoughts that develop through interactions between a child and an attachment figure (parent/caregiver). Through internalizing the attachment figure as a safe haven and secure base, our attachment system shapes our memories, motivations, and expectations of self, others, and the world. It explains the instinct for proximity maintenance (or lack thereof) with those we love and the distress we experience upon separation (or, again, the lack). 

After teaching the class, the following 72 hours brought an onslaught of anxiety about my own approach to parenting my daughter. My mind camped out on a law-filled mound of guilt over the pressure to build a secure attachment with my child versus an anxious or avoidant one. I feared I am failing her, without the capacity to change. Further, I was struggling to integrate any of the gracious, gospel-centered approaches to attachment I had just taught other people. This experience brought to mind a passive-aggressive Post-it note I saw every day for 3 years at an agency I used to work at (which ironically was about washing dishes), asserting, “When we know better, we do better.” 

Well, I know better. But I don’t always do better. That’s my problem.

All the knowledge about my daughter’s attachment needs is readily available in my mind. Be available, be attuned, and be responsive. But, to my dismay, my anxiety and selfishness still get in the way of being a thoroughly secure parent, which leads me to deep distress over 1) my limitations and 2) the uncertainty of my daughter’s future and fears that she has an insecure attachment to me. 

Jesus met me in this distress through my husband sharing a word of grace and truth with me. It is in the place of incapability where Jesus meets us the most, much like Paul’s experience with his “thorn in the flesh.” He spoke to Paul about this and said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:8). How absolutely outrageous and antithetical to “When we know better, we do better.” When we set down our efforts and “strengths,” God’s grace supplants. 

When it comes to the distress over the uncertainty of my daughter’s path and fears about her attachment style, God comforted me with the notion that he is the one crafting her story, not me. And where I fail, he does not. As parents, we often have an illusion of control over them. Do we have influence? Absolutely yes. Do we control their outcome? Absolutely not.

So, while the first five years of life are the critical period where attachment (and other important developments) is first formed, it’s not where it ends. Because, when in God’s story is something broken ever permanent? When do we get marked “too wounded” or “too wrong”  with no possibility of restoration? God, in his genius, made human brains with “neuroplasticity,” which is a word to describe how the brain can change and forge new approaches to the world. Our memories, motivations, and expectations about ourselves, our relationships, and the world can be altered. 

Those initial pathways from early childhood are often the strongest, which can make change feel intimidating. While the brain is adaptable and can form new paths, it’s more like forging a new path in a thick forest and the old paths like walking down a paved road. Change, then, requires repetition over time of truth to challenge our beliefs and experience to reinforce them. Like water, we’re prone to go down the path of least resistance, the path of familiarity. But through interactions with God in word, prayer, and community, we change. That which is new becomes familiar. God makes something out of nothing.

Beautifully, the grace of Christ is simultaneously a truth and an experience we receive repeatedly over time. It’s received by no work of our own; it’s not something we can muster up. We change not by our hands but by his. 

He himself is our perfect attachment figure – he is our safe haven, secure base, and close friend. He’s a safe haven in that when we are in distress, threatened, or scared he is responsive, attuned, and available. He is our secure base, from which we can move and have freedom in the world without fear, knowing that he will be there, come what may. And he desires proximity to us in that he came and took the form of a human and endured the pain and suffering of this world in order to be united to us, tearing the veil in the temple in the process, which, in the old covenant, kept the world at bay due to its sin.

God will not fail us in the ways that we have been failed by our parents. And just as he is healing me over time and his Spirit is reminding me of his grace, so will he do this for my daughter, because he is lovingly crafting her story. And as much as it pains me, I cannot be all things to my daughter. In fact, I will never be able to love her how she needs to be loved because she needs the consistent, steady love only Christ has. So in the times when I am unavailable, unresponsive, or unattuned to her, God is present with arms open wide, knowing exactly what she needs in ways I will never be able to. 

And that’s the gospel for all of us: the good news of God’s unbreakable, un-anxious, and unavoidant attachment to us. In our incapability, he parts the clouds of our anxiety, so that those who can’t do can rest.

The post God, Our Perfect Attachment Figure appeared first on Red Tree.

As dramatic as this scene sounds, all of us suffer under the very same stressors. What is this force that moves us so? We may not (often) physically throw things across the room when life doesn’t fit neatly in the cutout of our expectations, but the same inner turmoil is present. There’s an emotional pandemic that leaves us trying to claw our way upward through life, well acquainted with a sense of isolation and shame when we get anything wrong. It’s the subtle, but powerful work of anxious perfectionism.

Anxious perfectionism fosters a pervasive lie within us: “If I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all.” The phrase might come across as overly binary, and perhaps even childish, but we see variations of this innate idea all the time in others regardless of age. Hearing friends and people I work with identify and process this force in their experiences serves as a mirror to understanding my own. 

I might argue anxious perfectionism is, in fact, a product of the fall. A product of the law. Rules and standards create expectations of perfection. I have valued the wisdom of a friend of mine on a similar topic: “Children are great listeners but terrible interpreters.” From an early age, we learn to guard our sense of self and our sense of pride closely. We pick up on little things here and there that reinforce two false, internal beliefs:

1. What others think dictates who we are
2. What we do dictates who we are

We start to enact perfectionistic tendencies early – just like our four-year-old friend who threw up the puzzle because he felt his failure – because if what we do impacts who we are then when we fail, we are failures. And our fragile, child hearts can’t handle the feelings we associate with failure. Unfortunately, this childlike fragility doesn’t dissolve when we become adults. 

The pervasive nature of anxious perfectionism has gotten me wondering: if we do this in nearly every part of life, do we also do this in our reading of scripture? Do we try to perfect our scripture reading, and if it isn’t just right, do we stop altogether?

Let’s take me as a case in point. As a woman in what I would describe as the intermediate, maturing years of her faith (no longer a “baby Christian,” leading out in ministries, but not yet walking with the Lord longer than I haven’t), I have been through many phases of reading scripture and exposed to many different “correct” ways of reading it.

I went through my passionate phase: reading scripture all the time, hungry for more and more because the words of life were brand new to me, not having any theological clue, but relying on the Spirit to enlighten me. Too quickly, the “newness” of scripture wore off and my callous heart got bored. So, I started to learn there are actual tools for reading. Books on Christian living. There is even something called “Theology” and several subsets of theology within Theology. [Insert mind-blown emoji.]

I also learned how bad theology hurts people and I began to love learning and using new tools to glean as much as I can from the Bible. However, because of my sin that distorts beautiful things, these good, useful tools (to protect against this hurt) became rules. Consider a few of the following:

1. Don’t do the blindfolded, finger-pointing approach where you open up the bible and pick a verse and start reading. A verse taken out of context is bad news.
2. Don’t read the Bible emotionally. Jesus isn’t your boyfriend, and the bible isn’t a self-help book for you to get your daily pick-me-up.
3. Do study the text in its historical context.
4. Do consult commentaries, but do not only read commentaries, theological books, or Christian living books– you need to love Scripture the most.

And on and on. These rules, and more, have played on repeat in my mind. Then, I feel stuck. I don’t use any of them. I don’t even pick up my Bible sometimes because I fear if I choose one, I may be offending or not doing the other correctly. There’s a sense of worry that I will be wasting my time because I won’t actually encounter Jesus in my time reading because I think there is a “right way” for me to get to him. Further, both of the false internal beliefs spin out in a way that makes me question my sense of worth and value.

The first one, “what others think dictates who I am” proclaims: If I read and interpret using one of the wrong methods, I will be disappointing one of the people who taught me said tool, and if I disappoint one of these teachers, then I will be a disappointment! If I am a disappointment, then I am worthless.

Or the second internal belief that “what we do dictates who we are,” chimes in even louder: If I read and interpret using one of the wrong methods then I will be doing it wrong.  And if I am doing it wrong, then I am incapable of doing it right, indicating I, myself, am incompetent and even inadequate.

So yes, even in reading scripture, I tend toward wanting to make myself right by what I do and of my own accord. I create new laws to achieve my desired end of being perfect. And perfectionism says, “you can’t do it wrong.” Then anxiety pulls the thread further: “Just don’t do it at all.” 

Here is where Jesus brings a better word to anxious perfectionists like me. 

After his resurrection, he appeared to his disciples and said to them, “These are the words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:44-45, italics added). We could use every good and useful tool, read every theological powerhouse book under the sun, even earn a Master’s in Divinity, and yet still have a veil up to understanding the true meaning of the Bible. But, Christ himself is the Word, and his death tore the veil to the barrier of understanding scripture. He was torn on the cross for us, in order to mend our separation from God; and not only is the separation removed, but he actually walks towards us, just like he does the two guys getting this Bible lesson in Luke 24. He doesn’t hide behind the correct tools or interpretative rules, waiting for us to get it just right. He wants to be known and is actively revealing himself now through the Holy Spirit, just as he did to the two men on the road 2,000 years ago. 

When we trust in Jesus and not our perfected reading of scripture, our approach to reading the Word might even manifest itself in surprising ways. In this season of my life, one of the ways Christ has been meeting with me and healing my anxious perfectionism is through The Message (a loose paraphrase of the Bible written by Eugene Peterson). The Message has been a balm to my hard heart and has helped my mom-brain settle and receive Christ. While far from perfect, and not even considered a legitimate translation, it has helped me experience the gospel and move away from simply having a cognitive understanding to having an affective, heart understanding.

If you’re in a season of drought from reading the Bible due to having too many tools in the tool belt, or perhaps don’t feel equipped with any tools at all and don’t know where to begin, hear this: you don’t need to read the Bible perfectly. Take my word for it. My contribution to Bible reading is anxious perfectionism. But the gospel tells me I’m not the only one present when I open up these pages. Jesus is alive and his non-anxious presence casts out fear through blood-bought love. He desires to be known, therefore, you don’t need to employ every tool you’ve ever learned every time you open the Bible. Instead, take up and read knowing that the veil has been torn. He is our rest, even when it comes to reading the Bible.

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