Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

The humble are those who live in the fullness of this kingdom because they have nothing to prove. Their lives are found in God’s love. They have nothing to protect because they are not surprised by their own inconsistencies and contradictions. They have nothing to possess because they have been possessed by God’s love, which makes grasping and clinging unnecessary. It’s such a free life, unencumbered by the need to protect the idealized version we put forth.

One of the greatest gifts we give the people we lead (and generally the people we are in relationship with) is a lack of defensiveness.

The way of humility essentially says, I don’t take myself too seriously; I have no need to project myself as something I’m not; I don’t need to be in control; I’m open to things that are beyond my experience or understanding.

The humble person is one who repeatedly chooses the counter-instinctual way of vulnerability, honesty, and self-confrontation.

They were religious overachievers, desperately trying to mark all common life as holy as the temple. The problem, however, was that in their zeal, they had a tendency of becoming self-righteous.

soul. The prayer grounds us in our ongoing capacity to miss the mark. It calls us to receive Jesus’s mercy desperately and joyfully. In a blaming and scapegoating culture, the Jesus Prayer helps us confront our duplicitous ways. In an attacking and shaming society, the Jesus Prayer grounds us in our own inconsistencies. In a finger-pointing and judgmental world, the Jesus Prayer awakens us to the dark secrets we harbor within. In so doing, the Jesus Prayer petitions the mercy of God, which is to lead us in petitioning mercy for others.

me. The person being formed in humility is one who receives and even pursues correction. Why? Because the humble person recognizes the presence of blind spots.

Relationships fail because of our blind spots. Misunderstandings occur because of our blind spots. Wars occur because of blind spots. Humility says, I know I have blind spots. Can you help me see?

Jesus’s ways reveal the ways God works: Those who can confess being blind are those who see; those who claim to see are truly the ones who are blind.

I remember preaching a message on shame a few years ago. When I stepped off the stage, one of our congregants, a native New Yorker, approached me and said, “You know, Pastor Rich, in the AA meetings I attend, shame is understood this way.” And then he told me of the following acronym: Should Have Already Mastered Everything

we are not made whole by our mastery of everything; we are made whole in the love of God.

Becoming someone who can remain present to oneself and to another, especially in times of disagreement or distress, is one of the most important things we can do to become whole.

The cultivation of calm presence is the conscious and courageous decision to remain close and curious to ourselves and others in times of high anxiety.

Calm presence requires emotional and spiritual closeness to ourselves. It’s a way of life that takes seriously the feelings, dreams, preferences, and values that live within us. It’s a way of life that listens to the prompts and stirrings of the Spirit within.

the person growing in cultivating presence is curious, courageous, and compassionate—three words that God wants to form in us for the healing of the world, and three words that are possible for those rooted in love.

Anxiety manifests in the instinctual response to an immanent or imagined threat. It’s the opposite of careful, prudent, calm action and reaction. Anger, control, manipulation, avoidance, sarcasm, and distraction can all be expressions of anxiety.

Self-regulation is not suppression. It’s not ignoring the very real emotional sensations coursing through our minds and bodies. It’s not spiritualizing. It’s the training of our minds and souls to resist the force of our impulses.

this is not about getting people to change; it’s about taking responsibility for our own functioning with another person.

Self-differentiation is the commitment to paying attention to our actions, our reactions, our anxiety, our responsibility. Through self-regulation practices, we give our bodies and souls the care they need in order for us to relate to others from a unanxious place.

We all carry deeply rooted messages in our souls, and unless we can excavate, behold, and then reject them, we will live controlled by lies. The work of naming the messages can take a good deal of time but is critically needed for the sake of our wholeness and love.

To speak respectfully is to honor one another. It’s to regard people as made in the image of God, deserving of non-condescending speech. Healthy speech is also honest. It’s not marked by spin, exaggeration, or minimizing. It’s truthful. It’s also to be clear. Healthy speech calls for interior and exterior clarity. And finally, healthy speech is timely—that is, it makes adequate, appropriate room for meaningful engagement.

When relationships start or a new person joins a church community, it’s often regarded as heavenly. In this pseudo and surface stage—which is necessary and unavoidable—everything is ideal.

The people are beautiful, warm, and welcoming. But like every church in the world, sooner or later there will be some conflict. The problem isn’t the conflict; the problem is how the conflict is addressed.

It’s at this stage when people feel disheartened, disillusioned, and despairing. It’s the stage when people break up, quit their job, or leave a church. It’s the stage where we begin to see more flaws than beauty—a stage marked by greater impatience and frustration. It’s the period when people decide to leave a relationship or community, abandoning relationship altogether, or go on to search for the elusive heavenly stage once again. The cycle, however, never ends, and we never grow, because we are after something that doesn’t exist.

we recognize that the heavenly stage is delightful but not realistic. And we acknowledge that the hellish stage is very real but need not be resisted.

In this third stage, we do the work of growing up. We consciously bury our illusions but retain open hearts. We don’t impose an unrealistic standard on someone or the community but accept the mixture that is to be found within and between us. In this stage, we resist idealization and pursue intimacy—an intimacy formed by grace, love, and forgiveness. We begin to love as God loves us: without illusion. God sees us as we truly are and holds us close.

holiness doesn’t protect us from conflict. No matter how much we pray, read the Bible, fast, or give to the poor, we will not be insulated from conflict.

By confrontation, I simply mean that conflict requires face time. No, not the video feature on your phone (although it serves us well), but the mature act of addressing an issue with someone and resisting the temptation to spiritualize it away.

the message in our brains when confrontation becomes necessary is often “I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment.” But that is a lie. Are these moments difficult? Without question. Can we get through it? Absolutely.

Triangulation, in many instances, is talking to everyone about the problem except the person we need to speak to.

When we are attempting to explore hurt, disappointment, or frustration, we don’t need an expansive trove of multisyllabic words; we need plainness of heart and clarity of speech.

Steps to a Clean Fight Ask for permission. State the problem. “I notice…” State why it is important to you. “I value…” Fill in the following sentence: “When you…I feel…” State your request clearly, respectfully, and specifically.[6]

Listening well is a refusal to allow self-righteousness to distort our interactions. It’s a willingness to open ourselves up to blind spots, knowing that we stand in need of grace every single day. Defensiveness is often a subtle but blatant rejection of our humanity and, consequently, a rejection of God’s grace. Experiencing grace requires our walls to come down.

Holy communion is one of the great reenactments and catalysts for reconciliation. At the table, we are once again invited to live in the center of God’s ever-expansive love. The table is not a reward for good behavior but a gift for the broken.

Our conflicts are normal. Our disagreements are real. But so is the grace of God.

Interpersonally, forgiveness is a gift. It is bestowing to an underserving person an act of grace. The forgiving person possesses a generosity that confounds the world.

To forgive is to cancel the debt owed, to forego retribution, to say no to revenge. It’s the clear recognition of wrongdoing but the refusal to continue the cycle of offense.

One of the lessons we learn from this parable is that you can be forgiven but still be in prison. Notice in this parable that true freedom is not just in receiving forgiveness but in allowing that grace to flow through us to others. The man in the story refused to allow his forgiveness to overflow to others, and as a result, he remained in bondage. This is what unforgiveness does to us. It puts us in a prison of our own making. But God wants to set us free.

By remembering, you create necessary boundaries to avoid repeat offenses. But by forgiving, you extricate yourself from the cycle of revenge.

an act of divine forgiveness doesn’t necessarily remove the impact of our misguided ways. Similarly, forgiveness doesn’t mean that justice is rendered obsolete. Forgiveness and justice are not mutually exclusive.

Forgiveness is not medicine that heals past pain and inoculates us from feeling new waves of it. Forgiveness and grief are often held together.

however. There are times when another person doesn’t have the ability to be in healthy relationship. And, frankly, there are times when the wound is so deep that full restoration of relationship is not possible. That is when we must grieve the losses that come our way.

The options before us as people desiring to follow Jesus are not just extending forgiveness or withholding it. The only option is to figure out how to extend it in ways that honor our dignity, attend to our wounds, and reflect the gracious God revealed in his Son.

The powerful phrase Will you forgive me? is one of the most difficult for most of us to utter.

Listen to and empathize with the other person’s hurt. Make a sincere statement of regret and acknowledge harmful actions. Make restitution for the pain caused. Prevent repetition of the injury.[7]

Jesus on the cross showcased preemptive forgiveness. We are familiar with preemptive war (that is, we are going to strike you before you strike us), but Jesus had this thing he did that shocked people in ancient Israel. He would offer forgiveness to people who weren’t looking for it.

The world will ultimately become whole through grace. In the meantime, God invites us to anticipate that future by being people rooted in love, through forgiveness. In so doing, we think of the beautiful image of the One who knows our sins and failures and pronounces pardon over us.

God is not to be loved “first”; he is to be loved in and through all. The biblical idea is that we love God by means of all our loves, including those that in fact seem quite down to earth. In fact, to summarize and synthesize many of Christ’s most essential teachings, to love our neighbor is to give what’s due to God.

Justice is not something we do after we have “loved God.” Justice is one of the primary ways to love him. It is essential, not an extra. This is Christianity 101. The apostle John said it this way: “Whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).

us. The scandal of Christianity is that we love and encounter God through people, especially those on the margins of society, the edges of our awareness, or the “wrong” side of a conflict (an “enemy”).