The Bravest Thing You'll Ever Do

Brene Brown says, and this is not an exact quote, "accepting your story and loving yourself in the process is the bravest thing you'll ever do."

I would say that it may be the only work we ever will do that actually means anything. I'm discovering more and more as a chaplain that my ability to empathize and sit with the story of someone else, as difficult as that might be, is directly correlated to my own ability in any given moment to sit in my own story. Not only sit in my own story but to LOVE it. Really embrace it with a burning fervent love.

The problem of course is that we are too often running from our story or at least hiding from our story. There is always something in our story that makes us defective somehow. Less than. But less than what? Loving who we really are is a process and it sounds so simple, and it is in a way. The difficulty comes in really accepting that our story is already exactly all it needs to be. There doesn't need to be any embellishment or hyperbole. It just is what it is and I am called to just love it.

Why do we have to be brave to enter this process of accepting and loving our story? Why is this work so dangerous? Because, in the end, and even now, it is all we really own. Nothing else is ours. Money comes and goes, possessions too, even loved ones in perfect relationship (whatever that is) can't escape departing each others presence in death. We can't even claim our own bodies as ours. Our bodies change and decay toward simple organic material daily. No, all we have is our ability to accept and love our story. To accept life simply as it is. One must be brave if that one thing we have is deemed defective.

Our problem is that we try so hard to be perfect to cover up our perceived defectiveness. The reality is that what really makes us defective relationally is that we are unable or unwilling to accept the perfection of our own story and love it. Purely and simply loving it.

Joko Beck says that seeing and accepting simply "life as it is" is the heart of spiritual practice. With my life turning around me in ways I did not see even two weeks ago, I agree.