What God Had to Show Me About Myself

For most of my adult life, I explained myself wrong.

Not in the dramatic way — I wasn’t constructing a false persona or performing for a room. What I had was subtler than that, and in some ways harder to undo. I had absorbed explanations. For why I withdrew from people who got close. For why conflict made something in me go quiet and sideways. For why certain environments left me so depleted I couldn’t account for the cost. The explanations available to me were the only ones I had: character deficiency. Spiritual immaturity. A will not yet sufficiently submitted.

Those explanations cost me years.

The problem with a wrong explanation is that it points you toward the wrong solution. If withdrawal is weakness, the answer is to push harder against it. If sensitivity is self-indulgence, the answer is to toughen up. If the anxiety that has always been there — the kind with no felt onset because it predates your memory of yourself — if that is just ordinary life, then it isn’t something to address. It’s just the water you swim in. And so I swam in it, decade after decade, trying to fix myself in directions I didn’t actually need to go.

God, it turns out, had something to say about all of this. He was not in a hurry. His timing was not mine.

What Formation Actually Looks Like

Formation, in my experience, does not arrive as explanation. It arrives as circumstance. As stripping. As the slow accumulation of what you couldn’t see and then suddenly can. A counselor said something to me years ago that I dismissed — not because I thought she was wrong, but because I had no framework to hold it. What she said sat somewhere just outside my conscious map of myself, waiting. Years later, a different process confirmed what she had seen. A process I entered out of fear, expecting to find damage, that returned instead with the message that my perception of myself had been accurate all along — not a broken compass, as I had feared, but an instrument reading correctly in a room that kept telling it something was wrong.

That was its own kind of mercy. A hard mercy, because it meant retracing a long road.

The Material We Don’t Know We’re Carrying

I carry something else worth naming, because it bears directly on how I assembled my self-knowledge. I absorb the emotional states of others — not metaphorically, but as a felt experience, in my body, in real time. A room in distress and I feel it before I’ve consciously registered what’s happening. Someone else’s grief arrives in me as my own. For most of my life this operated without recognition or container. Which meant I spent years carrying states that were not mine and assigning them to myself. Building a picture of who I was out of material that, in significant part, was not mine to begin with.

You cannot form what you cannot see clearly. You cannot exchange what you do not know you are carrying.

The Exchange Requires a True Accounting

That phrase — the Exchange — is the frame I live inside. Galatians 2:20 is not a metaphor for me; it is the architecture of what God has been doing.

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

The old self taken. Something new returned. But the Exchange requires a true accounting of what is being offered up. And that accounting, I have found, is something God insists on doing Himself. Not because we cannot try — I spent years trying — but because we do not have access to accurate information. We see through the distortions we were handed. We explain ourselves with the categories we were given. We learn, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, to distrust the most genuine things about ourselves, and then wonder why we can’t find solid ground.

The darkness that preceded my own clarity was not empty. Looking back, it was working. The depression that had governed the emotional weather of my life for decades resolved through a single prayer — not as a triumph I engineered, but as something lifted. The anxiety that had registered as ordinary life began, slowly, to loosen its governing grip. The clarity about how I am wired, about what has actually shaped me, about what I am actually called to — that arrived not through striving, but through a door closing. A direction I had walked toward for years turned out not to be mine. And in the closing of it I found something I had not expected: a quietness. A settling. Not resolution, exactly. Recognition.

God does not reveal who we are to shame us. I want to say that plainly, because the experience of being seen accurately — especially after years of carrying wrong explanations — can feel like exposure. It can feel like being caught. But that is not what it is. His work in making us visible to ourselves is not prosecutorial. It is preparatory. He is not building a case. He is preparing material for formation.

Which means the question I’m left with is how much is still hidden. How much I am still explaining wrong. How many states I am still carrying that are not mine, or carrying as deficiency what is actually design. I don’t know. And I have learned, slowly, to be less alarmed by that not-knowing than I used to be.

What He Reveals, He Intends to Form

He knows. And He appears to be in the business of making things visible in the right order, at the right time, in ways I could not have chosen or predicted for myself.

That is not a comfortable process.

It is, increasingly, one I trust.