The contents of this post is a reply to Irene's letter:
A Safe Place

Dear Irene,

Hey hey... here I am! Thanks for giving me the time to get over the trauma of a 30th birthday before getting back to our correspondence, hehe. Wow, it's been a crazy two weeks for me, I tell you. Amidst the fun of camps, friendships, kingdom-talk, and mountaintop epiphanies, I've been terribly dazed at the pace at which I've been moving in the past two weeks. *exhales*

And it hasn't ended yet! I'll be off to Singapore this Wednesday, and then back in Seremban on either Thursday night or Friday noon. And after that, I'll be in KL on Saturday having a conversation with my friends at the Emergent Malaysia Open Meeting. So I figured that if I don't reply your letter NOW, I may not have the opportunity to do so in the coming week either, and you may not wanna talk to me again... ever.

You know what, I'm glad even if you're still not yet able to emotionally grasp the reality of God as Friend and Father, that you have Bob and me as a starting point. This would mean that there is in fact a model of unconditionally accepting relationships in your life, even if this model exists in imperfection. I believe the kind of relationship you're experiencing with Bob and me is what I've often called a "relationship of grace."

Now, you know the thing I have about clichés, so this term "relationship of grace" isn't a cliché term at all. It's a term that speaks about how Christian friendships should be visible embodiments of the grace of God. The grace of God is such that it precedes repentance. For centuries now, the Christian community has been speaking about how God's forgiveness and grace are contingent upon our repentance. I challenge this paradigm. Because in the life of Jesus our Friend, we see how he offers grace and friendship unconditionally without tying his intentions to any hidden agenda to provoke repentance. And it is often this unconditional offer of grace itself that invokes a grateful heart towards repentance in the first place. Such is the paradox of grace!

So you see, the greatest injustice that you can do to your friendship with God is to focus your attention on sin and judgement when God himself remains fixated on a desire to restore his friendship with you. When you condemn yourself and judge yourself by the measure of your worthiness, you dishonour his unconditional acceptance of you. I guess what I'm saying is that God truly desires for you to reach out to him in response to his offer of friendship.

Many (if not all) of us are products of a broken past. Likewise, it is very probable the your inability to experience God as Friend and Father may be a result of a similar type of relationship that has conditioned your understanding of father figures. And if so, it is necessary to move beyond the link that you have subconsciously created between these unpleasant father figures and your understanding of God.

I think you need to do some "re-linking." Look around you and see if there are other relationships of grace in your life (like that of yours with Bob and with me). And begin to consciously link these safe relationships positively with your conception of the friendship of God. Each time you experience grace from these relationships, consciously tell yourself, "Ah, this is supposed to be what my friendship with God looks like." In so doing, you are nurturing yourself by reconditioning your emotions towards a more positive experience of God as your Friend and Father. You reckon this can work for you?

I'm inclined to think that our receptivity towards signals that we receive from our environment is selective. As such, I think it may benefit you to be more consciously selective of what you choose from your sense-experience that you allow to actively condition your understanding of God. He loves you. Unconditionally.

Here I go again, spending lots of my life on the road. Until then...ciaoz!

To friendship!
Sherman