Idols and Alone and Rest for Your Soul
People Seem Safer than God
Come, all you weary.
Come, gather ’round near me,
find rest for your soul.
– Thrice, Come All You Weary
“Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. All of you, take up My yoke and learn from Me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for yourselves. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
Matthew 11:28-30
People seem safer than God. Well…people and also whatever other false idols (false idols – the things that people worship in place of God) people hold on to. False idols become idols because they seem safer to hang our souls on. Everyone just…wants a place to rest – rest for your soul. We all just want a place to be exactly what we are. So we find idols that we think will allow that, idols that seem strong enough to hold up our souls for us. Idols that will let us be, and be safe, and hurt less, and maybe find some joy.
The only thing we should be hanging our souls on is God – he’s the only thing strong enough to truly hold them up. But…God is completely uncontrollable. We cannot make him guarantee our safety. We cannot make him prove to us that he loves us in ways that we understand. So we look at the things that surround us every day – things that we think we control, of course – and we try to figure out which of those might make us feel safe.
(Josh) I struggled with the idol of rightness: if I was right enough, nobody could ever correct me or even dislike me, because I was right all the time. Now, I wasn’t always right, and I often had to do some quick gymnastics to get right real quick, so people couldn’t judge me. Mostly I just wanted to be left alone to work on awesomeness in peace. (/Josh)
(Laine) …and the worst of mine was convincing myself that if I retreated far enough, fast enough, I would be safe. Retreat from pain, retreat from emotion, retreat from relationships where people might leave. I even tried to retreat from God and told myself that it was much safer to try to heal my own wounds. (/Laine)
There are so many examples of false idols that people cling to for dear life. Social status comes with a feeling of respect and a kind of understood acceptance. Money and stuff give people a sense of freedom along with social status. Sex gives people social status and the sense of not being alone – a type of acceptance of a vulnerable version of who they are. Work/careers are also status and acceptance, within the sphere of the company/industry – with the bonus of coming with money. Romantic partners are basically society-guaranteed relationships – someone bound to you via social convention and sometimes laws. They give status, acceptance, and something like a captive audience.
People want to be safe, and they want to avoid pain. People are all afraid to be alone. People are afraid to be insignificant. People are afraid that their honest choices and who they truly are will lose them status, relationships, or safety – resulting in being truly alone.
People are all afraid to be alone.
So We Control
In addition to trying to find idols that seem like great ideas, we also try to find ways to make reality keep us safe. We build relationships with those in power so that they can protect us. We accumulate money and authority so the things we think we need can’t be taken away. We try to find ways to make our friends happy so they don’t leave us. We bend ourselves into all kinds of soul-pretzels, to the point where we are not us anymore, so people will be happy with us – so people will stay with us.
We try to find ways to be something that people want so that they’ll want us – and in the process we lose ourselves, and the safety we wanted.
People don’t understand what it means that they are only responsible for themselves – that they have no control over anyone else. It’s stunning, the extent to which this is true. Everyone pressures everyone to both manipulate and also accept manipulation – and they call it “love.” It’s insidious when you see it clearly. Watch a romance movie, and look for how the characters try to take away or fight the other person’s choices.
People are terrified to let go. Of everything, but especially of the people they love.
(Josh) I had myself convinced that all good in my life thus far was my doing, and if I let go, all good would stop. I just head-down kept loving, and hoping I could always be enough. All the while, worrying about being too much – too opinionated, too strong-willed, too stubborn, too angry, too happy, too wild. (/Josh)
Everyone is fundamentally most afraid to be alone. This is why manipulation works as well as it does. We accept manipulation because we accept the deal: your hooks in me, my hooks in you, we’ll both go along with this plan and then neither of us is alone. You do what I want, unhappily, and I’ll do what you want, unhappily – because we don’t know a better plan and at least we’re not alone and we can tell each other we accept each other.
– Barenaked Ladies, If I Had a Million Dollars
But We Should Let Go…
Turns out, there’s a better way. We can just…let go of control. It isn’t real anyway. We can ask for what we want, and let people give it. Or not. And then we can decide if we’ll take what they offer. That’s real. Relationships given authentically and honestly are truly not alone.
Unfortunately, converting relationships from control to choice is hard. We go from “I’m not alone because I’m making you stay,” to “I’ll let you choose to stay. Or not.” It feels like we’re going to end up alone – at a minimum, it feels like we’re deciding to be okay with being alone. That’s the risk that we take, because they could choose to say thanks but no thanks. But…if we’re being something we’re not, and we’re not really happy, isn’t it worth a shot?
Turns out, people will actually love you for you. Not for the control you have over them. Not for the fake version of yourself that you try to be to keep them. You.
(Josh) I thought I wasn’t controlling anyone, or anything. I had read Boundaries. I was a self-contained man. 
And then, through a series of difficult life events, I realized how scared I was for everyone I cared about to leave, and the things I was doing to keep them around. Being right. Hiding my real feelings. Trying to be exactly what they wanted.
Sure, I had relationships. But they were with a fake me. When people reject the fake-me, that doesn’t hurt as much. But when they love the fake-me…they don’t actually love or have a relationship with the real me. (/Josh)
…and Find True Rest in the One Safe
– Thrice, Beyond the Pines
Turns out, there is at least one relationship that will always last. It’s like one of those traps that you can only solve if you’ve seen it solved, or like a Chinese Finger Trap – you can only get out when you stop struggling and you instead behave in a manner that’s completely counter-intuitive.
God always loves us. We cannot control him. If we try to make God do something, he laughs, and ignores us, and we have to deal with that. If we try to convince God that we are not who we are, to more closely fit the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, he simply will not believe us. But he will love us and accept us as we truly are despite all that we’ve done and all that we will do. We cannot come to him falsely. The relationship between a human and God is either authentic and open, authentic and painfully deeply vulnerable – or it’s nothing.
Everyone both understands and does not understand this connection, this type of relationship. We yearn for it, we seek it – and we’re also terrified to even approach it, to even hope that it might exist. We look for it, in all of our false idols.
– Halsey, Ghost
If we try to control this relationship or, as it turns out, all of the others, we will lessen it. We will dampen it, decrease it, and kill it. We will neutralize its power to change us and make us more whole via real love and acceptance. We all know this to be true and also we know that it can’t possibly be true. This competing awareness, these competing realities that pull us closer to and push us farther away from God, this is the battle between Team Damaged and Team Divine.
Life is super duper hard. It’s relatively simple in concept, but it’s impossible to live successfully, joyfully, and peacefully alone. We must walk with God, and only a Great Goodness is strong enough to carry our souls through. Anything less than God, walking with us (and people who love us enough to shove us back at him when we need it), and we couldn’t make the journey.
But when he finds us, and we turn to him and decide to live with him openly and honestly, then we find the joy and strength and hope and love that we need to be human, and to really Live.