Leaving Room (Part 4)

Guilt. Guilt is something that haunts all of us. It shadows us until everything in our lives is a distorted burden with no joy, delight, calm, or peace. Guilt is one of the worst feelings in the world. People spend lifetimes and generations attempting to eradicate the poltergeist of guilt ripping apart their souls. The only true way to remove guilt is to set it at the foot of the Cross and leave it with Christ. But, here’s the kicker, even when we do that, we can still feel the guilt. It is part of the Now, Not Yet element of our lives—felt guilt.

Felt guilt can be real guilt and felt guilt can be false guilt.

False guilt can torment us worse than real guilt. Real guilt can produce no tears, heartache, disgust, self-loathing, or self-harm. Sometimes we easily ignore real guilt, its cost and its consequences. False guilt, hollow of any real truth, can torture us.

The difference between real and false guilt, regardless of the encumbrances of emotions, is the Law of God. Real guilt is sin. False guilt is finiteness. Real guilt is looking at another woman’s home with envy and jealousy. False guilt is berating yourself for not thinking to arrange the cabinets the way she did. One is sinful, the other is time, place, life circumstances, experience, background, and abilities. Here’s the challenge: because we are both finite and sinners, we must constantly sort out the layers between real and false guilt. Maybe a dear friend invited you out for coffee and you said no because your family needs you at home, but you instantly feel horrible about saying no to your friend. Is this real guilt or false guilt? If your family needs you at home—sick kids, sick husband, homeschooling, housekeeping, general home management, rest—then the guilt is false, but there is an off chance that the false guilt is pointing you to a deeper true guilt of bad home management, laziness, and selfishness. Maybe it is wise to say no, but the reason you have to say no is that chronic laziness pervades your home. The false guilt is feeling bad for saying no, the real guilt is that you need to stop being lazy and you might be able to say yes.

Do you see why this is complicated? Do you see that only you can tell you ultimately if you have real and/or false guilt because it might be both?

Recently, me and my hubby had a date night. We enjoyed some sushi and sake and then went to see Godzilla Minus One. This was one of the best movies I’ve seen in ages. It didn’t beat you over the head with The Message. It had a wonderful story of family and friendship. It was a war movie, a PTSD movie, a historical and cultural commentary movie, a healing movie, and a movie with a happy ending, plus a huge monster. It was such a great film all the way around. If we had been ten years younger, we would have instantly bought tickets for the next showing. It was that good. I cried, like CRIED, in a Godzilla movie.

One of the main things the movie deals with is guilt. Godzilla represents the guilt of the main character. He struggles with real guilt for what he didn’t do, and false guilt for what he didn’t do. He feels guilty because he wasn’t a kamikaze. That’s false guilt pressed down on him by his culture. He felt guilty for surviving, something most military men struggle with. That’s false guilt. It’s not wrong to survive when everyone else is dead. But he also struggles with the real guilt of failing to kill Godzilla when he had the chance. It’s his fault so many are dead. There’s real guilt there. Later in the film, the country of Japan must deal with the guilt of their lack of valuing life. That’s real guilt. The movie deals with all these different issues: Survivor’s guilt, PTSD, national guilt, false guilt that can still ruin you, and real guilt that must be atoned for. A coward must find his courage. The citizens of a nation must stand up and say life is important.

This movie is a wonderful visual testament to how messy guilt is. All that real and false guilt gets mixed around inside of us like poison until we are trying to atone for things that we need to just get over, and not doing the hard work of seeking repentance and forgiveness for the things we’re guilty of. Get your hands on Godzilla Minus One and chew on it. It will help you practice thinking through real and false guilt.

Now that we’ve kinda poked around guilt, let’s talk about how real and false guilt interact with us women. Women are tribal. We’re the ones who are community-oriented and relational because we are the heart of the home and raisers of children. We are the ones who teach our children about family culture and the broader culture. We are huggers, holders, nurturers, growers, and nourishers. In a fallen world, this plays out in ugly ways. No one is harder on women than women. No one preys on our fears and emotions more than other women. We are passive-aggressive, mean, bullying, gossiping, and manipulative to anyone who is not like us. Anyone out of step is exiled from the community. We are adept at cloaking horrific behavior under the guise of peace, safety, and being nice. I don’t know any woman in the world who hasn’t experienced some trauma at the hands of another woman. I still remember the day I realized that I wasn’t wearing makeup because any men cared, I wore makeup because women cared. Male expectations of beauty for their women are much kinder than women from other women. Women are cruel to each other. We all are both the abuser and the abused in this sinful relationship between women. We’ve all whispered things about other women, and we’ve all been whispered about.

This relational, community aspect of our makeup is a great gift that we often turn into weapons to injure and hurt each other. It’s gross and sad.

And it is often where we experience the falsest guilt.

We just finished the Christmas holiday. How many of you had to work through feeling guilty about what you didn’t get to? Christmas cards? The perfect gift? Baking? Decorating? Looking at lights? Hanging lights? Perfect trees? Did you do enough? Did you make enough magic? Did you get to all the movies, shows, events? Did you make all the gingerbread, paint all the cookies, and drink all the nog? Did you feel all the magic? Did you remember the reason for the season?

If you answered no to any of that, did you feel guilty?

Where does that guilt come from?

Seeing other women who seem to manage to do it all? Memories of what your mom did? Movies that show perfect holidays? Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest? Your own ridiculously high standard?

This false guilt that we strap on every morning, with extra at the holidays, is one of the biggest reasons we struggle with leaving room in our lives. We feel bad for saying no. We feel like failures for not being perfect. We feel like we’ve damaged our families by not being a woman who can and does do it all. Because of this feeling—and it’s a horrible one, I know, I’m the worst at saying no because of it—we over-commit ourselves, our homes, our people. To avoid feeling guilty for not doing and being all the things that the world, commercials, our stories, the feminists, and just an inaccurate view of what the world tells us we should be, we pile on more and more and more. We look at our knitting circles and see a woman doing more than us and instantly feel guilty and start doing more ourselves. We don’t stop to wonder what she has said no to that lets her do what she’s doing. We don’t stop to measure our abilities, the family we have, and the circumstances God has placed in our lives. We don’t consider letting her do that while I do this and then trading.

Again and again, mighty women are held up as our examples and again and again, we drop under the weight of who and what we are not. This is the same as every man beating himself up because he’s not Aristotle and Wellington and Einstein with Richard Winter’s virtue all in a Chris-shaped package. We women set impossible, heartless, savage standards for each other and ourselves. If every inch of our homes isn’t ready to be featured in a magazine every moment, we will beat ourselves up, while never stopping to talk to our husbands and children. We bring children into the world and then volunteer for everything, sign the kids up for everything, work a job, manage the home, and wonder why we’re dying of stress and don’t know our family. We beat the magic out of the holiday because we feel guilty about it not being magical enough. We strive after a standard set by the world and ignore the standards of the Lord. We feel guilty about not having a career and don’t feel guilty about being busybodies online. We think we need to save the world and all the poor people in it, but we’re never home in our pocket of the world with our poor people. We over-engage in our communities and never make it to church. We are always on, always on the go, always available. We quickly accept false guilt’s burdens while never dealing with the real guilt of our lack of trust in the Lord, our lack of eternal perspective, our laziness, selfishness, pride, and callous meanness.

Our homes are chronically frantic because we are attempting to rid ourselves of false guilt.

A good indication of this is what you say you’re sorry for. Do you say you’re sorry for not getting to a text right away? Probably false guilt. Do you say sorry for snapping at your husband? You probably should. I have started forcing myself not to say that I’m sorry for things that aren’t wrong. I don’t have to be sorry that I didn’t make homemade goodies as gifts. I don’t have to be sorry for not instantly responding to an email. I don’t have to be sorry for my home if it isn’t perfect. I don’t have to be sorry for needing to rest. I do need to apologize for harsh words, gossip, laziness, and pride. Watch what you say sorry to.

Ladies, there is more than enough sin in our hearts to work on. There are things that we are guilty of and need to repent of without taking on things that are matters of individuality and finiteness. When you have to say no to something and you feel guilty, it is imperative that you do the hard work of sorting through that feeling. Acknowledge what is sin and what is not. Go to work on the sin. Go to work on the false feeling of guilt. Gatekeep guilt. Don’t let what others do or don’t do grow guilt in you for what you do and don’t do when there isn’t a sin problem.

This is a lifetime of work. This is guarding and gardening our hearts and our hearths. Get help from your husband, your pastors, your deacons, and wise women in your knitting circles. False guilt is slavery, and it often distracts you from things you are guilty of. Plant your feet, water the truth, trust the Lord, go to work, out of love for Christ and the sake of your home!