A Confession of Sin

As I confessed in the past blog post tagged here, The Sin of Overprotection, my biggest sin is overprotection. I know that this might sound benign. But, in my experience, it does me as much harm as other people’s professed sins, It has cost me relationships, it has caused me needless suffering, and in many ways it is a denial of God’s ability to walk with people in their personal path of transformation without my help.

For a while, I thought I was getting it under control. But, yesterday my teenager showed me that I still have a way to go. I would get into why she got upset with me, but old habits die hard apparently. So, wanting to protect her privacy, I’ll just say that she called me out for being overprotective and my defense that as her father, it’s my job, didn’t work. Then some hours later, I kept trying to get my 6 year old to wear a jacket because it was cold and she gave me a speech letting me know that I didn’t live in her body so I didn’t know how she felt and therefore shouldn’t be able to force her to wear a jacket. Another father fail. And when I tell you that I wanted to go somewhere and cry, I am not exaggerating. And it gave me a flashback to when I was a teenager and my best friend yelled at me and told me I wasn’t her father when I tried to protect her from dating a guy I knew didn’t have her best interest at heart.

Like everything, I took these sad feelings to God and was immediately reminded of writing this post on my sin of overprotection. Believe it or not, it is a thing, I struggle with it, and I am actively trying to change. I’m humbled by it. It is my thorn in my flesh. And I pray to one day know what it is like to not have this burden and know what it is like to, for the rest of my life, live in the peace of knowing that God has this world and doesn’t need me to be a spiritual gangster.

Lastly, in recent months, I have felt overprotective of people who have been hurt by the institutional church or who are being actively hurt by the church. As I am writing this, I actively have overprotection energy in my body that I’m trying to discharge after hearing how members of a church hurt a dear friend. I can feel within myself an outsized desire to protect him and others even to the point of starting my own church specifically to support/protect people who have been hurt by the church. Now, is that my job? No. Is it one I would apply for if I saw it advertised. Absolutely not! And yet, for one reason or the other, I feel this urge to do something about it. And I especially feel it right now when I think of all of my poor, White, less formally educated brothers and sisters and other folks who have come to believe there’s safety in White adjacency and that Trump is their savior. When I see the fervor they have looking to Trump as their protector, that I doubt any of them—despite claiming to be Christian—have ever had for Jesus, as an overprotector, my alarms are going off like crazy all day.

You’d think given that many of them would have very little love for me, I’d at least, as the Bible says, “Kick the dust off my feet” and then give them over to a reprobate mind. But no. Because, as someone who was trained religiously in the same way as many of them were, I can see a direct correlation to how the church’s collective pedagogy set many of these folks up to see Trump exactly the way they do. Rather than teach people to follow the teachings of Jesus, the church has taught them nationalism, money worship, hero worship, conquering as justification for all manners of inhumanity, and all sorts on un-Jesus-like sentiments. Seeing this so clearly, I have the tendency to want to protect them too. But, the truth is I can’t. I am really trying to accept this. And my hope in confessing this is that I will release myself from this tendency so that I can use the energy to do things I’d much rather be doing. So, if you read this and are a praying person, please pray for me. And take care of told. So folks with my sin don’t feel like they have to.