Befriending Your Monsters: Facing the Darkness of Your Fears to Experience the Light

Praise for Befriending Your Monsters

So many of us are trained to run away from our fears. But what if running toward them is what will actually lead to life? Luke brilliantly weaves together stories and theology in a way that is compelling and beautiful and inspiring for anyone desiring to grow more into the likeness of Jesus day by day.

Jefferson Bethke, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus > Religion and To Hell with the Hustle

"We all know darkness, but few of us know the gift that exists within the darkness. Luke shows us a way through our fears toward the gift of our truest self in Befriending Your Monsters."

Fr. Richard Rohr, author of Falling Upward

"Befriending Your Monsters helps you see that the darkness you fear might just also be a lifesaving warning. Luke’s mixture of humor and wisdom helps you go where you don’t want to go, so you can become all that God intends for you."

Ian Morgan Cron, coauthor of The Road Back to You

Fear can steal, but it can also save. This powerful book gave me practical tools to still my knocking knees, thaw my frozen feet, and face the monsters I didn’t even realize were lurking under the bed. More than that, it invited me to excavate the unexpected gifts hidden in the dark places where fear often foments. In an age when monsters are multiplying, I can’t recommend this book highly enough!

Jonathan Merritt, contributing writer for The Atlantic and author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch

Thanks to author Luke Norsworthy for giving us a great gift indeed by showing how we can face our fears, overcome the monsters that threaten us, and move forward into a life of virtue and vitality, a deeper, healthier life.

The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, presiding bishop and primate, the Episcopal Church

Occasionally, an author finds a teaching opportunity amid the joys and concerns of a culture that allows for meaningful commentary regarding both what is and what could be. In a time when anxiety is falling on all of us, indiscriminately, and between necessary moments of grace, Luke Norsworthy has found a new and creative way to talk about fear. We need this book and, in particular, his gift for naming faith and its varied expressions as the appropriate antidote for a more holistic approach to our lives.

Suzanne Stabile, author of The Path Between Us and coauthor of The Road Back to You

Praise for God over Good

Luke Norsworthy’s inviting, accessible, and entirely enjoyable new book is an invitation to come to know God better. Or to come to know God for the first time. Highly recommended.

James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage and The Jesuit Guide

Luke’s insight and humor come through his stories and theology in beautifully carved pieces we can savor long after the reading is over. Part memoir, part preaching, part amazing storytelling—it’s all a gift offered by a man of great faith who has chosen God over everything. Luke is an exceptional podcaster, pastor, writer, and friend. Read his book.

Becca Stevens, author, priest, and founder of Thistle Farms

© 2020 by Luke Norsworthy

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-2341-5

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled Message are from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations labeled NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Some stories, names, and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Published in association with the literary agency of Daniel Literary Group, LLC, Brentwood, TN.

To my four girls,

with gratitude for showing me the light.

Contents

Cover    1

Endorsements    2

Half Title Page    3

Title Page    5

Copyright Page    6

Dedication    7

Epigraph    11

Foreword by Annie F. Downs    13

Section I

Meeting Monsters    17

1. Fake Monsters, Real Fears    19

2. Into the Dark    39

3. Destroy    61

4. Deliver    81

Section II

The Three Universal Monsters    95

5. Comparison    99

5.1 The Prop—More Than Me    101

5.2 The Pull—Identity Crisis    106

5.3 The Point—A Stable Scale    111

5.4 The Light—Your Lane    119

6. More    123

6.1 The Prop—I Need More    125

6.2 The Pull—Never Enough    130

6.3 The Point—Never Full    135

6.4 The Light—Gifted    141

7. Success    147

7.1 The Prop—I Am What I Do    149

7.2 The Pull—Losing or Loser    153

7.3 The Point—Not about You    158

7.4 The Light—Lose Yourself, Find God    166

Section III

A Monster-Friendly Life    173

8. How (Not) to Dress for Your Monster    177

9. Where (Not) to Find Your Monster    195

10. What (Not) to Expect about Your Monster    213

Acknowledgments    229

Notes    231

About the Author    237

Back Ads    239

Back Cover    242

We must abandon the common sense notion that the monsters we meet within ourselves are enemies to be destroyed. Instead, we must cultivate the hope that they can become companions to be embraced, guides to be followed, albeit with caution and respect. For only our monsters know the way down to that inner place of unity and wholeness; only these creatures of the night know how to travel where there is no light.

Parker Palmer

Foreword

I STILL CANNOT BELIEVE how much Luke likes sharks. The only panic attack I’ve had in my life so far came because a fisherman caught a shark and showed it to me. Eyeball to eyeball. Tiny shark mouth jokingly touched to my arm and within seconds, I am panicked. Like block-out-what-just-happened-and-where-I-am kind of panic. Apparently I ran very fast on the beach to get away from the tiny shark, but sadly I don’t remember it (which is disappointing because I’ve always wanted to run fast).

I grew up thinking sharks were incredibly dangerous and life-threatening. It’s not that I knew it personally; I just saw the same movies you saw and saw the same massive ocean you saw and knew it was too scary.

I read Befriending Your Monsters while lying beside a lake, a lake I grew up swimming in and playing around. And yet, sometimes when I jump off the two-story dock and land in the water, I’m scared. I’m scared of what is below me and around me, and I have to do some major self-talk not to lose my mind. Of course, there are no sharks in a man-made lake, but there is just no end to the stories my mind will tell me to keep me from doing the thing that is right in front of me.

Just to be clear, there are real things that scare me too. (Not just the idea of saltwater predators in lake water literally hundreds of miles from an ocean.) I’m afraid that my deficits are too much to get over. I’m afraid that if I’m not in control of a situation, it is going to go haywire. I’m afraid my history is going to be too much for someone. I’m afraid I won’t survive the losses that some of my friends are experiencing when it is my turn. I’m afraid my prayers aren’t going to be answered.

I hear you. You are saying, "Annie, you are afraid God won’t answer your prayers the way you want them answered. But he always answers." And yes, that would be the correct thing to say. But that’s not my fear. My fear is he won’t answer.

Luke and his wife and kids have become like family to me. And there is something about being in their house and in their lives that feels really safe. It’s not that the scary things go away, but darkness never wins in places full of light.

That’s why I read Befriending Your Monsters lying by the lake with the sunshine pouring down from the sky over North Georgia. I wanted to remind the darkness that light always wins. I wanted to hear Luke’s voice, page after page, a friend of great light in my life, tell me the stories I needed to hear.

There are many things that do not win in your life, if you so choose:

Fear doesn’t win.

Pain doesn’t win.

Darkness doesn’t win.

But it takes choosing light. Choosing to let the light invade the dark corners of your heart, not where things are hidden on purpose but where your courage went to crouch down, thinking this life would be too scary. It’s not. Befriend your monsters, let the light in, let your courage stand up, and walk right on into the life you’ve always wanted.

ANNIE F. DOWNS, bestselling author of 100 Days to Brave and Remember God; host of the That Sounds Fun podcast

Section I

Meeting Monsters

The Song

A TODDLER EMERGES from the dark recesses of our hallway, paci in mouth, pink blankie in hand, and terror furrowing her brow.

Daddy, I can’t sleep. Something skeedy is in my room on the ceiling.

Upon inspection, I realize that I’ve created this toddler, with ample assistance from my wife; therefore, this crisis is mine to solve.

I spring into action.

As soon as I find the remote.

I’m an empathetic dad, but I’m not reckless. I will pause the TV first.

Three strides carry me from the living room couch to the hallway, where I pick up and begin carrying my daughter back to her room.

I clear my throat, and now I’m ready to sing the song that will expel the fears and put the world back into harmony—The Monster Song.

I’ve sung The Monster Song to all three of my daughters and at least two coworkers. Each time, it has brought harmony back to the world.

It goes like this:

There’re no monsters in Avery’s room.

There’re no monsters in Adalyn’s room.

There’re no monsters in Audrey’s room.

So you don’t (click sound) have to be scared.

This song obviously brings up some questions. Most notably, why do all my daughters think monsters exist?

If monsters exist in children’s minds, then a good night’s rest doesn’t exist in their adults’ reality.

Children know about monsters only because adults tell stories about these nonexistent creatures. Adults could make a pact to remove monster stories for kids and thus increase sleep for adults.

But as adults, we haven’t done this, and so we continue to lose out on sleep. Not because we can’t get rid of Count Dracula, zombies, or the Big Bad Wolf, but because we can’t eradicate what monsters represent. We could set every monster book on fire, but that would not eradicate the real force behind the fictitious fur, flesh, and fangs.

Monstrous Metaphor

MONSTERS HAVE BEEN AROUND for thousands of years. Some believe the Greeks were the first to write about monsters; others believe that long before the Greeks wrote about them, our prehistoric relatives were depicting them. Some think the oldest evidence of a monster is a cave painting dated around 10,000 BC of a half-man, half-beast creature with deerlike antlers and human legs, albeit a human who does lots of squats, called the Sorcerer of Trois-Frères. Others, such as Paleolithic art historian André Leroi-Gourhan, say we’ve found monstrous forms in caves from southern France and Spain that are twenty to twenty-five thousand years old.1

Our preenlightened ancestors didn’t have modern technologies like flashlights, cameras, or Facebook to educate them that half-man and half-deer creatures don’t exist. But if it was just ignorance causing them to believe in monsters, why do monsters continue to dominate today’s screens?

Because fake monsters embody our real fears.

When the Big Bad Wolf appears with his asthmatic propensity for huffing and puffing, he makes us question the structural integrity of our security.

When an overgrown great white shark develops a humanlike longing for revenge, we feel the need for a bigger boat. The shark’s size makes us aware of how small we’ve always been.

When Godzilla snaps tons of concrete and steel in seconds, we wonder how much strength we possess.

Monsters act as proxies for what truly terrifies us by putting fur, flesh, and fangs on our finitude, our weakness, and our limitation. The gamesmanship might seem excessive, but that doesn’t discredit the actual fear.

Fear that I don’t matter.

Fear that I don’t have enough.

Fear that I don’t stack up to those around me.

Fear that I am out of control and in chaos.

The Hebrew Bible speaks of the hippopotamus-like monster, the Behemoth, and the alligator-like monster, the Leviathan. These two monsters often appear in the context of creation as the antagonists to God’s creative work. In the first creation account of Genesis, God tamed and separated the chaotic waters of precreation to create a good and orderly world.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Gen. 1:1–2)

God overcomes the formless and void water that covers the earth to create our good and ordered world and to create humanity, which isn’t just good but very good. Elsewhere, when the Jewish writers describe this anticreation chaos that God overcomes, monsters like the Behemoth and Leviathan replace the water as the chaotic enemy, a common practice in ancient Near Eastern literature. See how Psalm 74 puts fur, flesh, and fangs on the anti-God precreation chaos of the world:

Yet God my King is from of old,

working salvation in the earth.

You divided the sea by your might;

you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan;

you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

You cut openings for springs and torrents;

you dried up ever-flowing streams.

Yours is the day, yours also the night;

you established the luminaries and the sun. (vv. 12–16)

God brings order out of chaos by dividing the waters, just like in Genesis 1. But here the psalmist adds a second layer of God also conquering the dragons and Leviathan. The most substantial question brought up by this text isn’t if these monsters actually exist. The most substantial question is, What real fears do these fake monsters represent?

For the Jewish writers, these monsters might have put scales and teeth on the chaos that an exiled community felt when enslaved miles away from their homeland. The fear that their oppressors (and thus their oppressors’ gods) had more power than their God. The fear that they were small, powerless, and out of control.

The psalmist expresses the common attitude about monsters found outside of Judaism. Anthropologist David Gilmore writes:

The monster is a metaphor for all that must be repudiated by the human spirit. It embodies the existential threat to social life, the chaos, atavism, and negativism that symbolize destructiveness and all other obstacles to order and progress, all that which defeats, destroys, draws back, undermines, subverts the human project.2

Your monster is the metaphor or the proxy for what