E.2-8: Step Out of Your Shadow, and Into the Shadow of the Almighty
Season 2: Episode 7
Step Out of Your Shadow, and Into the Shadow of the Almighty
listen by clicking the audio player here:
In this episode you will learn:
You have a hidden room your relationship with God has never entered. You were sure you had to clean it first. You were wrong about that.
In this episode you will learn:
• How Jesus actually meets the hidden self: not by waiting for you to present yourself, but by seeking it out and stepping into it, the way He walked to Zacchaeus’s tree and the Samaritan woman’s well.
• Why the total exposure you have feared leads, in Scripture, not to a courtroom but to the throne of grace.
• Why the miracle you have been praying for may not be coming, and why the formation God is offering instead is the better gift.
Episode Length: 21:00
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Transcript
You have been waiting for the miracle. The one that fixes it all at once. That lifts you out clean, and leaves no mess and no lesson behind. I waited for that miracle too, for a long time, with the rent overdue and the shame rising. It did not come. And what came instead was better, and I very nearly missed it, because it did not look anything like rescue.
INTRO (0:25 to 2:50)
I am Angela Meer, and I welcome you into the sacred meeting place where the timeless patterns of Scripture meet the deep symbols of the soul. This is The Christian Jung Podcast. This is week eight of the shadow arc, and the title of today’s episode is Step Out of Your Shadow, and Into the Shadow of the Almighty.
Jesus has been the destination of this the entire time. Every room we have walked through in this arc, the wounds, the buried gold, the parts that resist, we walked through for one reason only: so that you would have something real, and true, and unhidden, to bring to Him. The shadow work was never the point. It was the road. And today we arrive. Today is about how Jesus Himself meets the hidden self, and I promise you, it overturns the thing you are most afraid of. Carl Jung is going to help us, once, and then you are going to watch us reach the exact edge of what Jung can do, and find Christ standing just past it.
[pause]
It is time to awaken holy wonder.
[music]
WHY THIS MATTERS PERSONALLY (2:50 to 7:30)
Let me tell you the whole of the story I started with.
In my early twenties, I made a real mess of my finances. I had not been raised with conversations about money. Nobody taught me how to invest, or how to limit debt, or how to budget, not really. And before I understood what was even happening, I was nearly twenty thousand dollars deep in credit card debt. I was carrying substantial medical debt on top of that. And I could not pay my rent. I was overwhelmed. My car had to be returned to the bank. And I had no family, and no friends, who could teach me any of what I had simply never been taught. And I was ashamed. It was the quiet kind of shame. The kind you keep hidden.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I cried out to God. And I want to be honest with you about how I was crying out, because it turns out to matter a great deal. I was crying out for a miracle. I was waiting for God to reach down and just fix it. Make the debt disappear. Lift me cleanly out of the consequences of what I had done. And the miracle was not coming. Month after month, the rent loomed up again, and the situation only got worse.
But one night, with the rent looming once more, something shifted. God answered me. And He did not answer the prayer I had been praying. He said, into the quiet, something I have never once forgotten. He said: I want to teach you wisdom with wealth, not just save you from your mistakes.
That was not the rescue I had asked for. It was something better, and it was much, much slower. For the next ten years, I learned hard lessons about money. About management. About integrity. About opening the hard bill instead of letting it sit unopened on the counter. About not blaming anyone for what I had never been taught, and just learning it anyway.
I run a ministry now. And the financial integrity that ministry stands on is real. But I want you to hear how it was actually built. It was not built by a miracle. It was built because Jesus stepped into my shadow. Into the most ashamed and hidden corner of my whole life. And He did not scold it. And He did not rescue me out of it. He stayed. And He slowly taught me the wisdom, and the discipline, that an integrous life is actually made of.
That is what He does with the hidden self. He steps into your shadow. And then, slowly, not in one miraculous moment but over years of patient teaching, He walks you out of your own shadow, and into His.
DEFINING THE CONCEPT (7:30 to 12:30)
So let me define what we are doing today, and let me be careful, because we are still, as we have been all arc, talking about the shadow. The hidden self. We are not changing the subject. We are bringing the subject home.
For seven weeks we have looked at the hidden self from every angle. And there is one thing about how most of us relate to the hidden self that I have not named yet, and it is the thing I want to define today. Most serious Christians are, without ever having decided to be, alone with the hardest part of themselves.
Think about that. You may have a real, sincere, daily relationship with God. And you may also have one hidden room that that relationship has simply never been allowed to enter. You pray every day, and you have never once brought Him the actual contents of that room. And it is almost never because you are in rebellion. It is because of a theology. A theology nobody ever taught you out loud, but that you absorbed anyway, from the air, and it goes like this: clean the room first, and then invite Him in. Fix the hidden thing. Or at least get it presentable. And then bring it to God.
And I need you to see what that theology actually does, because it sounds so reverent that we never inspect it. Under that theology, the worst room in you, the most ashamed corner, the deepest hidden thing, is, by definition, the one room God is never in. Because it is the one room that never gets clean enough to qualify for the invitation. The room that most needs Him is the one room your theology keeps Him out of. That is not reverence. That is a prison. And most of us have been living in it for years.
JUNG (12:30 to 17:30)
I want to bring in Carl Jung now, and I want to do something a little different than I usually do, because today we are going to walk right up to the edge of what Jung can give us.
Jung said something about the shadow that is simply true, and I want to give him full credit for it. He said the shadow does not heal in the dark. He said you do not become whole, you do not become enlightened, by imagining figures of light and pretending the darkness is not there. You become whole by making the darkness conscious. By bringing the hidden thing up and out, into the light, where it can finally be seen and known and dealt with. That is true. It is one of the truest things Jung ever said, and this entire arc has depended on it.
But here is the edge. Here is where Jung stops. Jung can tell you, with great precision, that the hidden self must be brought into the light. Jung cannot be the light. He can describe the terrain of the shadow better than almost anyone who has ever lived. He cannot be the One whose presence makes the exposed shadow safe. He can hand you a map. He cannot meet you at the destination. And this matters enormously, because if you do this work, if you drag the hidden self up into the light, and the light is only your own awareness, only insight, only consciousness, then you have done something brave and something incomplete. You have exposed the hidden self to a light that cannot love it.
The Christian claim, the thing that takes us one full step past Jung, is that the light the hidden self must be carried into is not a concept. It is not your own consciousness. It is a Person. A Person who already knows your name. A Person who is, right now, already walking toward your tree.
SCRIPTURE (17:30 to 27:30)
So let us go and watch Him walk.
Luke chapter 19. There is a man named Zacchaeus. He is a tax collector, he is wealthy, and he is despised, and he is, the text is careful to tell us, small. And Jesus is coming through his town, Jericho, in an enormous crowd. And Zacchaeus does the thing the hidden self always does. He finds a way to see without being seen. He runs ahead, and he climbs up into a sycamore tree, and he tucks himself into the leaves, where he can watch this Jesus from a safe distance. The way you watch something you want, but do not believe is meant for you.
And here is what happens. Jesus comes to that spot. And He stops. And out of an entire crowd, He looks up, into one tree, into one hiding place, and He says the man’s name. “Zacchaeus.” And then He says, “hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” Luke 19, verse 5. Now hear what He does not say. He does not say, Zacchaeus, come down, and clean up your record, and then we will talk. He does not say, get presentable first. He says, today. I must stay at your house today. And Luke tells us, just a few verses later, exactly why Jesus does this kind of thing at all. Verse 10. “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” To seek. He is not standing at the front of the synagogue, waiting for the hidden people to work up their courage and come find Him. He is walking through the crowd, to the tree.
It is the same in John chapter 4. The text says that Jesus “had to pass through Samaria.” Had to. And every reader in the ancient world would have raised an eyebrow at that, because geographically, He did not have to at all. Devout Jews routinely went around Samaria. He chose the route. He chose the road that took Him to one specific, hidden, ashamed woman, drawing water at a well at noon, which is the hour you go to the well if what you are trying to do is avoid every other person in town. And He talks with her. And gently, without one ounce of cruelty in it, He names her whole hidden life. The five husbands. The man she is with now who is not her husband. He names the very thing she came to that well at that hour to hide. And here is what wrecks me about this story, every time. When she runs back into her town, the thing she says is not, “I have been exposed.” The thing she says is, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.” John 4, verse 29. The being-seen was not the end of her. It was the beginning of her. The most thoroughly seen woman in John’s entire Gospel becomes the very first person in that Gospel to bring a whole town to Jesus.
And this is why the writer of Hebrews can do something that should be impossible. He puts two sentences right next to each other that, by the logic of the hidden self, should not be able to stand together. First, Hebrews 4, verse 13. “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” There it is. Total exposure. The very thing you have feared. It is real, and it is already true of you. But do not stop reading there, because the writer does not. Look at where he goes in the very next breath. Verse 16. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy.” Total exposure, and then, confident drawing near. In the same paragraph. As cause and effect. The exposure does not send you running. The exposure is what makes the drawing near possible, because once you are fully seen, there is nothing left to stage, nothing left to protect, nothing left to clean. The seeing you have spent your life dreading is the exact seeing that opens the door to grace.
MID-EPISODE
I want to pause here for a moment. If this episode is naming a locked room in you, a corner of yourself you have been keeping even from God, I want you to come and find me. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung. The free article this week walks through all of this in a form you can sit with slowly. And inside The Inner Room, the paid companion, I teach the three practices for bringing the hidden self out of solitary keeping and into the presence of Christ: a bodily practice of carrying the hidden thing into His company, a way of praying yourself daily out of your own shadow and into His, and a written practice that asks Him a better question than the one we usually ask.
The episode opens the locked door. The Inner Room walks you through it. Go to Substack and search for The Christian Jung, or come to angelameer.com.
Now, the three things to carry out of this.
THREE TEACHING POINTS (29:00 to 39:00)
Movement One: Jesus Is Not Afraid of Your Shadow. He Seeks It Out.
This is the reframe the whole episode rests on. You have pictured Jesus standing in the clean, well-lit part of you, waiting, a little impatiently, for you to get the rest of yourself presentable enough to approach Him. That is not the Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels walks to the tree. He chooses the road through Samaria. He goes, on purpose, to the hidden one, the ashamed one, the one watching from the leaves. The hidden self is not the part of you He is avoiding. It is the part of you He is seeking.
Movement Two: Being Fully Seen by Him Is the Thing You Have Feared, and It Is the Thing That Heals.
You have believed that if He saw all of it, the real worst of it, that would be the end. Scripture says the opposite, and it says it without flinching. You are already fully seen. Hebrews 4:13. And that total exposure does not lead to a courtroom. It leads to a throne of grace. The woman at the well was named, completely, and the naming did not destroy her, it freed her. Being fully known, it turns out, is not the catastrophe the hidden self has always assumed. It is the doorway. It is the only ground on which real healing has ever happened.
Movement Three: He May Not Rescue You Out of It. He May Step Into It and Walk You Out.
And here is the hardest and most freeing one. You have been praying for the miracle. The clean rescue. And maybe it has not come. And you have concluded your faith is too small, or God is not listening. Hear a third possibility. Maybe the miracle has not come because He is offering you something a miracle cannot give. A miracle would change your circumstances. It would not change you. And so, very often, instead of the rescue, He does what He did with me and my twenty thousand dollars of debt. He steps into the shadow. He stays. And He begins, slowly, patiently, over years if that is what it takes, to teach you and to form you from the inside. That is not Him ignoring your prayer. That is Him answering it with something better than the thing you asked for.
RECAP (39:00 to 41:00)
So let me bring it home. Three movements. One, Jesus is not afraid of your shadow, He seeks it out. Two, being fully seen by Him is the thing you have feared and the thing that heals. Three, He may not rescue you out of the hard thing, He may step into it and walk you out.
And if you carry one practice out of this episode and into your week, let it be this one. Tonight, bring to mind the one room you have kept locked, even from God. Do not fix it first. Do not prepare a speech. Just hold it, and pray the plainest sentence in this whole episode: Jesus, I am not bringing You the cleaned-up version. I am bringing You this. And then just stay there. In that room. With the hidden thing, and with Him, together, for two minutes. Most of us, in all our years of faith, have never once done that on purpose.
PAUSE, PRAY, HEAL (41:00 to 44:00)
Let us end this time with a moment to Pause, Pray, and Heal.
First, take a deep breath, and rest into the material you have heard today
Pause. Bring to mind the part of yourself you have most kept hidden, even from God. Do not resolve to fix it. Simply picture carrying it, exactly as it is, into a room where Jesus is already seated. Already unsurprised. Already glad that you came.
Pray. This week’s prayer is the Lorica, the ancient Celtic prayer also known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate. It is a prayer of being completely surrounded, the shadow of the Almighty made personal, Christ on every side of you.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise.
Heal. Here is the question to carry into your journal this week. What have I been waiting for God to rescue me from, that He may instead be waiting to walk through with me, and to teach me inside of.
FINAL
Subscribe to The Christian Jung Podcast wherever you listen. Share this episode with someone who has been carrying a hidden room alone. Find me at angelameer.com, or on Substack as The Christian Jung, where the free article and the Inner Room companion for this episode are waiting for you.
You have been doing the hardest work of your life in solitary confinement, and you never had to. The door was never locked from His side. Next week, the arc comes to its destination, and we count, honestly, the cost of becoming real.
Until then. Heal Deeply. Walk Holy.