Book Four · The Objectification Series
Use Me
Spiritual Objectification, and the Difference Between Access and Abiding
“Use me.” It is a real prayer,
and the wanting in it was never the problem.
Book Four · The Objectification Series
Spiritual Objectification, and the Difference Between Access and Abiding
“Use me.” It is a real prayer,
and the wanting in it was never the problem.
The premise
“Use me.” It is a real prayer, and the wanting in it was never the problem.
People pray it in their cars. They sing it with wet eyes and mean every word. Being used by God is a genuine biblical good, and this book does not sneer at it, or at the people who long for it.
Availability becomes the offering. Fruitfulness becomes the evidence. Being useful becomes the proof that things are well between us — and somewhere in there, usefulness stops being something we do and becomes who we are.
Nobody decides to make that trade. Every step is taken by somebody who loves God, and most of them are praying the whole way.
The argument, in one line
The veil was torn from the top. Hebrews says so in the indicative — accomplished, finished, nothing left to earn — and then, one verse later, asks us to draw near.
If access and nearness were the same thing, that second verse would have nothing left to ask for. It asks anyway.
Four realms
They are named for what we are doing rather than for what God is to us, and they are not ranks. Most of us move through three of them before lunch.
But one is the deceptive one, and it is the realm the title is about. Participation looks like intimacy from outside, and usually from inside. A person can serve faithfully there for thirty years and never pass the second veil, and nobody would have any reason to say something was wrong.
There is no symptom. The innermost room simply has no job in it — which is exactly why somebody whose standing rests on being useful finds it so hard to enter.
How it is written
Worked through Amos, Micah, Jonah, Obadiah, and Ezekiel, this is a trauma-informed study of a pattern nearly every believer runs — the narrator included.
Micah asks the question the book exists to serve: is it not for you to know? The distance between ignorance and willful corruption is the whole distance, and recognition offered early is how the first never hardens into the second.
Twelve chapters
From Chapter One
It is the most dangerous prayer in the English language, and it is dangerous in the opposite direction from the one everybody warns you about.
The room used to be a carpet showroom, and you can still see where the display racks were bolted down if you look at the floor, which Delphine does, because she has been coming here on Wednesday nights for two years and she has looked at everything else.
It is a good room. The chairs are the stacking kind and there are maybe ninety of them and about sixty are being used. The overhead lights are half off, which is not atmosphere — it is because the fluorescents in this building buzz.
Delphine is twenty-nine. She works nights at a distribution center forty minutes east, four on and three off, and Wednesday is the last of the off days, which means she is here on the edge of the week she is dreading.
The song they are on has been around for a while. Everybody knows it. It is one of the ones that spends its whole second half on four words, and the four words are some version of use me — it is I’m available, in this one, and then it is have your way, and the bridge goes around three times, and by the third time nobody is looking at the screen.
Delphine has her hands at her sides. She is not a raiser. Her face is wet, and it has been for about ninety seconds, and she has not made any noise, and she would be mortified if anybody mentioned it.
She means it.
That is the thing to sit with before this book says anything else. She means it entirely. There is nothing in that room that is being faked.
Where it closes
Handed the land, the promise, and an angel to go ahead of him — with the Person withheld.
Who it is for
What it will not do
The author
A licensed mental health counselor and licensed professional counselor in Washington, Texas, and Connecticut, a certified Human Behavior Consultant, and the founder of GraceRoot Relationship Healing Institute.
Her work is trauma-informed and relationally focused, which in practice means two commitments: that the patterns people arrive with are treated as intelligent adaptations to real conditions rather than as defects of character, and that repair is understood as behavior over time rather than as a realization.
Use Me completes the objectification series, after More Than What You Make Me Feel, Everyone I’ve Never Met, and Nothing Personal. · Articles drawn from the series
The distance between ignorance and willful corruption is the whole distance, and recognition offered early is how the first never hardens into the second.
A person who recognizes this in themselves has not failed. They have arrived in time.
GraceRoot courses are psychoeducational learning programs, not emergency care, legal advice, or a replacement for therapy. Certificates document GraceRoot completion. Court, employer, board, or continuing education acceptance should be confirmed before purchase unless a page states a specific approval.