Traveling true through hell to the New You

A sample of the worst days of my life
that helped make my life what it is today.

REMINISCING over 14-year-old journal entries proves a thing true: a hell-of-months traversed through consistently, blesses, for such memories never fade.

Vanquished was joy, bereft was peace, forlorn was hope, the grief so lamentably memorable, that those journal entries, read a third-of-a-lifetime further on, reveal:

©     Not one day in that season of comprehensive loss was devoid of both hope and hopelessness; hope a day would come where joy, peace and hope would return; yet, hopelessness was the incontrovertible sense that that day was a long way away. Both these feelings never left me. Together they tormented me. But they held me together.

©     I see now the eternal provision then that’s now become eternal possession. The coalescence of hope and hopelessness was a God-intended corner that grief backed me into, and it proved safe and effective, no matter how excruciating the experience was. It locked me in and it assured me of my ultimate restoration.

©     The promise and reality of God’s Presence is something that makes such a season endurable. But that’s not all. What continues to unfold is incredible. Restoration of life, post-grief, means that God’s Presence is but the embodiment of the eternal possession. And what more with it?

©     Thankfulness for God’s faithfulness swells when He commends us for our obedience. Done once, we’re compelled to do it again and again and again, for the power of the Kingdom is ours, something we would never deny again. A new me emerged. I am the same person but completely different.

Grief is a manifestation of hell in this life. Never go through such a journey without clinging to God. Indeed, only in this worldly life is it possible to endure hell with God’s company as comfort. Travel through it true. No matter how senseless it might seem.

Thank God for the hope in you that you cannot explain, despite the wretched pain, but is there and real and true. God has taught us something supremely and eternally valuable.

God adds hope for the journey that seems hopeless. He gives peace we never understand. And somehow, we make it through hell knowing we must keep on going.

God proves Himself real through a hope we can’t deny, and we learn to endure numbness and anguish. And that becomes our possession of faith.

Loving Everybody in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

Photo source: Unknown.

I WAS going to call this article, Why Everyone is a Loser on the Topic of Same-Sex Marriage, but it is too divisive.

This article is probably not what you think it is. I’m not ‘hating on’ anyone. I hope that’s what comes across. Or, perhaps I’m hating on everyone? Of course, by having a view — however neutral I think it is — I may inevitably be polarised into both camps. But here goes…

I think everyone’s a loser on the topic of same-sex marriage in Australia presently, because whatever side you’re on — and there are four I can see — you probably find yourself frustrated.

The question:
Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?

If you vote ‘yes’ you may not understand how others cannot see this as a moral / human rights / fairness / justice issue. You may only see bigotry and homophobia in the ‘no’ camp. If you vote ‘no’ you may not understand how others cannot see the threats posed beyond a continuation of, and consequences within, rewriting the law. If you’re neutral, you may not understand how others cannot see the importance of people respecting each other’s views. A fourth group constitutes those who have flexible views and may be undecided. You may not understand how others cannot see the complexity of the debate, and your right to be undecided, and you are probably silent.

Actually, silence is an important response to explore. You may be silent because your views don’t sit well with some you love and / or respect. Your silence might be because you don’t want to be shouted down. There are many reasons why people are silent, the worst of all, perhaps, that the circumstances of hateful behaviour on both sides of the divide have silenced you. You don’t want to upset people and therefore yourself. You desire peace over principle.

Over the years I have tried to look at all dimensions of this incredibly dynamic and complex debate and it confounds me as to how all-consuming it has become. Everyone seems stressed about it. (Although I’m sure there are some / many who aren’t.)

A THEOLOGY FOR LOVING DEBATE

I wonder if I can introduce the following quote as emblematic of the concept of love as it meets conflict:

“When you give and expect a return, that’s an investment.
When you give and don’t expect anything back, that’s love.”

— Unknown

When people on all sides of the debate engage in ways that expect others to be convinced of their views, it’s not love. But when people can engage with the freedom for having their view — feeling safe within a community of two or more to hold those views as sacred — without judgment or recrimination either way — love is encountered.

Whenever we expect others to think as we do, we fall short of love, no matter how ‘right’ we are. But when we appreciate a person amid the right they have for their view, we meet love.

***

The SSM debate is so divisive because sexuality is fathomless in its complexity.

Firstly, everybody’s sexuality is complex. Maybe nothing proves our innate brokenness than our vulnerability regarding our sexuality.

Secondly, our human biases see our sexuality as either superior or inferior to others’ — sexuality in a broken world is inherently shaming unless it is valued and treated as redemptive. Yet, as sexual beings, none of us is inherently better or worse than anyone else.

Thirdly, our brokenness either deforms our views or it compels us to redeem our views. The redemption of views results when all persons are seen as bearers of God’s image — all as equally precious in God’s view — all as deserving of their sexual dignity.

And there is a plethora of other views that could be considered, but for brevity here, won’t be.

***

Perhaps the key response we can make is to have empathy for how the SSM debate is affecting individual persons — whatever their views are — whatever their stake is or appears to be or feels like, for them, not us.

If we can appreciate another person’s truth — what is real for them — we begin then to meet love, because we’re meeting them. From such a place, trust emerges and truth can begin to coexist with love in the realm of conflict. The endpoint, the perfection of understanding, is truth as love — both seamless within each other.

Every view expressed respectfully has value, but it’s people on the opposite side of their view who determine whether it’s respectful or not. If it is respectful, and it appeals to a context of truth, i.e. it has logic about it, whatever the content of the view, it is loving.

SOME SYMPATHIES

I feel for the gay man, the lesbian, the bisexual person, the transgender person, and others of sexually diverse groups. You deserve to be loved and respected as much as anyone else, and perhaps in your vulnerability more so. You deserve more than my or others’ ignorance.

I feel for the conservative, for their fears whether well-founded or not. Your true views that you may be scared to voice ought to have their place.

I feel for those who represent other important societal issues, drowned out because of the heat within the present debate.

I feel for anyone who genuinely feels indifferent or frustrated or something else.

I feel for the peacemakers and peacekeepers on all sides of the debate, who hate the stress it places people under.

It’s good to conclude on the concept of love.

ABOUT LOVE

Many bandy-about the words of Jesus as if they have the market cornered on love.

Well, love was never meant to be a thing, a philosophy, a statute of right-and-wrong. Love in this context is a verb, it is observable; a behaviour. The use of Bible verses by all sides of the debate to convince, compel or conquer is not love; it’s a doctrinal activity aimed at edifying others, and it can clearly be done ignorantly or arrogantly, which, pushed to its extreme, constitutes spiritual abuse.

Love is only given as it is received. Love is not love if it isn’t received as loving.

Love is always more about the other person than it is about the giver of, or how they, love.

We cannot say we are being loving if it isn’t perceived as loving.

Jesus is clear: in all things, love. Especially in conflict. Especially when solutions are beyond our comprehension. Especially when there is space for a divergence of views. And there always is.

Only then is everyone a winner. That’s when love finally is love.

Love seems so far beyond us in the vast divergence of views and presented maturities.

New perspectives on Time

HEXHAM ABBEY, I recently learned, was built in 678 A.D., which is an astonishing thought — that an original church building is over 1,300 years old. There are church buildings elsewhere in the world that were built as early as the Third Century.

Think of all the persons in all the centuries, all the generations, and all the decades who have come and gone; how many moments. There are 31.5 billion seconds in one thousand years. There are forty generations over the same time period. And even though that sounds inordinately long, and that we only ever witness four or five generations in any one life, all those seconds tick dutifully by, one after the other, with inevitability. Sometime soon, it will be one hundred years from now, and almost all of us who breathe air now will have expired.

If I look back over the time experiences I’ve had in recent days, I see challenges that were overcome, accomplishments made that seemed to breed stress at the time, but now simply weave a story. Three days ago, an early start, anxiety for what I needed to do in a short time period, many people dependent on my role, and yet now I look back at it as simply an interesting event, a blip in my account of lived experience. What if heaven provides a perfect account of every reconciled memory — like a movie library of the ratified days of our lives?

If one of the purposes of our lives is to reconcile time, we have the motive to go back through our days and make an honest account of them. To investigate our attribution of these days’ experiences and make of them an outcome of acceptance.

Time waits for no person, we know this by the fact of a death that seems as an ever-present possible reality — the longer we’re alive, the more that reality bears down in truth. So, we have the rest of our lives — seconds or hours or months or decades — to decide the things we must decide and to do the things we would like to do. But we do this without ever knowing how long life will last. It’s good to bear this truth in the front of our minds.

What can we do with our time now that we cannot do when we’re gone?

How can we further challenge our understanding of time in the realm of experience?

Why are we so willing to deny our finiteness in this world? What fears do we have that are simply interesting?

When is it possible to come to new understandings of time around revelation?

Who told us we had to live from the paradigm set that we have today?

Where is the challenge ahead to debunk futile philosophies of time that do not serve us?

Light Shines Brightest at Night

THERE are foundational salvation truths we learn only in our darkest days. We never expect to be blessed at a time that seems so irretrievably cursed.

But we are.

If we can let go of the threads that bind us to what was.[1]

If.

The most significant word: if.

Of course, it’s easiest to let go when those things we could never let go of are ripped out of our grasp. Such situations are the hardest realities. So what we find in the hardest of authenticities is the easiest of choices, for choice is a luxury we’re not afforded in cataclysmic loss.

And still we must make the choice to suffer as much as possible without resistance.

That must be the key to entering the revelatory world: where light shines brightest at night.

And what a revelation that is! To suddenly discover the existence of upside down realities we always suspected were true, yet had never experienced. And now they’re real. This is where the déjà vu Spirit communicates things we always knew but didn’t know until we did. Then we recognised we had already had a sense of knowing them.

This is the rare life that Christ came to reveal to us, epitomised on the cross. So few Christians, however, have experienced such revelation that precedes Kingdom transformation.

This is because there are two steps: the first step, loss; the second, humiliation. Loss polarises many into wastelands of bitterness and resentment. There is a refusal to be humiliated as Christ was. Whether we deserve humiliation or not is not the point; Christ didn’t. Our flesh must be crucified, regularly and often. None of this is easy to write or read. But unless we’re crucified, regularly and often, we cannot grow into wisdom through revelation.

Humiliation teaches us humility.

Then it is in that night humiliation where the light that shines through is brightest. Because there is now nothing that can come against us that hasn’t already set itself against us. There is no longer anything more to fear. If we survived the worst that life can throw at us, nothing can hold us back in our hope for a restoration some time off.

See how if Christ is for us, nothing is against us?

We could never learn such experiential truths until we 1) suffered loss, and 2) suffered well the humiliation of our pride.

We know we must lose our life to find it.

At darkest point,

at dimmest hour,

let God anoint,

you by His Kingdom power.

Allow the darkness to brighten the light, and God will enlighten your sight.

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[1] Even as we let go of that which we never could otherwise, God never truly takes it away. We find later that, spiritually speaking, what was once ours, is always ours.

Trust That If God Called You He Will Use You

It’s always a fear held irrationally, that if God has called you yet then ceases in using you, what does that mean? Will He no longer use you?

There are times in all our ministries for God when the brakes are put on, and we’re called into a silence — so much worse when we’re not ready for such a moratorium — when the identity crisis we suffer is so fundamentally necessary, for it calls us to our dependence on ourselves and not God.

Pride increases friction at the pivot point when God’s use of us diminishes and we fear God’s call is over. Notice the coalescence between pride and fear. The latter is the manifestation of the former. Yet, fear is plainly pride’s revelation.

When God calls us, He uses us. He Who calls us never goes back on His Word.

Nobody used once is then put on the scrap heap. If He used you once, He will use you again. And even in the time of abeyance, watch, for that time of silence He is still speaking.

But there is still fear, perhaps. This is simply a sign that there is still too much dependence on ourselves. We needn’t feel vulnerable nor ashamed. It’s a journey we’re on. We needn’t be in any hurry to arrive, for God has assured us there is a time for everything.

It is important we keep the faith in what God spoke into our hearts long ago.

You did not get it wrong. He said it, alright. “The one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it,”[1] i.e. complete the work He started in you.

He who has called you continues to call, whether you hear His call or not. Stay faithful to His call.

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[1] 1 Thessalonians 5:24.

Valuing Most what is typically Valued Least

MYSTERIES prevail in life. To be confounded is to be wrestled down with a liberating truth: an invitation to the Something Else.

There is always Something Else; the thing we’re missing, everything we do not see, and that which God would have us know if only we were to will our will away.

As I write, I’m listening to music that has been slowed down. 800 percent. It is marketed as angelic. It does sound angelic. But it isn’t angelic. But it influences my thinking as I’m cajoled into a sense of shalom, yes, even as I press these keys, as my mindset is challenged and invigorated.

If only we could see what we ordinarily do not see.

Enter grief. As a for instance.

Loss takes us into a realm of pain, which by function, is an area of experience replete with newness. Nothing bad per se. (If we could be free of reacting to judge the pain.) But everything is new and foreign. Everything. And all this newness is frightening, and the soul imagines how vulnerable it is; anxiety is felt.

Little wonder grief feels like we’re regularly blindsided by overwhelming emotions.

Through grief God shows us how potent the Kingdom is for realising spiritual peace that confounds what would ordinarily confound us. See the mastery of God in that? God giving us access to rethink the unthinkable.

The Spirit within us reigns when we secede our will. And then suddenly God gives to us the powering of seeing; not a strictly or purely visual phenomenon. Of seeing something the prophets of old might see. God speaking through our experience.

We might see some of the following:

ü the wisdom within someone with an intellectual disability.

ü the possibility of unknowable dimensions within our present-day experience.

ü the riches of experience in a homeless person.

ü the pain behind a person’s smile.

ü the folly in material wealth gained inappropriately.

ü a range of possible decisions instead of just one or two.

ü the prevalence of suffering in the world and a way of entering into it.

ü the obviousness of one’s imminent demise (yes, death) and the choice to order life in accordance with such a resounding truth.

ü the importance (and acceptance) of difficulty as a proving ground for character.

ü the vision and hope resplendent in children.

ü the ‘Lux’ soap bar (pictured above) one’s son gives to his father with great joy on Father’s Day.

Jesus’ Kingdom is home most within us when we learn to value most what the world typically values least.

Peace has a way of being hidden. We find it when we let go of what we deem as valuable.

We can find peace when our hearts are open amid confusion. Only when the Kingdom is home in us can we understand that through experience.