Confronting conflict to promote peace

Having waited years for a time to finally say one’s piece, very often we’ve prayed for just the right moment to speak forth the truth on our heart. At times the soul becomes sick for waiting in hope, though just as much, time can equip us to speak more calmly. Nevertheless, many of us wait and wait for that cherished hope of redemption—where the person who has harmed us might finally own what they did.

I know this is a controversial subject. Everyone it seems has a view on this topic. I know there are many who have different views on whether confrontations of conflict are worth their while or not. Sometimes they aren’t. Often, it’s the case that it would be unwise to poke the bear—that abusive nemesis who may have been a former partner, boss, pastor, or someone else with power, that they issued over us. In these situations, we came to our peace for the fact that we removed ourselves from the toxic situation. Only then could we breathe a proverbial sigh of relief, even if potential triggers of the past were or are ever present.

Conflict literally begs to be reconciled; restitution for the trust that was damaged, and a relationship restored. In an ideal world there is no payment for reconciliation other than repentance. If only there were less lawsuits and more conversations of sweet reasonableness. A vast number of conflicts can be resolved simply through a shared mutual understanding—“Oh, THAT’S how what I did hurt you… if only I knew that before! I’m so sorry! Let me make it up to you. Please forgive me. I hope you can trust me again sometime, but I don’t expect you to. Whatever you decide I will accept.”

But a shared understanding presumes a lot. It assumes both parties are reasonable and are willing to give up something costly and not just take what they can from the relationship. Not everyone is willing to see reason, especially if it requires acknowledging a hurtful truth. Not everyone will be humbled. Shame is too big a weakness to bear for some; it takes too much strength to be that weak. There are many who will stick to their digs no matter what, because restoring the relationship is farthest from their goal. Vulnerability is too big a price to pay.

The narcissist is particularly terrifying when confronted. Very often they will leave us with much cause for regret; a bite that keeps stinging. They will seek to teach us a lesson for confronting conflict, and for having the audacity to hope for peace; a disgustingly laughable concept in their view. And the fact that they chide us in these ways stirs us up all the more. They expose us to ridicule because we believed they were capable of good. But people such as these always set their mind on the win. They flourish in conflict, are at ease in our confusion, love to confound others, and demand to be in control.

The only way we defeat such a person is through a peace they cannot reconcile. This is a God-peace that was lavished extravagantly on the cross for each of us. There is a reason Satan couldn’t predict eternity’s checkmate. It was completely unconscionable. Evil cannot think in the ways of genuine benevolence. Wickedness cannot reconcile self-sacrifice. Such magnanimity cannot be contemplated.

The kind of act for peace that evil cannot understand is a sacrifice that allows evil its own way, and that comes with an innate response of joy no matter what is lost, just as the apostle Paul considered every worldly gain a loss for the gain he had in Christ (Philippians 3). We only get this when we do it. This is an applied faith; it only makes sense when we apply it. God shows us that when nothing can threaten us, that which needs to threaten us is threatened so much as to be weakened. Evil has no answer to beneficence of God.

Where a shared understanding is possible, i.e. you have two reasonable people/parties, a confrontation of conflict designed for peace is a crucial intervention. Sometimes we will not know if reconciliation is possible unless we try a confrontation. But we do need to prepare, including owning our own stuff, if that’s the case.

So, there are two broad situations: the first, where reason can potentially exist between two disputing parties, and the second where there has been an abuse of power. The first situation evokes a response that lends itself to confrontation. The second situation involves finding peace by avoiding confrontation. Both situations involve planning and wisdom. Both situations involve caution, and the risk of great hurt, and particularly the unexpected which can often trigger what may be unprecedented on a mental, emotional and spiritual plane.

It truly is the prayer of the many, that those who have proven to be our nemesis actually come to their senses—as far as their senses for ‘us’ are concerned (presuming we’ve come to our senses about ‘them’, of course)—and prove to us that they are human, and capable of understanding, after all.

Many times, this involves family relationships, where blood is truly thicker than water, but this occurs any time where stakes are huge, and trust is high. The relationships we were most hurt by were the ones where we had most to lose.

Confrontations can be worth it for the fact that we are not left wondering, but equally they involve much risk, and not all risks pay off, and some cost far too much.

What I’m saying is be careful. Be diligent about the advice you seek and receive. Listen especially to discerning voices that differ from your own. Plan for the best but prepare for the worst. And don’t enter combat with a narcissist alone, and don’t allow them to get you alone. Have ready access to support and help. It can literally save your life.

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From trauma’s immunity to healing’s opportunity

Sometimes I’m completely unprepared for what someone might bring to me in a counselling session. But this is good, because it makes me rely on God and not my own understanding.

Occasionally I have people come to me to receive specific teaching, which is allied by mode to counselling, but then as a session unfolds it can grow apparent to me that we need to abandon the original plan and forge a new path in the session. I always see this as an opportunity, that God’s at work in this, and that departing from a plan is a good thing; we always plan to return to it or weave the original plan back through the lattice of the work being done, by God’s guidance.

I want to discuss how trauma can seem to have immunity to our healing efforts, but that healing truly is the opportunity at hand. But first, I want to imagine a scenario and how I go about it:

Imagine, for instance, that a person has something traumatic occur to them in a social setting and they suffered a breakdown. It’s certainly happened to me, and more than once. We might talk about what may have triggered it, the varying levels and degrees of trauma related to the event, the sheer number of quantifiable burdens related to it, and the time just before the event and the time since. We might talk about the mind and the nature of feeling overwhelmed; about how utter preoccupation of mind to the distraction of other things is a normal part of stress and trauma—the way the mind works in all of us.

With the person’s permission, I might slowly and patiently step back with them, through the event, even the days and weeks leading up to the event, and I also step with them through the days afterward. We would be careful as we approach and identify triggers, being very watchful that they remain safe. We might talk about the support they received, and the empathy that was shown—if that were the case—and how the capacity for empathy may have grown within them because of this experience. If they lacked support, we would try to determine in what way that was significant, and what they would have preferred. In other words, we use the experience as an opportunity to imagine what it might be like to support someone else in the situation that they have just suffered.

We also may talk about the varying emotional responses, including the guilt experienced if they felt that they had let others down in any way, and the shame of the embarrassment in having broken down, because such experiences always leave us feeling out of control. All these are very normal experiences, but of course guilt and shame add ever deepening levels of complexity to our already burdened, variegated and intricate emotionality.

I am often led to share some of my own experience. This sharing is even more powerful if it has recency. It shows the person I’m with how vulnerable we all are; I’m a counsellor and pastor and I experience low self-worth, doubting, anxiety and depressed thoughts. I just see it as normal and nothing to be ashamed about, not that I would ever tell someone to think that. They may observe that it’s nothing to be ashamed about, however, when I share (when I can) how only weeks beforehand something similar had happened to me. See how we can show people through our example and often don’t need to ‘tell’ them what to do or how to think. Example is a more powerful teacher than instruction is.

We might also wonder if there is an opportunity ahead out of such a traumatic event; whether, indeed, the trauma experienced might be observed as a learning opportunity, if only we can step back enough to view the experience through the safety and surety of objective eyes; imagining ourselves as a third person looking into the situation. Traumas are part of our equipping if only we can see them as an acceptable part of our experience. Trauma does happen and we need ways of reconciling it.

~

Now to the question of trauma’s felt immunity and healing’s opportunity.

Trauma can feel as if it’s been granted immunity within us; as if it has permission to invade us and cannot be challenged. It can feel as if there is no answer to it. And it can definitely overwhelm us for an answer. Trauma asks so many complicated and convoluted questions that seem interminably difficult to answer.

But healing is the ultimate answer
to the questions that trauma raises.

We can go from a place of trauma’s immunity, where we have no way of efficient affective response, to another place where healing has its opportunity.

First, we must believe this is possible. We must then gear ourselves up for the challenge, acknowledging that this is a marathon and not a sprint. Healing is the long game. And ultimately, if we can willingly and passionately engage in varying levels of support, including therapy and a great deal of reading and the preparedness to try different healing techniques, there is hope. We balance our efforts with rest—lots of rest.

If nothing else, healing is actually a pilgrimage of self-knowledge towards self-mastery. To be oneself is to know oneself. And to be one’s complete self, from the viewpoint of trauma, can almost feel like an impossibility, but please be encouraged; if you believe you can arrive there, you eventually can. And there are always moments of oneselfless along the pilgrimage to encourage us.

So even though the effects of trauma can feel so powerful to the point where it feels like it has immunity against our healing efforts, there is always hope for varying levels of healing. God can do so much more than we ever thought was possible.

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Those days after we received our death sentence

Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it; the title. But that’s how it was. Being in the Gold Team exam rooms having yet another ultrasound, waiting with bated breath, “It’s not good. He’s not going to make it I’m afraid. He deserves comfort and respect.”

Those words, “He deserves comfort and respect,” those words… they had gravity. They ended up having even more gravity when he received neither during the delivery, but that’s another story.

Those days after we received our death sentence—those days after three weeks hoping he’d be okay—were polarising. In some ways, a prayer had been answered. We knew what we had to pray for: a miracle. We knew we had to ready ourselves to lose Nathanael. But on July 18, 2014 a chain reaction started, much of it grief-laden, but some of it good, all of it touched by God—so present was our Lord with us, by our faith and others’ prayers.

Those days after we received our death sentence, that he wasn’t going to make it, in receiving the palliative care plan (never a nice document or process to deal with), in preparing for things we never choose to prepare for, we just keep stepping out the process of our lives. There was no rocket science in it, and it certainly wasn’t complicated, but it sure was hard.

We met further external challenges the best we could; an abject lack of compassion from a certain critical quarter that absolutely did our heads and hearts in, and absolutely interrupted our grief process so many times. Suddenly, with everything going on, we felt two things constantly—the absolute presence of relentless spiritual attack, with God’s incredible, palpable presence.

Those days after July 18—a bleak Friday evening having received news our boy had Pallister-Killian Syndrome, a very rare and complicated diagnosis—were full of experiences uncharted for us.

The days and weeks and months ahead; only God knew we could do it one day at a time. It’s all we did. Nothing complicated. We cried when we felt we needed to. We stared into space at other times. And just held each other when it was all too much. We found dark humour alleviating and necessary in dealing with circumstances that were, all together, completely off the wall.

At any rate, it helps reflect five years on. How did we do it? Doesn’t matter. We did. That’s all that matters.

The spiritual abuse of, ‘Oh, you just need to pray more!’

More abuses are done when people open their mouths than we realise. Take the case of someone ailing in grief, or someone triggered into a post-traumatic stress response, or someone who just cannot beat the suicidal ideation circling in their mind. The phrases, ‘Oh, you just need to pray more,’ or ‘trust God more,’ or ‘stop thinking about it so much,’ are at best unhelpful, and at their worst they are stigmatising, traumatising, and therefore abusive.

When a caring person says such things, we can say they’re misguided, spiritually immature, and lack a significant portion of life experience.

But frequently people say these things because they do not care, even if they think they do care. These people are the most dangerous, because they refuse to see what must be seen. They are ignorant to the possibilities that they could be wrong.

Sometimes people say these kinds of things because they themselves are tired, and compassion fatigue has driven an ability to care far from them. Their discernment in such a season has gone awry. Perhaps they have cared too much for too long. There are many reasons why good and caring people become too tired to care.

It can surely help anyone on the receiving end of abusive advice to consider why their advisor has given such poor counsel.

Perhaps the only thing that can alleviate the hurt and betrayal experienced because of such abuse is to attempt to understand and empathise just why the other person has said what they’ve said. There is always a reason why they have said what they said. Maturity on our part suggests we at least attempt to understand their position.

Let’s now deal with the facts. Are any of the complex issues of life actually fixed with prayer, in and of itself?

Prayer is something we are called to do as an act of faith.

Even to imagine that prayer can change something that we want changed, in other words, that we have control over the things we pray about, makes of prayer a way to manipulate God.

Think about it for a moment. If anyone suggests that anything that happens to us happens because we don’t pray enough, or don’t pray the right things, or don’t pray in the right way, makes of prayer some human divination—that by our prayer we can bring about our own will, and conform God to this will.

Think about how silly this is. The will of God will never be changed. We are fools if we think we can manipulate God to our own ends. The testimony of life attests to this.

Does prayer in and of itself solve the complex, or even the simple, issues of life? No, it can’t. It’s not the purpose of prayer to cavort with fortune. The fortunes of life much of the time are but an enigmatic anathema. We only need to suffer loss to understand this. Anyone who has travailed with mental illness, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depressive and anxiety disorders, and many other complex health issues knows that prayer is futile as a reliable change agent.

But the faithful pray to God,
because the call of faith is to pray anyway.

Engaging in prayer has nothing to do with changing God’s mind, yet it has everything to do with acknowledging that thanks and praise are due to God no matter our circumstances. Prayer is an admission that we’re not in control. It’s also our opportunity to petition God, but we submit our plea in utter dependence. Prayer is a language we use to communicate how desperately despairing we feel when change and loss and grief occurs to us. Prayer is the way we’re comforted. We feel God hear us. Do we pray believing God can act miraculously? Yes, of course, but we juxtapose such an attitude of prayer with an acceptance we can’t twist God’s arm.

Whenever anybody says anything to us about our role in disconnected misfortune, they are engaging in spiritual abuse; for example, accusing parents of being at fault for having an autistic child; that it was their ‘sin’ that caused it. Such a thing said is positively abhorrent. How on earth would anybody have anything to respond to that? Anyone hearing such garbage would be forgiven for being left jaw ajar. Such things said warrant no response, for people who say such things won’t be convinced otherwise. Unless we can say something to make them reflect, the cause is pointless.

Whenever you hear something like, “Oh, you just need to pray more,” you have just heard someone totally discredit themselves spiritually.

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You must BELIEVE in your Redemption Story

Amid the turmoil of loss, it’s such a temptation to panic, to lose it, to say to hell with it all, or to avoid, run, depart. To the worst extremes, temptation exudes power, convincing us its way is right.

But the temptations of attack and escape never work out. The third way is the only way. The third way is to believe in the narrative spoken deep into our heart of a hope that can transpire if only we give God the room to move, to work, to gently and patiently grow something from nothing.

It seems nothing will ever work out. I know this. I’ve been there. I’ve tasted that kind of season twice in the past sixteen years, and both times I had to insist on holding to the vision God had given me of redemption. In both cases, redemption took three years to the day (which I’m not suggesting is the way it will be for others, just that God has shown me divine faithfulness to this level of specificity.)

Let me take you deeper. Both times, my worst year was absolutely foundational and pivotal, but only as I looked back with the wisdom of hindsight. I was fortunate in one sense, that the first of these times I did sense that every time I gave something up materially, I was somehow blessed spiritually—that God was faithful to the degree that I have rewarded spiritually even in the dearth of a calamitous season.

We cannot not hope on our hope but when that hope is shattered, it leaves us in a situation we never thought would occur. It is totally foreign to not believe in our hope, and the effect is it makes us into tyrants of a temptation’s manipulation.

None of us, backs pushed against the wall, willingly go the third way, which is to reject the overtures of temptation to run and hide or attack from unsteady footing. But we must overcome the grappling desire to have things righted our way, in our time, exactly to the degrees of comfort and satisfaction we demand.

See how that’s a good desire; to have justice done; to have our day of redemption; to be restored. God wants to restore us, but when we get in the way of the passage of divine grace, we destroy the Lord’s plan—thankfully, our Lord is patient, and none of us have cooperated anywhere near perfectly. Yet it works out for our good and for God’s purpose.

In the between time, we must continue to hunt with the passion of the truth-bearer, honestly sacrificing, through godly sorrow, our own desires for the better will of God, who wants the best for us, but in ways we hardly reckon are even good.

We must stick with God, trusting divine purpose in the madness of moments we have no control over. Sure, we must stay safe and not be around toxic people. God blesses our healing when we strip away negative influences that only goad us into reacting and wrong responding. We cannot recover if others continually assert themselves abusively. We do need a clear way.

Trusting in the reality of our own redemption story is believing upon a hope that seems strangely disconnected from what even seems possible, but which is in fact intrinsically and divinely connected, and which must surely come to pass.

But remember we’re dealing in the realm of God, and God is in the business of doing the impossible. Believe the ‘impossible’, be steadfast and true, and God will do it. We simply need to allow the Lord to do what must be done and that usually takes a significant period of time.

Be as faithful as you can be in the meantime.

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Managing anxiety through continual God consciousness

I can only tell you what works for me. You may try it and have varying levels of success. All it takes is the commitment of self-discipline (recall this is one of the godly attributes of 2 Timothy 1:7) to embark on the journey. And if you see sufficient early progress, you may be encouraged to continue to grow in your experience of continual God consciousness.

Indeed, what I am encouraging you to do is what I did when I taught myself how to nap. It took a year or two to learn how to relax my eyes into unconsciousness, such is the muscle control required. Learning a continual God consciousness is similar in many ways, particularly regarding the journey of early commitment, tracking progress, and seeing it through.

It is essentially about being prepared to change practices, and in this regard, have God change the way you think.

Firstly, I must say that in practising a continual God consciousness there is never any more need to practice a structured devotional life. That must sound hideous. And certainly, any pastor who heard that could be abhorred. What I mean is practising a continual God consciousness becomes your devotional life. You are of a practical sense, praying continually, as Paul urged us to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. When you are practising a continual God consciousness, that mystery of having a ‘relationship’ with Jesus—the one and only true living God—is settled once and for all. Suddenly we understand what having a relationship with the Spirit Jesus is all about. And by the Holy Spirit you are led, to go left or right, to the persons to interact with, to the book and page and paragraph to read, and even to what to do in most situations. You could very well call continual God consciousness a prayer life and a devotional life wrapped into one. Continual God consciousness drives the prayer life and the devotional life.

But there is more. This continual God consciousness is not just about being a faithful follower of Jesus. It is but a fundamental start to all of life itself.

Secondly, and I’ve already mentioned this, what I’m suggesting can only be learned through practice, over the years, and honed over the decades. If you’re willing to give it a go, if you really want to taste and live the abundant life that Jesus promised in John 10:10b, you’ll make the initial and ongoing commitments.

The mechanics of this practice are simply about carrying a connection with God in our minds all the time. Wherever our minds go, our minds are conscious of God being there with us, about God speaking to us through his Spirit about what we are experiencing. Through all our senses we experience the world with God, aware of his presence, being fully accompanied through life with this God of our creation. We can certainly get to a point in our continual God consciousness where we see there is no other way to be.

Thirdly, you might be asking by now what has this got to do with anxiety?

For me, anxiety would sometimes dominate my thoughts, and there are anxieties I feel in my body. Knowing that the root of many maladies emanates from the mind, we can use our minds to soothe our minds and bodies. Certainly, also, anxiety stems from trauma and other causes that are insidious. These are specialist areas that this article cannot delve into because of its brevity.

Using the replacement principle from Philippians 4:8—“whatever is excellent… think about these things”—using the soundness of our minds, we begin to exercise control over our minds. I am not for one minute saying that this is the only thing you should do, but what I am saying is this can be the basis from which all other things you do can be founded.

When we use the replacement principle, we may commonly find, that as light shines into the darkness so that the darkness cannot cohabit, with our minds positively engaged with God there’s less room for thoughts that overwhelm us. This is not to say that all anxiety will be removed. There is such a thing as existential anxiety, which is common to the human experience of living. This is the anxiety that makes us aware that we are alive, thinking and feeling creatures. To be rid of this form of anxiety would also be to agree not to experience the heights of joy. No, we should not be threatened by our thoughts and feelings, even when they are sometimes difficult to cope with.

Managing anxiety through continual God consciousness really does help, because we are more or less able to check in with God on everything, and the more we do it, the more seamless it becomes.

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Heights of Transformation from Valleys of Repentance

Those who think they have arrived never actually do. But those who realise they’ll never arrive are right in the lap of God’s will. This is a beautiful and golden paradox that has all of humanity shouting, “Amen!”

Everyone appreciates humility, but pride divides.

The world cannot stand boastful Christianity. And neither can Christians who espouse the importance of the cross. We did nothing to earn salvation, and there is nothing we can add to it, either.

Too many of us have made an idol out of discipleship. We have manipulated God just so we might bear visible ‘transformation’, after all, for some, we are hardly true disciples unless we have something to show for it. But if we take this past God’s power, we use God to make ourselves look good. (Oh, always for God’s glory, of course!)

No, the very best Christian faith recognises human paucity and the magnanimity of God. It recognises that the fruit of the truest transformation is borne not on the wings of our own victories, but on the victory already won for us in Christ. This most fundamental transformation occurs in our mind. Of course, it has an outworking in our behaviour. But it has its genesis and its blessed daily operation from our mind.

Once we have been transformed by the renewing of our mind (yes, that’s from Romans 12:2), there is a very real ripple effect that occurs; one that we cannot stop. Not one word or action from this anointing will return void. 

Connected to the Vine, as branches,
we emanate fruit of the Kingdom.

True transformation is therefore nothing ever of our own effort, but it comes as a result of the God work being done in us. Therefore, nobody can take credit, because all the credit goes to God. All we could possibly gain credit for is the decision to follow in the first place.

But there is more.

The heights of transformation come from the opposite experience. To go up, we must go down. To be transformed, on a living basis, one day and one interaction at a time, we must be in touch with God’s Spirit, and then we must do what God’s Spirit says. And no human being can definitively discern this work other than our own discerning, but the key indicator of our followship is always in the fruit—what we and others see. And the fruit of the highest transformation comes about having walked as much as we need to in the valley of repentance. Many times, the highest transformations come as a result of remaining in the valley of repentance.

This is not about staying in our guilt or our shame or feeling condemned. This is simply about being prepared to walk with the Lord. It surely has very little to do with our own performance, the pressure is off, more praise to God.

The deepest work that God wants to do in us requires our devoted pledge of allegiance to simply walk in the ways of the Lord. This is no harder than giving up what is eternally irrelevant for what is of everlasting relevance, which for us human beings is actually hard.

We all too quickly become entrapped in attitudes and behaviours that keep us from walking with God. And this is okay, if only we can admit that it does occur, and truly it always does.

When was God possibly most pleased with David, the king? Not long after he had sinned with Bathsheba. That would be my answer. When we’re honest, especially in brokenness. A broken and contrast spirit God does not despise.

When we most feel we have disappointed God,
God is most pleased in us, for us, through us.

This is because we are truthful in a brutal situation. We have done a simple thing and a hard thing simultaneously. We turned back to God (which is both easy and hard) and realised—and this is the case all along, God be praised—that God never does turn his back on us.

In the valley of repentance, in what seems a dark and destitute place, where it looks to be full of discomfort, we actually find we’re catapulted to transformation.

And let us not discount the losses we endure in the face of tyranny. Sometimes these very losses gain for us what the world cannot touch. But we must keep repenting in faith, bending our will to God’s, prepared to lose many battles to win the ultimate war—which is the fight for peace.

This, I think you’ll find, is the truth:

The heights of transformation
are ascended from valleys of repentance.
To go up, we must first go down.

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