Depression, trauma, anxiety, panic attacks, loss, chronic pain, a bearer of suffering, and more Christian than ever

What feels like tiredness, but is more, much more debilitating, where mental health goes into freefall, the body refuses to work, the mind cannot think, and the being cannot feel, is an indescribable state.  It could be just for brief periods, but it’s like all the life forced is sucked out.  Surrender occurs because there is no other choice.

Whether we call Christ our Saviour or not matters little.  As a function of trauma or of inexplicable reasons, whatever, we can descend into crashes like this.  Through burning out or through grief for loss, and it matters little the victory you have in Christ or anything else you may cling to.

Certainly, as far as faith in Christ goes, I know there are those who believe it’s an all-conquering thing, as if click your fingers and every ailment goes away.  This is not the hallmark of Christian faith.  Faith in Jesus occurs in the opposite orientation — when we are weak then we are strong, yes, even though we are weak.  We don’t need to overcome in our own strength for Christ has already overcome FOR us.

Whether we suffer depression, trauma, anxiety, fatigue, panic attacks, triggering, burning out, chronic pain or not matters little in the economy of God, and yet God — yes, God — is a sufferer!  God groans with all creation.  God bears pain.  Our pain, most intimately.  We cannot know God more or better than when we’re in the midst of our own existential torment.

We are in the best company when we suffer.  God is close whether we feel God is close or not.  It’s a divine fact.  When we have nothing left to give, we can know that we’re not required to give anything to receive it all from God; every need, not least our precious salvation.

We live in the hope of a resurrection; THAT is the victory of the gospel.  It is a ‘now but not yet’ reality, and it isn’t for us to gloat about how ‘good’ our faith is if we can miraculously procure it.  Indeed, all miracles belong to God and all glory goes to our King, and yet the King and Lord of glory would not have one person separated because they ‘don’t have sufficient faith’.

Indeed, God knows that the person who suffers many debilitations is the living testimony of faith.  And what God says is all that matters.

May the peace of God be with you all ways. 

Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash 

What Year would Nathanael be in, Dad?

“What year of school
would Nathanael be in, Dad?”
My 7 year old son 
asked of me recently.
“Pre-primary this year,”
I said in response,
“‘This’ big he would be.”
“Oh,” my son said,
A little surprised,
and kind of curiously pleased.
That was that as we sat
quiet and reflectively thankful.
It was another moment of which
in the silence of being
to just be pensively grateful.

Don’t be concerned that our seven-year-old would be grieving.  He’s not grieving, he is just remembering.  We don’t forget Nathanael.  We keep talking about him because his memory is alive with us and keeping his memory alive is important to us.  He is part of us.  It doesn’t make us sad.  Not all the time.  And besides, why would we be afraid of our sadness?

Of course, we would have him with us in a heartbeat.  As a school chaplain, I’m particularly mindful when I walk into a pre-primary class of children who are approaching their sixth birthdays as Nathanael would be at the end of this week.  I look at the way they walk and talk and share (or not as the case may be).  I see them laugh and cry and I know that this is what Nathanael would be like.

And yet, Nathanael, had he lived, would have been a very special child.  Nathanael had Pallister-Killian Syndrome — it’s extremely rare; only about 300 children in the world at any one time have this syndrome affecting the twelfth chromosome.

One thing we like about the fact that we’ve lost Nathanael from now to eternity is we get to practice the art of loss with our son.  Perhaps that sounds weird, and certainly countercultural.  We get to practice the idea that we cannot control all the things that happen to us.  We try on the clothing of acceptance and we get to wear it as long as we think about him.  We get to face those things with our son in ways that show him that facing things is the way to life; that turning away — dissociating — from stuff is truly death.

We don’t like everything about that fact that we’ve lost him; how could we?

We don’t like the fact that Nathanael never had a chance.  We hate that.  But we’ve learned to accept that we’ll have our day with him one day.  And that hope is beyond words and meaning in this world.  We’ve learned that he’s safe with Jesus.  Never more do we need to worry about his welfare; that is sealed.  Our anxieties for keeping our child safe have been replaced with a gentle and patient longing for not having him.

I love those moments when we sit together — literally a few seconds — where it’s the peace of acceptance, where the fear is stripped away from sadness, where acceptance is grief resolved, where the sting of wanting things differently has been replaced with silence in our souls.

None of us need to tip-toe around the gorgeous subject of our dearly loved son.

He has earned his way to heaven in a way that none of us in this living realm can.

Isn’t that good? 

God won’t give you more than you can handle but life certainly will

I can’t claim this as my own idea.  It was provided by someone I counsel.  It is such a remarkable concept that I thought some of you would appreciate it.

God won’t give us more than we can handle but life certainly will.  The second part of that sentence is definitely our life experience.  So often we’re sent things that seem destined to break us, we feel overwhelmed, anxiety is difficult to shake, and we wrangle with depression when grief besets our soul.  In this we face an existential death.  But death breeds life in the Jesus-economy of things.  Life will give us more than we can handle, yet there’s a godly purpose in being pushed beyond our control.

§     We learn we have limits and as our pride takes a hit, humility has a chance to grow.

§     We gain an appreciation for the suffering of others and our empathy grows.

§     We begin to understand that in frustration is futility, and our patience grows.

§     Experiencing how much we need people to be gentle with us, and how much we need to be gentle with ourselves, our gentleness grows.

§     In trusting God even though we want things back the way they were, or better than they are, our faithfulness grows.

I think you get the point.  All this essentially out of loss.  See how grief is often not the nemesis we think it is and that it can be the gateway to life eternal.

So, having acknowledged that God has a purpose in suffering and a plan beyond it, to give us a future we hope for and not to harm us, we move onto the concept I want to focus on; the concept I was given by my client.

If you had battled through many months of an intense steps program, and faced so very much of your past, and had God bless your faithful adherence to the program, you may find God blessing you in incredible ways.  Perhaps, for anyone looking on, these blessings would be extremely small mercies, but because they are the exact desires of your heart you are over the moon because they’ve happened.  Maybe you’ve bargained with God and said, “I want this and that,” and frustratingly you’ve heard God say, “No, that’s too much for you to handle all at once.”  You say back to God, “No, Lord, I’m able to handle this.”  But God knows better.

God doesn’t give us more than we can handle in terms of what is brought into our life one day at a time as we recover.  Our Lord is so patient to take the pressure down, when we would have it all happen overnight.

God gives us a small amount of what we want, and often the size of it is enough to blow us away.  This is to show us we often don’t know what we’re wishing for.

Life has given us more than we can handle, which tipped us into this place of loss.  God has responded by not giving us more than we can handle, by giving us little bits so we can be assured we can handle it.  What God gives is always good.

God knows we overestimate our abilities and capacities, and therefore it’s our Lord’s kindness to expect less of us than we would expect of ourselves.

Acknowledgement to LW.  This is no comment on 1 Corinthians 10:13.

Photo by Long Truong on Unsplash 

4 problematic pillars of Authoritarianism and their impacts

Following the contemplatives, namely Fr Richard Rohr et al, considering the vast benefits to all humanity of nondual thinking (and how important this thinking is to love), it necessarily makes us face love’s opposite — the authoritarian and their fourfold pillars of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition, that incidentally move love out of the way in favour of each of these pillars.

Let me give you more background how purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are taken from the good, how they’re taken and blurred, and how they become idols.

And let me show you the attitudinal and behavioural impacts of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition that go too far.  These manifest through many forms of bias.

Purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are good, even necessary things.  To a point.  

PURITY as an IDOL

When we take purity too far, we become disgusted by anything we think of as evil, and it directs our rejecting response to it, making us impotent to engage in the right ways with that evil, to resist it and advocate effectively against it...

It’s no good shouting at the rider; we need to speak to the elephant.  (Yes, there’s a hyperlink to a great video here that explains this.)

When a pro-lifer demonises someone who has had an abortion, they shun that person away from ‘their’ God.  The authoritarianism abuses.  They cannot love, even though they may be saying, “I’m DOING this because God loves you/to show you I love you.”  Little wonder people scoff.

But, if we’re honest, it’s the same for those of us who demonise abusers.  No matter the heinousness of their crimes, and they may be monsters, we lose a part of OUR-SELVES when we cast them into the oblivion of hell, because they have besmirched the name of purity.

We take purity too far when our zealousness attacks those who are made in the image of God — yes, all humanity.  There is a place for earthly justice to take its course, and if that isn’t enough for us (and it often isn’t!), God will sort them out (all of us actually!) in eternity.

We who despise authoritarianism ought to be on guard, because authoritarianism doesn’t just self-select those of the patriarchy.  Authoritarianism is rooted in dualistic, right-wrong, good-bad, black-and-white thinking.  Authoritarianism has its eyes on us all.

Interestingly, anyone given to putting ‘special’ human beings on a pedestal is equally adept at putting ‘repulsive’ human beings in the dungeon.

Would Jesus do either?  Seriously.  Jesus would find a way to love them into the Kingdom — if that is possible.  Even Jesus couldn’t convert many of the religious leaders of his time.

AUTHORITY as an IDOL

If you’ve ever had the question posed to you, “Do you have a problem with authority...?” [I have] you know that, for the questioner, authority has become an idol.  This is because true authority uses love to establish moral influence that people WANT to follow.  That’s leadership.  But the issue with ‘authority’ is no surprise really.  Authority was king in the 1950s, and though it is gradually diminishing in deviant influence, it is still an issue today.

Don’t get me wrong.  We MUST have respect for and understanding about authority or democracy would fail.  But authoritarians have always used the steeping of authority as a platform to hide their abuses.

Those who herald authority be respected at ALL costs are destined to harm people.

These are those who cover up ‘small wrongs’ for the greater good, when ‘small wrongs’ are deal-breakers.

LOYALTY as an IDOL

Hasn’t loyalty become a doozy!  The worst of this is when a leader is challenged, and the leader and his followers call the challenger disloyal.  Loyalty is an idol if nothing can be challenged.  If you’re not allowed to have your view, you live within a toxic system.

Authoritarians are loyalists and they commonly place themselves or the one above them on such a ‘God’ impenetrable pedestal that nobody can challenge them.  There’s no love in that, because nobody is beyond respectful challenge.  Truth must reign; not the leader’s truth.  Not the truth of the one who has the power to call their reality ‘the truth’.

You can tell when loyalty has been made into an idol when a person or a role is paid blind allegiance without recourse to their behaviour, alleged or confirmed.

TRADITION as an IDOL

In taking tradition too far, we often canonise what we human beings have created, and that, over and above what God has ordained.  Think of the environment as a good example.

What do we do when someone flouts tradition?  If our responses are punitive, if we punish without endeavouring to understand why they did what they did, without trying to engage them to help them reform, we lose them.

So many of the patriarchal systems are steeped in tradition and it becomes a safe fallback for the powerful, usually men.  The top-down ‘strong father’ parenting (a.k.a. authoritarianism) manages the family by strict adherence to rules... and it damages everyone along the way.  Where tradition isn’t utilised as a teaching opportunity — for what to understand and respect — tradition becomes a shrine.  We want those in our care to learn WHY tradition is important.  We don’t want them to fear it or resent it.  Tradition isn’t an end in itself.

Authoritarians uphold tradition (their idol) above love and the flow-on effect is abuse.

HOPE from JESUS

Hope from Jesus pertaining to love over abuse is centralised in truth.  The truth will set us free, but not only that; ONLY the truth will set us free.  Fascinatingly, love will guide us to truth every single time.

More about this theme from the Center of Action and Contemplation.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash 

The authoritarian, incapable of love, can only abuse

Following the contemplatives, namely Fr Richard Rohr et al, considering the vast benefits to all humanity of nondual thinking (and how important this thinking is to love), it necessarily makes us face love’s opposite — the authoritarian and their fourfold pillars of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition, that incidentally move love out of the way in favour of each of these pillars.

Let me give you more background how purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are taken from the good, how they’re taken and blurred, and how they become idols.

And let me show you the attitudinal and behavioural impacts of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition that go too far.  These manifest through many forms of bias.

Purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are good, even necessary things.  To a point.  

PURITY as an IDOL

When we take purity too far, we become disgusted by anything we think of as evil, and it directs our rejecting response to it, making us impotent to engage in the right ways with that evil, to resist it and advocate effectively against it...

It’s no good shouting at the rider; we need to speak to the elephant.  (Yes, there’s a hyperlink to a great video here that explains this.)

When a pro-lifer demonises someone who has had an abortion, they shun that person away from ‘their’ God.  The authoritarianism abuses.  They cannot love, even though they may be saying, “I’m DOING this because God loves you/to show you I love you.”  Little wonder people scoff.

But, if we’re honest, it’s the same for those of us who demonise abusers.  No matter the heinousness of their crimes, and they may be monsters, we lose a part of OUR-SELVES when we cast them into the oblivion of hell, because they have besmirched the name of purity.

We take purity too far when our zealousness attacks those who are made in the image of God — yes, all humanity.  There is a place for earthly justice to take its course, and if that isn’t enough for us (and it often isn’t!), God will sort them out (all of us actually!) in eternity.

We who despise authoritarianism ought to be on guard, because authoritarianism doesn’t just self-select those of the patriarchy.  Authoritarianism is rooted in dualistic, right-wrong, good-bad, black-and-white thinking.  Authoritarianism has its eyes on us all.

Interestingly, anyone given to putting ‘special’ human beings on a pedestal is equally adept at putting ‘repulsive’ human beings in the dungeon.

Would Jesus do either?  Seriously.  Jesus would find a way to love them into the Kingdom — if that is possible.  Even Jesus couldn’t convert many of the religious leaders of his time.

AUTHORITY as an IDOL

If you’ve ever had the question posed to you, “Do you have a problem with authority...?” [I have] you know that, for the questioner, authority has become an idol.  This is because true authority uses love to establish moral influence that people WANT to follow.  That’s leadership.  But the issue with ‘authority’ is no surprise really.  Authority was king in the 1950s, and though it is gradually diminishing in deviant influence, it is still an issue today.

Don’t get me wrong.  We MUST have respect for and understanding about authority or democracy would fail.  But authoritarians have always used the steeping of authority as a platform to hide their abuses.

Those who herald authority be respected at ALL costs are destined to harm people.

These are those who cover up ‘small wrongs’ for the greater good, when ‘small wrongs’ are deal-breakers.

LOYALTY as an IDOL

Hasn’t loyalty become a doozy!  The worst of this is when a leader is challenged, and the leader and his followers call the challenger disloyal.  Loyalty is an idol if nothing can be challenged.  If you’re not allowed to have your view, you live within a toxic system.

Authoritarians are loyalists and they commonly place themselves or the one above them on such a ‘God’ impenetrable pedestal that nobody can challenge them.  There’s no love in that, because nobody is beyond respectful challenge.  Truth must reign; not the leader’s truth.  Not the truth of the one who has the power to call their reality ‘the truth’.

You can tell when loyalty has been made into an idol when a person or a role is paid blind allegiance without recourse to their behaviour, alleged or confirmed.

TRADITION as an IDOL

In taking tradition too far, we often canonise what we human beings have created, and that, over and above what God has ordained.  Think of the environment as a good example.

What do we do when someone flouts tradition?  If our responses are punitive, if we punish without endeavouring to understand why they did what they did, without trying to engage them to help them reform, we lose them.

So many of the patriarchal systems are steeped in tradition and it becomes a safe fallback for the powerful, usually men.  The top-down ‘strong father’ parenting (a.k.a. authoritarianism) manages the family by strict adherence to rules... and it damages everyone along the way.  Where tradition isn’t utilised as a teaching opportunity — for what to understand and respect — tradition becomes a shrine.  We want those in our care to learn WHY tradition is important.  We don’t want them to fear it or resent it.  Tradition isn’t an end in itself.

Authoritarians uphold tradition (their idol) above love and the flow-on effect is abuse.

HOPE from JESUS

Brian McLaren states that Jesus uses parables to teach — stories of narrative that transcend black-and-white thinking.  Jesus deliberately mystifies his followers to challenge their thinking.  Interestingly, Rohr says that God needed Jesus to be a man to show MEN how to be true men — strong but not macho; if one desires to be first they must be servant to all (yep, overturning power structures!).  While not all authoritarians are men, most of them are.  It’s not men’s fault.  It’s our global culture.

Hope from Jesus pertaining to love over abuse is centralised in truth.  The truth will set us free, but not only that; ONLY the truth will set us free.  Fascinatingly, love will guide us to truth every single time.

More about this theme from the Center of Action and Contemplation.

Photo by Siavash Ghanbari on Unsplash 

The way they treated us is for our learning not for our revenge

There is an incredibly valuable opportunity in being mistreated, misunderstood, mishandled, abused or assaulted, especially in God’s economy of things.

Even more useful than forgiving the wretch that torched a part of us is the purpose of hurt in the first place.  That purpose is learning for empathy.  Now that we know what it actually feels like and how it actually hurts, we have the opportunity of doing no such wrong against anyone.

That’s the purpose of suffering — 
to absorb all we can learn from God about it.

There is no better way of learning most lessons than through experience.  Some are gifted to learn by observation, and that too is a purpose in watching on as someone else is mistreated, misunderstood, mishandled, abused or assaulted.  We watch on and say, “No!  I’ll not be mentored by that abysmal example.”

The way they treated you may be contemptible, but it’s no excuse for us to live for revenge, besides this more supreme idea puts forth the power of making something of the hurt; to look to the heavens and simply ask, “Lord, what may I learn?”

Often God can be heard within our spirit saying, “I want you to learn to never do what hurt you to others — learn that and you’ve made good of the purpose I had in you experiencing this horrid thing.”

Ever since I began writing in October 2007, I have written to the theme that, “Life is the learning ground.”  That’s the practical purpose of life.  It is one way we can redeem the contemptible and glorify God in the process.

What we need to do to employ this method is patience and faith.  It is far easier to allow our passions to best us and to exact retribution.  How many times have we all fallen for that ruse?

There is a better way — 
we pay it forward into the lives of those we may not even know.

This is how we build the Kingdom from our low vantage point — we take what we’ve learned, the toughest lessons, and we agree with God that these disgusting behaviours will have no role and no power over our lives.

When we put this method into practice, we find by our experience that God always intended to bless it. What we sow forth in faith, God always gives credence to.  God honours us as we honour God.

We use every pain, trial, hardship, betrayal, disappointment, broken dream, injury, privation and adversity to say not, “God, why?” but to say,

“God, You have a purpose in this; something for me to learn... keep me patience and wondering in the meantime before You show me what that is... and please make it so that I never do what was done to me to another person, because You have shown me what that feels like.” AMEN. 

What we suffer ought to make us more compassionate.  What we suffer is purposed to soften our hearts.  But if we’re not careful the opposite can occur.

The wrongs done to us are always wrong.  Our opportunity is to right them by never engaging in the same behaviours.

Photo by Helena Cook on Unsplash

7 signs of the reality of God’s presence in the life of daily faith

There are times in our faith lives when we experience keenly the presence of God.  Here are seven signs that God is so incredibly close as to be real in our presence:

1.             God is moving in every dimension – the times when we know that every situation and event is God-ordered and God-directed, when we know which way to go, to the right and to the left, life is a symphony.  These times God’s presence assures us beyond doubt and evermore that God is good beyond doubt and extraordinarily real!

2.             God is felt in the quiet crucible of your personal, private suffering – this is usually, in my personal experience a cross-and-resurrection experience.  One day we’re experiencing the pit of existence to the point where we may seriously question if life is even worth it and the next day we’re lifted out by some supernatural intervention, sometimes or usually as a result of our willingness to trust God afresh.  There are entire seasons of the dark night of the soul, and as we look back we know beyond knowing that God was present ever more poignantly at just the time when we felt most alone.  One experience of God’s presence at these times is enough vapour of eternity to live on for a lifetime.

3.             God’s Word comes alive – hardly more surreal is that moment when the verses of the Psalms or Proverbs or Corinthians or the gospels become personally relevant in a God-orchestrated lament, even as we open our Bible or flick through and land at the exact spot that God has predestined us to arrive at.  It’s supernaturally uncanny when this happens again and again and again, and especially when we arrive at a verse or passage we’d read a thousand times before, but suddenly, now, we’re stunned to read it with brand new meaning.

4.             God arranges circumstances in only a way God could – well, you know how they say things happen in threes...?  When this happens, God reminds us of divine presence when a weird set of circumstances aligns in a way only God could have done it.  We know God has done it because the circumstances were arranged in a very personally meaningful way — like, only God could have known.  When this happens we’re reminded how much God knows us even more than we can know ourselves.  In reality, none of us pray boldly enough.  God’s answers are always more awesome than our audacity.

5.             God speaks a Word in due season, heard audibly or intelligible to be written – this is how we know that God speaks other-than in the Bible, for God’s presence cannot be contained to the canon of scripture.  We know this Word is for us personally because of the way and timing of its coming.  This Word can be a solitary word or theme, it could be a phrase, and it can even be a bunch of connected words.  So many of us have carried these Words with us (or these words carried us), and many of them over the course of our lives, as God’s Spirit directed our path.  We knew it was God because we followed these paths and grew.

6.             God intercedes through our worship – whether it’s experiencing baptism in the Spirit, or we’re swept up into heaven-on-earth when worshipping, or we encounter something else that is so incredible it can only be God, we see how God comes into our experience in ways that are powerful, timely, connected, and faithful to the character of God.  We often think of prayer as us giving our words, thoughts, emotions and desires to God, but just as much God ‘shows up’ through giving us experiences that we know can only come from our Lord.

7.             God’s grace experienced through a merciful forgiveness – nothing quite speaks the power of God in the relational dynamic than one person forgiving the unforgiveable in another.  When this happens, and it is glorious to give and to receive, we know God is real by how a relationship is restored when it faced destruction.  Both the giver and receiver of God’s grace experience the reality of a forgiving God in this faithful act of giving and receiving.  They do stand on sacred ground! 

The thing that sets faith apart from life without it is the presence of God in the living of the life of faith.  From the first moment we experienced the reality of the realness of God in our midst, we believed.  And God heaps evidence for belief on belief.  The more we believe, the more we see.

Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash