Adversity can lead a person to the meaning of life

Liminality is a big word describing the in-between or middle stage of a journey.  Each journey of life has about it uncertainty, disequilibrium, ambiguity, disorientation; chaos in sum.

Importantly, although we come to want to escape or resent a life that makes little sense, the very point of life is that life will inevitably make little sense, there’s a hope beyond it that makes sense of it all.

Follow along as I describe a process of the-what, the-why, the-how, the-who, and the-when.

THE WHAT

Life calls us into the gospel reality of agreement — the very essence that the Kingdom of Heaven is both now but not yet.  It is consummate liminal space.  We feel the presence of God but cannot see God.  We believe by faith in things we cannot prove, and we know by faith that these are real without being able to prove them.  We may execute the divine vision of loving others, but there’s no guarantee they’ll feel loved.  Et cetera.

If you have been called to a life of loss, and grief has swarmed about you and through you for time and depth enough that part of you died, you may know a blessing few have experienced.  This is the resurrection life that comes when part of us dies: not least, our self-dependence.

Better still, although it can often feel anything but a blessing, the overall sense of liminality, once it arrives, never truly leaves.  That fact can lead to unresolvable bitterness and resentment.  That usually leads to a life of denial or anger — and commonly a combination of both.  The purpose is to resolve this by moving through it to acceptance.

Be encouraged.  If you were suddenly plucked out of the liminality, you’d quickly abandon God, because that kind of ‘freedom’ is deceptive.  It is good that your life has much about it that’s unresolvable.  We never feel completely home here on this earth, and that’s how it’s meant to be.

In simplest terms, adversity holds open to us the meaning of life.

THE WHY

I’ve touched on this immediately above.  God knows our nature.  If we don’t need God, we don’t need God.  But for life to go well, we need to recognise we do need God.  Life only has hope when we begin from this standpoint.

The-why is answered by two truths that fit nicely together.  Life only works when both truths work together in unison.  These are the two truths, first and second:

1.             Life for all of us, at some point, yet also overall, involves liminality.  The One who created everything, including the concept of life, has — by divine and inscrutable wisdom, i.e., we don’t fully know why — created a perfect heaven and a perfect earth, but because of love, earth is now both broken in the sense of suffering (the-now) and perfect in terms of the cross and the resurrection (now-but-not-yet).  We live on this earth ever seeking heaven but are ever unable to attain it.

2.             When we accept the above truth, which we could consider ‘the problem of this life’, we’ve been given power to see and to agree.  We therefore see the cosmic relevance of the gospel as the only way forward.

THE HOW

Accepting these two truths — holding them in tension by unison — leads us to the wholeness of Christ (life, death, resurrection, ascension, for us new life in the Spirit) by the fundaments of faith and the hope of glory in and beyond this life.

In other words, in Christ there is the reality of perfection but in this life that perfection can only be accepted as a hope, the realisation of which is a possibility one moment at a time, through, as we say in the Lord’s prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  That hope represents the only perfection possible this side of eternity.

The ‘how’ of this hope — of bringing heaven’s perfection to earth in a moment — is established in the “One final command I give you: love one another as I have loved you,” said Jesus.

THE WHO

The easiest of all is the-who is everyone.  Humanity makes this difficult by our biasing everything.  Psychological science attests to this unconscious phenomenon.  So, if there’s any hope we might achieve the-how, each of us must be honest about those — the-who — we exclude.  Much of the time people are either completely unaware of their prejudices or they feel justified making them.

Including everyone in our expression of the-how is our biggest problem.  We all want permission to exclude some.  But God won’t have it.

We cannot resolve the problem of our inherent liminality until we love everyone.

We can now see how important forgiveness is in the cosmic plan of God.  We’re all on this journey of practicing forgiveness for our own healing that we might experience the reality of it.

THE WHEN

The when is, of course, now.

The ‘now’ is a cosmic paradox.  We only ever get now, it’s all we have, it’s cosmically limited, but also, it’s cosmically safe as it’s known, yet it’s cosmically unsafe for the traumas we bear.

We would hope for more — and that by faith — but fear of the unknown and also the uncertainty of the unknown envelope us in the reality that we don’t know if we can trust this unknown reality.

Now is both a better and a worse concept: better, because it’s known, but worse because it’s broken.

In context with the-what, the-why, the-how, and the-who, the when is pertinent.  There is only the-now.  Only in the-now can we demonstrate to God that we get the-what, the-why, the-how, and the-who, and the-when.

So, to sum up:

§     THE-WHAT is about liminality: accepting its presence as the clue for the living of a problematic life that begs resolution but cannot be resolved — the very definition of liminal space.

§     THE-WHY is about the God behind the liminality: the-what and the-why heralding the-how.

§     THE-HOW is about the concept of “on earth as in heaven,” which leads us to discover Jesus’ “One final command I give you: love one another as I have loved you.”

§     THE-WHO is necessarily everyone — all who bear God’s image — including those we want to exclude.

§     THE-WHEN is now; for all and each of the days of our lives.  We’re here for but a short time.

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

The grief journey – sad, scary, exciting, etc

I went to a reunion/memorial event for a school friend who passed away.  There are always remarkable things said and heard at these events.  Death brings the best life out of us as we face inevitable truths, just as death brings us into even closer connection with one another.  Death is not all bad.

As I listened in on the conversations I was party to, one particular piece of wisdom struck me poignantly.  “It’s sad, scary, exciting,” was what I heard.  I’m actually not sure the third word was ‘exciting’ but I will leave it as that because each of these words together explain the grief process well.

Grief is a mixed bag of a compendium of emotions — sometimes like all the seasons in one day.

Grief is full of sadness.  Sorrow.  Depression.  Unchangeable realities — yes, more than one, many realities in fact that would be changed back if only we could.

There is so much gut-wrenching distress that goes with the grief journey, waves and waves of it, to the point of nausea, over and over again.  Just when you think a corner is turned toward happiness, joy or contentment, in comes the tide of cosmic emptiness and that current convinces us that there is no hope.

Tears upon swelling and sobbing tears, tears that roll down the cheeks, tears that won’t stop.  But just as much an inability to sleep and stop analysing, yet a paralysis in many other functional areas of life.

Grief is also scary.  You often don’t know from one moment to the next just what will come, which evokes tremendous anxiety, panic attacks and the like.  

With the thoughts that come to overwhelm, and the feelings unpredictable, there is little wonder people run from the truths enveloped in loss.  Having said that, many people find they have no option but to face their grief, and the fact that there’s no option but to be brave and face the ever-rippling tsunami feels only slightly better than a complete denial, though at least after a few years there is recovery and new life for the suffering that’s been endured.

Grief is also full of excitement.  Not party excitement, but theme park excitement.  When you’re on a roller coaster for the first time, it dawns on you very early on that you can’t get off until the end of the ‘ride’.  Grief is one-hell-of-a-ride.  Once grief has entered your life, you want to get off the ride for all your worth, but then you find that you’re on it until the ride is over.

Grief always takes longer than you anticipate or feel you can bear.

But that’s not all.  Excitement brings with it not only the intensity of overwhelm, but real hope of the new.  Grief ushers in a new normal, and that’s not always bad.  It just takes an eon before you can begin to see the good that can come from being smashed against the rocks of life.

Dedicated to Allison and friends.

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

In every grief there’s a grace

On July 28, 2014, Facebook tells me, I added 17 new friends. That wouldn’t be anything to write home about apart from the fact that each of the 17 people have something rare in common. They each have a child with Pallister-Killian Syndrome (PKS).

Instantly we discovered that our Nathanael Marcus had this rare syndrome (around only 300 people in the world have it) I made a search of the Internet, and within a day had made online contact with not only a global group, but the local Foundation as well. We had actually met the President of the PKS Foundation of Australia and his family face-to-face within a week. So, within 10 days of having had our brutal diagnosis, we found people who would become a cherished community for us.

As we prepared to publish our memoir of Nathanael’s life in 2018, we reflected deeply — having to reread and reread the book so many times in editing it. We still pinch ourselves as to how well we were carried by the prayers of the many in those times. That, and the faith we deployed accepting our lot, whatever was to come.

Our prayers didn’t deliver our baby from his peril, and that is okay (has to be), because we prayed that God’s will would be done. Our hope is to see him soon, according to His will.

This is a hard thing for many to understand; our will did not initially align with what God had ultimately in mind, but we did pray ultimately, ‘Your will be done, Lord, and not our own.’ It is still a hard thing for many to understand. But the way we understand prayer, whilst it’s the most powerful thing we could ever do, is it’s to be God’s prerogative and not our shopping list.

Stepping through those days, one tumultuous day at a time, wasn’t that hard; faith really isn’t that hard. Because faith is trust, it’s pretty simple. As we walked, step-by-step each day, doing what we felt was God’s will for the moment, we tried not to overthink our situation, and just be a support to each other.

And yet as we stepped the days between July 18 and July 28 of 2014, God was adding a grace that somehow compensated for our grief. For what was being taken away from us, a baby we so desperately loved already, there were things being added, like fellowship with a group of very special people.

Although Nathanael passed away over six years ago, we’re still embraced. The PKS Foundation of Australia even invited me to join them on the Board (I served as Secretary from 2017–2020), and we’re personal friends with a few of them.

Just today I heard from our friend the President, Nic, that another of the precious PKS children had lost his life. I dedicate this article to Thomas and his family.

For many friendship like this would seem hardly a worthy comparison, but it isn’t about comparisons at all — it’s all about accepting the inexplicable and inscrutable will of the God in a life that is a constant uncertainty. Again, faith accepts. Were there tears? Many of them. (And still today at times.) But, even in that, brutal as it was, our minds were grounded in acceptance for whatever our reality had in store for us. Still, some moments floored us. And not always what we expected would upset us.

Grief, as it is, is hard enough, but if we will look back over the journey and notice the blessings that God was doing even at that time of our loss, gratitude fills our hearts with His Presence.

For everything life takes away there is something added.

The heart that insists on believing this will find what it is that God has stowed already as the very means of hope to get through the grief of loss to the only prosperity that means anything.

True prosperity is the comprehensive spiritual blessing that says we overcome through suffering.  Nothing can defeat the hope of the one who grasps this truth with both hands.

Photograph above taken by Heartfelt.

We’ve got to get past our entitlement theology

On a day when I conclude a ministry that sees me feeling like I’ve ‘made it’ and been vindicated, where I’m no longer in my darkest times, I’m forced to reflect on how entitled my theology has been at times.

I’m not even going to quote where this is coming from, because the source of it is just peddling what so many peddle these days, and it’s a theology that only leads to entitlement.

This is how it goes: “You’ve got to go through the dark part to get to the good part.  It won’t always be this dark.”

What if the dark part is actually teaching us something?  What if that’s the most redemptive part?  Is it so dark?  Is suffering dark because it’s so hard?  Why don’t we reverse it and say to ourselves that when life was going well, when we took God for granted, that that was the dark part — because it was and is!

No, we’re more apt to see that anything that costs us any of our happiness is dark, and entitlement has got us thinking that way.  Like, “God, I deserve that You’d bless me... You know I’m on your side and all... so, where’s my favour... I’m believing on you for this... if you can’t get me out of this bind, what’s the use in believing in you?”

What if the good part and the dark part are one and the same?  What if we’re to learn how good the dark part can be, or more so, learn how to find the good in the dark part?

But, no, we condemn all suffering because we feel, in our westernised comfort lifestyles, that all of life should be ‘blessed’ and ‘good’ because we’re happy, free of pain, and have our luxuries intact.

What if the true theology is the so-called dark part is the kernel to embrace, and that if only we can do that, we gain hold of the wellspring of life?

It’s not a theology that will make sense and that will sell, but in my experience, it’s a theology that works at a profoundly deep level.

But you only see it if in your ‘darkness’, your suffering time, you’re open to exploring it over the longer term.  Few people are prepared to do that.  If you do, you may well discover the meaning in suffering, and then nothing can conquer you.

Then you discover that, as the Serenity Prayer says, hardship is truly the pathway to peace.

Photo by Andrew Liu on Unsplash