Even when there’s time, there’s not enough time

Like all families, our family has had to contemplate loss of late.  I think within my own extended family, a precious uncle passed away in 2017, and Sarah’s grandmother died last year.  I’ve had others who I have the privilege of sharing life with lose loved ones in the recent past.  I recall a work colleague who experienced five key losses in one 12-month period.

As the family gathered around a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a great grandmother, a sister and dear friend, there were several dynamics at play that sheet home the significance of time in this world—spending the time we can with our loved ones before their time is up.

There was the scenario of a granddaughter with her one children who was unable to attend due to illness.  This was heartbreaking for her, for her parents, and for grandparents who are also great grandparents—and yet, this precious niece made the right call to sacrifice much for the health of her Gran.

Another granddaughter made an extraordinarily special trip interstate with her husband and children to be there at the occasion, yet there is only so much time that can be given at short notice when lives and livelihoods are considered.

A sister-in-law lost her father several years ago, and that loss is intensely felt today within the family.  An aunt is a widow, and her husband is still missed.  For a brother, there’s a life-threatening condition.  For another aunt and uncle and our cousins, like for our family, there’s the loss of what strokes do to create challenges for recovery.  There are the health challenges that prove loss-worthy, those that come with age—once you turn 50, the wilfulness of youth (even one donut too many with routine regularity) catches up with you.

I could go on, and I do sense that I’ve missed a few significant losses in trying to depict what occurs in all families.  While I think of it, I honour your loss, for that depth of empty longing you carry.

Time of a sense evaporates into the ether and there are bound to be regrets for us all—it’s all part of the grieving process, however unfair it is, there are things we would all do differently.

Yet, regret is something we commonly think is a lonely curse lamented by ourselves alone.  It isn’t.  The regrets for time better spent are endured by us all.

And yet, there’s the real sense that even with a plethora of time, there is still the need to say goodbye in a life where none of us live forever.  We sit there knowing we should do and say everything we can, while we have the opportunity, but even if we were to do that, we’d quickly find that there is still a clawing intimacy gap that we cannot bridge.

Life is littered with goodbyes, whether it’s having to say goodbye to a husband and father, or wife and mother, each week (or for longer) as they fly away to work, or it’s something a little or a lot more permanent.

Even when there’s time, there’s not enough time.  There’s something unimaginably and innumerably intangible about time and the human experience of life.

We routinely go about the living of our lives without a thought or care regarding loss until it smacks us between the eyes of our heart in grief—then we realise it changes our lives.

And that’s a clue.  Grief calls us to an attention we’re otherwise asleep to.  It rouses us to the important things, to teach us to live from the mode of loss backwards, so we do now what we cannot do later.

But even in that we can’t have everything we’d want.  The goal of life is to accept what we cannot change while attempting to change what we can.  We’re destined to fail often.

Still, I’d take the depths of grief for the depths they’ve taught me, however hard they make life to be. Am I afraid of the thought of experiencing future losses?  Not so much the experience as the sorrows of irreversible loss; the desiring to return in time to what was.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

In vulnerability - yes, weakness - is beauty and strength and courage

We all, to a person, hate being weak.  We hate being the one people could take advantage of.  We hate it, because, let’s face it, most of the time people have taken advantage of us when we’ve been in positions to be exploited.

But do you know what?!

There’s nothing so beautiful as vulnerability that says, “Look at me, I’m not ashamed to be weak, to show you who I actually am in this chin-quivering moment.  And as you look at me, may you too redeem some of the courage you have in you that I’m showing you is in me right now.”

Do you know why raw vulnerability is beautiful?!

It’s because it reaches out in realness to connect—me with my imperfections, with my mask torn off in shreds on the ground, so you can see me for who I really and actually am.

Vulnerability says, “Come, know me... know me in a safe way, in a way that is good for the both of us... because we all need friends who believe in us... because we all desire to be known and to be believed in and to be vouched for as worthy.”

Vulnerability says, “Come here and be with me, and be real and safe as I’m real and safe.  We no longer need to put on a façade that we’ve got life sorted nor ashamed that we’ve stuffed some things up.” 

It’s beautiful to be weak because we give others permission to be themselves, and by the courage we show in not being fearful by hiding our weakness, we give others courage to be bold about the struggles they have.

That’s real power, right there... power for the mightiest human power there is... for connection... and there’s nothing like connection for making us feel fully human.

The truth is, if we’re real, we all have struggles, doubts, fears, sorrows, frustrations, dreads.  There’s nothing worse for a human being than to feel alone in being human.

Being human with others being human, on the other hand, helps us to face the world, our fears falling away, knowing we can relax where there’s no judgement, only support.

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash

Love is choosing to believe in the potential in people

To celebrate our wedding anniversary, we went to see Peter Rabbit 2.  

It’s a fascinating movie, full of laughs, but I was struck by an important truth: how you treat a person can have an impact on the way they see themselves.  Peter Rabbit was depicted as mischievous and a bad seed, and though he’d done good and was blamed for something he didn’t do, and because the negative narrative was so consistent, he chose to run with it and act out of it.

So many scapegoats in our society are imperilled the same way.

Where we treat a person or people group a certain way, it will influence their attitude and behaviour, much to the point that it becomes ingrained.

I’ll never forget how this applied to the life of one of my daughters when she was a teen.  During one period she was constantly being told by certain people that she was trouble.  It grieved my spirit as her father.

One day when I visited to pick her up from her mother’s house, I was startled to find an open can of beer near the computer she was working at.  She’d gone off to another part of the house, so I curiously picked up the can and it was full to the brim, not even a sip taken from it.  When she came back, I challenged her about it.  She said she’d planted it there, “If I’m going to get in trouble, it might as well be because I’m doing the wrong thing!”

That stunned me in the moment and caused me to reflect.

On another occasion I was ‘tipped off’ that my daughter was holding a party at her mother’s place.  I responded by putting together a ‘covert operation’ to bust her.  When I and another one of the parents ‘sprung’ them, there were four girls, a little music and very little if any alcohol.  It was 9pm and all the girls were all completely sober.  They’d been trying on makeup and clothes.  They even responded well when us parents overreacted.

During all my three daughters’ teen years there was only ever one event of slight rebelliousness, and even on that occasion the daughter in question responded well, respecting my decision that she wasn’t to go out when she’d demanded she would.

Yet, there have been so many times when my daughters have been misunderstood by certain people who just wanted to transfer their own insecurities onto them.  As a father, I’ve always had faith that they’d get through these times with my tacit encouragement and without my rescuing them.

But the point is really salient.  The psychological explanation of this is the reverse of the Pygmalion Effect.  When we believe a person can achieve greatly, that inspires self-belief, and they rise to achieve higher than they would otherwise have.  That’s the Pygmalion Effect.

The reverse of this Pygmalion Effect is highlighted in racism and other isms.  Treat a person or a certain people group a negative way, and it has its traumatic impact.  Jane Elliot demonstrated this the day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  On April 5, 1968, she segregated her third-grade class and picked on those with brown eyes and privileged those with blue eyes.  The following day she switched it around, those with brown eyes were privileged and the ‘blue eyes’ discriminated against.

Those who were treated badly reacted badly.  It didn’t matter who they were.

The lesson is, treat anyone well and they rise, but treat someone poorly and their attitude and performance plummets.

People are affected by their environment.  We thrive when encouraged—we all do.  And we tend to act out what people expect of us.

If someone thinks of you as someone to be watched, you sense that lack of trust and it can be hard to rise above it.  If you’re starved of attention, you tend to begin to believe you’re not worthy of attention.  If you’re overlooked and sidelined, it affects your performance, and you begin to resent being treated like a mushroom.

This has an application in ministry to people.  We must have an unwavering belief in the person before us, no matter their attitudes and performance, having faith that they’ll eventually respond to our loving respect and care.

If they’re recalcitrant, we do them a favour by watching them closely; but mainly so we can see what deserves commendation.  We seek to understand why they’ve got a poor attitude.  We’ll understand why they think we’re watching closely.  They’ll think we’re waiting for them to slip up.  We need to find the good, encourage them for it, and build their trust in the reliability of a sensible justice.  If they do disappoint us, we’re gracious and kind while being firm with consequences, because we must believe in their long-term potential to turn their lives around.

Growth is always a longer-term proposition.  Believing in a person’s resilience to bounce back after failure is inherent in their spiritual survival.  It’s incumbent on us all to believe beyond cynicism and scepticism.

We must always believe in people.  Jesus believes in people.  We must believe that if we treat people consistently well that they’ll respond to our love.  For some it takes time.  All we need to do is consistently love people, which has about it the shape of patience and grace.

If there’s a person in your life who consistently doesn’t seem to care, ramp up your care, your love, your commitment, your belief in them, and your encouragement.

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Nurturing contentment in the little things

One of the most valuable truisms I find is, “Whatever you think about most, grows.”

I’ve certainly been in many negative funks of mind, resonating from a hardness of heart, sometimes only seeing what’s wrong with the world and people and situations.

The only trouble with that thinking—even if or when it’s right—is it leads nowhere but to negativity.  It helps nobody and only frustrates and hinders progress.  It serves nobody, least of all the self.

The thing I loved most about AA was its focus on spiritual progress.

Striving for perfection is a sure-fire way to despair.  It’s the direct route to overwhelm.

Spiritual progress on the other hand is about appreciating, taking time for, the small things.

Spiritual progress is attainable, one day, one moment at a time.  It’s granting ourselves permission to let things go.

For instance, you can redeem an hour of joy from simply a one-second glimpse of incredible creation.  Things of beauty surround us, not least the beauty in having loved ones around us.  We realise this when they’re gone.

When we’re noticing the good things of life, that goodness enters our heart, nourishes our mind, cleanses our soul, and that joy wells up as a spring of gratitude.

The more we think on making a little spiritual progress each day, the more gratitude grows and the more joy we experience.  It’s all an inside job.  We must nurture it within.

Have you noticed that negativity often enters from our external world?  When we’re not looking within.  From our discontent and outrage at what’s wrong with the world.

There are so many things wrong with our world.  Yet there are just as many and perhaps tenfold or even one-hundredfold more good things.

Focusing on the negative things takes us in the direction of inner destruction.  Somehow, we must devote significant time to the good things, so goodness is nurtured in our heart.  Our hope depends on it.

This is where forgiveness is important.  Now forgiveness is a very personal concept, so I’ll keep this in the first person.  Recently, having struggled for years to forgive a hurt or two, I was granted the freedom of sticking it.  Nothing short of a miracle.

Now there’s freedom where there wasn’t beforehand; what I’d ever prayed for.  Things that ‘mattered’ beforehand seem to matter less.  I believe everyone who wants to forgive will eventually arrive there if they don’t give up.

I’ve found there’s no merit and no progress in being defiantly unforgiving.  It’s good to have experienced bitterness to see its toxic influence personally and interpersonally.

It doesn’t matter how ‘right’ we are, a continual focus on injustice hardens the heart.

Now that certain business is done, suddenly the smaller things come into view.

The small things matter.  The small things ARE the big things.

Very truly, true happiness is in wanting nothing at all.  It’s the peace of simply practicing contentedness. There are a thousand things and more to enjoy.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Days of remembrance are important especially when they’re hard

Well, it’s Mother’s Day, and from a minister’s viewpoint, it can be difficult to negotiate – so many individual responses from celebration, joy and the deepest gratitude to lament for broken dreams, sorrow for lost mothers and losses around mothering, the triggering of trauma experiences, etc – and even experiences of a confused mix of the complete gamut of emotions.

Days like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and all kinds of other remembrances are crucial especially when we languish.

Days of remembrance are opportunities – invitations – to:

§     process further cavernous depths of sorrow and emptiness and any other kind of difficult mental and emotional experience

§     honour what the occasion celebrates

§     journey with those who have different positive and negative experiences of these days, or to receive such a journey

Particularly helpful is the experience of digging deeply into the grief that may be present on such days.  This is so we can learn about why we grieve as a way of searching for ways for ultimately resolving it.

I call this ‘facing’.  Nothing needs to overwhelm us forever.  If we find something like a day of remembrance triggers much negative cognition and emotions, there is the opportunity to face what comes up.  It’s an opportunity – an invitation – to overcome the negative power and grow in resilience.

Without such opportunities – that realistically only come up perhaps once a year – we continue languishing.  Recovery from grief is strategic in that healing is a wisdom principle.

We all have opportunities to grow in resilience.  We can deny the presence of the fearful things of life, or we can resent them, or we can resolve to go a third more positive way.

Denying things doesn’t make them go away, and resenting things makes us bitter.  The third way of facing facilitates life.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

An enviable lament

There is something about how Sons of Korah sing the psalms, especially the laments, that raises the possibility of hope.  Which raises the point yet again—something wholly unpopular that it repulses our human sensitivity.

Little wonder those who are perishing want nothing to do with God.  But imagine if your misery was the key to your healing?

The polarising irony is the fact that, as far as many human moments of experience are concerned, we’re all perishing.  Paradoxes win the order of the day: lament is the way to life.

There’s nothing quite like sitting in your sorrow, having no way of escaping it, and being there, experiencing the empathy of a God who heals us even as we cry out in anguish.

What that requires, however, is an image of a GOOD God; a God who is good ALL the time.  Appreciate that God is wholly faithful and trustworthy, and through a long-felt lament is the healing that can come no other way.  Please, I beg of you, imbibe this truth!

Yes, it makes absolutely no human sense.  Some will read and say, “Rubbish!”  But an enviable lament is this: it’s that experience in life that claims hope out of the jaws of despair, victory from the cusp of defeat, that grasps life from death.  Honestly, there is such a thing; a never-more-certain thing through faith enough to trust God.

Nothing can crush us—and no attack of the enemy can threaten—when we embrace the grief that takes us to the envelope of overwhelm, where suffering burrows deep abysmally.

This is the very spiritual place of the Christ who clung most ardently to his Cross—knowing that in the calamity of death is the heralding of the eternal light that cannot be vanquished.

Lament is a very lost art.  Only the psalmist, the mystic, the contemplative can attain to it, and yet as they do, they hold a precious secret any of us can partake of.

When we bear an enviable lament, patience becomes us, acceptance for things that cannot be changed overwhelms our reality—that, “The Serenity Prayer, wow Lord, I’m living it!!”  Yet, it can’t be done unless we go there, trusting the truth of our lament to a God who is right there in it with us.

Do you see how all of life’s success BEGINS from such a point as this?  Do you not sense that this is the beginning point; the New Thing that God has come to show us.

It took until we were grieving in the grave of our despair to come closer than ever to the abundant life that’s achievable only through lament.

Imagine being so honest with God and anyone else who would listen, so authentic as to sing a song of Psalm 88, if that’s your reality.  Isn’t God great to have honoured lament so well in the Psalms, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and the prophets, and in Jesus and in Paul?

There’s no ‘name it, claim it’ prosperity doctrine in the two thousand pages of the Bible.  That’s a recent idolatrous ‘gospel’.

Instead, we have the riches of the glories of the graces of the Cross.  Amid the enemy’s finest moment comes his cataclysmic pulverising defeat.  And the same fits with our lament.

When we find ourselves sitting content in lament—which just sounds idiotic—hating the fact that we cannot master our destiny—we find, in a moment, we have mastered our destiny.

Truly the people of God in the book of Acts were those who could praise God at any time.  Only when we’ve learned to lament, to repent from our denial and raging against God, can we come close to a peace that can only come from within.

An enviable lament is a thing.  It’s a thing that makes no earthly sense.  But it will capture the imagination of those who are watching on.  An enviable lament is a witness to the glory of God that resurrects a human even when that human is travailing in depths deep of hurt.

~

I don’t want anyone to be under a false misapprehension.  Lament is suffering, but it’s not glorying (enjoying) suffering.  It’s simply the acceptance that any good place beyond it is through it, not around it.  This is victory for the acceptance of something that cannot be changed.  It’s acceptance because we have dropped our claims as to the injustice of life.

It’s a very countercultural idea for this time in history but test it and find that it is biblical.

We have fallen for a truth that isn’t true; that easy and comfortable is best.  Clearly it isn’t.  We need reminding regularly, opening the Bible and turning its many difficult pages, that there is always something beyond the pain of now.

I’d commend you to the opening words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:3-7.

Praise to the God of All Comfort

³ “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. ⁵ For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. ⁶ If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. ⁷ And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.”

Image: Sarah Wickham

The stumbling blocks to faith, hope and love

Our church leadership team had a retreat today and what I’m sharing here is part of what we covered. Not everyone is interested in healing, but if you are, this could be worth your knowing.

Three things we need to learn to let go of, one day, each moment, at a time in order to abide with God in faith, hope and love:

1.             Understanding – we must be humble enough to recognise that our own understanding of what the truth is—what we think it is—is a stumbling block.  We pretend that we can attain the knowledge of God, but we only need to read our Bibles to understand that our personal fixed view of what understanding is fraught with error.  Isaiah 55:8-9 says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord.  As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  We’re at our most dangerous spiritually when we think we understand something fully—the essence of pride.  Let faith have its way by producing in us openness that we may be wrong, curious enough always to be open to learn new things, never so sure of ourselves to limit God showing us the new thing (see Isaiah 43:18-19).  This is never more important than in our relationships.  Humility is the key to a faith that renounces understanding that is tainted by ignorance.

2.             Memories – these also form part of what becomes ‘our truth’ and it too is often a stumbling block to healing.  We attribute so much judgment to our memories—they’re good or bad.  Never are our memories neutral.  Our memories form the greater part of what are or become our perceptions and these affect our hope.  Memories are meaningful and they were formed through our attributions of what happened to us, and because we attach certain meaning to our memories, these become false hopes.  Bad memories hold us back, because of fear, anger, shame and guilt—they threaten to break us again and again.  They’re a reminder of how we were undone in life and the threat is they may undo us at any time we go back there.  Good memories can just as easily be bad for us in that they enable false hopes and dreams—that will, of themselves, be crushed in time.  What we’re to focus on is God’s loving gaze—the one and only source of hope.  The fact that we’re objects of eternal delight.  True hope is built on reality alone.  We must let go of our memories when it comes to hope, only accessing our memories as we give ourselves permission to reminisce, for there is nothing wrong with reminiscing. 

3.             Wanting – those desires of our hearts are ever a stumbling block unless they’re conformed to Love.  Bypassing wanting—identifying the wish list items of prayer, for instance—can only be done through going deeper into the mysterious and unfathomable rivers deep inside each of us.  Into those unknowable abysses that leave us sitting still in the acceptance of a dark night reality.  This is where we shall find the love we’re looking for—in just the place it would seem least likely to inhabit.  Only when we cease our wanting will Love capture our imagination.  Nothing can overcome us if our wanting is overcome.  Our false desiring and our desiring of bad things or good things in the wrong ways will hold us apart from the love that will heal us.

If we hold space for faith by letting go of our understanding, and are open to relinquishing our memories for hope, and give up our wanting for the love that pursues us, then we face a healing only God can do.

Only as we embrace our dark night of the soul reality will we see that the keys to our healing are held in that seeming most miserable place.

Acknowledgement to Sandy Clifton and her use of Rowan Williams’ Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash