Things I learned on a road trip to Esperance

Earlier in my life, the Karratha-Perth road trip was a more-than-annual experience. These past twenty years, however, it’s been the trips south and east of Perth that have been the main fare.

Road trips can be similes for life.

I’m sure you’ve all heard things like, ‘life is not in the destination but the journey…’

This is like that.

My earlier road trips of 1,500 kilometres and more were races in trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible. Not that I had a death-wish, but I really wasn’t focused on the journey at all. I had done that trips in a little over 13 hours, and, in a police pursuit-patrol car, in 12 hours, twice!

Having passed 50, and with a greater appreciation than ever of the meaning and significance of life, I enjoyed every minute of the 1,430-kilometre round trip. I wasn’t focused on the destination at all, both ways. I subconsciously knew we’d arrive there. I enjoyed this round trip so much that I didn’t need a break from the driving. We had Colin Buchanan CDs to play and occasionally we would tune into the cricket. We chatted as we went, planning what we would do when we got to our holiday destination, and on the way home we planned our upcoming Wedding Anniversary, my wife’s birthday, and talked through our next month. We also visited best friends in a town on the way home.

Our mode of travel was car and our trip wasn’t driven by haste to get where we weren’t.

This trip was revelatory to me in that it wasn’t drudgery. It was enjoyment.

Life’s like that. We hustle through life until we reach our holidays and then we’re in no fit state of mind to enjoy our time off. We save all our joy for Saturday and Sunday and miss the joys every Monday-to-Friday period bring. This is such a shame and a waste of most of our lives.

We must learn to value the journey of our life; the destination is death, and there is no sense rushing there.

What is life if we cannot enjoy it? And I challenge anyone who does not enjoy the abundance of life. If you don’t enjoy your life, do all you can to change it so as much of it can be enjoyed as possible.

My last thought: enjoyment of life is a paradigm, that’s all. It’s a mindset. We all have the power to choose our approach.

There’s something more important…

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Sir Doug Nicholls. Many of you, especially those beyond Australia’s shores, will have no idea who this Aboriginal man was. Honestly, until recently I didn’t know anything about his life.

He died in 1988, aged 81. He achieved so many things against the odds, given the racial discrimination he faced. Yet, he was honoured by Australian and Royal society. And, what inspires me most, he was not only a legendary footballer and a governor, but he was a pastor and Aboriginal rights activist.

At this time of year, I am especially given to vision. I’m wondering what God has in mind for me next year. I can imagine it might be the same for you. I’m in reflection mode, pleased with my efforts to do for this year what God has placed me on this earth to do.

But I cannot help asking, what next? What is around the corner… on the horizon?

Pastor Doug, as his family affectionately refer to him as, was an inspiration in the shape of someone like John Wesley — a doer. He achieved. He was not full of wind, not full of his own voice, like so many who waste their lives promoting themselves. John Wesley preached 45,000 sermons and wrote 300 books. Not satisfied to live the comfortable life, to write one or two best-sellers, Wesley just kept going. And so it was for Pastor Doug. He worked tirelessly and seemed tireless in his pursuit of change for his people; as a people made, like everyone else, in the image of God.

He made a difference. He spent his life out. And 30 years after his death, we’re still marvelling at his legacy.

I don’t need to do anything great, or be great, to honour God through the living of my life. Neither do you. Of course, I speak in terms of what the world considers great, for even as Christians we have much difficulty understanding and accepting what Kingdom greatness is.

One thing I feel compelled to do next year is live more boldly between the fissures of a divided church. I sense there are so many agendas, so much nepotism, so much partiality, so much politicking, and still so much abuse. I feel positioned as an inside-outsider, having lived most of my life outside of the church, I feel I have an historically-valid vantage point to pass comment on how the world might judge the church. Church and Christian exclusivity sicken me. I feel true disciples have been through, or are going through, tremendous and transformational suffering, yet there are many who don’t ‘get’ the gospel — much like I didn’t get it through my first nearly 13 years as a Christian.

If the gospel doesn’t radically challenge
and therefore change your life
you haven’t ‘got’ the gospel.

But the way I have to do these things will need to be moderated and harnessed in the kind of way Nicholls and Wesley would have done them. I can’t afford to upset people just for the sake of it. There needs to be due reason for due result.

There’s something more important than acquisitions, possessions, comfort, silence, favouritism, opinion, political idealism, one’s own achievements, being heard at all costs, sell outs, lobbying, and anything else apart from Christ.

That one thing more important is Jesus; for his agenda to be our one and all. This will cause us never to ever be predictable again, and his agenda will cause us to make true change, sacrificing hundreds of forms of compromise in the process.

2018 Christmas Letter

We greet you with great joy.  2018 has been a great year for us, our first year in our own home!

Sarah continued working for the City of South Perth. Sarah is still our main breadwinner, but Steve has launched counselling and funeral celebrant businesses this year and continues to work 0.4 FTE for Regent College as their chaplain. He helped supervise students at the Year 4 and Year 6 camps, and once again spoke at Regent’s ANZAC and Year 6 Graduation services. We thank God for His provision in the area of our work. Steve also preached 35 Sundays and is grateful to continue to improve in this area. Steve was also invited to become part of the national training team for PeaceWise (biblical conflict resolution) and took part in a train-the-trainer in NSW in March and helped deliver 2 one-day programs in September. He also continued as Secretary for the Board of the Pallister-Killian Syndrome Foundation of Australia (PKSFA) (Nathanael had PKS) this year. Steve conducted four funerals and one wedding and has had significant counselling journeys with several (nearly 10) couples and individuals this year.

Ethan won the Pre-primary Respect Award at Middle Swan Primary School where there were three Pre-primary classes. He was in a great class with such a fabulous teacher in Ms. Bird.  Steve volunteered in Ethan’s class each week and in Term 4 became a mentor for two boys—one in Year 3 and one in Year 1.  Ethan had Malachi, Braxton, Iya, Lewis and William to his birthday party at Woodbridge Park.  Ethan did well academically and socially.  Steve was also active on the P&C committee this year. Oh, and Ethan won the Christmas cake raffle AND had a On Ground Experience (with Steve) at the Australia vs India Test at Perth Stadium! They loved every second of it.

Steve was gifted tickets by Coral and Ron (Mum and Dad) to visit Amy and Dan in Sydney in November before they returned to WA and moved to Baldivis. Zoe and Lewis moved into their own home in Seville Grove this year. Rhiannon is pregnant and her and Blake are expecting their baby on May 8, 2019, and they moved to a new home in December.

Steve graduated with a Master of Divinity from Vose Seminary in March 2018. In October, Steve and Sarah launched their Shining Gift of God: A Memoir of the Life of Nathanael Marcus at the 2018 Silent Grief conference they spoke at, and Steve was interviewed on 98five FM. Steve and Sarah also started a life group on Friday nights with three other church families. Steve, Sarah and Ethan are spending Christmas in Esperance with the Brown family.

The highlight of the year was moving to Stratton in February, from which we haven’t looked back. We have found our spiritual home at Bellevue Baptist Church, where Steve is now an elder. We love the people at Bellevue, they love us, and we love serving there. Steve and Sarah are both now integrally involved in several of Bellevue’s ministries.

What are our hopes for 2019? Really, that we would continue to build relationships in Midland. We continue to pray that Amy’s, Zoe’s and Rhiannon’s and their partners’ lives will further blossom. We’re so proud of them all.

We sincerely wish you a very joyous Christmas and pray that your hopes for 2019 are realistic and can be achieved.

Paralysing grief that strikes at any time

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Panic attacks, the very first experience of them, teach us something about the nature of a life we never knew existed.

There is a suffering that is deeper and darker than much of humanity typically comprehends.

This is not said to glorify something that ought not to be mentioned. It ought to be mentioned to corroborate the experience of the few.

I recall speaking with a 50-year-old director of a psychology firm — a man with great access to the best psychological resources humanly known — who had never suffered any mental illness. Having experienced an unprecedented failure, something that he could not have foreseen, within days he plummeted into such a sharp depression that panic attacks came as a rude surprise. He lost weight overnight and his face was gaunt. He was beyond words for the hours he had never previously experienced.

For me, I was a 36-year-old when paralysing grief struck at a time that I could not have predicted. I was plunged into a darkness beyond words and comprehension within hours — the nature of an irredeemable loss that couldn’t be denied. And yet, it was months later — five months later to be exact — when I had one paralysing day that couldn’t have been predicted. A day when I almost ended my life, such was the power of feelings that overwhelmed every sensibility of my personal capacity.

You’re shown something in that moment where paralysing grief overwhelms you. There are experiences in life that are completely foreign to our experience of life. Once you have survived these experiences, you’re granted the opening of your eyes. God gets your attention and your life is never the same again. But staying the experience is about resting within good support that is available to you.

You can fight reality all you like, but when loss strikes it takes no prisoners and you quickly find a grievous reality is yours and it lasts and lasts and lasts.

There may be a plethora of ways we can kick against the goads, but each time we find ourselves thrashing in quicksand. To no avail. Sooner or later you realise there is no shortcut to a rectification to your circumstances. And when you would settle for acceptance, even that, for a very long time, is impossible.

Paralysing grief is only experienced by those who 1) have the rug of their lives pulled from under them, and who 2) experience such a poverty of resources to deal with such a tormentingly perplexing reality that they submit to their despair.

But here is a paradox! Not everyone will have the humility to allow such a slide into such an abysmal oblivion. Many, many people will run to a crutch, some form of handle to attach themselves to the scaffold of distraction that saves them from entering transformational grief.

It is no good for someone to sidestep suffering. Insisting upon control in a life situation where there is no control, attempts to delay the inevitable. It is utterly futile, yet so many go there for fear that they will not survive the crushing.

If life throws us a situation that involves paralysing grief, though it seems counterintuitive, we’re blessed to go with it, to suffer the truth of the love we’ve lost, which will crush us again and again, rather than betray the experience by somehow denying our grief.

Denial of the reality of grief is denial of our very identity. We become less when to be transformed by grief would be to become ultimately more.

The promise of grief is the promise of growth.

Suffering the truth of the love we lost crushes us again and again, but in facing a reality of suffering we never knew existed we find resources for hope and recovery we never knew existed.

5 top reasons why people come to counselling

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Conflict. Grief. Recovery. Advice. Empathy. These are not the reasons why people come to counselling. They may be five they initially want help with and inevitably find, but there are five better, deeper reasons why I find people come to counselling.

Firstly, whether people know it or not, they want something different; something more dynamic, even if the dynamism offered and received actually slows things down. Counselling is a unique relationship. You pay a counsellor to give you something no other relationship you have can offer. One session (1 – 2 hours) is dense in two dynamics: the level and depth of the truths you speak, and the attentive engagement you have with your counsellor as they direct you deeper in your own pilgrimage. You encounter in your counsellor quite a different human being in the way they interact. It really is all about you, and it needs to be.

Secondly, people come expecting advice and help and coaching; to be told how to fix their problems. Many people are astounded to find that the process is far gentler and more respectful than that. Somehow, subconsciously, people do most of all want to be listened to. But they don’t realise this is their desire until their either have been listened to well, or they have been ‘missed’ and the counsellor hasn’t listened well. Again, if it’s really all about you, then listening is primary. And listening is more a science than an art. There is no substitute for focus and concentration and of the counsellor expending all they have to achieve presence with you in the room. The counsellor needs to be completely in your story.

Thirdly, people come needing their confusion allayed. They come for peace. They come for hope. Peace is the sense of completion amid complexity. People come with their complex lives completely askew. Therefore, people come for simplicity, or what is termed elegant simplicity; a process by which the complexity is dealt with so elegantly that it feels simple. A roadmap is possible even if the way there seems utterly enigmatic. This is a mysteriously spiritual process, but counsellors seek to give you crystal clear clarity, and this comes through their surrender to the principles of simply serving you. With clarity comes confidence. With confidence comes belief. With belief comes motivation. With motivation comes action. With action comes results. It all starts with clarity.

Fourthly, people come because it’s almost too late. Usually it can be a last-ditch attempt. This is not always bad news, because if there’s enough will, there’s enough hope to work with. But people who come in this situation must recognise how forlorn things are. Ideally, the sooner issues are addressed the easier and better the process. But there’s a reason people come when it’s almost too late. We all believe we can do things in our own strength and power. If only we were wisely humble enough, however, to concede we need help earlier. And yet, there is massive power in the rock-bottom experience. There is nothing like the power of having your back against the wall. Many people find the reserves to fight against all odds. They’re inspiring to work with.

Fifthly, people come either expecting hard and finding easy or expecting easy and finding it hard. About even numbers of both kinds of people. I like to think that counselling tackles what is hard to make things easier. Facilitation literally means to make something easy. Counselling can be seen as a process for helping make your life easier. It’s very common for someone to come to counselling feeling stressed and leave an hour or so later and feel a lot lighter. But that’s usually because they’ve been courageous. The person counselled has trusted their counsellor and been honest. And they receive acceptance. This always helps. And as the counselling relationship deepens, therapeutic gains become even more efficient and effective. The goal is to do away with the counsellor and go it alone.

People most often come to be helped with conflict, grief, recovery, or to receive advice or empathy. But as you see above, people actually receive something else.

Signs I’m in relationship with someone narcissistic

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As opposed to a symptom, which only others can tell me, a sign is something I can observe about another. Now, I need to set the record straight from the get-go; I do want to love you. That’s my beginning premise; that you want some kind of friendly relationship with me. It’s okay if you don’t. There is a plethora of reasons why you might not want to go there. But, if you do express some desire to relate with me, we will need some boundaries that we can both respect and reciprocate.

Here are some signs that indicate to me you might be narcissistic:

·        That your time is more important than mine. That you’re happy to keep me waiting. And I’m not talking just once. I’m talking about a consistent pattern that you’re tardy. But, if I’m late once… well, that’s upsetting to you. In a word, entitlement.

·        You have communicated to me in a language beyond words that we have roles in this relationship. Like, you do all the talking and I do all the listening. Or, I support you, like that’s my role, but you’re nowhere to be seen when I need you. In two words, entitlement and control.

·        You have little tolerance for the interruptions to your time with me. You have little grace regarding the inconveniences all relationships must occasionally bear. You are easily irritated.

·        You talk in tones of care and concern, but do not ever seem to have the capacity to behave in caring ways and seem only concerned about yourself and your needs.

·        You don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and even when it seems you’re okay with ‘no’, you still make some veiled attempt at manipulating me or the situation to get your own way.

·        Control. In one word. You seem to need to have control. And the more skilled you are, the more nuanced are the forms of control you operate in. You may even admire how deftly you operate your control.

·        Being vulnerable is either impossible for you and/or you’ve developed it as an art form, i.e. for manipulation. In other words, you’ve weaponised vulnerability.

·        You are adult, meaning that I understand that if you’re still developing there is still hope for you, but if you’re adult… I need to be realistic that you probably won’t or cannot change.

·        You have weaponised empathy and compassion, because they’re stock in trade for manipulation. In other words, you don’t have empathy or compassion.

·        You expect things to go your way all the time, even if you say you don’t. In other words, words are tools for you. They don’t mean a thing.

·        Others exist for your use and advantage. People are helpful while they’re helpful. When they’re not, they’re not. You’d never say this, but people can be disposed of.

·        You have a piqued relationship with envy and are constantly comparing with others. You exist in a land of better and worse. There is always a pecking order.

·        Success is very, very important to you, however you define it, and heaven only help the person who blocks your path.

·        Intimidation, bullying and other forms of abuse seem to be your right, but if anyone tries these on you… whoa! In a word, entitlement.

People who are narcissistic tend to be entitled, have no issue exploiting people, and have no capacity for true empathy.

Marriage Intimacy is about one thing

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It’s not rocket science and never will be. Marriages thrive on connection as all relationships do. It’s wanting to be together. It’s saying nice things to each other. It’s touching one another. It’s helping each other out. And it’s giving gifts to one another. All the love languages work together for connection-sake.

But when we don’t feel connected, and especially when we crave connection, whether we realise it or not, we go to maladaptive things to get connection. For me, it’s food. It’s something to replace that comfort that connection gives me. If my wife’s too busy or too tired for me, and I need her, I am tempted to find comfort in those things that are bad for my health — for instance, carbohydrates at night! For me, it’s admitting that I’m tempting to eat when I don’t need to, because I crave not food but connection.

It’s not an excuse, it’s a fact of that hole within us that needs filling. Intimacy with our partner, being together, physically in proximity, being on the same page, is the sweet spot in marriage.

For partners who do not want this, who negate what their partner truly desires and craves, and who refuse to give what their partner healthily desires, that partner will be punished. It’s just the way it works. Whenever any of us is violated, and in these terms think of the abuse of neglect, we do seek reparation through resistance — whether we’re conscious of this or not, we punish our partners who do not give us what we desire.

All we seek is a little connection. And when we’re refused that connection the partnership, the marriage, loses out big time. The partner refusing connection is doing a foolish thing. It always backfires. Selfishness always does.

If there genuinely is reason why connection is unattainable, it’s best to be honest and negotiate with the partner who seeks this good thing. Give them some assurance that they’re not being forgotten. Help them to understand why you can’t give them what they healthily desire. Communicate. And even in communicating how you cannot meet their needs at this time you will paradoxically create some form of powerful and valuable connection.

The peace that rebuilds and restores relationships

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Other people’s distance is not always their way of saying they don’t care.

It can often be the case that they perceive distance from us.

Social psychology explains the phenomenon: anyone who perceives anyone being standoffish mirrors that behaviour.

In fact, we human beings characteristically mirror each other all the time. It’s called the law of reciprocity. Smile and people tend to smile back. Scowl and people give us a wide birth.

This Christmas holds the opportunity
to rebuild a relationship.

The Prince of Peace came to this world to bring shalom — the completed perfection of peace in the place of conflict. Trust this season to be the time to make peace with those you’ve been in conflict with.

Don’t just make one move. Make a commitment to keep moving toward them in your heart. Damaged relationships will only be rebuilt if commitment runs much deeper than surface level. If you’ve decided that the relationship in question is much more important than the issues that have divided you in the past, because you believe in the bigness of relationship, you will be prepared for conflict to rise before peace returns.

Occasionally, however, the issues cannot be compromised, and the relationship cannot be repaired. For instance, when there is no capacity in the other for repentance. When they cannot see their wrong.

If you want peace for yourself, it’s your move. You may soon discover that peace for you comes when you’ve done all you can to live peaceably with everyone.

The ultimate peace is known
when acceptance lives through us.

This is not about tolerating
what we could otherwise change.

It’s agreeing that some things are beyond our control. It is healthy and mature to accept that some relationships are damaged beyond repair — that a one-way street is no way for flourishing traffic to travel.

The potential that lays dormant within us relationally is birthed by the action generated through getting the log out of our own eye.

When we take responsibility for what we can do,
often, though not always,
much relational repair can occur.

How to build more trust in a breaking relationship

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What is often not front-of-mind is also intrinsically connected to our relationship with peace.

If a relationship is going poorly, trust has been rocked, and that’s generally a two-way street.

Here is a method anyone can use to improve trust in every damaged relationship. It’s a Christian method (see Matthew 7:1-6 and John 13:33-35; 15:12-17) but anyone can apply it and it will work.

We could say it’s just being mature and virtuous in our relating with ourselves and others; to choose for understanding over our own way.

Here is the challenge: redeem every wrong we do.

Important note: We cannot redeem anything anyone else does. Only they can do that — if they choose, but they are the only ones who can choose. We can force nobody to do this, and it would be wrong to try to do that, though we can attempt to help them understand.

Redeem every wrong we do. Let’s think about it. At one level it might sound like perfectionism, but it isn’t. If we’re made aware that we’ve said or done something wrong, we should do what we can to set it right. It’s an invitation to humility; to humble reflection — surely there is something we could have done better.

Committing to redeem every wrong you become aware of is the best and fastest way to build trust in your relationships.

Whenever we have such a focus on being honest about our relational shortfalls that we’re redeeming every hurt and potential hurt, hour by hour, day by day, we not only heap love on people, we’re too busy to notice what they’re doing wrong. They see our example — some of them — and the law of reciprocity kicks in. They start trying to outdo us in love. Some of them. But it grows around us. A culture of peace.

Trust is built when one person in a relationship gets the log out of their eye and apologises. Such action often has enough power to soften the heart of the other.

Breaking relationships can be restored when trust is rebuilt.

Being committed to a breaking relationship often takes great tenacity. There are setbacks when we want to give up, even fight back.

But we must remind ourselves that we must own our own behaviours and attitudes, and trust that that will be enough. As far as it depends on us, we ought to live at peace with everyone (Romans 12:18). But that means we need to accept what we cannot change. Some relationships will inevitably break permanently. But many more relationships will be restored.

Pallister-Killian Syndrome (PKS) Awareness Day

Everyone thinks their child is 1-in-a-million. Well, our little Nathanael was actually 1 in 15.4 million. He was one of less than 500 reported cases of Pallister-Killian Syndrome in the WORLD.

December 4th is recognized as PKS Awareness Day because PKS results from having 4 copies of the short arm of chromosome 12.

In an effort to raise awareness, I’ll be sharing some facts on PKS until December 4th! ❤️🖤❤️🖤

Fact #1: Pallister Killian Syndrome is a genetic condition that occurs during conception, it is neither hereditary nor environmental. The malformation is that chromosome 12 has 4 short arms as opposed to the typical 2. It is a mosaic syndrome which means that not all cells that contain chromosome 12 will contain the malformation. The severity of the syndrome is determined by how many of a child’s cells contain the extra genetic material.

We believe in Nathanael’s case that he was afflicted more globally than some, though there is great variation from one PKS child to another. In Australia, there are less than 20 PKS children, and our thoughts are always with a particular family who has a child the same age as Nathanael would have been.

I work in a school and Nathanael would have been Kindergarten intake next year. So I will view the 2019 ‘kindies’ very specially, keeping his memory alive as a work with them.

I’m thankful also for the wonderful support, fellowship and care we have received from PKS-Kids worldwide and for the community we have enjoyed through the PKS Foundation of Australia. It is an honour to know these people and to serve them too.

On December 4th, please spare a thought for PKS kids and their families.

What if social media were bad for us?

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How did we fill our time back in 2006, the year before many of us began adopting a new way of living?

What would we do if, suddenly, tomorrow, we woke up and discovered that social media was gone?

If we suddenly came face-to-face with who we are now and what we do with a lot of our time, what would the 2006 version of ourselves think? Would our twelve-year-younger self be bemused that we spend hours every day looking at a little screen?

Perhaps we cannot reach back that far; maybe we don’t care.

There’s a chance we don’t want to know. Everybody’s doing it. Safe in the crowd.

I’m not going to suggest one particular reason why social media might be bad for us, because I think there are so many reasons and, the depth, the variety, the manifestation of the problem, changes from one person to the next.

Do we need it? Would we survive without it? If it would be hard, that would be my point.

In giving ourselves away to comparative strangers, people we ordinarily wouldn’t be in an intimate relationship with, we’ve given some of our most private information. For nothing tangible but for the currency of approval.

There is coming a day for us all when we will come face-to-face with our eternal destiny. Death hovers ever-present in the background. How each of our perceptions is about to be shaken up!

Oh, and isn’t it a grand irony that
I use social media to deplore social media.

Social media gives us a power we never had before; it gets our voice ‘out there’. But our voice is monitored, and its audience is manipulated. We are being used. We will soon learn this. When life finally grabs our attention. Then we will note the thousands of moments we gave to a machine, and to a mirage of humanity, in favour of truly being present with ourselves and those precious others God has given us physically in this physical phenomenon called life.

Thousands of moments.
Twenty moments a day?
73,000 moments in ten years.

How many of those precious living moments are we on social media… at work (unless for work purposes), at family events, distracted from activities we more ought to be doing? Or, from keeping good health, as another for-instance.

We’re losing our humanity. We’re losing touch with our children, parents, friends, peers. We’re giving our attention to a thing that does not care about us; a thing that is using our ‘intel’ for its own benefit, and perhaps even for a dark purpose.

Sure, there is some relationship and connection shared electronically; we get to stay in touch. That is unquestionable. But, for what we get, is it worth what we may be losing? Each can only answer for themselves. Are there alternatives for staying in touch?

Could our social media world be depressing us, making us more anxious, keeping us from healing?

Could it be that the ‘inspirational’ content we’re imbibing is making us dependent on it?

And is what we’re imbibing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Are our ‘news feeds’ delivering the ‘content’ we need?

Will we regret later the things we care about now?

What is capturing my attention?

Just some things to ponder.