White flag ministry for acceptance in failure and brokenness

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

Dido’s White Flag (2003) came to be an anthem for me in a season of musical anthems. I can’t be sure whether the words resembled my heart or if my heart grew to accept the words of the song. Little did it matter.

What mattered, alone, was that the pain of accepting my loss was more pleasurable than the bitterness I could have chosen in resenting my ex-partner.

The very weird thing in this was the agreement I made with the will of God; the vulnerability of simply saying, ‘I give this person up who I so desperately want… I don’t want to give her up… but I must give her up.’

This is White Flag’s hauntingly committed chorus:

I will go down with this ship,
and I won’t put my hands up and surrender,
there will be no white flag above my door,
oh I’m in love and always will be.

This song is astounding in what it conceives as possible in the realm of emotional management.

The lyrics speak of a person so smitten with their ex-partner that they cannot war with them even though the relationship is over.

It speaks of the peak of love
in the peak of grief.

And the weirdest thing about the faith involved in balancing two seemingly opposed purposes is it’s possible, and not only that, but so very purposeful. It’s when grief takes a life all its own and energy is given instead of being sapped.

A white flag ministry is an absolute imperative
in a season of failure and brokenness.

Such a ministry is discharged solely between two entities — us and God — even if a third party is centrally involved. And it is God’s therapy to us in our aloneness, in our second-guessing, in our head-and-heart struggle, in our teary meltdowns, and in our narcissistic aloofness, that shows us that we must attend to this fractious and feverish season face up and head on.

The only way we can manage to do that
is through a courageous honest vulnerability.

This white flag ministry with God, where His Spirit ministered to me in a way no human being can, showed me that the only answer to the hell I was facing was to raise the white flag whilst refusing to show it.

In simpler words, I learned that I had to do two things that seem opposed at the same time: 1) give up on the relationship that only I wanted, and 2) not give up on my love for her.

And the only way to rationalise and reconcile the enigma presented in that was to agree to love the person I could not have. I would need to love her through my prayers in wishing for her the love she sought that I, at that time, was unable to give.

That kind of sacrificial humility can come only from God,
through trust, which necessitated the need to be close to Him.

We cannot give up that which we would insist on keeping
without drawing close, clung as it were, to God.

It takes a lot to recognise and reconcile our
human frailties in our human strength,
but it is easy to accept our human frailties
in God’s power and have Him change them.

That is why I say this white flag ministry is an absolute imperative. It’s why the gospel is needed in every person’s life. It’s why the world needs to know and be converted to Christ. Everyone ought to know that the secret to everything in life is that life must have been, at one time, lived authentically through loss. It is the golden gateway to the only proper selfhood.

Our conceitedness must be crucified with Christ
before we can live the Christian endeavour.

This gospel power makes reconciling loss in a way that’s possible — it turns what is impossible in human strength into a possibility through God’s power.

Here is White Flag in a YouTube clip.