Unity, The Spiritual Gifts, Truth and Love

“But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

~Ephesians 4:15-16 (NRSV).

Abundant strength in all departments, any good team has few (if any) weak links. It is not a complement of stars, but a star complement.

The giver of gifts—the Father of Lights (James 1:17)—has apportioned gifting for each one in the Body of Christ: an entity for the glorification of God here on earth and the worship of God in heaven. Those individual gifts must complement the overall sortie-of-grace or God isn’t glorified and the mission of the Church is diminished.

Awkwardness of Maintaining a Functioning Body

The older I get the more I realise the aches and pains of the physical body, though my lower back was much worse twenty years ago than it is now.

Notwithstanding, we injure ourselves and deal with niggles all the time. If it’s not a sore neck then we have a digestive problem, or we’re depressed, or we have limited use of another part of our bodies. It can seem a massive task just getting the body to the starting line at times.

At any one time there is at least one thing wrong with my body; no sooner do I ‘welcome’ the newest ailment, the old one gone I’m thankful for, praying it won’t revisit me.

In much the same way issues and contentions mount up against the Body of Christ. Links of any chain come under surprising sudden strain. They contend against the body’s maturity.

The Body’s Growth to/in Maturity

Just like the physical body—which is governed in certain ways by the mind (beyond external limitations)—the Body of Christ is governed by the Spirit of God.

The purpose of both bodies is to function—efficiently and with effect.

Through the select and grace-apportioned use of gifts, the Body of Christ is honed and hopefully poised to glorify God here on earth to the very heights of the will of God. Per the physical body setting itself to run life’s race, everything is prepared and all risks are to be mitigated. Both are wisdom activities... like running in machine-like unison.

Maturity is the hope for the realisation of optimisation. In other words, when life turns real we want a body fit for duty—one that can attend to both the diversity of the task (using all the body parts or gifts required) and task specifics.

The body serves us (and the Body, the Lord) and not the other way around. Additionally, the individual body part serves the overall body, and the disciple with their gift serves the Body of Christ, not the other way around. But there are also times when the larger part (the body/Body) ministers to the smaller as a parent helps a child.

Speaking the truth in love is the very manifestation of the mature Body’s modus operandi. It’s a key sign that the Body is fit for the task God gives it.

It is most important that the Church attains and maintains the fullness of Christ these very ways. Each of us has a key role; to exercise our gifts and our overall way, maturely.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Men Respecting Women

Three words mean so much for our civilisation—for men to be manly enough to respect the women around them; their wives, mothers, sisters and co-workers, particularly.

Yet, gutless, fearful men cannot bring themselves to respect women. Their abuse and neglect of women spurns from a pitiful lack within them, as they strive for their self-esteem through the folly of macho ends.

Perhaps as a father of three daughters, and being at times a very flawed husband, I will identify myself as a man who’s struggled to appropriately respect the women in my life. The failure of my first marriage taught me much about the importance of men respecting women. I’ve learned first-hand that treating women like one of the guys, or without the appropriate care, can be a big mistake. Not that I would’ve been described as anything abnormal so far as husbands are concerned. That’s the point. Men very often don’t get it. We must rise above ourselves to achieve a level of respect that God requires when it comes to women.

A mature man is one who knows how to treat a woman.

Women – The ‘Holier’ Of Human Creatures

What might sound ridiculous is, in my opinion, nevertheless true. Women might only be insensitive and uncouth when they’ve been exposed, even dominated, by the male culture around them. It may have been a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.

Women, generally speaking, are much more principled than men are, and perhaps men have the additional pressure of the macho persona to uphold.

As I write that women are holier of the human creatures, I necessarily check myself. Is this true? Are women, generally speaking, further from tests and temptations than men are? Perhaps not entirely, but a woman’s test and temptation seems fundamentally different and more subtle than a man’s. They’re the gentler gender. Care is more their aim than it is a man’s. And without being seared beyond recognition, their consciences seem more able to be right-sized and redeemed. They’re also truer, more often than not, regarding the reality of their emotions than men are.

A Task Big Enough For A Man

Men must understand that women need to be treated like human beings and not treated as if they can be owned, utilised or used. Men can’t treat women like they often treat other men, not that other men should be treated anything less than human beings either.

The task big enough for a real man is to be sensitive enough to the needs of the moment, trying to sense and intuit how to treat the women in their midst. This is not about treating them any better than anyone else; but it’s about treating them as we would wish—if we were women—to be treated.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Totally Tolerating Transgressions

If we ever wish to experience a miracle of God’s grace it’s easily manufactured. Nothing is more miraculous than the toleration of a transgression—especially in our dog-eat-dog world.

Very few people expect the extension of grace toward them, and much less when they’re in the mode of attack against us—which is so often a fear response.

As we take these fear responses—the attacks upon our mind, body and soul—and allow them to hang without counter-attack, we, by God’s miraculous grace, convert them into testimonies for later unification. Truth be told, most people are gobsmacked to find there’s no counter-attack. And their responses are strange. Our response of tolerating their fear-based attack often gives them something to reflect on. And our observation of this gives us something to think on, too.

Experiences Of Toleration Teach Us

Toleration within attack is a comparatively rare response. We hardly think in the spur of the moment to do nothing, and let our response hang upon further enquiry. So, just the fact of not responding is a miracle of itself. Yet, at one level, could there be anything easier than doing nothing? But to resist an attack by counter-attack is our unfortunate general default—a thing to unlearn.

We can learn a better way. Even just one experience of not counter-attacking can teach us so much about human nature, and about the power of wresting control by doing nothing.

We see, here, that when we resist the counter-attack, absorbing their hurts toward us, and not even counter-attacking within our minds, we’ve facilitated room for the Lord to embellish grace in the space between them and us. A godly power is made known. The agenda for aggression is converted in an instant to an agenda for reflection and the possibility for harmony.

When There’s No War At All

It’s only the enemy that wants us to think the world is full of conflict. We’re only affected negatively by conflict in our world when we live it. Otherwise, observations of conflict intuit a perspective of empathy within us. And we see so much more, including many threads of humanity, than conflict.

And there ought to be empathy present in situations where conflict abounds, for many people do not know why they fight, why they experience aggression, or why they hate. Only the love of Christ brings forth the truth in unobtrusive and bounteous ways. Only where love is presented in an entirely uncompetitive context will people see it for what it is—a cosmic game-changer.

A vital truth is this: the war, if ever there was one, exists more between our ears and between our minds and hearts than anywhere else. When we win the victory over ourselves, and over our climbing will to attack and counter-attack, we may understand that attacking behaviour comes, mostly, from disharmony within.

***

The power of love defeats the power of attack. When we tolerate transgressions miraculous things can occur. The space between us and them is transformed; aggression makes way for reflection. Many incalculable things of miraculous grace occur within toleration.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

As always, there should be, on this subject, a caveat: where the constancy of abuse or neglect is apparent, toleration may serve no good purpose.

Privacy – A Vital Freedom

I heard a story once of a girl who, upon kissing her father goodbye at the airport, would each morning thereafter put on his last-worn shirt as she ate her breakfast. It was worn for a mix of pride, the longing for her dad, and as a visible prayer for his safety and safe return. And to those close enough to her, the knowledge of this practice was okay. But if it was to be revealed to others not so close, or in circumstances she couldn’t control, a vital breach of privacy would occur. She may feel exposed to being mocked. Then upon such an experience would be embarrassment; an uncontrolled exposure leading to feelings of shame.

Not that such love—the wearing of her father’s shirt—ought to reasonably produce such shame, but that is the nature of privacy. We only open up when it’s safe to do so.

For everyone, there’s a vital freedom in privacy.

Owning Many Sorts Of Embarrassment

The story of the girl above is a story close to the heart of every one of us. We each have ‘secrets’ highlighting places of our identities we make known to only a few; only a few get the gate pass into discreet corners of our hearts. When it comes to children, access to such otherwise hidden places are cherished, indeed. We don’t trample them.

A feature of our humanity is we open our hearts. Exposures producing embarrassment are bound to occur because we trust, and that trust isn’t always founded soundly.

These exposures of the soul’s secrets, elucidating the way we think and feel, that we may even struggle with, only prove embarrassing when they occur beyond our control. In the case of a child, he or she chooses to open his or her world by divulging inner information. We do the same. We choose who we’ll trust with what information. Our privacy is a controlled environment, and it’s only us who has the key. But our secrets of privacy are not bad secrets at all. They’re actually good things that we keep hidden with our discernment.

This is why, even though we’re embarrassed by uncontrolled exposures of our privacy, we shouldn’t feel shame at all, but, of course, we do.

There is an important twofold lesson in this regarding the emotion of shame. Firstly, whilst we shouldn’t feel shamed we often do, and this creates many other cascading anxieties. Secondly, the shame and embarrassment within uncontrolled exposure is inevitable, yet it’s not embarrassment because we’re wrong—though, somehow, we may feel it’s wrong.

The challenge, if we’re big enough, is to ‘own’ many sorts of embarrassment so that they wouldn’t damage us, like they may have damaged us as children upon uncontrolled exposure. Owning the rights to our privacy, and protecting same, is a vital freedom of self-respect.

***

Accepting that we own our rights of privacy is the hallmark of our humanity. We carefully select those we trust. And embarrassment for breaches of our privacy is an appropriate feeling. Privacy is a vital freedom we should, always, hope to respect.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Why Deeds-of-Hate Don’t Work

There’s a time and a circumstance where we’re despised for something we’ve done or didn’t do; blame is vested toward us and the disgust of which it comes is poignant and incessant, for the season it lasts.

Perhaps we’ve had our turn at it. Someone has turned us inside out upon ourselves, and we couldn’t bear the thought of them being happy. We wanted them to get their just desserts—for things to end badly for them.

What we have here are thoughts and, certainly, deeds of hate, for wherever there’s a thought a deed is later, more often than not, actioned. We don’t have to think too far to imagine an example from our experience; examples from either side of the ledger.

The Stimulus For Hatred

Endless would be the list that proffers us toward feelings of hatred. These feelings come from deep within and cannot always be explained.

From deep within, and often several levels deeper than our conscious understanding, exists the nerve that’s piqued by given situations—for simplicity, let’s call it the hatred nerve—and we (or they) get instinctually angry and either withdraw or attack.

So often the stimulus that jangles this hatred nerve is either unacknowledged or unexplored. Either we (or they) aren’t aware or don’t understand why we get angry or we (or they) fuel the anger, justifying it as okay.

But either allowing hatred to fester or actually fuelling it is counter-productive. It never achieves for us (or them) what we (or they) set out to achieve. The demise of the hated rarely occurs. Indeed, successes are now more likely to be noticed by the hater as envy commences in full swing.

The Reason Hatred Never Works

Many people know this already, but the world works on love, on caring, on responsibility toward those ends, and in reciprocity. This is the Divine order, whether we like it or not. God has created life this way and loving action works harmoniously, whereas hating action divides, even—at its foremost—the self.

Those that hate end up despising themselves (below their awareness) and the more they refuse to acknowledge the truth the more they’re confounded by themselves; their end is never good. If it’s not resolved, they just get angrier.

Even worse is this fact: those in the position of hating will, by their thoughts and actions, twist others around them within their poisonous web. Now others are forced to choose between lies and the harder-to-see truth. And if the hater holds any influence, others will believe the lies and their lives will be compromised as a result.

Hating doesn’t just affect the hater, but it spirals off affecting others’ lives too. It can never end well for those who believe in lies.

***

Hating goes against the grain of life and becomes a curse to the hater and those who love the hater most. It rarely affects the person hated as much. Hating simply doesn’t work.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Making the Most of the Living Years

There is a way beyond the regret we experience for not having said or done things differently regarding someone special who’s passed away. But better than that, even, is to tend to those concerns in the here and now. Perennial annoyances should be nipped in the bud before it’s too late.

“I just wish I could have told him in the living years.”

~Mike and the Mechanics, The Living Years (1988)

Where God gives us our own way we come, later, to despise it. We held on to dark concerns, those different to our loved one, and they polarised our interaction. We held on and they held on and never the twain would meet.

But there’s more to life than even our most important concerns; living in harmony, even upon sharp disagreement, is one of the secrets of life. To subsist in harmonious tension with someone we’re inextricably linked with, by birth or by blood, is something we’re all capable of. There is no loss to our values, to what we hold dear, to love someone whom we disagree with. This is our character test.

Appreciating The History Of Our Moments

We’re apt not to think about this until it’s too late.

Our family history we take for granted, usually, until it’s too late. We may sense the significance in the history—in the ordinary moments spent together—and we may occasionally act in a way to honour this history, but we don’t grasp it in all its essence, generally, until it’s too late.

Surely this is a gentle reminder, from God, that our human wisdom is incomplete; that we’ve missed something all along. In some warped way it could be a privilege that all humanity would experience this loss, and the gap between them and their God, before eternity comes; when the resounding truth comes home and bears itself over our felt experience.

Each common moment cannot be appreciated to the level and depth of our potential; it’s beyond our human capacity to achieve that. And God’s grace is available so we might feel forgiven for not having said and done things we ought to have reasonably done, as we can see via hindsight. We didn’t appreciate our family history—those moments we could touch. We couldn’t fully appreciate them. But now, just now, whilst its part of our conscious experience, we can do something significant with those we’re still present with; just now.

***

Making the most of the living years, and saying and doing that which we can with our family members before it’s too late, is the essence of life. God gifts us no better than our opportunity to do now what can’t be done then.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Acknowledgement: to Rowland Croucher.

Enjoying Love from Opposite Perspectives

What brought us together in the symphonic majesty of romance, possibly tears at us, later, as we consider how different our backgrounds had been. For all the similarities a husband and wife share there are bound to be many more dissimilarities.

Just as the similarities have drawn us together, our dissimilarities, if we’ll let them, can tear us apart. Engendering an uncommon respect for each other’s pasts is crucial if marriages are to blossom.

The Importance Of Time And Understanding

Possibly the biggest hurdle any relationship has is resolving what presents as irreconcilable differences. And many, by appearance, are those.

Appearance is the thing, for what presents as an irreconcilable difference has no potential as a barrier where partners to the relationship commit to an openness of consideration that respects the other, no matter what. This is obviously easier said than done. But at all times it’s possible.

And this merely elucidates the importance of time and understanding; the time required to augment the maturing of understanding. Time, this way, is the portent signifying the process—and it’s by process that we all learn and develop and grow. It all takes time.

Time facilitates understanding, as we, by the lengthening of our years together, deepen our appreciation of our mate. But time is not the only consideration, for many have been married decades and still haven’t grown as God may have desired them to grow.

The Honed Understanding

Whilst time together is a critical ingredient, nothing will bring us together like an understanding of our mate, and their uniqueness to themselves, us, and God. No one deserves more respect than our partners. They’ve chosen to live with us. They’ve committed to live through all our stuff. They may even be more committed to parts of us than we are to ourselves—certainly by way of holding us to account for our health, for instance.

Understanding can’t be underestimated as a vital human growth quality. Only the mature reach a sustainable understanding. And being that maturity is the noblest of all conquests, where we get to be more of ourselves than ever before, we have every reason to gain in understanding.

Any misunderstanding in marital arrangements is a sharp reminder of our individual or collective lack of maturity. For this lack we should pray, trusting the process of development as we surrender, continually, to God.

***

Truly appreciating the vast diversities of difference in our partners requires time and understanding. Each partner has work to do in gaining understanding so as to love better. Everybody’s pasts are important and integrally part of them and, therefore, part of the marriage. Everybody’s pasts must be respected.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Being Happily Misunderstood

None of us wants to be misunderstood, but the fact is we’ll often be misunderstood. We don’t need to be rude or uncouth in response. It’d be far better to learn how to be happily misunderstood.

When we’re misunderstood it creates dissonance, whether consciously or unconsciously. Gaining a happy acceptance of being misunderstood is a vital resiliency mechanism for life. It gives us a way of reducing our inner discord that we either deny or find upsetting.

Two Unhealthy Responses

Taking the situation of being misunderstood, perhaps where someone believes we’ve betrayed them when we haven’t or never meant to, there are two responses that are unhealthy. Yet, each of us will vacillate between the two, and may find ourselves favouring one by the features of our personality default—whether fight or flight.

The Aggression to Fight

One of the classic responses to being attacked, and being misunderstood is taken as a form of attack, is counter-attack. ‘We can’t just sit here and take this without defending ourselves!’ is the inner sentiment of a heart and mind all at sea, but fiercely indignant, with its situation. Most ‘fights’ end badly.

The Submission of Flight

The other classic response is to harmonise the encounter—to quell the attack. The motive is to hasten in retreat so that conflict can be avoided, whether it’s a healthy conflict or not. And some conflicts are healthy. Some provide a way through; a better relationship is forged. It’s just that all conflicts need to be skilfully negotiated.

***

Despite reticence to anger management problems or the doormat syndrome, neither fight nor flight is superior to the other. They’re both inferior responses. Neither of these responses is doing us, the other person, or our relationship any lasting favours.

Reactionary behaviour is always found wanting.

A Better Response Fits With Truth And Faith

Otherwise termed as assertiveness, the position between aggression and submission, the right response to situations of being misunderstood is to happily accept the inner discord, and the tension between them and us, and to let it ‘sit’ pending further investigation. What we have here is delay; not to delay for any other reason but to continually align with truth and, therefore, exemplify faith.

Relationship outcomes, in the eventual sense, always give way to the truth. People are often vindicated later as the truth comes to bear in the relational setting.

Being happily misunderstood accepts a mighty and eternal truth: people will get it wrong about us sometimes. When we lurch back in defence, or too quickly own something we shouldn’t, our credibility suffers because we’ve sold out on the truth—that knowledge that’s still not known but is coming. The truth lags. But it does come.

This lag may take little more than a moment or several minutes. It may take longer. We gain (or retain) more respect from people when we wait on the truth—even in the tension of conflict.

***

We feel more at peace when we’ve got tools for being misunderstood—which happens daily. Getting panicked and defending ourselves never helps. Being happily misunderstood is about holding the moment of conflict, in faith, so the truth may be revealed in a cooler light of day. The truth is about relational fairness. Faith augments it.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

The Art of Happy Relaxation

Nothing beats a quiet night at home. Add to this prospect a couple of nice drinks, something tasty to eat and a movie and we have joyous simplicity wrapped up in the moment.

Whether we have a partner or not we can enjoy such a night. And if we feel like fellowship we do it with our best friend forever (BFF). If we’re alone we enjoy it with God. We make the best of what we have, and we commit to enjoy it.

Relaxation is prospered in change; when we afford the possibility and capacity of downing tools when we’ve been especially busy or in undertaking a cherished repose when the mental landscape has been arduous. There’s a time for relaxation; a time when we escape from the world; relaxation is not just a weekend activity; it occurs when we need it—when God provides the opportunity and we grasp it.

Planning The Opportunity

Everyone may foresee the opportunities for growth in the regress of availability—when we, for a time, disappear from common view. These are times when we turn off our computers, unhook the phone and cut ourselves off so we may be replenished.

There is as much beneficence in planning the opportunity than executing it.

When we imagine the availing space coming to us in rest and relaxation, in the freedom we have in escaping our world, we feel joyful; in control. The imagination has its way of refining our known place in the world, to make it as we would have it. Within the boundaries of possibility the imagination creates a foreseeable circumstance and environment that we can relax into. Using our resources, and any method we choose, we plan and we enjoy the planning.

Taking The Opportunity To Rest And Relax

At last the opportunity has arrived. We advise people or perhaps we don’t. We’ll be, for a time defined, out of reach, out of place, out of time. We’ll only be devoted to that environment we’ve set up; that’s to be our world for this time.

There’s a tremendous amount of resurrecting personal power in taking this sense of control. We live it without looking too far forward. Each minute we enjoy the moment. We want the memory of this occasion to reach deep down into us, so we can draw the pleasantness out of such rest any time we wish in the future—especially when we feel stressed and pushed for coping.

Perhaps one of the troubles of rest and relaxation is when it finishes. The mind’s eye should have available to it the experience of those feelings; the calm and the space felt. Instead of lamenting the closing of the opportunity to rest and recover, we do it in a way that allows us to relive the memory any time we want.

***

Everyone needs rest and relaxation; opportunity to recover. There’s joy in the planning, for our imaginations are sparked. Then comes time to withdraw from the world—bliss! We enjoy the moment in a way that when it finishes we can reclaim these memories any time we wish. Best it is to plan frequent times of rest and relaxation. The soul needs them.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

Transforming a Relationship with ‘History’

Life revolves around relationships, be they with others, ourselves and ultimately with God. There’s no time where we get away from this truth. But, many of our relationships have formed to the point of no return so far as a dysfunctional history is concerned. This grieves us. It may grieve them, too.

Things have happened (some might say, s . . t happened) and we and they wear that history reluctantly, especially if we or they bear the desire for authenticity and freedom with each other.

With some of those twisted relationships we have the opportunity to transform a disjointed history.

Entering A New Relational Age

Hope presents upon the imagination of one party, or both parties, desiring more—for both—from the relationship. Here one or the other, or both, are willing to extend a copious portion of grace to refloat the relationship.

To begin with, though, we need to be realistic.

Creating a new, entirely level playing field may be impossible given our individual and collective histories. But the relationship may still be transformed, given one fact, if we accept it, by faith, as a fact.

All dynamics, of which the relationship is but one, exist in dynamism—movement is implied. There is flow. No relationship becomes entirely static.

We can move the bases of any relationship however we want, in any direction we want, because we’re one of the actors. We have some influence. Particularly when it comes to familial relationships, where our hearts are sown irrevocably in love, we have the perfect motivation to do whatever it takes to rebuild or reclaim the love both parties do feel the need for.

Whatever It Takes

Whilst it would be impossible to predict what’s required to transform the-relationship-with-history, there are the obvious options.

In some relationships honesty is the best policy. In other relationships it’s only a matter of time. For some others it’s a matter of consistent application of grace—the test is our patience. Most of all, when there’s history, we reset our expectations. We should never expect perfect arrangements, but instead we could magnify the small wins (without exaggeration).

When we’re willing to do whatever it takes to restore the imbalance, using our imaginations to find innovative ways to love, God will side with us and often provide a way.

***

History is impossible to rewrite, yet it’s possible to transform an imperfect past, by forgiving in the present, in order to forge a better future. It starts with us, today. As we add patience and grace to our interactions we forge that better future, one loving act at a time, never disconsolate at setbacks. We keep moving forward.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.