BUT… have you struggled?

YEARS ago I remember reading some luminary saying — like it was God speaking through them — that writing on suffering will always be needed.  

It resonated with me because of the journey I’d been on.  It spoke to my purpose.  

It seems absolutely berserk to say that suffering produces goodness in us, but of course, the Bible’s said this longer than even Jesus’ teachings.  

Not that any of us embraces the journey of suffering.   

The point of this article is this: 

We cannot pretend we know the wisdom,
maturity, and fruit that comes from suffering.  

We need to have BEEN THERE to credibly and capably state truths resplendent of the “deeper magic” as C.S. Lewis put it.  

I believe God allows us to struggle whole seasons of life so we genuinely KNOW in the deepest fissures of our being what it is like NOT to be able to easily escape such an existence — eternally speaking, the passage to a gift if we would learn it, but hell in a world like ours.  

In counselling those in existential conflict I’ve drawn on this so many times.  It is a saving grace to have been caught up in the vortex of suffering for an extended period of time — we would not learn the deeper humility to be gained in such seasons if we weren’t caught there for months or years.  

Grief always takes far too long.  

Getting to the point where our lives and happiness are secondary is the purpose of the journey — having died to ourselves — but truthfully, as human beings, in humility, we never remain there.  That’s okay, because God can show us enough in a glimpse of death what we can carry for the rest of our lives.  Re-reading these words, it can be easy to just write them; living them is another reality altogether!  

But I’m getting distracted.  

Who is it that can speak authoritatively
into the space of suffering?  

Usually the person who does so consistently speak into the space, for they cannot speak on other matters.  But the person needs to have been there, to the pit of their own personal hell — to be held there for a time — to have been kept there — for a substantial period of time.   

Suffering teaches us so much, not least that one person’s suffering is worlds apart from another’s.  Humility is the wisdom of the person forged through fire.  

My real question when I see a person ministering in the struggles of others, is, have you, yourself, struggled?  

I need to see this in the person counselling others in the temerity of pain they have no idea about.  Counselling’s the most humbling task — you have no idea.  What an anachronism if the guide hasn’t been there — to their own existence of suffering, I mean.  But the guide who has been there knows in the pit of their gut that they know nothing.  

But they do know how inextricably painful it is to suffer.  And that’s enough.  

For the person assisting the sufferer, the person walking alongside, if you have been chosen, you have the noblest task.  

The sufferer sees something in you, and you may well doubt your worth to them.  This is an important doubt to have, because God will only shine through you, and use you, when you insist He fills you, because you otherwise have nothing to offer.  

BUT… have you, yourself, struggled as the one before you is?  You stand on sacred ground around them.  Your work will go well when you know you stand right where God does as you minister together.  

There is no greater work in the whole of life than to sit with another in their suffering and, like them, to have no answers either, but to wait on God who is the answer.  

Who am I?  What do I have to offer?  Nothing.  And yet it is everything in this work.  

The most certain personal reality to come

The older I get the more I think about a day to come: the day I’m no longer counted among the living.  As I muse at every funeral I go to or conduct; one funeral closer to my own.  

I think about such things daily, or most days.

It seems bizarre to me to be alive right now from the context of a time when I wasn’t or are no longer.  Even if I live 100 years, far more of time passes where I either did not exist or exist no longer.  

Yet life feels long.  Ten years ago feels like a long time ago given how much my life has changed over that ten year period.  And yet, the same could be said for the previous ten years.  And the previous 15, which cover my entire adult years.  

If I live another 30 years, depending on how I’m feeling from one moment to the next, there are aspects that that’s too long or not long enough.  There are times when I’m resigned to the idea that this life is too hard — times of intense discouragement where I’m guilty of catastrophising.  But there are the realities that once I’m gone, I’m eternally missed by loved ones left behind.

All this convicts me to ensure God is holding me to a short account with myself.  I’m not getting away with anything.  All will be revealed, all truth, in the time to come, how I treated people, including having to face my own predilection for failing love and courage (to mention only two).  Am I afraid of this?  I don’t think I need to be, I will inevitably face what I must face, but I also have the opportunity now to live as truthfully and as lovingly as I humanly can.  

Whilst the nature of this reflection is personal, I’m hoping it gives pause to others to imagine what lies ahead, whether it’s one day or another 10,000 or more.  

The nature of time is that it goes.  Psalm 90:5-6 talks of human beings as grass, new in the morning, by evening dry and withered.  Being a grandfather now, one thing I’ve noticed is getting up off the floor is harder than it used to be.  All signs of a gentle but certain withering.  

I watched an astounding video recently where a 92-year-old woman reflected over her life and remarked how the last thirty years went quicker than the first sixty.  It’s sobering.  We know that the seconds don’t actually tick by faster, but it seems like they do.  

In any event, I trust in a good God and that ultimately the reality beyond this life is not only safe but beautiful — “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived — the things God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

My apologies in advance for the mind-dump here.  I hope there is some benefit to you in the few minutes you’ve taken to read it.  

What Death Teaches Us

LOSING MUM in 2022 taught me that no matter how much we prepared for her passing, we never truly believed she would be taken from us.  Strange as that is to comprehend 3.5 years later.  As I say at every funeral I officiate, “death always catches us by surprise.”  

Losing Mum taught me that losing a parent is different than losing a child.  These lessons also seem so obvious now, as if I should have always known.  

You will no doubt be reading this conscious of your own precious losses, and I invite you to bring that to your present thanksgiving awareness right now.  Take a moment to honour it.  

We grieve because of love,
that most bittersweet
of concepts in this life.  

When we lost Nathanael in 2014, in spite of the pain of losing him, something was added to me.  I also learned that I grieved better for his loss — with a ton more acceptance — than I had when I lost my first marriage in 2003.  

It was useful to me to observe this in the gait of my grief, over and again — it helped me to face the fact that I was better off for an initial grief that I’d endured a decade before.  

I’d learned an acceptance wisdom that has served me ever since.  The wisdom of letting go.  This is a wisdom that benefits our whole lives, and as our lives always ripple into others’ lives, theirs is benefitted from our benefit, too.  

When I lost a career that was very dear to me — at the time, the centre of my identity — it taught me that my identity was in the wrong place.  So many times I’ve had to learn and re-learn this lesson — a thing that’s stuck a little more in 2022 and then again even last year.  I don’t pretend that I have arrived, I expect to learn more in future on this lesson, but there are some things I’ve completely let go of that needed to be let go of.  

An everyday non-religious way of positing the truth of Job 1:21 summarises a key juncture of our development: 

“Life gives and the Life takes away,
blessed be Life for what we learn.”    

Only when we learn the lesson of accepting the
loss of things have we mastered the key lesson in life.  

The purpose of loss is shrouded in what we gain, what we learn, what we glean; yes, from within the caverns of pain we find ourselves in, from within the fissures of desolate disconnection we endure.  

Never more true: out of loss there is gain.  Spiritual gain for what we learn.  For the wisdom to live life well.  

Love finds itself defined in truth

There are many ways of saying it, but “love finds itself defined in truth” is a good start.  This short article will not be a perfect treatise on the matter of love within truth or truth within love, but it is no less worth writing.  

Truth is an inherent part of love, and what besmirches love is conditionality — a betrayal of love — a place where conditions are or must be placed on the love.  But there is generally an initiator of such conditionality in love, and the parties who respond with conditionality (the abused/neglected) always do so because of the harm the conditionality evokes.  

Conditions can be placed on love, either through the initiation to love — which can make love a thing of abuse or neglect, often based in the initiator’s sense of entitlement — or through the response to love, where safe boundaries are placed in response to the initiation of conditional love.  

Of course, conditional love is one antithesis of love.  

Love by inherent design is sacrificial, unconditional.  

Such inadequacies of love are placed there by those who have been hurt and have not healed or learned to trust again, or by those who feel entitled to love (feeling entitled to love is an antithesis of love — not recognising love’s a respect to be earned and maintained — that loving is giving without expectation of return), and by those who respond to those who feel entitled, installing boundaries for their and others’ protection.  

Where there is conditionality in love, there is also conditionality of truth.  People who cannot handle the truth tend to be those who initiate conditional love.  And in these situations, we tend to be drawn into reciprocating part truth for part truth — it becomes a stunted relationship that cannot reach its full potential; it can feel impossible to safely reciprocate trusting the untrustworthy with truth.  It can be unsafe and unwise.  

There is much more that could be written here, but let me move to truth’s central role in love.  

Let’s turn to the positive duty in love which finds itself enunciated in truth.  

Where truth reigns in a relationship, love is supreme and the parties can live in safety and grow freely as a result.  

Where love is grounded in truth is in the concept of faithfulness.  

One cannot be faithful without being truthful.  

Where there is faithfulness, there are no lies.  The test of true love is whether there is space for lies.  

A lie = any nontruth.

Of course, in our human relationships, we wrestle constantly with sin, which is that capacity in us all to do the wrong thing.  Even if it’s only 2 percent wrong, it’s not right nor loving, especially because we tend to underestimate the value of our wrongs and overestimate the value of others’ wrongs.  In other words, if I think I’m 2 percent wrong, I’m probably 10 percent wrong and other people may think it’s a lot more than that.  

This is where love and truth are aligned.  Love serves to the commitment of truth.  Love doesn’t miss the mark.  Love honours truth.  Love duly repents to the fullest discernable measure of the truth when it is wrong.  

The faithful person is the best person to be in a relationship with because they’re trustworthy.  

The faithful person honours truth and therefore loves unconditionally — the best they can, and when they miss the mark, they repent (make amends).  

The irony is that our task in life is to BE this person.  It’s only when we’re faithful, honouring truth, fully committed to love, that we experience the fullness of peace, hope, and joy available in this life.  

God blesses the faithful, and the more devoted to truth we are, the more abundant life we will experience.  

POSTSCRIPT: I find it’s quite common for people to think I’m writing this about you.  Truth is some of this many relate with.  I wrote this as it came to me as an idea to write on, i.e., not from any actual situation in my life.  It certainly doesn’t relate to any of my pastoral or chaplaincy work.  What I’ve written is to be seen as observations from me, that’s all. 

Winning the Battle of the Mind

Recently I found myself in a familiar battle — the battle of my mind.  For me at least, I find I’m deceived and deluded at times, and my mind threatens to leap off great precipices into unknown and perilous abysses.  Not always, but often enough.  I think it’s pretty normal for many of us.  

Anxiety is often a sign that we’re imperilled spiritually, especially when we’re tempted to see others as enemies.  A form of cognitive bias imagines others motives as bad and ours as good (technical name: motive attribution asymmetry).  We need to overcome this bias by seeing it for what it is and agreeing to change our minds.  

Winning the battle of the mind means we acknowledge that spiritually we don’t ‘wage war’ with flesh and blood but with powers in the spiritual realm — powers that battle for control of our minds, wishing to influence our hearts, contorting our feelings.  

Winning the battle of the mind starts with an openness of heart.  It takes humility to be open to reflect on being wrong.  None of us enjoys this.  But it is key to relating well with others.  It is also key to being at peace with ourselves and God.  

If I can genuinely ask the question of myself, “Could I be in error (even in part) here?” I stand at the doorway of my relational freedom with others.  

“Where I have offended them, I can work my way back.”  

“Where I have created distance by my actions, however well intended I was, I can foster forgiveness through apology.”  

The good thing about accepting our responsibility to correct ourselves when we’re wrong is that we have power to influence ourselves.  We don’t have that power of influence over others.  

The peace of God is ours when we live right with others.  When we have won the battle of the mind and we no longer see others as enemies.  

What a beautiful world we can enjoy when we’re not demonising people.  

Of course, there will always be those who don’t party along such lines.  Let them.  For us, however, there is life to be had in reconciliation with those who also wish to live this way — happy to be wrong, willing to initiate the reparative work of relating one with another in humility.

The darkness of the depressed descension

The darkness descends with no announcement but its very presence.  

Suddenly out of nowhere, the mind vacuous somehow, the body emptied of energy, the spirit bereft of the purpose to exist.   

Nobody can discount the enigma of the depressed descension; it confounds ‘the best of us’.  Indeed, the times we most think we’re beyond its ravages is the time we may be most vulnerable.  

Like loss and grief, depressed moments, and clinical depression, are respecters of no persons.  I’ve met 50-year-olds who were stunned when they plummeted for the very first time into the abyss of a mental health crisis.  

I normalise it here for you.  You are one-in-two.  50 percent of people will suffer some form of depressed descension in this day.  And we can think of it as a gift even if it’s terrible.  

It’s a gift because it opens our eyes to the horror of debilitation, to the presence of despair despite the apparent hope all around us.  Once our eyes have been opened to these horrors it piques the conscience of our sensibility.  Compassion comes alive in us!  

Think of a world where every single human being is blessed with the gift of compassion.  What a beautiful world that would be.  It is better to be compassionate than not be.  

But that is not our world, and at times it can be something other humans do that disrupts our spirit, triggering us.  There are just as many times when we’re perplexed and have no rationale for why we feel the way we do.  Be validated, this is normal, and no amount of searching will uncover it until we make meaning of it at a later stage.  

Peace can seem impossible amid the battle.  The more we let go and let God, the quicker peace re-enters our life.  The wisdom of lament advises us to divest the frustration and anger and invest in the truth of how we feel — it’s sorrow or fear.  

If we can go to our sorrow and face it as it is, nothing will overcome us.  Nothing overcomes us when we accept this state we, in this moment, cannot change.  

The depressed descension is a horror to our anticipation.  If we can sit with it, pour out our heart, surrendering to it, we may more easily rise out of it.  

Go gently with yourself, gentle soul.  Fret not, it only takes us to darker places.  Get some support around you, and reach out to Him who hears your soul cry.  

When Failing Is Succeeding

None of us plans to fail.  None of us likes to fail.   But fail we will!  

We know that striving for success inevitably leads us to deplore ourselves when we fail.  

We cruel ourselves in fear, guilt,
and shame when we fail.

One of the greatest gifts of growth in life is when we’ve let go of our perfectionism — suddenly we’re able to experience the simplest joys from our work.  They are suddenly within reach when we’re not looking for the problems within it.  

And when we lower our standards of ourselves,
we lower our standards of others,
and we are more loving and less judgemental.  

In recent days, I’ve performed several public speaking roles, moderating a panel at a conference, awarding an award at a ceremony, preaching a sermon at church, delivering an ‘industry address’ at the Governor’s Chaplaincy Awards.  Whilst I did all these speaking tasks capably, the way they were delivered was far from perfect.  Would I have liked to have done them better?  Yes, but… I think it’s more important to lead in not being perfect — to show people there is dignity in part failure.

I’m comfortable with being conspicuously average or even under par — because I’m not perfect and never will be.  I even catch myself giving the chase for perfection away — it’s a beautifully freeing thing to do.  

If I’m not good enough for some people and situations, so be it.  Why should it bother me?  If it did bother me, I’m sure I wouldn’t be capable of doing what I do because my increased anxiety would get the better of me.  

Here is a paradoxical thesis for you:
FAIL and do so with joy.  

I’m not suggesting you fail at anything that hurts others, but fail at something that bruises your ego.  

When we achieve this, we have put one of our fears into the shade and it no longer has any power over us.  We can allow ourselves the imperfections due to any human being.  

If we can understand and forgive failure in ourselves,
we can understand and forgive failure in others.  

~~~

The problem with perfectionism is we can NEVER achieve it.  

It sits ever there on the horizon, five kilometres away, always promising to be seen but impossible to reach.  What folly to chase it like the wind.  

Better by far to go gently with ourselves in conspicuous moments of failure that reveal themselves to us in guilt or shame.  

Here’s a practice for you: fail.  Yes, you saw that word and noticed it’s a verb.  You can DO it.  Again, I’m not suggesting you fail at anything that hurts others, but something that hurts your ego.  

Fail well and we show humility — a much prized character trait.  

Let the cards fall where they will, and then experience the power of living without that fear.  

So when is failing succeeding?  When we can consistently forgive ourselves in failure we are successfully living with more joy and freedom.