Failing Well

Last year I failed. What’s more, ever since I have been carrying around the feeling, wrapped up tight in a little packet of anger, that God failed me. I reached the end of my strength, the end of myself and I turned to him and he didn’t show up. He let me fail. Heck, he set me up to fail. Those are my true and honest feelings. I feel let down. Betrayed. And because he let me down I ended up battered and bruised and gingerly picking myself up off the floor. I lost things and people I love. And I left other people bruised and battered too.

I failed and it was calamitous. I failed and it smashed my life to pieces. I failed and all of the doors that had opened up to use my gifts to serve God in a way I had hoped and dreamed of for years came shuttering down. Called to surrender all of my ambitions, hopes and plans again not because of any external circumstance but because of weakness, inadequacy, lack within me. Because I failed.

Cast back out into limbo, into the place of questions, what should I even be doing with my life? Should I pursue the calling I feel so intensely it’s more of a demand, when whatever I try to do falls apart, is snatched away. When I meet failure over and over again. Should I give up? Settle for not selling out for the gospel, for a life more ordinary.

Several people, non-Christians, have said to me recently, yes sure, that thing, that needs doing, someone should do that, but not you. You are too fragile, too unstable, too vulnerable. Let someone else take the risk, someone else carry the burden. Retreat to where it’s safe. And I wonder, are they right? Is that what God is trying to tell me? Stop seeking out the least and the lost with the good news of the gospel, stop giving everything you have away because it breaks your heart to see all the people who have even less than you. That’s for other people, not you. You are too weak, too riddled with sin, too broken. All you do is fail and lose and fail and lose and what good does that do anyone? And if God wanted you to do these things, why does he let you fail and fall and kick around in the dirt? Why does he give you this compassion and empathy and passion for communicating the gospel with one hand and such weaknesses so that they are next to impossible to use with the other? What do you have to offer when the best you ever have to offer is a job half done and usually a mess left behind?

The place of failure is a place of questions. Questions for yourself and questions for God. I can’t answer all of my questions. I don’t honestly know what God wants from me. I don’t know if my indwelling sin and brokenness disqualifies me from doing anything good or lasting or worthwhile with the gifts and desires God has given me to serve him and to love others. If the mixed motives behind the desires themselves, the piece that wants others to admire me, the piece that wants praise of man, the piece that wants to define myself by my good deeds, my self-righteousness, means that there is anything good left in the things that I do because I want to honour and obey, because I want to love as Jesus has loved me. Do I fail because I bring nothing but my own desire for glory, so God never honours my efforts or uses them to glorify himself and bless others? And if that is true, why won’t he fix it? I can’t. And do I just stop trying until he does?

Looking inside there are no answers, only more questions. But even when I’m so mad at him I could spit, God’s grace doesn’t stop and his voice isn’t silent. And as I’ve tuned in to listen again a little, set aside my toddler tantrum and my sniffy fit of pique, here are some of the things he has been saying to me.

1.       I don’t need you.

One of the frustrations of having to walk away is the thought of things left undone. Of the people you left behind, the shattered relationships, the promise unfulfilled. The frustration of the ways you might have shared and helped and discipled others, the work still left to do but in which you no longer are able to take a part. The harvest field ripe and the workers one man short.

There are many answers to this feeling. One is simple, you are not indispensable. God closed that door, you have no control over its opening. Well, he is the God who can cause the stones to cry out, he can make a donkey speak his word if he chooses. He doesn’t need you. 

2.       I care more than you do.

The people he gave you to love, who you have next to abandoned because of the gate slammed shut behind you, they don’t belong to you. You might worry for them and their well-being, but like Jonah, you did not plant the seed or make it grow. God did that. They are his, the work is his. You are angry because God has taken away the work he gave you, well it was never yours. He lent it to you for a time in trust, now he demands it back. He loves them more than you do. He will provide for them. Surrender cheerfully into safer hands than yours, he cares more than you do.  

3.       I want your obedience not your success.

I was in a seminar where this was said recently and grabbed me by the guts. My ideas about failure and God’s are not the same. I sought to obey God with every ounce of strength that I had. To trust his word, to seek his presence, his truth about me, to listen to him over the voice of my fear. I failed, crashed and burned. But I strained to abide with every ounce of strength I had, with every resource I was given. And I have been angry because God ‘didn’t show up’, as if he wasn’t there, all that time. Of course he was, he was there, he just didn’t give me what I wanted. Because what I wanted was not to fail. To defeat my sin of fear, to fix the mess and to keep the life I loved.

But that wasn’t the success he was looking for in that situation. He was looking for the success that comes in failing well. In clinging to him through the storm, in surrendering everything you have and everything you want to do for him, in obedience to him. In accepting that when he doesn’t answer your prayer it isn’t because he doesn’t hear or doesn’t care but because he has decided that it is his good timing to move you on and he wants you to count it all loss for his sake. He wanted me to surrender of all my good things to him, the only truly good thing I have and he wasn’t willing to grant his peace and power over my sin of fear until I had given them up to him.

I have not been gracious in my surrender. I was stubborn, reluctant to let go. I have resented the price exacted. I have been angry with the people who failed to help me. I have seen only the failure and not the obedience demanded. I repent of that. I could not have done anything different to change the outcome of what happened. God is sovereign, he gave none of us the strength, the wisdom, the grace to deal differently with the situation, in a way that would have avoided the mess and the loss; therefore he required the sacrifice of me, the faith to say, “Thy will be done”, to give it all up to him and walk away.

He requires that same obedience now, obedience in the face of my fear of loss, when he wants me to pick up my broken tools and climb off the floor with my painful bruises and start again, knowing that whatever and whoever I may invest in loving and serving, he may at any moment require the surrender of it or them. The obedience to put myself under the authority of the church leadership by investing in serving my church, knowing that the situation may repeat and the demon of fear of authority might return, that God may allow the loss of another family, another place of belonging.

I have no promise in this life of overcoming my sin and brokenness, of becoming immune to the risk of abrupt loss of all I love because I cannot overcome my fear, of ceasing to be at the mercy of the wisdom and insight of those in authority over me. As long as I choose obedience, that is to trust and follow him, I choose risk of failure.

But as long as I choose obedience I also enter into the great and precious promises of Romans 8. Nothing is wasted, in all things he will work together to conform us to the likeness of Jesus; and he will not leave me, I have his love and nothing in this world or the next can steal that from me.

My life may look like one of constant and repeated failure but the yardstick of the world is not the yardstick of God. In his hands, failure becomes just another means of grace and another part of the journey to glory.

4.       Give thanks for your suffering.

Today’s lesson and perhaps the hardest of them all. I had a sin of fear of man that I could not defeat, by any means of grace given to me. I had a sin of fear of man it pleased God not to defeat until it had robbed me of many things that brought me joy in my life. I had a sin of fear of man which led to loss and pain and failure and defeat.

But had that sin been more easily overcome, I might not have seen it in all its depths of ugly, dangerous, destructive and overwhelming power. And I would not have had the knowledge, that such a sin as that lives in my heart, and from such sins as that have I been forgiven, and from such sins as that will I one day be delivered.

Conviction of sin is a blessing, conviction of our powerless before sin is grace, conviction of our need of Christ’s atoning death to crush the power of sin within us is mercy. Revelation of our helpless, abject failure before our sin is a mercy for which we can give thanks, for she who is forgiven much loves much. Each time God enlarges my view of my sin and allows me to be overthrown and fail before its power is an opportunity to understand better his grace and to love him more.

Further than humbly accepting his purpose and plan and my non-indispensable-ness, beyond cheerful surrender of all my good things and accepting the risk of failure as the price of obedience, God wants me to so orientate my view that my defeat and failure results not in anger, resentment and bitterness against him but rejoicing and thanksgiving. For to me as a Christian, revelation of my sin and its power is only a greater revelation of Christ’s goodness, mercy and power seen through his death to forgive and overthrow that sin within me.

“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

¹² Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

How to help the suicidal

A friend of mine has helped me by excellent example of their behaviour to me to formulate a template for what to helpfully say and do with someone in mental health crisis.

1. I love you and Jesus loves you
2. You matter to me and to God, it’s important to me that you are safe
3. This isn’t your fault
4. I know you are trying your best
5. This is going to get better

I have found this a really helpful formula to teach friends to say to me when I am in crisis and have found it effective to say to others in crisis.

If you take away nothing else from this blogpost, I will be happy. But below I have spelled out a bit more in detail what some of these things could look like in practice for church and church family.

Please don’t do that. It would make me sad.

This is the most glaringly obvious thing that most people don’t do. I understand why they don’t. Suicide is scary. It is scary to think that someone could make the decision to live or die based on not wanting to hurt you. It is scary to think that someone may die if you say the wrong thing. You don’t want to seem to be panicking or judging them or doing anything that would push them ‘over the edge’. It seems right to be calm, neutral, to give them space to make good decisions for themselves. So people are falsely calm, they act like it is no big deal. Although this may be better than panic and judgement it also sends a really dangerous message to the person in crisis. That message is, I really don’t care that you are suicidal, I’m kind of OK with you hurting yourself.

It forgets that we are relational people, that someone in crisis is not operating under any kind of logical conditions and that they are fighting the screaming voices that tell them that they are worthless and useless and everyone would be better off if they were dead. You can join those voices or contradict them. I’m going to tell you something that will probably scare you. The biggest challenges to my self-harming behaviour have not come from people calmly accepting it, they have come from people saying, don’t do that, it makes me sad. I stopped cutting because someone in my life was brave enough to say that and keep saying it.

Cutting was an expression of my feeling that I was evil and disgusting and toxic and deserved to be punished, needed to be defaced. It was an act of self-degradation to make the outside match the feelings on the inside more than anything else. And my friend said to me, don’t do that. It’s not OK. Not because you are bad for doing it, as other people said or implied, because it is a sign you are a bad person trying to manipulate others (simply and utterly untrue) but because Jesus tells me you are precious and lovely and that is not how you treat something precious and lovely. You protect it, you don’t damage it. She wanted me to stop cutting because it hurt her to see me damaging something precious. And her sense that I was precious because God said so became my sense that I was precious, firstly because she said so, then learning from that human example what it meant and felt like that God said so.

And that is something to understand. We are mediators of God’s grace to one another. We are not God and we are not Saviour, but the way in which we express our love and value for one another can teach us, in fact does teach us what it means that God loves and values us. That is the meaning of family and church as family. Most people (not all) with mental illness never grew up with that. They didn’t have family that taught them that they were precious and lovable. So they struggle to understand what it means that God loves them and calls them precious to him. Church family, slowly, painfully, patiently, faltering but persistently can re-teach that lesson. It’s about the only thing that can, it being God’s means of grace for that purpose.

The response to insecurity, to suicidality, to neediness is not to pull away but to go in closer, to increase intimacy, to commit and commit and commit until they start to believe that you are not going to abandon or reject them, and understand what it means that they have a God who won’t abandon or reject them because they are ugly or dangerous or damaged or evil or anything. Like anything that means anything in the Christian life, loving the very broken is both incredibly sacrificial and profoundly transformative for both parties to the relationship. You may feel completely out of your depth, afraid to say something wrong, but if that leads you to push someone away ‘for their own good’ you are going in the wrong direction. All they will learn from that is that someone else has rejected them, has found them not good enough, too broken, too sinful, too ugly. The people who have helped me most effectively to know Jesus have heard me say, you hurt me and now I want to die and have responded by pulling me in closer and telling me that they love me.

I didn’t start to look at many of my deep hurts until someone loved me so radically that I truly believed I could trust them. Until they had such unbelievable grace for my brokenness that I had to believe they were on my side. That gave me a space where I felt safe to have the courage to really look at my own mess and sin and not be rejected for it. Not everyone can do that, but we are all called to give to one another what we can. And the very least we can give is the assurance to someone that they matter, that the world will be a poorer place without them, if for no other reason than the fact they are God’s child. That we do in fact see them as God sees them, as precious and lovable because they are valued and loved by him.

I have always lurched into suicidal thinking when experiencing emotional pain and panic, but for the first time that reaction is becoming seriously undermined although not yet completely stopped. And that is because several people have started saying, please don’t do that, it would make me sad. One person has always said that to me. But one voice can be ignored as an outlier, two is louder, three is a shout that starts to rival the lying voices in your head. One time Jesus spoke to me directly on the verge of a very serious suicide attempt and said, don’t do that it would make me sad. It stopped me. But lately that same message has been spoken into the fog and confusion of mental health crisis by his people, with the same effect.

You should get some medical help sounds like a rejection, a ‘go away and be someone else’s problem’ statement. Suicidal people leave behind their pain for others to bear is a condemnatory statement that never feels true in the moment of crisis (no one will actually care that much if I die is a necessary pre-condition to suicidal thinking). It is a guilt trip. Don’t do that, it would make me sad, is a statement of relationship, of love. It can’t stop the pain but it can reduce it by challenging the lies and it can guard the passes against suicide as a pathway out of it.

I am keeping my phone on through the night because I want you to call me if you are going to hurt yourself.

You may be anxious about this, you may need your sleep and there may be individuals who will take advantage of this in distress for what feels to you like trivial reasons, or excessively because they are not self-aware in their consuming distress of their impact on you, but with the right people this can be an incredible act of protection. There are 2 people who as thoughtful adults have done this for me. Number of times I have used their offer = 0; Number of times it has been a protective factor to help me cling on to not hurting myself in the middle of a long, dark, painful night = dozens; number of times the thought of it has stopped me in the middle of actively and seriously attempting to take my own life = 1. Those stats seem to work for them as being worth the inconvenience.

Can I come and get you? Do you want to come over? Can I come and stay with you until you feel safe?

This is another one that could seem scary. It doesn’t feel safe to invite a suicidal person into your house. It may be inconvenient, you may have kids and be concerned about their welfare. And of course there may be times you need alone time or family time or it feels too stressful and too much pressure and you just can’t do it. You are not the Saviour and ultimately pointing to your own weakness and inadequacy to keep someone safe, whilst pointing to his can be very helpful.

But the reality is that a safe place is what I need the most when I am suicidal. There are a number of reasons why the home of a friend is the safest possible place to be. Firstly, suicidality is a place of hyper-stress and adrenaline. It is a place of terror. Imagine being in a room with a mad-axe-murderer. Then imagine that that there is no possible means of escape. Your life is in danger and you are trapped with the person endangering it. For your rational mind, this is a place of ultimate fear. This keeps your adrenaline flowing and your amygdala (fear centre) in a state of hyper-arousal and stops you from thinking rationally and self-calming. The thought of killing yourself becomes a stimulus so great it stops you from being able to manage it and the state of panic escalates until suicide seems both the problem and the answer because it will at least end this unbearable state of panic and pain. Being in a safe place, a place where you feel people want to protect you, allows the de-escalation process to begin.

Now ideally, a lot of people would like this to be a medical facility. Suicidality is so scary, the fear you will say something wrong and provoke someone stops a lot of people from offering to help. Better to let the professionals deal with it. There are two reasons this reasoning is faulty. Firstly, although medical services can serve as a safe place for de-escalation and in fact should be sought in the last resort, our mental health system is utterly broken. Emergency mental health facilities are rubbish, you are frequently left for hours in unsecure places like waiting rooms, or A&E, non-mental-health staff can treat you like a bed-blocking waste of space, these spaces are inherently stressful places to be and you are in such a state of panic if you encounter a person who seems to indicate you are a problem and they wish you would go away that feels like a confirmation that you are wrong to seek help and may lead to impulsive behaviour.

Secondly, chances are if you are suicidal you are exhausted. Sleep and mental health crisis have a complex chicken-and-egg relationship. Sleeping poorly leads to an increase risk in crisis, in fact is a necessary condition for it, but crisis puts you in a state of adrenaline which makes sleep next to impossible at all. This becomes circular. But the effect is that when you are in crisis you are fairly inevitably exhausted. The idea of sitting for 8 -12 hours in A&E trying to calm down is overwhelmingly unattractive. If there is no other possibility and it will keep you safe you may go there, but it is always hard to believe anything will make you feel better (although you know it will really) and it is the path of least resistance to lie in bed and think about killing yourself. A friend’s house usually has a bed where you can lie down and feel safe at the same time, allowing de-escalation but without costing too much effort. You are more likely to want to do it, so more likely to seek help from that source.

Thirdly and probably most significantly, in order to be seriously suicidal you have to believe that your life is worthless, that everyone would be better off if you died, that you are a toxic burden on the world. Your brain is telling you this. Screaming it at you in fact. When someone says, I care that you are safe, come here and I will try and protect you, that speaks very powerfully to the scream in your brain. It is true that you can’t stop someone from committing suicide who has absolutely decided to do it, but by saying ‘can I come and get you? Or do you want to come over? You immediately introduce a protective factor, even if you aren’t taken up on the offer. It says quite simply and without fuss a whole load of things the suicidal person needs to hear to bear their pain. I care, you matter, I understand. Even if you aren’t able to invite someone over, saying that you wish you could but explaining why you can’t because of your limitations or other commitments can in itself be very protective. Medical professionals are paid to help you stay safe, a friend’s voice provides a counterpoint of truth against the screaming lies much louder and deeper and calmer than the voice of someone you don’t know.

And a corollary to all this is that you don’t actually need to be afraid to invite a suicidal person to your house. It is not tantamount to offering suicide watch, you can go out and leave them, you don’t need to be afraid for your children. Most suicidal people are trustworthy. They won’t want to hurt you or your kids when you have shown them love. I physically cannot hurt myself in a house with children, it overrides every other consideration even in the deepest place of crisis. But mostly, just by inviting them you have probably de-escalated the situation to the point that suicide or self-harm is a far less likely outcome. You have provided a place of safe de-escalation, an affirmation of care to speak against the lie of worthlessness that drives suicidal thinking and offered a place of rest for those processes to take effect.

I can see that you are hurting, it makes sense that you feel that way.

A suicidal person is irrational. Pretty much always. They are scared, in terrific pain or numb because they have shut down the pain and with it all emotion. They are confused, because they are flooded with stress chemicals. Arguing with them, challenging their negative thoughts, words or actions about others is probably not going to lead to any good right now. There is one piece of advice for those that work with people with BPD which is very counterintuitive but incredibly important. People with BPD feel the discrepancy between the stimulus and their emotional reactions and they fight their emotions, hide them, feel ashamed of them and fear them. That leads to a heightening of stress and self-judgement and shame which feeds the emotions themselves and maintains the state of crisis.

The first and necessary pre-condition of de-escalating those emotions is acceptance of them as a real, valid and reasonable response to the stimulus. It’s super counterintuitive. It seems that rationalising and arguing against the excessive emotional response is the right way to help reduce it, but that is exactly what they have been trying and failing to do and they are exhausted by it. If you join in it adds your voice of judgement of the emotions to their own. It validates the feeling that they are bad because their emotions are bad. Instead if you validate the emotions themselves the pressure suddenly lifts. The vicious cycle stops. This is how I feel and it is OK. And relax. Now I can actually start to look at the emotions themselves. I can start to apply rationality, justice, proportion, love. All those higher brain functions that get swamped out by the pain caused by the shame and hatred of the emotions themselves.

The mentally ill in church: you are in control, but I am here to support you to make good decisions.

People with severe mental health crisis have lost control of their mind and their behaviour. That makes them feel ashamed and very afraid. It is very tempting to step in and start to attempt to re-establish that control for them. To share their personal information with others ‘so they can better help’, to restrict their activities to ones you feel are safe and low stress, to protect others that you perceive to be vulnerable from them, to protect them from things that you fear might trigger them. The effect of all of these things however, if not handled extremely carefully is to further increase their sense of shame and lack of control. They feel toxic, dangerous, and you are subtly reinforcing this message. They feel ashamed and like their ability to control what other’s think of them is impaired – unable to hide and that others will see what they see - and again you can easily reinforce that message.

People in crisis need autonomy, as far as it is possible to give. And where it is not possible they need very, very clear explanation of the motivation. That means that if you want to talk to someone about them to help them you should ask them first what it is OK for you to say and not to say. If you are concerned someone or something is unhelpful you should talk to them about it but leave them to make the final decision and where you really believe that is not possible for their safety or for others, in extremis, explain that keeping them safe is the motivation for your action.

Really listen, things that may seem likely to you to be stressors, may in fact be protective factors. And be prepared to believe that what looks from the outside like bad and sinful behaviour may in fact be motivated by things that you can’t understand or sincerely repented of although it may not appear so because they may trust God’s forgiveness but fear your condemnation. Avoid statements that imply judgement with someone in crisis. They are already ashamed and they will hear condemnation very easily. There may be sin that needs to be addressed but now is not the time, both because you may be wrong that it exists and because they are in no place to address it right now.

Be quick to listen, humble to believe you have misunderstood and change your decision, slow to act unless there is an obvious and direct risk of harm. Counterintuitively, the harm of overdoing things for someone in mental health crisis is probably far less than the risk of driving them away from church by shaming them. Before you rush to judgement and church discipline on sin, be careful to ask non-judgemental questions to find out the motivation for the behaviour and whether it is repented of, remembering that repentance may be present but concealed because of shame. So be patient in trying to find it out. Remember that someone in mental health crisis has lost the ability to hide, has lost control. Their sin is obvious and exposed but that doesn’t make it worse than yours or any less repented of than the secret sins that you conceal so effectively behind a barrier of niceness.

You may feel responsible to protect other congregation members from the ‘harm’ of being exposed or having to deal with a person in distress. I can’t see any Biblical warrant for this unless there is abuse. You can support people and empower them to understand their own limitations and not to attempt to be a Saviour but I can’t see that anyone’s role is to protect us from loving one another in costly and painful and difficult ways. In fact, I think it is to facilitate that. You might find a person’s problems complex and overwhelming but that doesn’t mean that a seemingly fragile person, who may in fact have much greater understanding than you do, will. Or that the process of being overwhelmed and finding a situation challenging may not be what God intends for that person to learn to depend more on him.

Don’t underestimate the power of believing that someone will do the right thing. Someone in mental health crisis may be writing a script for themselves where they are a failure who will inevitably fail, hurt people and cause a mess. They’re behaviour may look messy and destructive, but usually they desperately want to do the right thing and are trying with all their energy to fight their chaotic and harmful behaviour. Tell them you believe that. It will challenge their script, actively lift their shame instead of adding to it. Make them part of the conversation about how to support them and how to support and love people who support them. They care about those people profoundly. They don’t want to hurt them. Help them to be the person who loves others in Christ by expecting them to.

Conclusion

This may feel like a radical call to action to the church, and it is meant to. It may feel like something that will pull you way out of your comfort zone, and it is meant to. The church is different to the world in that the last are first and the first are last, the least in the kingdom are the greatest and we are all accountable for how we treat the least of these. The mentally ill, like the refugees are without honour in our society and the church should be a place that welcomes them, not as I see with heartbreak all too often, drives them out through ignorance and lack of understanding.

We are not the Saviour. We are weak and limited. But we can be driven less by fear and more by faith, less by judgement and more by grace, less by self-protection and more by radical, sacrificial love for one another. More often than not our hearts are the problem not our resources.