Good fences make good neighbours

I’m not usually a controversialist but I have a controversial message for the church today. Boundaries are bad. Stay with me, I hope that by the end of this post I will have persuaded you.

Where do they come from?

They seem to me to be a toxic import from our secular Western, individualistic culture. Pop psychology’s answer to the phenomenon of a world full of need and a life full of responsibilities. How can I protect myself from the needs of others? I can have boundaries, they’re healthy relational things, the psychologists tell me so, sigh of relief. Except as far as I can see there is no basis for the concept of boundaries in the Bible. Where are boundaries in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet? Where are they in laying down your life for a friend? Where are they in the cross? It seems to me that communities of grace were supposed to be modelled on sacrificial love, on turning the other cheek, on letting relationships be costly, on a mutual inter-dependence. Jesus’ compassion for the sick and the suffering and the hurting had no self-imposed limits.

Boundaries in the secular culture come from an observation of co-dependency. This is where one of the parties in a relationship facilitates the helplessness of the other by enabling it. This places an intolerable burden on the person supporting. So Western individualistic psychology says, the needy person is the problem. They need to learn independence, to take responsibility for themselves. The co-dependent will help them by refusing to help them, by imposing a boundary.

The Bible has a different answer

Co-dependency is a real problem but it lies not with the needy person by with the facilitator. People have needs, real, physical and emotional needs. Some people who have suffered a lot have a lot of them. Supporting them can feel exhausting, draining, impossible. They may make demands that just can’t be met. But co-dependency arises not out of the need of the other but out of my need to be a saviour. If I think or am even subconsciously afraid of the fact that I am responsible for meeting this person’s needs I will be overwhelmed and push back against them. I will tell them that their needs are wrong. But the issue is not with them, as so often when we take a look, it is with me. I sense their needs are beyond my capacity to meet, and I am right, they absolutely are. But the point is, it is not my responsibility to meet their needs, it is simply my responsibility to love them with the fullest extent of my resources.

The liberating truth of the gospel is that we are all needy beyond the point of hope or help, but that we have a Saviour who came down to bear our burdens, to heal the sick, bind up the broken hearted and set the prisoner free. He alone can save. When I allow myself to believe that I am the saviour, that it is my job to fix people I will become afraid and overwhelmed and push back against people. I will hurt them. When I know that it is Jesus’ job to save and heal and set free, I am free also to love people in a sacrificial, generous way because their wellbeing does not ultimately depend on me. I can live in the reality that Jesus places us in relationship to love sacrificially, knowing that the point where I leave off because I have run out of resources, he will not because he never runs out of resources.

And incredibly, this is what my suffering, needy friend needs to hear too. Not that they need to take responsibility for their problems, that they are a problem that I need to manage with boundaries, but that there is a loving, heavenly saviour who has us both. And being unafraid of your need sets me free to do my part in meeting it, by showing you the kind of sacrificial love that you have learned not to expect from anyone and by simultaneously pointing you to the one who is the source of meeting all our needs, by saying “I love you, because he first loved us,” by saying my love, it is here for you because of his. When we cease to think we are the saviour, we are free to express radical acts of loving kindness and generosity, we cease to think of ‘you and I’ and begin to think of ‘we together’ being recipients of his grace and gifted with resources to love one another. And as we model that to our needy friends, as we show that we are unafraid of them and need, we will help them to understand what it means that there is a saviour who loves them and in whose hands and love they are ultimately safe and who has all the resources necessary to meet all of their needs.

Because when we become believers, God does not send us on our way, to follow him as strong, independent people. He gives us communities of grace to learn from one another what it means that we have a Saviour full of grace and love for us. A needy person may believe that they need you, the truth is that they need to learn that they need Jesus, but you won’t teach them that by sticking them out in the cold, by putting up boundaries for ‘healthy relating’. That is not the gospel way, the way of radical grace that is beyond human imagination for tracing out. A needy person needs Jesus, but the way that they will learn that is if you model that you need Jesus in your relationship with them. If you found it on prayer, if you point them to him as you love them as the source of your love, if you centre your relationship in scripture.

Personal experience

I can honestly testify to the truth of this gospel way, as a giver and as a recipient of gospel grace under the Lordship of Christ. I am one of these needy people, I have hurts and damage that scream for healing, I externalise my self-worth so that they way the last person treats me is the way I see myself, I can be desperately frightened by rejection and by authority and desperately in need of reassurance of people’s love when they have acted in a way that has triggered my fears. And I have experienced phenomenal change and healing, but never at the hands of ‘boundaries’, always at the hands of astonishing saints who have loved me in astonishingly sacrificial ways, whilst never ceasing to point me to the one who is the healer and the saviour and the true bringer of change. The ones who have never treated me as a burden because I am not their burden to bear, are also the ones who have loved me with a generosity forged by the certainty that it is not their responsibility to save me. Who have opened their houses, who have left their phones on through the night, who have offered to come and get me to keep me safe, who have invested time and love beyond the usual reach of anything but possibly close, loving family and who have relentlessly throughout told me of the one who is holding me and loving me and saving me and is still able to be there when they are not. Who have taught me to trust Jesus because they trust him with me. Who have told me constantly not that I must take responsibility for myself, a task for which I am singularly ill-equipped, but that Jesus has me and holds me and protects me and owns me and keeps me.

These people have gifted me a ministry that is able to be like them, generous to those in desperate need, without being afraid, because I am not responsible for them, Jesus is. So I can love them and not feel burdened by their pain and need, because it belongs not to me, not even to them, but to Jesus.

A new way of relating

So, what are some of the ways living this out looks like in practice. Well I would argue, one way is to move ourselves mentally away from the language of boundaries entirely, which has toxic, exclusionary overtones and instead to talk about limitations. Because boundaries are invented, but limitations are real, and very much a Bible concept.

The power of limitations are that they are about me, not the person in need. You have need, that need is real and genuine and matters but I will not always be able to meet it, because I am weak. And that is good, because ultimately it is not me that you need to trust for your needs, but Jesus. That does not mean I abdicate my responsibility to love you to the fullest of my capacity, that is my responsibility in Christ. It means that when I tell you ‘no’ it will not be because there is a problem with you and your need, but because there is a limitation in me.

We are finite, we have limited resources and many demands on them. I cannot meet every need that I encounter and I am not supposed to. But when I say no, it is not from a defensive posture, because I know that it is not my responsibility to fix you. It is simply my responsibility to love you as best I can alongside all the other responsibilities I have in my life. Including the responsibility to look after myself physically, emotionally and spiritually. Jesus took time out, he went away to pray and be with his Father because he knew that was what he needed to keep his perspective right, to keep living in the dependence on God which we need to model to the needy.

Suddenly our relationship transforms from one of power and weakness to weakness and weakness. I am not controlling my friend with my no, I am not sitting above them, telling them they are a problem, I am not ‘teaching them independence’. I am expressing my own weakness and needs. I bring myself down to their level and let them see that I too am human and that together we need Jesus. It takes humility to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you right now, I am too weak.” It can be hard. It takes humility to say, I love you but I can’t meet your need right now, but Jesus can. A ‘no’ in fear and hardness feels like a rejection, and in the wrong place can drive me into a frenzy. A ‘no’ clearly articulated in weakness feels like love.

Where boundaries can be right and good

Having gone into great detail for the case against boundaries I want to say that there are cases where boundaries are good and necessary. These cases involve abuse. Putting up boundaries against a needy friend – protecting yourself from their need – and putting up boundaries against an abusive person are entirely different things. Sometimes it is right and appropriate to protect yourself and it forms part of the self-care and dependence on God I was talking about above. When a person is attempting to physically or emotionally damage you, to deliberately hurt you, it is right to be very clear and firm with them that you will not accept that, and potentially take steps to prevent them doing so. That also reveals Christ, because it shows that you are his child and precious too him and will not accept someone else’s attempt to rob you of that reality.

In such cases it may be necessary to restrict access, to limit communication or a whole other range of measures to ensure you make it clear, as far as it is possible that you reject this person’s behaviour. However, this should always be held with grace, with a readiness to forgive, with or without repentance, and where there is repentance to restore relationship. Where abuse has been persistent, or there no true repentance, or there is evidence that expressions of repentance are being used by an abuser to re-establish control in order to abuse again, it may be appropriate for those restrictions to be permanent.

Negotiating the grey areas

Sometimes these things will not be clear cut.

For instance, there may be occasions where there is genuine repentance and commitment to change, but relationships will still need to be handled carefully if your own weaknesses make you vulnerable to the abusive or sinful behaviour of the other person. But once again we are returning to the language of limitations, because I am weak and limited, I am struggling in these ways to deal with your difficult behaviour and its consequences in me, and to help me with that I need these restrictions.

An example of this is a friend of mine who taught me to recognise my anger. As I began to recognise it and express this emotion that had previously just been trapped inside me making me want to hurt myself, for the first time, I did not know what to do with it. On one occasion, whilst I was living with her, I deliberately turned a chair over in her kitchen in my anger. I was immediately repentant, sorry for my actions. I apologised and she forgave me and said she did not mind.

However, I am very fragile when it comes to the anger of others. If someone came into my house and turned over a chair in anger, I would probably be very afraid. I am also very fragile to feeling unsafe in the place where I live. Because of my weakness, I might therefore think it was appropriate to say to a friend who had turned a chair over in anger in my house that it would be better for my well-being if we no longer met in my house. This is not about punishing them, or teaching them consequences or assuming their repentance is not sincere. It is simply about my weakness and the real consequences on me as a result of their actions because of that.

You might call this a boundary, but it is not one that is expressed in terms of judgement, condemnation, superiority or distrust, but rather one expressed in terms of my weakness. Again, it doesn’t exclude, it says, we together, both, are weak, fragile people in need of healing by our saviour.

An appeal

I think if there is one take away message from this post it is this. Let’s stop being afraid. Fear is the enemy of radical love, and radical love is the way of the cross. We live in a world of pain and suffering, where the clamour of the needs of the world makes us want to protect ourselves, to say, this space here is mine, I have to look after myself, your needs are an imposition and need to be kept at a distance. We live in a world that says put yourself first, take care of your own, that idolises independence and shames and despises weakness. We live in a world that says one and one is two and I must maintain my boundaries to prevent you encroaching on what is mine and to teach you to stop others encroaching on what is yours.

The gospel says God is the provider, the meet-er of needs. It says to serve others is to be great in his kingdom, to lose is to gain and that one and one is one, the one body of Christ. The gospel says, you and I, together are weak. We need one another, we need Jesus, that everything we have and are come from him and are at his service and therefore at the service of one another, following the example that he set. We are not called to be strong, independent individuals, we are called to be a community of grace that takes on Jesus’ mission into the world. To heal the sick, set the prisoners free, bind up the broken hearted and call the sinners to repentance.

But we cannot live like this unless we are set free ourselves by our own dependence on the grace and provision of God, in our own lives and with the lives of others around us. Unless I know that there is one who meets my needs, your needs are a threat to me, unless I know you are not my burden, I will be afraid to start loving you or fall down in my attempt to carry you and run away from you because you hurt and exhaust me. We cannot live like this unless we are humbly prepared to admit that my weakness and limitations are the problem, not your need.

We should not be afraid that others need us. We should expect that. The size of their need should not deter us from offering what we have, whilst pointing to our own weaknesses and God’s sufficiency.

A couple of months ago I knelt in the street next to a man who was bleeding badly from his head. I held a jumper to his wound and reassured him that the ambulance was coming. He was coughing blood, he probably had internal injuries, those I could not help. But I could stop his bleeding and I could call out to the people who were equipped to do more. The man was a drug addict and probably a thief, he had been violently attacked. The world says protect yourself, walk by, you can’t fix this problem, he brought it on himself. But I could kneel by his side and hold a cloth to his wound and tell him, it’s OK, help is coming. The man who attacked him came back, threatened me, but I could not move, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference, but I felt that to move away was to say that this man did not matter, that his life was unimportant because he was weak and sinful and broken. And I couldn’t do it. The gospel crosses boundaries, takes risks and takes a stand against the lies of Satan.

People I knew passed by, but they had children with them, they did not stop. They were right not to stop. They had other responsibilities that meant they did not have the resources to help at that moment.

Needy people have psychological and emotional wounds, sometimes as serious as the wounds of the man on the street. It may be at times as foolish to say to them, ‘take responsibility for yourself, make good choices, call your own ambulance, heal your own wounds’ as it would have been to say that to the man who lay on that street that day. We do no service to ourselves, our church or the gospel when we put barriers up against the needy and hurting, when we hold them at a distance because we are afraid of their need, when we sit in judgement on them because they are weak in ways we can’t understand.

This is my appeal to the church. Do what you can. Tell them why when you can’t. Point them relentlessly to the God who loves you both.

By his wounds

I have taken my time about writing this blog, some 4 months in fact, partly because it has been so hard to put what happened into words even when talking it over with friends and partly because of the sheer preciousness of it, which has made me want to hold it close and share it sparingly. It’s still as precious and as hard to articulate, but I have decided to attempt to write about it.

From January to April this year I was very, very unwell. Perhaps as unwell as I have ever been. Certainly dangerously unwell. Something happened in January which for most would have come under the heading of life sucks and rubbish things happen, cry, lick your wounds and move on. With my special brand of emotional volatility combined with acute sensitivity to rejection it caused an injury that disabled me for months, that but for the event I am going to share here would probably still be disabling me today.

I experienced a rejection, one that I was aware was largely constructed in my own head, rather than in reality, but a profound one nonetheless. A thoughtless and rather serious mistake was made, I felt rejected and as a result as though someone had hollowed me out with an icecream scoop of any self-worth or identity I had ever possessed. Intellectually I could tell myself that my worth was in the way Christ saw me and treated me rather than in the way other people did, but in my heart there was a void that proclaimed my nothingness, constantly, agonisingly.

While I was with others often the emptiness could be covered over, distracted or temporarily filled with their love and regard, but as soon as I was alone it would drain away through the still open wound of rejection and I would be beset with obsessive, intrusive, relentless thoughts of ending my life to make it all stop.

I felt mortally wounded, beyond help. Objectively I knew the insanity of it, that my reaction was ridiculous, insane, utterly sinful. That I was taking man’s judgement, and in my better moments I knew not even an accurate version of that, over God’s judgement of me and allowing it to rule my emotions to the point of incapacitation.

I prayed, wrestled, cried out for the strength to believe, to subdue my fierce idolatrous emotions, to hear God’s voice over my own and the world’s, but I was failing, drowning. I checked into a secure crisis inpatient facility for 10 days, and spent the time reading the Bible, journaling, sleeping and praying, forcing myself to eat regularly, although I had by then fasted to the point that eating had become painful. I left feeling a fragile peace, hoping I was on the way to recovery but within a week I was back rocking on the brink of desperation and suicide.

My relationships were all profoundly dysfunctional at this point, I needed the affirmation of others to keep re-filling my leaking self-worth and when my evident illness meant that I received the opposite at times it pushed me further towards the edge. Criticism and judgement, explicit, implied or imagined, filled me with incandescent rage and despair, I was building an infinitely fragile meaning for my life on my ability to do things for others, and anybody who threatened that was my terrible enemy. I knew it was all wrong but I felt completely powerless to stop it, I would try to fill the emptiness with the knowledge of God’s love but it would leak out, just as my friends’ love and care did, rapidly, through the jagged tear of rejection.

It felt pointless to talk about it, many around me probably didn’t know it was happening, or were maybe aware that I was unwell as I said so, but didn’t have any idea of the daily battle against self-destruction that I was fighting. Occasionally it would all explode as a torrent of rage and pain, meeting a range of responses from a completely understandable baffled helplessness in the face of my intractable feelings, to a compassionate understanding. One particular friend, who has my gratitude would poke fun relentlessly at my irrationality, which is a risky strategy, but happens for me to be an excellent way to de-escalate my turbid emotions.

In any case, I had been some months trapped, bleeding and not healing. I had sought refuge continuously, physically, spiritually, and found none beyond short, temporary moments. I would say I was at the end of my resources, but I had been living there for months, somehow day by day finding enough determination to fight when I felt there was nothing left to fight with and choose to live rather than die, to obey at least in that, to love God and others at least that much, little though it was.

I had been out of the crisis centre about a week when things had cycled up to the point they had been at before I had checked in and I was once more screaming internally with rage and pain as I lay in bed at night. I lashed out viciously by messenger, and not for the first time, at the person I blamed for the situation and felt shame but some small relief. And as I lay there, still in scalding fury and intense pain, relentlessly thinking about acting upon the urges to take my life, I once again cried out to the Lord. At first in anger, and then in humble, desperate faith, from ‘why won’t you help me and why did you let this happen,’ to, ‘I believe you have the power to change this, to heal me, to bring change.’

And then it happened. He came. He was there in the room with me. The risen Lord Jesus stood beside my bed. And just as once before he had said to Thomas he said to me, “Reach out and touch my side, touch my wounds.” I was full of wonder but not afraid. I did what he said. And as I reached out my hand to touch his side he said, “This is how much I love you.”

I felt it immediately, I understood what he meant. This, these wounds, this is how much I love you. I loved you to the cross, I loved you to death, I loved you to blood and agony. This is how much I love you. It flowed into me, his love, and blew away everything before it but what was like itself, good and holy and loving and lovely. It filled me from head to toes, as physical as my own terrible emotions had been a short time before, as gentle as they were violent but oh, so much more powerful. I was loved. I wept a little and rested in his love for a while. Then with curiosity, like the way we pick a scar or prod a bruise I looked at the thoughts that moments before had created the negative emotions that had ripped through me with such power. I saw them clearly, could acknowledge the wrong done to me, the sin of my response, I felt a gentle compassion for the wounds but there was no power in any of it to hurt me whilst I had his love. I had seen my Lord, I had reached out and touched his wounds, felt his love and there was no longer anything in the present, past of future, real though all of it was, that could cause me pain.

Sin against me had lost its power to harm, and in that moment sin had lost all its savour for me. It held no attractions, it had nothing to offer compared to the love that I possessed. I understood for the first time a puzzle that had occasionally bothered me in the past, how, given all that we suffer in this life and that we would remember it in heaven, would it not cause us pain? I understood then that we would remember sin and suffering, it would not become less evil or cease to matter but it would have no power to cause us pain when seen from the perfect safety and loving presence of our God.

This is the bit where my words fail me. I can’t quite convey the experience in language, it seems inadequate to express it. How can I describe a love that I have never felt humanly in human language? How can I explain how it did what it did? I can’t explain, I can only tell you and promise you that it is true, when I came face to face with the risen Christ and saw his wounds and felt his love, sin was in that moment utterly defeated in me and suffering lost its power to cause me pain. I experienced a taste of the promises of heaven but I am as defeated as the New Testament writers to explain how it is that the troubles and sin that press on us so heavily here will seem light and momentary there, and simply say that it is true and that it is by the love of the crucified and risen Christ that it is true.

I had no expectation that the feeling would last. It seemed clear to me from the outset that this was a short sojourn in heaven, meant to heal and equip me to persevere with life here, not a permanent ‘high’ to allow me to float above the troubles of life. Heaven is for the future, when he calls us home, and in this life we must have many troubles and much suffering. But there has been much fruit from the gift. Firstly, the wound was healed. The love of Christ I experienced was so great it utterly destroyed the lie that I was worthless. How could I be worthless when I had been loved like that? His wounds, the real, concrete, torn flesh evidence of his love for me, had healed me from the wounds of the rejection of man.

From that moment I began to get better. What I had known in my head I had experienced in my heart and although there may be many other feelings to work through as a result of what had happened, many other battles to fight and sins to slay and truths to choose to believe, at that point, my soul and mind had been healed stronger than it had been before it sustained the injury. Secondly, I now have a lasting and more tangible hope in which to lean in moments of despair. I have tasted the joy of the presence and love of my Lord. If I persevere until the end it will be mine eternally. When tempted by sin, or suffering now I can lean back upon the memory of when I tasted and saw that the Lord was good, when I understood, not only in my head but by my emotions the love that is expressed in his wounds.

This is love

Here’s the thing about getting better from a serious illness. You have setbacks. But every time you have a setback you learn something new. As you clear away the layers that have built up around your illness and your response to it over the years you start to see the deeper issues. The stubborn ones that started it all off in the first place, the ones that will be hardest to shift. Also, the physical processes that are underlying the mental ones.

I once described getting better as like digging up dandelions out of your lawn rather than cutting the tops off, now it feels more like uprooting a tree. There are thousands of smaller roots which you can cut off quite easily but they all feed into 2 or 3 great big gnarly roots that go miles down. To get to them you need to clear out the little ones that are gripping the ground all around, solidifying them in place. Then you can start to dig down through the rocks and soil and get hot and sweaty and exhausted, so you can loosen them, see them clearly to start chopping them into pieces and pulling them out. Which is a long-winded way of saying it’s actually much harder than uprooting dandelions and it turns out it’s all connected.

Anyway, recent events have created some clarity on the massive, gnarly, deep roots of my illness and although the process has been agonising and exhausting as usual, I’m quite excited about things that I have understood. They feel like things that once dealt with will bring really good change. One of them is recognising how much I am driven by relational fear. Which is ironic because I would have told you a few years ago that relational fear was something I didn’t possess. People who knew me well would have told you that too. I offer up intimacy without strings or reservations to anyone who comes along, I expose my vulnerabilities, I trust people and expect the best of them and I get beaten and wounded time and time again by the sinfulness, selfishness and self-protection of others. I learn the hard way every time that most people will take advantage of your generosity and then kick you to the curb when they no longer have need of you, but never seem to retain that learning into the next situation. It used to make my mother despair.

But it turns out that all that behaviour is actually driven by fear. Completely understandable fear. It is behaviour that I learned as a child to survive. By the time I was 6 years old I had a fixed understanding that I was fat (untrue at the time), ugly, stupid and unworthy of kindness. On reflection, all of those things were untrue, but they were the core of my self-understanding.  My parents were going through a nasty separation and there was no adult in my life who could understand or help. In fact, without meaning to, they tended to make it much worse. I retreated and was excluded and this reinforced my sense of being unacceptable to others. But then I discovered something. If you make yourself emotionally available to people in distress they are nice to you. I was blessed with empathy and I could use it to make people like me. It didn’t last, people recovered from their distress and rejected you as unnecessary and went back to the centre of a group of people who had no time or interest in you (as a best case scenario). But for that while, being the person who understood and cared and gave compassion without stint insulated me from isolation and rejection and abuse. It was my safe place.

For decades it was the only way I knew how to do relationship and it left me vulnerable to rejection over and over again. In some ways it is still the only way I know how to do relationship, in that the habit of making myself available and emotional vulnerable to people and engaging in empathy is a habit I have never learned to break. The only thing that has changed is that I no longer need it to feel acceptable to people, that the beliefs that underpinned it as the only way that I would be worthy of kindness and attention are gone. And it can be a phenomenal gift. A blessing, I respond automatically to the mood of the people around me and that makes me, I have been told, good company. I mirror your feelings which makes talking to me a comfort, I mirror your interests, which is flattering. I am emotionally open with my friends which makes them feel they can be open with me and trust me. All these things are good things.

But there is a hangovers from this mode of existence which is far from good for me. It is that my default setting is to use empathy as a tool of manipulation. It seems like it is about you but actually it is about me, making me safe, even in the short term from being despised and rejected by you. Something that looks kind is actually fundamentally selfish and ugly. That motivation is and always has been deeply enmeshed with the actual love that I have for people and the real desire to make others feel better. But it is there, and the evidence of that is when I can’t do anything to make you feel better or what you need is beyond my ability to give I tend to get stressed and panicky. My tendency to become overwhelmed by the pain and suffering of others has its root in this sin.

Praise be to God that through the gospel of grace I am able to look square in the face of that fact that one of the things I have always liked most about myself and that others like about me has an ugly, nasty root in sin. In fact, more than something I like about myself, it is something of a pillar of my identity. I am a person who cares and understands, I’m intuitive and empathetic. It’s also something I look to still to give me a measure of security in relationship, I may now expect you to like me for myself, or not and that’s fine, but there is part of me that looks to the fact that I make you feel good as source of security in our friendship. My tendency to get insecure when I am a bit low and be afraid to spend time with people in case they get fed up with me is evidence of that.

So, this is something that I look to for identity and security and it has to go. But here as always it gets tricky. A behaviour you developed as a survival strategy at 6 and have perfected throughout your entire life, a behaviour that is utterly entangled with good and loving parts of you that you have no wish to lose, a behaviour that was for many years the only safe place you have known in relationships, how on earth do you even begin to tackle that?

Well, of course, the beginning of the answer is that you don’t. You can’t. But there is someone who can. An expert gardener who knows just where to cut and how hard to pull to take up the sinful root but leave the healthy, loving plant free to thrive. Which is a metaphorical way of saying the first and last thing that needs to happen is prayer. My father has shown me I have a problem, and my father wants me to bring it to him to fix.

And there is truth I can listen to, to help the process along, there is the sword of the spirit, the gardener’s tool for cutting out the sin. Firstly, I need to love people more, not less. Loving them means making our relationship about them, not about me. Loving them is finding my safety and security in the Lord and not in their needing me or making them feel good. Loving them means being free to say hard things that they need to hear, means being able to hear their pain and not be incapacitated by it and so unable to help, means trusting them enough to be myself and letting them decide whether I am a person they want to know or spend time with.

But where do I find the power to love like this? I can only love like this when I am utterly safe relationally, so that although relationship always gives people the power to hurt you, it cannot destroy you. What we all need from relationship I think really boils down to this: knowing and being known. This is where true security lies. This person knows me. They know the good, the bad, the ugly and they still love me. They still want what is best for me, they are still on my side, they still accept me. My best friend is the person who knows me best and doesn’t turn away in disgust. 

Jesus is the one who can give us this. The only one. The verse that comes back again and again is “then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”. I am fully known by my God, and one day I shall know him fully. Even more “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”, the more I see him as he is the more I shall be like him, and one day I will see him fully and completely and that will make me love as fully and completely as he loves. This is how to love: to become like Jesus. And how to we become like him? We see him as he is. 

We see him the man, the human and all the details of his life and the way he interacted with people and the way he loved people. We see him the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us, the chosen one who will rule as God’s king over God’s kingdom forever. We see him the suffering servant, who humbled himself under the unjust judgement of sinful man, submitting to death on a cross, enduring God’s curse and wrath so we can enjoy God’s blessing. We see him the resurrection and the life, reigning in heaven, interceding for his people, with them always by his spirit, gathering in his children and preparing his bride for the wedding feast. We see him, the God who knows us fully, living, serving, dying, rising, reigning for us, who hated, rejected, despised, betrayed and abandoned him. This is intimacy. This is security. This is love.

Moving a mountain

When I started this blog 6 months ago I was exhausted and terrified. Exhausted from months of sleeplessness, exhausted from the effort of appearing normal, exhausted from the unbearable pain and confusion of broken relationships and rejection I was experiencing. I was dancing on the edge of a precipice, ready to give up.


Those who had told me they loved and cared for me couldn't seem to understand what was happening to me, they were confused and upset. They couldn't relate the silent, quivering wreck with the person they had known before. I couldn't see myself, couldn't step outside the mountainous load of pain and fear I was carrying. I felt their anger, their frustration, their hurt, confusion and fear but I couldn't understand it at all.


I try not to think back too much on that time, or the times like it that have come before. It still hurts, still has the power to terrify me. I'm nervous of the approach of Easter, the temporal landmarks, Lent, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, returning to school after the Easter holiday, each event tied into memories of spiralling anguish, confusion and despair. Waiting in the cold for ambulances with weird and freaky hallucinations dancing in front of my eyes, baffling meetings, inexplicable conversations, fleeing into the night to sleep in my car, the only place left I felt safe.


These are the bad times, its rarely like that, not now, praise the Lord. I still can't reflect really on what went wrong, or who was to blame, if anyone was. Even in my current state of well-ness thinking back into that time has the power to paralyse, to drag me down back into the mire.


But one consequence of this latest dive into the dark depths was 3 words that dropped into my life out of the storm. 3 words that others have found so painful to be given, but for me have been the beginning of healing. Borderline Personality Disorder. I'm not claiming I am better, I am neither so foolish nor so bold, but I have seen that through the gospel applied to the insight that diagnosis gave the mountain of emotion has begun to move.
My friend who helps me think through things told me today that she always knew this was possible, that although there might always be a vulnerability here, there could through Christ and the gospel be change and healing for me. I used to argue. I don't anymore. I used to think my emotions would always be a stick of dynamite hanging by a thread, a battleground where I was fated to lose and lose and lose again, and could only win periods of peace by constant vigilance, discipline and self-control. But in the last 6 months I can't deny that I have experienced change I would not have believed.


When we first started working together, specifically using the BPD characteristics I firmly told my friend that I didn't believe that they could change. They were too deeply rooted, too firmly embedded in my defences. But I wanted them to change. And when I was diagnosed with BPD we learned two things which seem to have made a tremendous difference and have held the seeds of the change I have experienced.


Firstly we learned, that unusual as my behaviour was for a depressed person, it was classic for someone with BPD. The sudden, violent mood swings, the blinding intensity of emotion, the anger, the terror of rejection and abandonment, the numb emptiness and obsessive thoughts of self-harm, these were characteristics straight from the BPD playbook. So we treated it like a shopping list. The gospel speaks to all of those, my friend said, pick one and we'll start there.

Secondly and probably more profoundly we did some reading and spotted a trap we had been falling into for years. Tell someone with BPD that they need to change and they will feel judged, tell them that they are OK and they will feel unloved and misunderstood. The former means you haven't understood how impossible change feels, how overwhelming and hopeless the emotions are. The latter means you don't care how much pain they are in. You don't realise how not OK it is.


We both saw it, it was a lightbulb moment. As was the solution recommended by the specialist writing. First, they said, you have to show you have heard and understood the person's feelings. How overwhelmed and trapped they feel, how impossible they feel change is. But then you have to tell them that although it feels impossible, change is possible if you work for it.


And there it was. The gospel tearing down resistance to change. Jesus sees and accepts you just the way you are. Your feelings are real, they are understandable and they are OK. But he loves you way too much to leave you there, there will be change. The relationship between my friend and I had to be modelled on the relationship between Jesus and us. We both started talking differently to one another. I would express my feelings, openly, honestly, excruciatingly and she would hear, acknowledge, validate and affirm them. She would acknowledge their justice where just, and my frustration where they were irrational. From that day I felt heard. I felt understood and I was able to trust much better.


Then we would lay out a plan for where we wanted to get to. No matter that it felt impossible. We would shoot the moon and agree a plan for where I wanted to be. And then we would find a way to work for it. Look at God's character, his stories, his people, many of the places we went are laid out in this blog. We would pray honestly, confessing sin, unbelief, hurt, fear, seeking healing and change. And I would take the verses away to meditate on, to reflect on, to write about. I did this not because I believed I could change but as an act of faith that the one who could move mountains, could in fact move my mountain.


And against all my expectation, change started to happen. Roots that were dug down deep suddenly began to come loose. I'm not better and I'm still afraid of a return to the darkness but I can't deny that I am facing situations and people in a new, healthier way, that I am richly enjoying God's presence in a way I've not known before, that I am finding depths of comfort and strength in my relationship to Christ that were previously unfathomed.


We have setbacks. Days were struggle to hear each other, days we need to re-tread old ground, remember old truths. Its hard work, but rewarding, in the same way that digging up the dandelions from your lawn is more satisfying that chopping off the tops. Back-breaking, but this way we know they won't be growing back.


I may never be free from the emotional volcano beneath my feet, but I now believe, some days at least, that I can live free of the fear of it, free of the harmful defence mechanisms that have served their turn and gone past their usefulness, free of enslaving lies that tell me change is impossible, that the mountain is too big and your faith too small.


Most of all free in the truth of Colossians 3:12, that I am a dearly loved, chosen child of God, just as I am, utterly accepted. I can stop hating my feelings, stop fighting them, stop struggling to suppress them. They are mine and with all their excess and the ugliness they sometimes possess, Jesus looks at me and says you are OK, you are mine. But then free in also to change, to clothe myself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness and love. Because Jesus accepts us as we are, but never leaves us where we are. He loves us too much for that. That is the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Silent night

In order to sin against someone we have to re-define them. We cease to see a person for who they truly are – a person of dignity and worth made in the image of God, a child beloved of God and precious in his sight. We de-humanise one another in order to justify asserting our needs and desires over one another. Lust happens when we objectify someone, we see them as an object to gratify our sexual desires and not as a person of dignity and worth. In order to be selfish or greedy I must first justify that my needs are more important than yours, and I usually do this by diminishing your humanity, by deciding I am worth more than you. The natural end of this process is murder, we degrade one another to the point that my needs and feelings are of more value than your life.

Even when we make an idol out of someone we have to deny that person their humanity. In a peverse way, by making that person’s words and actions too important in our lives we actually end up degrading them as we stop seeing them as a person in their own right and only see them in relation to how we feel about ourselves.

I’m pretty sure that all sin against one another is a form of oppression. It is a seeking of power over one another in order to define one another for our own purposes. Sometimes it is blatant, sometimes very hidden, but coded within all my acts of lust, selfishness, greed, envy, theft, dishonesty and sinful anger is the message that you, the object of my sin, are worthless and your thoughts and feelings are unimportant.

Now I have known for a long time that one answer to ridding sin of its damaging power in my life has been to refuse to let it define me as worthless. To meditate not only on who God tells me I am but also his right to have his definition be the one that I listen to. But I have only recently learned the power that sin has exercised over my life in silencing me. One extreme expression of stripping others of their worth and dignity is using our power not only to hurt others but then to dictate how they are allowed to respond to the harm we are doing them. It is the oppression that says you are not a person, you are a thing that exists to meet my needs. Crudely put, I am going to hurt you and then I am going to make you smile at me. The object of the sin is silenced, no one is allowed to hear their thoughts and feelings, they have been objectified and then robbed of the ability to protest their pain.

For my whole life whenever I have been in pain I have retreated into crushed silence, it has taken decades to begin to believe that there are people I can trust who will listen and who will hear. But whenever I come up against someone who cannot or will not hear me or someone who wants to silence the expression of my feelings because they don’t suit their purposes or they aren't convenient, the weight of silence descends again and I feel as helpless and unheard as I did when I was a child.

Seeing this has started me down a new track, one that has lifted the heavy yoke of silence from my shoulders. It is simply this – God hears. So simple, so easy, so life-changing. The feelings I crush down inside as a reflex to other people’s sinful demands suddenly have an outlet, an escape, this person does not hear me Lord, but you do, and this is how I feel. God hears my pain, and what is more, he cares.

I am no longer silenced, unheard, diminished, de-humanised. He hears and it matters to him. Reflecting on this I was drawn to these passages; here is unfolded God’s full response to those being silenced by oppression:

 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.  God saw the people of Israel—and God knew. (Exodus 2:24-25)

God heard, and God saw. The cries and tears and pain and suffering of his people are not hidden from him. He hears me and he sees me.

God remembered. This is how I know I can trust him, he makes promises and is faithful to keep them. He will not forget or abandon me.

God knew. He not only sees and hears, but he knows. But what kind of knowing – I think the parallel passage in Exodus 3 helps us out.

Then the LORD said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them”. 

(Exodus 3:7-8a)

Now he addresses them personally – I have seen, I have heard, I know. All the verbs of the passage before but now he adds one more, I have come down. And here is why this post is for Christmas. He has come down. He sees, he hears, he knows but all that would be no comfort if we couldn’t trust him, but we can because he remembers and he has come down. Come down to get involved, to get his hands dirty, to know my pain. To feel it, live it, bear it. He does not know with an abstract kind of knowing, but with the gritty, getting your hands dirty, walking in my shoes, experiencing oppression and pain for himself kind of knowing. Christmas is the ultimate fulfillment of this passage in Exodus. God doesn’t just hear, he intervenes, he delivers. Jesus arrives, he comes down into my mess and pain, into the mess and pain of our world, comes down with a promise to heal and bind up and set free. Comes down to a cross where he is broken, wounded and condemned so that promise can be kept. He comes down to declare that whatever oppression may say, I matter because he has chosen to die for me.

So I will not live anymore in silence, I cannot be silenced, the yoke of the oppressor has been broken, he has no more power over me. He may take away my words, my cries, even make me smile when I am in pain, but I am not a thing. I am a person who God hears and sees, who’s suffering he knows and for whom he came down. And when I face the person who does not or cannot hear me I no longer need them to. I am no longer crushed by their rejection of my humanity, my feelings. So I am free to see them as the person they are, a person made in the image of God and desperately in need of him. Being heard sets me free to break the cycle. Being heard sets me free to love. 

Give a man a spade...

I hate change. I know I'm not alone. It rather runs in our family for a start. New ideas take time to be adjusted to, changes are often preluded by weeks of grumpiness. We're an anxious bunch. I have a particular problem with unexpected change that I have no control over. I expect it might partly be all those times I was picked up from school and found we weren't going home but rather to grandparents, great aunts, or one particularly memorable night sleeping in the car at a service station. The slightly on edge feeling of nearly a decade of never being quite sure where I would be sleeping that night.

Anyway, take me by surprise with a significant change and chances are you will get panic and tears, however potentially good or bad it may be. It's on my mind as a poor church leader has had the misfortune to tell me twice in 18 months that I will be moving homegroups. Both for excellent and completely non-personal reasons but nevertheless resulting in profound changes in relationships and  completely out of my control.

I say poor church leader because both times, most latterly today, it has resulted in hysterical tears, irrational lashing out and knee-jerk panic. The initial panic now subsided I am left with a sense of uneasiness and unsettledness that would usually not dissipate until the change is accomplished and irrevocable. Experience tells me that once the change happens I will settle down fairly quickly and almost certainly happily but until then traditionally I will fret, and cycle in and out of panic and occasional paroxysms of sobbing and explosions of anger.

So perhaps this is the time to try to put into practice some of the things I have been learning over the last few months. As my friend says, you may have learned what a spade is, and that is useful, but the key is remembering to use it when you need to dig a hole. Or something like that. She likes concrete metaphors for her theology, does that friend.

So what is it I need to remember about God that will help me deal with the barely covered over panic? With the feeling that I just got settled in this group and now I have to start all over again with people I don't know at all. With the fear that I will lose everything good about my current homegroup and that it will be replaced by everything that has been bad about any homegroup I have ever previously been in. Some may say that a dose of rationality and common sense should do the trick. The change is unlikely to live down to my worst fears. The unknown is rarely as populated by monsters as I imagine it to be. And homegroup is only a small part of my very, very busy and people-filled life. However one thing I have learned is that my emotions rarely respond in a satisfactory way to rationality.

So where do I turn? What are the foundations I have been trying to build that are going to help me now? The one that comes to mind is one I mulled and meditated over when thinking about how I use anger to try and control situations where I am afraid - God the Lord is in charge. Now is the moment to cling to the truth that my loving Father is Lord over creation, over circumstance, over the past, present and future.

There are three verses that remind me of this truth most powerfully. The first is the simple promise of Romans 8:28-29, that whatever happens, good bad or ugly, God will work it together for good for me, who he has called and chosen to be made like Jesus. In the words of the old hymn,

"I have called thee Abba Father,

I have stayed my heart on thee,

Storms may howl and clouds may gather,

All must work for good to me."

The second is the staggering picture of Revelation 1, where the glorious and terrifying Son of Man, before whose majesty John falls in terror "as though dead", this mighty Lord stoops to lay his hand on John's shoulder before imparting the words of comfort, "Fear not, I am the first and the last and the Living One. I died and behold I am alive for evermore, and I hold the key to death and Hades." Jesus, the dreadful and awe-ful and powerful, says to us, there is nothing you need to be afraid of if you are with me. Death? I have defeated that. I am the Living One who died came back to life. Change? I am the first and the last, I know the end from the beginning, nothing takes me by surprise. Judgement? The key to death and Hades is in my hand, nobody else's judgement matters. And small, weak and dirty as you are before my purity and shining glory, I will bend down to you, I will at once be humble and gentle and fierce and almighty, and I will touch you and speak comfort to you.

The third and final place I have learned to grasp hold of when I am afraid and to which I need to turn now is Psalm 18. This Psalm never ceases to still my fears and calm my heart. Here I see God who hears, who is angry when I am distressed and whose anger shakes the very foundations of the earth, and who comes down to rescue me from those who are too mighty for me. I can lay hold of the truths in this Psalm of the Messiah as I stand in the righteousness of God the Son, in whom the Father delights. I matter because Jesus matters and Jesus is mine and I am his. So God cares about my hurts and fears, cares so deeply that they make him angry, cares so deeply that in Jesus he has come down to rescue me from them, come down to live through change and insecurity, loss and powerlessness, come down to defeat all the things that can harm me: the world, the flesh, the devil and death itself. God who makes the mountains shake and the sea roar has delivered me because he has delighted in me. How can I doubt this Lord will keep and provide and sustain me, that this Lord is indeed enough in himself if I should lose every other help I have.

So here is my spade. I know what it is and how to use it. Let's see if I can actually dig a hole.

Now you see me

Hagar was a woman and a slave. She was no saint in the ordinary, everyday sense, not above a bit of unattractive gloating, but in many ways she was a victim of her situation. She was trapped in circumstances of life far from her choosing, enslaved, forced to sleep with the husband of her mistress and then driven out into the desert by her mistress's jealousy, pregnant and alone.

Hagar was powerless to change her situation, she had no control, even over her own body. She was at the mercy of the whims of others, treated as a possession and as if she herself possessed no dignity or worth. People didn't look at Hagar, they looked through her, to the people who mattered. She was unloved, unvalued, an object to be used to fulfill the wishes of others and then to be discarded when she was no longer wanted or needed. And to a certain extent she was her own worst enemy provoking her mistress to rage by despising her infertility in spite knowing all the pain and shame and humiliation that entailed.

Hagar's story is extreme but in it I do see faint echoes of my own. I may not know what it is to be a slave, but I do know something of what it feels like to be trapped by circumstances and powerless to change them. I know something of what it feels like to be at the mercy of others and treated without compassion or dignity. I know something of what it feels like to be discarded and rejected. I certainly know what it is like to suspect my own unpleasant, ugly sin means I probably deserved most of what I got. I guess most of us do, some a little more than others. 

But as it is so common to find in the stories of God's people, Hagar's story comes with a twist in the tail. She did not die in the desert, instead she discovered there that she was not alone. There was one there who did not see her as a possession, who looked at her, not through her. There was one there who saw her dignity and her value as a person made in the image of God, to whom she was not a worthless object to be used and discarded. There was one there to whom she mattered and by whom although she may have been powerless, she was not unheard. 

The Lord came to Hagar and said to her, however others have treated you, however little you have been valued, I, the Lord, hear you and I, the Lord, see you. And Hagar, the woman, the slave, the sinner, the oppressed, the alone, was the first person in the Bible to give God a name. 

She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” (Genesis 16:13)

Names for God describe a part of his character, Hagar had indeed seen God as she was privileged to give him a name to reveal part of his character to the world. That name was 'the God who sees me.' God sees me. That is his name, a fundamental part of who he is, so it can't and won't change. Whoever else has failed to see who I am, God has not. Whoever else has tried to tell me I have nothing of worth to offer, God does not. Others will get me wrong, will underestimate me, overestimate me, misunderstand me, look through me to the people who matter, but not God. He sees me. 

And like Hagar this seeing means blessing too. God did not merely restore to Hagar the worth and dignity she had as a human made in his image. He never does stop there, his heart is too full of love, his hand too generously full of gifts. He gave to Hagar the gift of the honour of being the mother of a great nation, a nation that would not be crushed or despised as she had been. To us of course he gives a much more precious gift the gift of the honour of being his child, found in Christ, the honour of being his beloved, clothed in Christ's beautiful righteousness, the honour of being his ambassadors to declare his name upon the earth. 

There is a cry of pain from my heart that says, "Why does nobody ever see me?" It's less a reality than it used to be but the wound is still there barely scabbed over and vulnerable to break open once again when knocked about by circumstance. The damage of the past is too deep to placate that cry with reassurances that things are different now, that there are people who do hear and do see. But there is an inexpressible comfort in this, which was true in the past, is true now and will always be true: "You are the God who sees me".

What do you expect?

First a disclaimer - this post is about the expectations we have of one another within church of real, deep and meaningful relationships, not our expectations (which are idolatrous) of a specific person being available to meet a specific need at a specific time, or having a knowledge and understanding of us they can't possibly have.

Expectations is a dirty word. A word we use to beat each other up when we feel inadequate before another’s needs. A word we use to express our frustration and disappointment at the people that let us down. You need to expect less of people, you can’t have expectations, it’s not fair to expect…

Relationships in a fallen world are painful, difficult things. We’ve all been hurt. We’ve all felt rejection and loss and betrayal. But I have never found anyone who has been helped by being rebuked for their unrealistic expectations, or who having said they have lowered or changed their expectations has ceased to really long after real, deep committed relationship.

Because that is what we are made for. Real, deep, committed relationship. Garden of Eden relationship where we can be naked, known and accepted and feel no shame. But however much we long for these relationships, we feel how inadequate we are at giving them. We think with shame of the friendships, at one time so close, that distance, circumstances and sin have allowed to fall into neglect. And we hide ourselves and our selfishness behind the rhetoric of expectations. You can’t expect that of me, surely?

Furthermore we do it to ourselves. We start to feel that friendships like that are for other people, there’s something about me that means people just can’t love me that way, and if I don’t expect it, I can’t get hurt. It doesn’t work though, our soul cries out, even through the bitterness and pain that pushes others to arm’s length, for intimacy and security.

What is it exactly that we shouldn’t expect of each other? Should we not expect each other to keep promises? Should we not expect each other to care? Should we not expect our family to give us relationship in real and meaningful ways? That is what Christ tells us we are in church, family.

At this point I want to point to my limitations, I do my best, I’m just so busy, there are too many people, too much going on. To that I say to myself, yes, I am limited and I am busy but mostly that is my choice. Like the time I waste, not resting, not refreshing myself, just waste. And the times I let my guilt at failing you get in the way of loving you. And the times I run after my own needs instead of thinking about yours. And the times I am angry with you but don’t want to admit it. And all the times I make choices based on what looks good or makes me feel good instead of actually being faithful. Not to mention the times and times I waste my physical and mental energy not trusting God with things in my life so I have few resources left over to love. I feel guilty, and rightly so, because however limited I am, I hurt you infinitely more because I am sinful. Which is uncomfortable as it’s much easier to blame your expectations of me.

The answer is, as always, not more guilt but more grace. Guilt puts up more barriers, makes it harder to step over and begin to love you again. Grace says what I really should be saying is “I am sorry”. I am sinful, frail and selfish. I know what you need from relationship because it is exactly what I need: consistency, patience, grace, perseverance and love, but I just can’t give you that. Because I am inadequate, because I am weak, because I am, deep down, wicked and I don’t want to. The problem is not yours, it is mine, and I cover it over by blaming your expectations of me.

Real relationships start with grace. They start with the fact that I will let you down, I won’t love you the way that I ought. And when that happens I need to ask God’s forgiveness and yours, not blame you for expecting me to love you. Real relationships start when I know you won’t always be there for me, that you will choose your happiness over mine, that I have to let you make promises of commitment and love, and trust you to keep them, and forgive you when you don’t because that is where real relationship happens and if I cut myself off from that, I cut myself off from part of my humanity. A really good part too.

And of course this is all missing the obvious. These real relationships can only happen in Christ. Only when I am freed from my guilt in Christ can I be free to see my sin, say sorry and start over. Only when I am clinging to Christ for ultimate security and intimacy can I dare to expose myself to your frailty and sin in intimate relationship.

So think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “they expect too much from me!” Recognise you have probably sinned against them. Recognise that what they need from you is real relationship, which can say sorry and start over, which isn’t enslaved to guilt and fear. Recognise that Christ has set you free to love them and continues to do so every day as you continue to sin. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

And think of that person in your life of whom you are tempted to say, “I can’t trust them again, they have let me down too many times,” or even for some people “I can’t trust anyone, they will always let me down, I will just never have that kind of deep friendship.” Recognise that in Christ you are utterly loved and safe and secure. Recognise that people are sinful and weak. Be brave. And through the mess and the pain and the struggle just keep loving.

We all long for relationships that are deep and real. We all live in a world where relationships are broken and messy. But the miracle of the church is that by grace broken and messy relationships can become deep and real whilst never stopping being broken and messy. God is just that good. So don’t give up.

Touching Christ

Something happened today. I was with a friend who is grieving a recent and terrible loss, she was crying and I leaned over and took her hand. And we sat. And cried. I have only known her a few months and for many of those we did not see each other much but I knew that taking her hand was the right thing to do, that it would be OK, for one simple reason. She’s not English.

We have fetishized touch as a culture, limited to romantic relationships only, to the extent that walking around in public holding another woman’s hand feels awkward for fear onlookers will question your sexuality. I have some female friends with whom I will snuggle under a blanket or lie with my head in their lap to talk about serious things, but although I get a huge amount of comfort from the action, talking about it makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. This is not a universal cultural norm, in fact in my experience it is rare. My Chinese boy students will hug and hold hands throughout a class in a completely unselfconscious, platonic way, my female Arab friends will sit with their hands on my knee when we are talking, but for many of us Brits at some point in our life we learn that close, prolonged physical contact is reserved only for people who are ‘in a relationship’ and anything else is weird.

This creates a problem for some of those of who are single. It’s a difficult thing to admit but I need physical contact. It makes me feel loved and safe and secure. It makes me feel connected to other people and accepted. And the point when I need it most is the point at which it is often completely withdrawn. See a person in pain, wrapped up in a ball, head down, hurting and the English instinct seems to be back away, give them space, ignore it. We think it is what people want. It’s what many people do want, and to offer physical comfort to a person experiencing such intense emotions is a risky thing in a culture where most physical contact is taboo. But there are a significant minority of us for whom that is the wrong answer. When people see me in distress they touch me less and it leads eventually to me feeling untouchable, even dirty. It contributes to my sense of isolation, to feeling not understood, separate, sometimes even not quite human.

That’s a very specific issue which operates when I am very unwell but being a physical person affects my day to day relationships as well. My desire for sustained physical contact which is often chronically unsatisfied can lead to feeling profound wellbeing when with certain friends who are capable and comfortable with friendly touch. I value these friendships to extremes, frankly I often make idols out of them and often experience acute fear of rejection and envy of others with whom I have to share their friendship or a dramatic feeling of betrayal and overwhelming hurt when they let me down or seem to reject me, as humans must inevitably do. I hate this reaction in myself and I fight it and hide it and deny it, but it exists and it certainly can make me a difficult person to be friends with.

People with BPD are vulnerable to black and white thinking when it comes to people, believing them to either be perfect and unable to hurt you or horrible and deliberately out to damage you. I have the gospel that whispers in my ear, they are human, sinners in the image of God and loved by Jesus but it can be difficult to hold on to that interpretation when you feel baffled, bewildered and desperately hurt because this friend that you thought cared about you, who you love intensely, suddenly seems to be saying, “hang on, you’re not that important to me”.

Some people will read this and think, the culture is right then, we shouldn’t touch, look how powerful it is and what it can lead to. I think that is the wrong conclusion. The people who have most profoundly helped me change for the better in my life are the people who have loved me and kept loving me through my difficult behaviour, who have been hurt by me and have come back again and again. Because I am a Christian and I can change, and the more you put me in a situation where I see my rotten, stinking sin, the more you love me so I hate what that sin does to you, the more I pray and turn to God and seek to become more like Jesus. Pull away, try to teach me ‘boundaries’ and I will turn inward with self-loathing and self-destruction but keep loving me when I am awful and I will turn outward to Jesus in desperation for change. And I’m never going to boil anyone’s bunny rabbit. I have walked away from several people for a time when I just couldn’t get any perspective and my idolatry has been out of control. Walked away, prayed and in time been able to come back and start again on a healthy footing by the grace of God and of those friends. I hope they know who they are and how much I appreciate them.

But this blog is not about coping it’s about healing, so how can I move from fighting to keep my relationships under the Sovereignty of God to freedom to love my friends and enjoy my friendships, especially the ones that give me a deep sense of peace and contentment? I have been thinking about this lately and have come to some discoveries. The first is that the Bible recognises us as physical people and offers a multitudinous array of imagery that involves receiving comfort and safety from God, Father and Son in the form of physical contact. From the image of a father carrying his son through the desert in Deut 1:31 to the picture of a hen gathering up its young under its wings (Matt 23:39). Even, astonishingly, we find the glorious and terrifying Son of Man of John’s vision in Revelation 1 stooping to lay a hand on John’s shoulder as he lies face down in terror before uttering his words of comfort.

But the Bible goes further, far further than I would possibly dare to go. I hesitate to imagine physical contact and intimacy with Jesus for fear that I will pollute him with my sinful thoughts but the Bible pushes right through where I fear to tread in describing the church as Jesus’ bride. His bride who he has cleansed (Jer 33:8), divested of her filthy rags (Zech 3:4) and beautifully clothed, coming down to him in Revelation 21. The Bible says that marriage is only a partial fulfilment of our desire for intimacy, our need to know and be known, to accept and be accepted, to be one flesh, united with another, and that the true fulfilment of that desire, true intimacy in every sense, will only arrive when we are finally united with Christ in the new creation. That intimacy will be so absolute that the partial picture of it in marriage that we have here will cease to be needed or have meaning.

What is more we have already tasted this intimacy. I fall into a trap of thinking that Jesus isn’t here. He’s ‘up there’ in heaven, loving me, yes, interceding for me, yes, but not physically here. And of course I am wrong, Jesus is very much here by his Spirit. Just because you can’t see the Spirit doesn’t mean he has no physical presence, Jesus describes him like the wind, which has a very powerful, palpable effect on the physical world. Of course the Spirit is able to interact physically with the world he helped to create. The idea that Jesus is not physically with me is a massive lie that is concocted somewhere between my low expectations of God and my culture’s cynicism of physical, spiritual manifestations, and like all of Satan’s lies it has robbed me of a precious truth. Christ is here, physically with me and he is not running away from my sin, my dirt, my mess, my need. He’s not frightened by it, he’s not disgusted or repelled by my filthy heart, my filthy life. Not this Jesus, who touched lepers and ate with ‘sinners’ and washed his disciples’ feet. This Jesus says, “I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you”, (Ez 36;25b-37a).

Jesus’ Spirit is here and he is within me. And I am in hidden with him in God (Col 3:3). You can’t get more intimate than that. The complete intimacy that I will enjoy with Christ has already begun. Jesus does not keep me at arms’ length, he doesn’t give me space and to him I am never untouchable or too dirty. When I start to panic with a fear of rejection, I have begun to imagine Jesus placing his arm around my shoulders and saying the only message simple and direct enough to get through, “I love you, you’re safe, I’m here”.